Are humans doomed? Stephen Hawking, the renowned physicist, thinks so. Hawking said that humanity will only have 1,000 years left, with an impending asteroid collision possibly wiping out humans by 3016.
Despite NASA and other space agencies tracking near-earth asteroids, these space agencies could only trace thousands of them in space -- a small percentage of the estimated 600,000 known asteroids in the solar system.
“We only know about 15 or 20 percent of the objects which are larger than a few hundred meters in size. If these bodies impact Earth, they can cause regional damage across a whole country or even a continent," said astronomer Patrick Michel.