I'm not sure who originated the rumour. It's about the third or fourth such prediction so far this year - all the previous ones of course failed as we are still here.
What's going to happen is that an asteroid of maximum size of about 300 meters is going to pass by more than 21 times the distance to the Moon.
At that size its effect would be local if it did hit (6 km crater, causes tsunami or devastating to city or small state but impact zone could be evacuated).
But it's not going to hit us anyway, not this time.
It's got many future flybys of Earth. The ones in the near future all seem almost certain to be misses. But perhaps some time in the next few centuries or millennia, and almost certainly some time in the next 20 million years, it will hit us, but easy to deflect. You just need to adjust its trajectory by a fraction of a meter per second before one of its many flybys of Earth. Or if it has useful materials, if we have space mining underway, mine it instead and use the materials for space habitats or whatever way they can be used in the future.
It is a reminder though. Asteroids, unlike tsunami, or volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes - they are the one natural disaster we can do something about, and quite easily given enough warning. There's a program underway to find and detect potential risks. But we could do more. We could detect nearly all asteroids down to 40 meters, possibly down to 20 meters by the 2020s. And if we go that small, we'll probably find a few that are due to hit Earth, just create a bright fireball in the upper atmosphere chances are, but could be good practice. I expect we'll get our first successful deflection of a small asteroid some time this century.
See also: Robert Walker's answer to What are the chances of Asteroid 2012 TT5 hitting the Earth on September 24, 2015? (where I also link to the pages with the details of asteroid 2012 TT5).
And if you are coming at this from a Christian perspective, you might be interested in: Robert Walker's answer to Why did God create the world if he was just going to destroy it at Armageddon?
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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