Stuff hits our atmosphere all day long folks. Only a matter of time before something really does us in. And as far as our dealing with it, well, there’s not a whole lot of people involved in tracking this stuff.
The detection of Earth-crossers used to be small independent operations, including an active group in Australia (which is the southern hemisphere; most of the Earth’s landmasses are n of the Equator, but a large impact anywhere screws up the whole Earth). There was persistent resistance to the idea of impact, in part thanks to Aristotle, who stated that stones can’t fall from the sky (Aristotle said, they believed it, that settled it), up until the 1994 SL-9 impacts on Jupiter.