Yes, out of nowhere, the Sweet Meteor of Death will someday blow us all away without (much) warning, but not today.
From the story here:
... Asteroid 2026 JH2 was initially observed by the Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona, which uses a 60-inch telescope to detect near-Earth objects like comets and asteroids. ...
J. P. Morgan explains gold's rise as having something to do, in part, with "waning confidence in fiat currencies." 😏
Why should anything pegged to fiat be more confidence inspiring, especially involving PayPal?
People who've been permanently banned by PayPal this morning are probably saying, "Couldn't have happened to a finer company".
This event should be good for fiat, and really good for gold, which won't suddenly be minted by anyone to the tune of $300 trillion, at least not until Elon Musk lassoes one of them thar asteroids.
PayPal’s crypto partner mints a whopping $300 trillion worth of stablecoins in ‘technical error’
Paxos, the blockchain partner of PayPal, mistakenly minted $300 trillion worth of the online payment giant’s stablecoin on Wednesday in what the company called a “technical error.” ...
Transactions on Etherscan showed that the mistake had been fixed after about 20 minutes.
PYUSD is advertised as a dollar-pegged stablecoin that is fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, U.S. treasuries and similar cash equivalents. Therefore, PayPal says the tokens are always redeemable for U.S. dollars on a 1:1 basis.
However, the technical error highlights that the dollar peg is guaranteed by PayPal and its independent third-party attestation reports, rather than intrinsically tied to the minting of a stablecoin. ...
... Astronomers have found roughly 95 per cent of the near-Earth objects larger than 1km, and none of them poses any threat to Earth. We know much less about the smaller ones. An asteroid as slender as 50m across can wreck a city. Of the nearly quarter of a million that are around that size in Earth’s neighbourhood, 93 per cent remain undiscovered. ...
In July 1994, fragments of a comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter, and Nasa, for the first time ever, caught the spectacle on video. Later that summer, Congress tasked Nasa with mapping all near-Earth objects larger than 1km, sobered by the sight of the comet’s cataclysmic Earth-sized impacts. The brief was then expanded to include 90 per cent of all objects 140m or larger — a task that is still less than halfway complete. ...
In 2028, Nasa plans to launch an infrared asteroid-detecting telescope called NEO Surveyor. The following year, which the UN has designated “International Year of Asteroid Awareness and Planetary Defence”, an asteroid called Apophis [~375m] will pass within 32,000km of Earth, closer than some satellites. A Nasa spacecraft is on its way to study Apophis in detail. ...
More.
Gee that's . . . not a happy thought.
The asteroid, named 2024 MK, is estimated to measure about 480 feet (146 meters) across, which is greater than the height of a 40-story building or the Great Pyramid of Giza.
More.
A sucker that size could destroy London, England:
"If [an asteroid as big as Dimorphos] were to fall on the city of
London, windows would break over the whole south east of England and the
damage in [the Greater London] area would be very extreme," Collins
said. "There would be no survivors in the center of London because of
the impact itself and also because of the severity of the air blast." ...
While asteroids of this size crossing the path of our planet are rare, astronomers estimate that 60% of near Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters are still unknown.
NASA said it came in at 152.4 meters.
European Space Agency said it came as close as 180k miles.
Talk about giving two weeks notice.
The current value of ~208,874 tonnes of all the gold ever mined is only $14.47 trillion, so the discovery and mining of huge new supplies of precious metals could cause a deflationary depression . . . some day.
Launch date is October, arriving in 2029.
Meanwhile we can exchange worthless pieces of paper for all kinds of stuff made in China.
Seems fair.
