>Impact experts believe long period comets represent roughly 25 % of the expected fatalities
>from impact. A long period comment is not one whose orbit that has been modified by Jupiter.

The reasoning behind this claim has never really been submitted to any scientific analysis; & as such can't be used with much confidence. True: were a long period comet - personally, i found your freudian typo rather appropriate - on a collision course with Earth, the realtive velocity would generate appalling casualties; but the numbers/distance ratio is so against such an impact actually happening with humanly meaningful timeframes (which in this context actually means millions of years; not the mere millenia of the modified orbit object threat), that claims like _25% of the expected fatalities_ are little more than comic strip; & (more importantly) have no actuarial validity whatsoever.

(Predictions of fatalities - which have often been used by people like Ed to claim that you have as much chance of dying in an asteroid impact as in a plane crash - are only useful if the events occur within an actuarially meaningful timeframe, of course; which is why no insurance company has used these claims of threat as a reason to even consider this threat - unlike, say, the financial effects of globabl warning; which the insurance businesses are now taking very seriously indeed)

I mean: there are many real short- & mid-term threats to this planet without using Bruce Willis fantasies to eat up limited mitigation budgets.

Robert