At 9.45pm on 13 April 2029, you might want to take a look out of the window. That rock in the sky heading your way fast is actually an asteroid called 99942 Apophis, named after the ancient Egyptian god of chaos. Roughly the size of Wembley Stadium, when Apophis hits it’ll do to our species what another asteroid did to the dinosaurs 66m years ago.
Did I say “when”? I obviously meant “if”. After all, as Tom Phillips puts it, space is big, and little Earth easily missable – despite the nominative determinism of what he nicknames Smashy McDeathrock. Plus, in 2022 Nasa deliberately crashed the Dart spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos, knocking if off course. If Smashy hits London, hypothesises Phillips, it’ll engulf everywhere from Camden to Clapham in a fireball and leave a crater three miles wide that “would have previously contained approximately 150 branches of Pret”. Truly, any survivors will envy the dead.
