Duck and cover - it ain't rain

If you are enjoying your life as normal today, don't look up — maybe skip going outside altogether and just hole up in a basement — because Chicken Little was right about the sky.

OK, technically the sky itself isn't falling, but I'm sure you'll find no comfort in knowing that it's a dead NASA satellite the size of a school bus that's tumbling down from space.

Being dead and all, the satellite is sinking from orbit into Earth's atmosphere where it is expected to break into pieces, some of which will burn up during that transition. Some pieces, like the 300 pound ones, will most likely survive to fall through the sky to the Earth's surface ... somewhere.

So, sure, it's not the sky falling, but the whole large-pieces-will-survive-to-crash-who-knows-where thing is not comforting.

This is NASA, home to a bajillion scientists and excessively smart people with big computers and expensive technological doohickeys, and they can't project the expected trajectory of an object they put into space.

It just makes me think of my mother. Doesn't NASA have a mother?

Can't our president or the leader of some international space regulatory agency say: "NASA, I swear, you'd lose your head if it wasn't screwed on tight." And then cuff NASA upside the head and bark: "Learn to keep track of your stuff!"

Oh well, NASA. It didn't work for me either.

Now the space junk is raining down, and it begs the question: What are the odds that one of us might get struck?

NASA told the folks at LifesLittleMysteries.com that the odds are 1 in 3,200 that one of the 7 billion humans on Earth will get beaned by a piece of this satellite. Not good. But the odds that you specifically will get hit are 1 in several trillion. Not bad.

Those numbers inspire the standard-issue comparison to the likelihood of getting struck by lightning this year: about one in 100,000. That makes us feel better about NASA, but worse about Mother Nature.

There's also your chance of winning the Powerball lottery this weekend: one in 195,249,054. Not good. Yet I still hope.

And your lifetime odds of dying from a poisonous spider bite: about one in 593,000. Oddly more likely than one would think. And, of course, if you live in or plan to visit Australia, the continental home of the greatest concentration of poisonous creatures per human capita, then your odds worsen significantly — as do your odds of dying from a poisonous bird bite, strangely enough.

All that makes the one-in-several-trillion odds of getting conked by space crap look even more survivable. But before you get too casual about the imminent storm of space debris missing your parade, remember that in 1997 a Tulsa, Okla., woman was struck by a piece of a Delta II space rocket. Sure, the space garbage was the size of a DVD and fluttering on wind currents, but struck is struck and proves that it does happen.

So what am I doing to protect and prolong my life today? I'm playing the odds — fumigating for spiders and tethering myself to a lightning ground rod, with my lottery ticket stored safely in my pocket.

And, just in case the whole cry of "A satellite is falling! A satellite is falling!" is NASA code-talk for a UFO invasion, I made a tinfoil skull cap to protect myself from the alien brain waves.