There is an asteroid headed to Earth.

With the current projected momentum no living creature will survive the impact. It slipped neatly out of its 100 million mile parabola when the magnetic poles switched just right.

First the planet will become very cold as its mass creates shadow out of Sun, permanent night. Earth’s climate becomes uniform months before its topology.

NASA estimated it was 100 kilometres in diameter. It will leave a crater 400 times its size, it makes the Richter scale look like an abacus.

Thousands of tonnes of debris and tsunami waves ten miles high will pulverize our puny footprint, quickly Paleolithicizing our few centuries of enterprise. Humans, all flesh will be ripped to shreds, incinerated by heat and dissipated by winds 20,000 kilometres per hour. Humans in bunkers and bomb shelters will be crushed into gelatin. Humans above the surface in planes will suffocate while their eyes explode with pressure. Humans on their way to the moon or International Space Station never made it, immured after the electromagnetic pulse until starvation or they kill themselves.

Remnants of the rock reconnect with space and, along with ash and dust, form a dome around what was once Earth over the course of a few years, and a ring over a century. Without sunlight the planet cools until it looks like there was never life at all.

Now, there’s a couple things humans can do in this situation.

You can try to cool the asteroid to slow it down. You can maybe change the trajectory with lasers, diverting its path to at least hit Earth at an angle. You can try to set off an explosion near its surface to deflect it entirely. You can create a magnetic pull using another massive object to slow and divert it off course.

In fact, we will do all this, when it comes. My people and my government will fight for the right to live, and your people and your government will, too, and we may all join together and fight as brothers. And they will devote all of our resources, all of our creativity, all our time, all our children and unconceived children, all our money which is frozen time, all of our blood, sweat and tears, all our storage and bandwidth, all our savings and pension accounts, all our donations, all our taxes, all our secrets, and all our passion and all our devotion and sex and emotion and drugs and flings and night-outs and beers and parks and concerts and nature and nurture and games and sports and haircuts and massages and movies and meetings and handshakes and exercise and giving money to that junkie on the corner, and they will devote him, and they will devote your unconceived children.

And you might not ever get it back, you probably won’t, but nevertheless my people will take it all from you for the mere chance that they can change things, because if they can’t control the meteor they can at least control you.

So ultimately there are some things, that are only a little bad, and you can helm a lot; then there are things that might be sincerely bad, where your influence is the arbiter; and then there are the eschatologically bad, that position the human imagination into the context of the size of the universe.

Everyone wants to convince you, now, that either things are only a little bad or are apocalypse, but in either case they want to convince you that your participation is absolutely analytically necessary and things cannot possibly do without. It’s nothing stupid like pick a side, tyranny of the inside or wasteland of the outdoors; more primitive, it’s put a quarter in the game. The rest of us can’t rest without hitting the buttons.