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Asteroids yes, comets not so much. A long period comet could hit the Earth with a warning time of only a few years, and could easily be large enough to destroy human civilization.


Asteroids can be large - up to 1000 km, but comets are much smaller - up to 40km.

According to http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/crater.cgi?dist=20000&... a 40km comet impacting the earth would destroy entire countries.

But on the other side of the earth, while it would be noticed, it would not kill anyone and it would not cause severe damage.

So deadly? Yes. but humanity destroying? No.


Pluto is effectively a comet. There are objects just as large or larger in the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud. It's likely that the larger an object is the less likely it is to be jostled by interstellar forces and have its orbit perturbed enough to fall into the inner Solar System (if we're lucky) but we don't really have any clue on what the size limits are for such processes. It would suck to find out by way of the entire human race being eliminated.




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