This Friday, on your way to work, or the gym, or drinks with friends, you could get clobbered by a piece of satellite. You probably won’t, of course, but you could. And for many, that’s fun to think about.

News that NASA’s Upper Earth Research Satellite, or UARS, will soon crash to Earth has inspired a sort of twisted glee among the public worldwide, according to the Los Angeles Times and other news sources.

The satellite-related frivolity includes glib polls on where the pieces will land ("My House!" is one option), a website taking bets on the point of reentry, and a FoxNews gizmo that supposedly tracks UARS in real time (the server is often down, ostensibly because of popularity). Especially titillating is the 1 in 3,200 chance UARS might fall on a person.

Aside from the sudden interest in plummeting space objects, NASA says there’s nothing that provocative about UARS' return home. As of press time Thursday morning, it was too early for scientists to determine where the 20 or so pieces expected to survive reentry would land, but odds are it will be somewhere in the 75 percent of the world that's covered by water.

"The UARS reentry hazard is being overhyped," Don Kessler, a retired NASA senior scientist for orbital debris research, told the Times.

In the mean time, it’s the things that go up and don’t come down that pose the real hazard. A National Research Council report released earlier this month warned that the growing cloud of orbital debris—manmade junk circling earth—had reached a dangerous tipping point, according to the Washington Post.

Soon the amount of celestial garbage will reach a point where it will trigger a “collision cascade,” a concept Kessler posited in the late 1970s. A collision cascade is basically a chain reaction in which junk crashes into other junk, busting it apart and leaving more pieces to crash into. Eventually, the pieces will become prevalent enough that they stray from their ring-like orbit and encase Earth in a shell of debris. Case in point—two collisions in 2007 almost doubled the number of pieces of junk orbiting Earth, according to the Post.

Of course, it’s not much fun to ponder a future 10 or 20 years from now where our atmosphere is so polluted that we can’t launch a satellite or explore space. Perhaps that’s why our collective imagination has latched onto the UARS scenario. But beware, NASA officials say: If you should come upon a piece of UARS, you shouldn’t touch it. It could be sharp.