That would be hilarious, to a sufficiently distant civilization after a respectable amount of time. Maybe there's some kind of award they give out to planets that self-destruct. But instead of the Darwin award, it's called the Fermi award.
What would be ironic given that quote from the article is if we nudged it into the path of a larger asteroid and that collision sent the larger, dangerous asteroid into our path. Perhaps the larger asteroid fragments in a way to increase the probability of a collision with the fragments.
Don't get me wrong... I do agree with you that all of these scenarios are extremely unlikely (space is really big) and I do think the experiment is worth doing. But still, there are failure modes and unintended consequence opportunities that should at least be thought about a bit, even if a very little bit.
In this case, wouldn't any risk of a butterfly effect causing an asteroid to hit us be offset by the chance of a butterfly effect accidentally deflecting an asteriod off of a colission course.
Given the limited knowledge we have about space, how accurate are the assumptions that no harm will be done? We are still figuring out water on Mars and that is quite near to Earth.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
- Douglas Adams
Chances of anything striking anything as a result of human intervention are quite slim. Effectively nil.
"Thirty years before the First Interstellar War, a meteorite from Klendathu System was deviated from its star during the Operation Fedmil, the first contact in Klendathu. Thirty years later, the meteorite reached and hit Earth, destroying Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina, killing over 8.7 Million, and wounding a further 12.5 million."
"However, the United Citizen Federation claimed that the Arachnid launching a "Bug Meteor" by Bug Plasma from the Klendathu system towards Earth and destroyed the city of Buenos Aires."
There's some rock throwing in this latest book in the Expanse series. You'd want to read the earlier books beforehand though. (They are worth reading anyway.)