As we'll see throughout the course of this article, the end of the world is a popular topic in the movies which is often utilized without any real consideration for scientific facts. Whether it's an alien invasion or a catastrophic natural disaster, the end of the world is pretty much guaranteed to get plenty of bums on theatre seats. Following hot on the heels of Deep Impact, Michael Bay's 1998 movie Armageddon opted for an impending asteroid collision to build up the tension for planetary destruction, even co-opting NASA to assist with the production. Needless to say NASA didn't exactly go out of their way to correct the many scientific flaws in the film's narrative. From radically underestimating the explosive force of such an impact (the movie states that the asteroid thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs had the power of 10,000 nuclear bombs whereas science conservatively estimates a figure of around 800,000), describing the asteroid as "the size of Texas" even though none in the solar system are such a size, or the inexplicable failure to spot something so large until it's only 18 days away, NASA's involvement clearly had little to do with ensuring scientific accuracy. Still, at the end of the day (or world) this is a Michael Bay action movie - expecting it to stick to scientific facts is clearly missing the point of what a movie like Armageddon is trying to achieve. Big explosions and dumb, loud action is the order of the day.
