Imagine an asteroid...

Imagine if an asteroid was coming to get us.

 Imagine if there were already meteor showers and even relatively minor impacts happening on a regular basis, but governments decided that, due to free market ideological purity, they had NO intention of doing anything about it... they claimed to care, but they wouldn't release any real resources - in short, imagine if asteroid impact mitigation was entirely up to private enterprise, charity and individuals. Imagine also that no crewed space exploration had taken place since the early 1960s, since the putt-putt era of Gagarin, Tereshkova, and John Glenn - imagine that we never landed on the Moon and that no human had ever spent more than a couple of hours in space.

The last man and woman in space

Imagine that a dino-killing asteroid was coming to hit the earth in 30 years at most and we didn't even have NASA.

 The first and last American in space

He'll see you right when the time comes

.

Imagine that, for some reason, certain private interests, perhaps the makers of asteroid shelters, had convinced large swathes of the population that asteroids didn't exist, or that if they did exist, weren't a problem.





Imagine if the President of the United States didn't believe in asteroids, and it was considered an article of faith among his party that they didn't either.

Not such a stretch...

Imagine if even opposition figures just waffled and fudged when asked what they were going to do about the asteroid.
 
 Imagine if an asteroid was going to hit the Earth in at most 30 years time, and most people acted like they didn't give a shit - and the authorities were asleep at the wheel.

Imagine if we had to put together a space mission to destroy this asteroid within ten years or we would certainly perish - imagine if we had to design and build an entire class of spacecraft, monster nuclear weapon, delivery system, and crew return vehicle within TEN YEARS, or the asteroid would be too near the Earth to deflect no matter what we did. Imagine the public anger, the sense of betrayal, if our leaders just spouted platitudes because they were alright, they had bunkers and private islands sorted out, and they were just going to leave the rest of us to fry - too bad, suckers!

Again, not such a stretch...

Now imagine that most people didn't feel angry or betrayed but simply resigned to their fate. Imagine if an anti-asteroid protest movement existed, with slogans like BUILD THE BOMB and DETONATION NOT DEVASTATION and LETS BLOW UP THE FREAKING ASTEROID ALREADY, and they were universally derided as weirdoes on the fringes of society, unwashed hippie layabouts, and subversive leftie scum - even among other protest movements! Imagine if in its desperation, this movement resorted to blocking traffic just to get traction on the airwaves because the world was going to end and all that happened was that people got pissed off because it made them late to work.

This is what is happening with global warming. Humanity has a vast job to do, sure it might not work, just as bombing the shit out an asteroid might not work, but it's better than waiting to die. And nobody gives a flying fuck. I condemn myself as much as the next person, but I have no goddam clue what to do. So I wrote this.

Maybe Extinction Rebellion aren't perfect, but at least it's a start.