The Rocks We Haven’t Found Yet

There are roughly 15,000 asteroids orbiting in Earth’s neighborhood right now — each one at least 140 meters wide, each one carrying enough energy to obliterate a city — and we have no idea where most of them are.

On February 16, 2026, NASA’s acting Planetary Defense Officer Dr. Kelly Fast stood in front of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Phoenix, Arizona, and said it plainly: NASA has only found about 40 percent of the near-Earth objects in that size range. And here’s the thing that got me — how do they know the other 15,000 exist if they haven’t found them yet? I don’t know how that works. But apparently they do.

Scientists call them “city-killers” because that’s precisely what they would do. Not end civilization, or even just a continent or two. Just erase one city — one functioning urban center, one economy, one million or five million lives — while the rest of the world watches the news and tries to figure out what just happened.

Science magazine puts the explosive energy of a 140-meter-wide asteroid impact at around 300 million tons of TNT. For comparison: the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States at its Cold War peak was estimated at around 12,000 megatons. A 140-meter asteroid carries roughly 25 times that energy. Delivered to one spot.

The reason we haven’t tracked most of them is that many of these rocks spend significant portions of their orbits in the general direction of the Sun — and no ground-based telescope can look into the Sun. There’s also the problem of what they’re made of. A large fraction of near-Earth asteroids are carbon-rich bodies — dark, low-reflectivity surfaces that absorb rather than bounce back sunlight. How NASA knows the composition of rocks they haven’t actually found yet is a question I’ll just leave hanging there. What we do know is that they don’t glint. They don’t shimmer. They move through space looking like nothing, until the moment they don’t.

NASA’s DART mission in September 2022 proved that if we know a rock is coming far enough in advance, we can physically nudge it off course. The spacecraft hit the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos at roughly 14,000 miles per hour and measurably altered its orbit. Dr. Nancy Chabot — and yes, that’s her actual last name, Chabot, not Chatbot, though given the subject matter the confusion is understandable — led the DART mission and was clear at the Phoenix meeting that its success should not be confused with operational readiness. There is no spacecraft currently sitting fueled and ready to launch on short notice. DART demonstrated that deflection is possible in principle. It did not create a standing defense capability.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 made a close pass on Christmas Day 2024, and early calculations briefly suggested a possible Earth impact in 2032. Further analysis ruled it out. Not that I was worried. Honest. (Thank you, Jesus!) But the episode revealed something important: in a real threat scenario, the window between initial detection and confident trajectory analysis can be dangerously short. The failure mode isn’t a cinematic countdown. It’s compressed time, ambiguous data, and inadequate options — pressure that human systems handle poorly. Something you’ve probably felt if your child tells you their science project is due tomorrow, but they’ve known about it for three months and this is the first you’re hearing about it. Not that I ever did that to my parents. That I’m admitting.

NASA’s answer is the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, an infrared space telescope that can detect dark asteroids by their heat signatures rather than reflected light. If we know anything about dark colors, they absorb heat more than light colors do — and that heat is what the Surveyor is built to see. Its planned launch date is September 2027, and its stated goal is to find nearly all near-Earth asteroids at least 140 meters in size. Though I’d point out — how do you know when you’ve gotten them all? You’d have to already know exactly how many there are. There’s a lot of educated guesswork in here. Which is probably worth keeping in mind as we talk about what all of this means.

So we’ve gone from one thing to be concerned about — 3I/ATLAS and its alien probe theories — to something on a completely different scale. Fifteen thousand somethings, to be precise. And somehow that shift makes it feel less like science fiction and more like a very old conversation.

The Weight of “We Don’t Know”

Why scientists and astronomers are concerned about this — aside from the obvious 15,000 rocks possibly hurtling our direction — is that this is something completely out of our hands. Despite our knowledge, expertise, and technology, this is simply something that sits outside of human control. We’ve solved diseases that used to kill millions. We’ve developed systems that give us at least some warning about earthquakes and hurricanes. We’ve built nuclear weapons and the treaties meant to manage them. We can control the weather with chemtrails using jet planes… okay, just kidding, wanted to make sure you were paying attention. We tell ourselves, collectively, that modern civilization has a handle on most of what can go wrong.

Then a NASA official stands up in Phoenix and says 15,000 city-sized rocks are out there and we don’t know where they are.

The Christian faith has always had a word for the gap between what human beings control and what actually runs the universe. That word is sovereignty. And this asteroid story has something to teach us about it.

What the Sky Has Always Said

Long before NASA existed, before telescopes, before anyone understood what asteroids were, the writers of Scripture looked up at the same sky and understood that it was not ours to command.

Job chapter 38 is one of the most remarkable passages in the Bible. God speaks to Job out of a whirlwind and asks him a series of questions — not out of cruelty, but to give perspective. God asks in verse 4:

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”

In verses 31 and 33, the Lord asks:

“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the belt of Orion?… Do you know the ordinances of heaven, or fix their rule over the earth?”

Job had been through genuine suffering. We won’t get into his story here, but give it a read if you feel you’re not depressed enough and need some help going emotionally even darker. Understandably, Job wanted answers. We all would in his situation. What he got instead was a tour of the cosmos — a reminder that the systems governing stars and sea and season operate far outside human jurisdiction. The point wasn’t to humiliate Job. The point was to relocate his trust. God wasn’t saying nothing matters. God was saying we are not the ones holding this together — and that is actually good news, because the responsibility is not on our shoulders to fix everything or even be in control of everything… even in our own lives.

That answer still holds. The 15,000 untracked asteroids are not a failure of God’s management. They are a fact of the physical universe that God created and sustains, and they have been on their current trajectories since time began. What’s new is our awareness of them — and our honest confrontation with the fact that we are not in control of the sky.

The Week’s Other Story

All of this was already swirling in the news last weekend when former President Barack Obama was doing a podcast interview and got hit with a lightning-round question about whether aliens are real. He answered quickly — “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them” — and the internet did what the internet does. By Monday it was everywhere. Obama later clarified on social media that he meant statistically, given the size of the universe, the odds favor life existing somewhere out there — and that he saw no evidence during his presidency of actual contact… which of course did the exact opposite and brought out the rest of the world saying “but that’s what he’d have to say now!” Regardless, the headline was already running.

Then on Thursday, President Trump accused Obama of sharing classified information with that comment — but how would he know it is classified information if the aliens weren’t actually real? If aliens don’t exist, then Obama wouldn’t have revealed anything classified. You see how this spirals out of control when you think about it too much? Then to escalate things even more, Trump announced he was directing the Pentagon and other agencies to begin identifying and releasing government files on alien and extraterrestrial life, UAPs, and UFOs. Trump told reporters he personally didn’t know if aliens were real. Of course, that’s what he’d have to say at this point without causing a national incident like Obama almost did. His daughter-in-law Lara Trump said the president had a speech prepared on the subject, ready to deliver at the “right time.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded with a laugh and said a speech on aliens would be news to her. No timeline for any file release has been given. No classified information has actually surfaced. A lot of noise, very few answers.

And I’ll be honest — that noise unsettled me when it first arose. So much so I had to create a Weird DarkNEWS episode about it and even insert some God-stuff into it not only to give you, my podcast listeners a little hope if you were freaked out by it — but to also give me a little comfort myself as a reminder of who is in control. Not because I think the government is about to confirm little green men, but because the ambiguity of it all created this low hum of anxiety that I didn’t love sitting with. I imagine that’s not entirely unlike what scientists feel about 15,000 asteroids they know are out there but can’t see — that specific unease of knowing something significant exists just outside your ability to track it. The reminder I needed is the same either way: none of this is outside God’s awareness. Not whatever files are or aren’t about to be released. Not whatever is or isn’t out there. None of it is a surprise to Him, none of it threatens the legitimacy of faith, and none of it changes what we’re called to do on this planet while we’re here.

The Trap of False Security

Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica about the false peace that comes before sudden disruption. In 1 Thessalonians 5:3:

“While they are saying ‘Peace and safety!’ then destruction will come upon them suddenly like labor pains upon a woman with child, and they will not escape.”

He wasn’t writing about asteroids. Or little green men. He was writing about spiritual complacency — the way human beings, and the cultures we build, tend to settle into a sense of stability that isn’t grounded in anything real. We build cities. We establish economies. We pour concrete and glass and fiber optic cable into something that feels permanent. And then something outside our control reminds us of what Job heard from the whirlwind.

We do this in our own lives, too. We set up routines, surround ourselves with familiar comforts, build our sense of security out of jobs and health and relationships — none of which were ever ours to guarantee. Jesus said it directly in Matthew 6:19–21:

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

The contrast Jesus is drawing isn’t between having nothing and having something. It’s about what we’ve placed at the center of our sense of security. A 140-meter rock moving at orbital velocity can reach the upper atmosphere in less time than it takes to file an insurance claim. The things we build and store and protect are genuinely fragile. That’s not a reason to despair — it’s a reason to build our foundation on something that can’t be knocked loose.

The God Who Counts the Stars

Isaiah 40:22 describes God as the one who “sits above the circle of the earth” and “stretches out the heavens like a curtain.” Two verses later, in Isaiah 40:26:

“Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these stars, the One who leads forth their host by number, He calls them all by name; because of the greatness of His might and the strength of His power, not one of them is missing.”

Not one is missing. Not one star. Not one asteroid despite the billions upon trillions there most certainly are in existence. Not, we might reasonably infer, one 140-meter rock that may or may not be floating towards our house.

We haven’t catalogued 15,000 of them. That’s our gap. The NEO Surveyor, launching in 2027, will help close it. That’s the plan, at least. Human as it is. Human science is doing the responsible thing — acknowledging the problem, building the tools, closing the blind spot. That work matters and it’s worth supporting. God specifically put us in charge of taking care of this Earth. Planetary defense is stewardship of the world we’ve been placed in responsibility for.

But “not one is missing” means something different in a universe governed by the God of Isaiah. It means the dark carbon rocks absorbing starlight in Earth’s orbital neighborhood are not outside God’s inventory. He isn’t waiting on the Surveyor. Our lack of knowledge about these objects is not the same as their being beyond oversight. The God who numbers the hairs on our heads, as Jesus says in Luke 12:7, is not outpaced by space.

Living in the Gap

So what do we actually do with this? Between now and September 2027, when the Surveyor launches, we sit in the same position humanity has occupied since time began — aware of real dangers, limited in our ability to manage them, and deciding every day where to place our trust.

In Proverbs 16:9:

“The mind of man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.”

Planning is not faithlessness. Building the telescope, tracking the asteroids, funding the research — all of it is right and responsible. Wise stewardship is part of what we’re called to. But the planning happens inside a sovereignty we don’t own.

The gap between what we know and what God knows is not a threat to faith. It’s actually where faith lives. We don’t trust God because the situation is manageable. We trust God because the situation often isn’t — and because the one who made the ordinances of heaven and set the stars in their courses is the same one who, according to John 3:16, loved the world enough to send his Son into it. The same power that flung 15,000 city-sized rocks into orbit (assuming they’re right about that number, I still have my doubts as to how they arrived at that figure)… that same power was personal enough to come down and walk the same dust we walk.

The universe is enormous, violent, indifferent to human plans, and governed by forces that would erase our cities without noticing. And into that universe came a God who noticed. Who notices. Who calls each star by name and knows each one of us by name — and who didn’t consider that knowledge sufficient. Simply knowing us wasn’t sufficient for God — He cared too much about us to leave it at that. So he did something about it.

A Closing Thought

The 15,000 rocks out there aren’t a reason to be afraid. Neither is whatever the government may or may not be about to tell us about what’s been flying around in our skies. Neither is the daily uncertainty that doesn’t make headlines but follows us around anyway — the health scare we can’t get answers on, the relationship we can’t fix, the future we can’t predict no matter how carefully we plan for it.

We are not the ones holding the sky in place. We never were. And the older I get, the more I realize that’s not a terrifying thought — it’s actually the most comforting one available to us. Because the One who is holding it together didn’t create this universe as an indifferent machine and then walk away. He populated it with stars He named, populated a planet of people in His image who could look up at them and admire their beauty. And He designed all of it to sustain us — and then when we made a mess of our end of the arrangement, He didn’t write us off. He showed up.

The rocks are out there. The government files may or may not tell us something worth knowing. The NEO Surveyor launches in 2027 and maybe it finds what we’ve been missing. And through all of it — every discovery, every disclosure, every thing that turns out to be exactly as alarming as we feared — the God who sits above the circle of the earth has not moved. Has not been surprised. Has not lost track of a single thing He made.