In what first appears like a rather morbid game of “which would you rather?”, researchers have released a new study that games out how likely the average person is to die should one of various mishaps like car crashes, carbon monoxide poisoning, and lightning strikes, occur—or because a giant asteroid destroys the Earth.

The probability of a planet-annihilating asteroid crashing into Earth is low, but it’s not zero. In fact, Earth had a recent close call when a newly discovered asteroid was calculated to have a 1-in-63 chance of impacting our planet in 2032 . Thankfully, scientists later revised the chances of that happening to nearly zero , but nonetheless, asteroid 2024 YR4 reminded us how vulnerable we really are.

In the new study, researchers set out to calculate just how likely

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