7 Ways Scientists Plan To Avert The Apocalypse

7. Asteroid Impact

Until quite recently, most people were inexplicably chill about the idea of an asteroid screaming out of the sky and obliterating life on Earth. That was until an asteroid 300 metres across unexpectedly passed by the Earth at a distance of less than half a million miles back in 1989.

We were never in danger of being hit that time, but it definitely made the powers that be sit up and pay a bit more attention to the space rocks of death, just floating around out there in the solar system.

An impact from the kind of asteroid that passed by the Earth in the 80s would likely result in a continent-wide firestorm as the skies above the Earth ignited, and a catastrophic effect on global temperatures, and we didn't even see it coming.

Since then, NASA has formed a network of observatories loosely dubbed as "Spaceguard" to keep an eye on the skies and document all of the shifty-looking Near Earth Objects (NEOs). They continue to track apocalypse-causing rocks, but what would happen if one was actually heading for us?

Despite the risk of simply creating lots of smaller asteroids, many still consider nukes to be a viable option. Others think that a slightly less dramatic tactic of nudging it off-course with a projectile would do the trick. A slightly less orthodox solution would be to paint it. Giving it a different shade would change the way it reflects sunlight. Long story short, this would mean that it receives a different amount of "push" from solar radiation, knocking it off course.