The warning didn’t sound like a warning at all. It came buried in jargon, padded with calm assurances and familiar routines. Another rock, another flyby. But then the numbers slipped out—kilometers, not meters—and the illusion cracked. A mountain-sized asteroid, officially “no threat,” silently threading past our world, close enough to rewrite everythin… Continues… It has a name that feels more like a catalog entry than a menace: 52768 (1998 OR2). Somewhere between 1.5 and 4 kilometers wide, it drifts through the dark with indifferent precision, while on Earth, teams of scientists track its motion down to fractions of a second....
Continues…