It's a cosmic roll of the dice. A major asteroid strike could cause widespread devastation and profoundly impact life on Earth, so thwarting an incoming object could be a matter of life or death.
Luckily, we have a little bit of practice at this. On Sept. 26, 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) slammed into Dimorphos, a moonlet that orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos. DART was the first-ever mission dedicated to trial-run one method of asteroid deflection by changing an object's motion in space through a kinetic impact.
