NOW PLAYING: The Sky Is Falling! 14 May, 1998 The Wife and I just saw Deep Impact, and while it is clearly a modernized spinoff of the "disaster movies" of the '70s, it has the potential to make you think. (And I don't mean think about how, if Our Hero is only six miles away from the Virginia Beaches when the tidal wave hits, does he manage to make it safely to the mountains on a motorcycle before the rising water catches him. Unless my geography is way off, the mountains in VA are a good 5 hours or more from the water. Anyway...) Even though it's easy enough to say, "Yeah, well, it was just a movie," the scenario really can't be dismissed like that. According to some dude I saw talking about it on the Discovery Channel, astronomers have only charted about 10% of the comets, asteroids, meteors, and other space-rocks floating around near us. So there's a better than average chance that something wicked could be barreling down on us at this very moment. Stuff from space hits our planet all the time, it just isn't big enough to really matter. But when something big enough heads our way, we're goners. I don't know that anybody has a real plan to stop a comet from plowing into us. So what would you do? Try to build some sort of underground shelter and stock it up with enough to live on for two years while the earth healed itself? Say "To hell with it," and use up all your money and max out the plastic doing whatever you wanted (Assuming, of course, that the credit card companies wouldn't just close out everybody's accounts beforehand)? Just go on living your normal life until Doomsday? What? I don't think it would be the same as finding out you had terminal cancer or something; I mean, with the cancer, you'd eventually be too sick to really do anything except stay in bed, which limits your options to a degree. With the asteroid scenario, you'd be fine and dandy right up until the thing hits and snuffs you out. Unless you escape instant death so you can die a slow, horrible death from freezing or starvation during the two-year winter. I suppose some people might manage to survive -- living on Twinkies and cans of beans salvaged from grocery stores. Maybe. Quite the Post-Apocalyptic nightmare, I imagine. Like The Road Warrior on ice. I'm not sure I'd want to live in a world like that... The roaches would survive, of course. Probably prosper. Maybe they'd evolve over hundreds of millions of years and build cities and things. RoachWorld. I don't know what I would do. I've been thinking about it for a few days now, but still don't have an answer. With any luck, I won't have to.
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