Michael Bay was sort of accurate with his 1998 film Armageddon, a film which NASA screen to applicants before asking them to point out all the bad science on screen. There's tonnes of that, but the director of such hits as Transformers and every other Transformers was right that a huge asteroid might well be what destroys our planet. It seems like a week can't go by without doom-laden predictions about a huge space rock heading our way and every time, it either narrowly misses the Earth's path at the last second, or else it burns up in the atmosphere and impacts the planet as a stone the size of a golf ball. Nothing to worry about then, right? The possibility of an asteroid killing humanity off any time soon is something like 0.00013%, with early warning systems giving us time to put together a way of stopping it (which will not be astronaut training for oil rig workers). But it's certainly true that a rock 5 kilometres across hits Earth about once every 20 million years, and it's been a while...
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
