Of all the fears baked in to being a Millennial of a Certain Age, none has stuck with me quite like the Hollywood-hyped prospect of life as we know it ending in a bang when a giant fragment of rock and ice comes hurtling out of the inky depths of space to slam into the crust of our planet. I, and plenty more like me, grew up at a time when the film industry couldn’t help but hype a scenario in which an asteroid impact would kill millions of humans instantly, while dooming the rest of our species to a slow death from a dust-induced ice age. Bruce Willis gallantly sacrificed himself to save the Earth from this apocalyptic fate in Armageddon, while Elijah Wood survived to watch helplessly as an extinction level event destroyed the entire Eastern Seaboard in Deep Impact.
In part, these doomsday scenarios were so terrifying to my overactive imagination because I knew that no matter how much Hollywood overdramatized the possibility of death from above, it was still not wholly out of the realm of possibility. You don’t see many dinosaurs around these days, y’know?
