So now Earth has a chance to be hit by an asteroid in 2032.

Great. That’s just what we need.

It’s called 2024 YR4 and scientists spotted it as it was hurtling away from Earth. The rock is somewhere between 130 feet and 330 feet long, not huge, but big enough to wipe out an entire city and its surroundings with a direct hit.

But relax, the experts say. Asteroid 2024 YR4 has only a 1.3% chance of actually hitting Earth on Dec. 22, 2032, and those kinds of figures are usually revised downward — often to zero — after further calculations are made. Of course, they’re right. We should breathe easy. Then again, the odds of anyone throwing a no-hitter in a major league baseball game are way less than 1% (0.16%, according to Forbes Magazine, if you want to be exact), and yet we see no-hitters thrown pretty much every year.

When news of 2024 YR4 broke, it was temping to see in it a metaphor for the wrecking ball that’s hitting Washington these days. But that’s too cheap and easy and deflects from the looming malevolence of the asteroid itself.

It also distracts from a pair of actual metaphorical asteroids that struck this past week with ominous implications.

First came the request from State Farm insurance to California officials for a whopping 22% rate hike for homeowners across the state because of the company’s “dire” situation after the Los Angeles wildfires. That’s just for this year. With the state having imposed sharp limits on rate hikes, many other insurers have already kissed California goodbye, leaving the state-organized last-resort plan with so many customers for its bare-bones coverage that the plan doesn’t have nearly enough assets to cover its exposure.

And it’s not just California. Homeowners in huge swaths of Florida and Louisiana are similarly underinsured given the obvious risks they face from rising seas and increasingly destructive storms. One estimate puts the uncovered fire and flooding damage faced by owners of underinsured housing across the U.S. at as much as $2.7 trillion.

Now add to that the week’s second asteroid: a report from the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit climate risk research group, that found that more than 70,000 U.S. neighborhoods — that’s 84% of all census tracts — will see falling property values due to climate risks over the next three decades. Properly pricing insurance policies to cover those risks and maintain property values would require a hike in average premiums of 29% and far more than that in some more vulnerable places.

As a result of that mix of storms and fires, inadequate and expensive insurance, and sinking property values, First Street says that “over 55 million Americans will voluntarily relocate within the U.S. to areas less vulnerable to climate risks by 2055, starting with 5.2 million in 2025.”

America has never seen a migration quite like that. It’s the kind of migration in scope that we associate with other countries, and threatens to have the same dramatic effects we see elsewhere in terms of strain on resources, loss of personal wealth, difficulties for communities shedding and absorbing residents, and psychological trauma for those relocating. It’s the price we pay for not thinking clearly and acting responsibly about the risks we face.

And yet, despite all that, we continue to move to places at the edge of danger, and delay taking steps to protect ourselves.

So, yes, we should track and prepare for whatever long-shot space rocks are out there that might cause us harm. But we really need to be confronting the calamities that await here on Earth, calamities that are certain to keep visiting us with damage we can already measure.

Columnist Michael Dobie’s opinions are his own.

Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.