What are our options?
We don’t have any options. We’re on a collision course. Either we move or it does. Or kaboom. And we’re not moving.
So we’ll have to move it.
Right. Only there’s no way to do that.
What do you mean? There’s always a way.
Well, how would you recommend we go about it?
Why don’t we just blow it up?
Then you end up with a thousand pieces instead of just one, but they’ll still be heading right for us, and they’ll still hit us.
But won’t that make it less likely that any one piece will be large enough to be catastrophic?
No, because the mass won’t change considerably. Sure, you may lose a few kilograms into interstellar space, but you’ll still end up getting hit by about the same mass as before.
Okay, so the mass might not change much, but in smaller pieces, won’t they be more likely to burn up in the atmosphere?
Yes, it probably would, as long as each piece was hitting independently. But when they all hit at roughly the same time, it ends up causing the same problem as a single large impact would.
How could that be?
Think about it. 50 kilometers isn’t all that big, in comparison with the whole world. There are even some cities that are bigger than 50 kilometers. So a single asteroid 50 kilometers across hitting us would be no big deal, at least in the grand scheme of things, if all we had to worry about was the destruction caused at the place of impact. People would die where it hit and probably for a thousand kilometers around the point of impact, but life for the rest of the planet would go on.
But you’re still worried.
Right. A meteor this size won’t lose much speed. It’ll hit with a lot of force, forming a crater 10 to 20 times its size. All that dirt has got to go somewhere.
So you’re saying dust is the problem?
That and radiation. But the real problem is the climate change that follows. With that much dust and dirt and radiation in the air, the atmosphere will quickly become toxic and unbreathable, and we’ll plunge almost overnight into an ice age like we’ve never seen before. Our simulations show that within ten years the average temperature will drop to minus 100, and it’ll take at least 350 million years to come out of the ice age, if the planet can recover at all.
But surely there’s something we can do . . .
Believe me, we’ve run all the simulations.
If the problem is the atmosphere, then let’s just build giant underground bunkers. We won’t be able to save everybody obviously, but we’ll preserve the human race.
And wait it out for 350 million years?
There’s got to be something . . .
I’m telling you, there’s not. We’ve looked at everything.
What if we leave?
Where would we go?
I don’t know. I don’t know. But I won’t take no for an answer.