Avi Loeb

Six years ago, I asked an undergraduate student at Harvard

Go look at a catalog of meteors.

Meteors are objects colliding with Earth and burning up, producing a fireball as a result of friction with air.

Similar to an atomic explosion.

And actually, every year you have...

a meteor that releases as much energy as the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy every year.

It's never reported in the news because the explosion takes place at an altitude of 30 to 50 kilometers, so it's pretty high, doesn't cause much damage on the ground.

The Hiroshima atomic bomb was released from 600 meters above Hiroshima, and that's in order to maximize the damage.

But these meteors are not, so we don't hear.

Like a Tunguska meteor, for example?

No, much smaller than that.

Smaller, okay.

Every year.

Tunguska is a century ago.

So, of course, you have bigger things causing more damage, and the dinosaurs went extinct by a rock the size of Manhattan Island, but those come to Earth once every 50 to 100 million years.

Okay, so there is plenty of time.

We might get one.

If we illuminate the night sky, we won't even know about it.

but the point is that there are rocks the size of a person basically one to two meters in size or a few meters in size that release as much energy as the Hiroshima atomic bomb every year

And only one in a thousand of those may have originated from outside the solar system.