Bill Nye: Asteroid DA14 ‘could kill a lot of people’ if it hit Earth

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Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, admitted Thursday night that the recently discovered 2012 DA14 asteroid would kill a lot of people if it struck Earth.

“An asteroid like this could kill a lot of people,” he told The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur. “This one is one of many, many, many — about 100,000 objects like this. So we have discovered or we have tracked about one percent of them. There’s 99 percent more out there.”

Though the DA14 asteroid will zoom just around 17,200 miles above the Earth’s surface on Friday, NASA scientists are confident it poses no threat to the inhabitants of the planet.

The asteroid is about the same size as another object that obliterated a forest in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908, Nye explained.

“We are the first generation of humans that could do something about” an asteroid heading towards Earth, he proclaimed. “If I may, how cool is that?”

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube, below: