The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule.

Absolutely, based on the information we have today.

That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that’s coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don’t know about that one.

The thing about our probabilities of events that haven’t happened yet to leave a scar that we can notice on the surface of the Earth, we haven’t been very good at observing the sky except for the last 100 years or so, really 50. So, we’re learning more and more about things and newly discovered hazards don’t lower the probability of occurrence…

A star that’s capable of producing a gamma ray burst is not “innocent-looking”, it’s actually very obvious. There are none that are that close to us.

That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst. What we don’t know about that star is the super Jupiters orbiting it in a quasi stable multi-body arrangement that could collapse a bunch of mass into the star and turn it from Jekyll to Hyde under your bed ASAP.

Also society isn’t going to collapse overnight.

Not if it goes down like you expect it to.

In my experience, the real problems are the ones you weren’t planning for.

Even if we don’t end up nuking each other like we thought we would in the 60s-90s, we could still get a massive asteroid / comet strike with less than a week’s notice. That innocent looking star 23 light years away could have collapsed 22.99 years ago and zap us with a gamma ray burst next week.

More likely: something we don’t even know about comes along and makes life far more challenging than it has been for 100,000 years.