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.
With Jupiter life on this planet might never have evolved at all. At least not much past say, the celhlepods (octopus, cuttlefish, etc). Jupiter is our ‘’cosmic short stop’’. It’s massive gravity pulls in stuff that would otherwise come crashing into us. Most of the time though not always. It’s better that the great mass of humanity not know just how much of a crap shoot it is living on this little smote of dust and water. It’s one thing to have some big chunk of iron coming at you at 40,000 mph a second. It’s quite another when 5 billion people find out they have maybe only a few weeks or a month to live.