How would we save the planet from a killer asteroid?

We don’t need to be scared of everything that falls from space. In fact, literal tons of space rocks rain down daily, though that’s mostly in the form of minuscule dust grains. But every 100 million years or so, catastrophe strikes in the form of a rock spanning miles.

The last one killed not just the dinosaurs, but three-quarters of all life on Earth. The effects on humans could be equally devastating — bomb shelters wouldn’t cut it in the face of such an event.

Not when the shaken Earth hurls tsunamis onto every shore. Not when volcanoes explode in angry retort. Not when the skies go dark with the asteroid version of a nuclear winter,dustand debris covering the sun. Even people who survive the first wave of destruction would inherit a world utterly destroyed. The world’s stubbornest creatures, the cockroaches and rats and tardigrades, would probably be fine. But the rest of us are doomed.

It’s a cataclysm of almost unthinkable proportions, but history tells us that it is indeed possible. Thankfully humans today have rockets and nuclear bombs and NASA. We can engineer a way out of this.