Asteroids: where do they come from? Where are they going? These bizarre flying lumps of rock have perplexed mankind for centuries (almost as much as fucking magnets: just how do they work?) and are as dangerous as they are mysterious. Like a drunken munter who’s just been kicked out of South Bar, asteroids lurch aimlessly about the galaxy, wreaking terrible destruction upon anyone unfortunate enough to get in their way. An asteroid hitting Earth would mess our shit up in a profoundly devastating fashion: the ground would shake, giant waves would take out entire continents, and dust clouds would cover the sky, plunging the earth into darkness and causing a lot of fumbling around and general tripping-over of things. Yessir, it would be a real-life Armageddon – just like in that movie, Deep Impact.
Most
experts agree that the chances of an asteroid hitting Earth are pretty slim,
but I wouldn’t get too smug about it just yet. Yes, I know it’s fun to point up
at the night sky and laugh, believing that we’re safe here on Earth and those
pathetic little asteroids can’t do anything about it. And sure, according to
‘science’ the odds are stacked in our favour, but don’t get too comfortable.
You see, with every Justin Bieber video watched, and every racist comment made
on YouTube, humanity is tempting fate. Just because being wiped out by an
asteroid is unlikely doesn’t mean the universe won’t do it anyway in a fit of
poetic justice.
Let’s
not forget about our reptilian friends the dinosaurs. I’m sure they were equally
smug about the whole ‘existence’ thing, doing all sorts of perverted
prehistoric shit that we can’t even imagine
(try as we might), and then BAM! – a huge asteroid gets all up in their
coelacanths. Remember, these were not small and slightly grotesque puppets like
on that terrible 90s sitcom Dinosaurs: these were massive lizards with teeth
and everything. An average dinosaur could easily kill a human, yet every single
dinosaur in existence was taken down by a single asteroid: even those of us
with a shaky grasp on logic can see that humans don’t rank too well in the ol’
human-dinosaur-asteroid hierarchy.
These
days dinosaurs are a pretty miserable bunch, standing around in museums,
missing their flesh and vital organs and generally not doing a whole lot. Do we
want to end up like that? Probably not, unless that kind of stuff floats your
boat. So even though scientists will tell you that the chances of being
bombarded by fiery death from above are almost non-existent, just be aware that
with every Nickelback album you buy you are tempting fate, practically begging it to come and wipe us off the
face of the planet.
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