The End Is Nigh

So it has come to this. New translations of the quatrains of Nostradamus fill our bookshelves and catastrophic predictions of the future proliferate. Countless disaster movies bear witness to the fantasy and drown it with special effects. Songs, paintings and novels present a variety of utopian and dystopian scenarios for the future. The perennially recurring issue of how the world will end has no alternative but to fall short of completion. After all, should anyone survive the apocalypse there will be no biros. The world will end, but I when I imagine the apocalypse I can’t help but think of all the food spoiling in my fridge.

On Tuesday I was reminded of the immortal words of Billy Bob Thornton in Armageddon, “It's what we call a Global Killer....the end of mankind. Half the world will be incinerated by the heat blast.....the rest will freeze to death in a nuclear winter. Basically, the worst part of the Bible!” Nice. So an asteroid 600m long did zoom past the earth on Tuesday, apparently the closest asteroid approach for 2,000 years. Asteroid 2007 TU24 was expected to pass 538,000 kilometres away (not a kerjillion-million, as I had hoped).

It is possible that an asteroid (more specifically its impact) wiped out the dinosaurs and many other creatures in the Cretaceous period. Today hundreds, perhaps even thousands of asteroids intersect the Earth’s orbit. Some have struck the Earth in the past, leaving large craters in their wake. Others have come very close, like this recent instance. Current astronomical research suggests there is a 1 in 5000 chance that there will be extinction due to an asteroid colliding with the Earth before the end of this century. This could wipe out humankind, or at least civilisation as we know it.