Worried about death by meteorite? Worry on Fridays, relax on Mondays

Asteroid Predicted to pass close to Earth on a Friday the 13th in the Spring of 2029.

Some terminology:

Asteroid: A small (smaller than a planet, anyway) rocky object orbiting the Sun.

Meteor: A meteor is an asteroid which burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Meteorite: If a meteor survives plunging through the atmosphere, it’s called a meteorite.

I discover the exact day the dinosaurs began to go extinct.

I was pleased with myself as, while I was melding scientific fact with human superstition, I believe I discovered the exact day that infamous asteroid that killed the dinosaurs impacted the Earth.

It was a Friday. Friday the 13th to be more precise. To arrive at this ludicrous level of accuracy took a supernatural strength of deductive reasoning mixed with gut feeling. That infamous day was Friday, May 13, 65,997,977 BCE.

My self-satisfied pleasure with my presumptuous and smart-ass methods was, sadly, shortly lived.

I should have stopped my research right there. I was the only person on the planet who possessed the knowledge that the dinosaurs were killed on a Friday. I should have been content with that.

What I discovered next humbled my faux feigned superiority to boring and meticulous mainstream science. A very similar asteroid, coincidentally, has been recently upgraded to a 4 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale of 1–10, giving it the highest Torino score ever given among all of the known potential hazardous objects that could threaten life on this Earth.

This object, named Apophis, designation Near-Earth Asteroid 99942, is on schedule to potentially bring death from the skies, near Australia in the southern hemisphere, on April 13, 2029, a Friday. Friday the 13th, the same day that many people subconsciously dread for no rational reason. The same day that I postulated the dinosaurs met their fate.

Apophis was named after the Egyptian and Greek God of Chaos. This God is said to be the enemy of light and the archenemy of Ra or Re, the Sun God.

The coincidences continued piling up as I researched further.

I know this sounds a bit like pie-in-the-sky voodoo musings and the Friday the 13th connection might require you to suspend your disbelief but hear me out. The coincidence of death by asteroid happens astronomically more often on Fridays as you will soon see.

What are the odds of TWO mass extinction events, both meteor impacts, occurring on the same planet on the same day of the week eons apart? And on the same day of the month? And that day is Friday, the 13th?!

The impossibility makes it look almost certain to me. I have a theory that anything which is near impossible must happen somewhere in an infinite multiverse. In some universe 100 monkeys really did write Hamlet.

At least scientists are aware that Asteroid 99942 is heading towards us.

They didn’t even see the last threatening near miss asteroid which came within 45,000 miles of the Earth as recently as 2019!

The section of my brain that analyzes coincidences short-circuited when I discovered this next tidbit of information: the only 8 people we definitively know to have died from a meteor impact in the 20th century died on Friday, May 17, 1948 when the town of Santa Ana in Mexico was decimated by a meteor impact.

(Later, I also list a death in 1992. Many of these source articles mention that the case they are writing about is the first or the only known case of death by meteorite. Obviously, these journalists didn’t have access to the internet.)

Want some more? June 4, 1880, Whitestone Township, Australia, a man was killed by a meteorite.

Guess which day of the week it was? Friday.

But wait, there’s more.

Friday, August 14, 1992, in Mhale, Nigeria, a young boy dies after supposedly being struck in the head by a meteorite.

Last, the most famous meteorite strike of at least the last two centuries, the strike of February 25 ,2013 in Chelyabinsk, Russia. That one injured approximately 1,200 people and killed one person. February 25, 2013 was also a Friday.

Of the 10 recorded meteorite strikes since 1880 that have been documented as resulting in at least one fatality, four of them were on a Friday.

It might be worth mentioning that no fatal meteorite strikes have occurred on a Monday.

(After a busy week of hurling asteroids causing death and destruction across the universe, God rests on Mondays?)

To round out the 10, two were on Thursday, and one each on Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.

What are the odds of dying from a meteorite impact? Either 0 or 100% in hindsight.

One Quora poster put the odds of dying from a meteorite impact at 1 in 100 million. So, what are the odds of all 8 billion of us dying from a single meteorite impact just like what happened to the dinosaurs on their bad luck day Friday the 13th in May some 66 million years ago?

According to the Torino rating of Near Earth Object Asteroid 99942, scientists calculate the odds of that asteroid hitting the Earth at 2.7%.

Although there are no modern cities which have been hit, deadly meteorite strikes wiping out entire ancient cities or villages may have happened a few times before recorded history.

The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah supposedly suffered near 100% fatalities from a meteorite strike.In China in 1341 and then again in April of 1490, tens of thousands of Chinese people reportedly lost their lives in a couple of meteorite strikes.

April 4, 1490, by the way, was a Friday.

If you were living in China on April 4, 1490, statistics such as “the odds of dying from a meteorite impact are 1 in 100 million,’ wouldn’t be of much use to you.

Let’s hope the same isn’t the case for the citizens of Australia and the rest of the planet when Friday the 13th of April 2029 comes around.