There Are No Good Ideas for Saving Us From a Killer Asteroid
It’s not really a question of whether a massive asteroid—one big enough to wipe out human civilization—will fall into a collision course with Earth. It’s a question of when.
NASA estimates a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid, big enough to flatten a city, hits our planet every 70,000 years or so. Half-mile-wide rocks, capable of killing much of the life on Earth, strike every 700,000 years.
Anticipating the inevitability of a catastrophic impact, scientists are scrambling to devise methods of detecting—then destroying or deflecting—an incoming space rock. The best solution might still be the most obvious: nuke it. Just like Bruce Willis’s miner-turned-astronaut did in the 1998 movie Armageddon.