Saint Valentine’s Day Space Massacre

Updated February 15, 2020 12:20pm EST – We survived.

Over the past few days, some articles popped up online warning people about a giant fucking asteroid that is going to do a Top Gun “buzzing the tower” style flyby on Earth Saturday morning.

Good news! We aren’t going to die! At least not from that. We aren’t quite that lucky.

Buried in all of these stories is the fact that it’s going to pass by at about 3.5 million miles away. Granted, in the grand scheme of space shit, this isn’t all that far. But it’s also not close enough for you to stock up on booze and ammunition and stop paying off your student loans. More importantly, it’s not close enough to set off the nuclear winter apocalypse the headlines seem to imply.

My favorite is the one from IGN with the following headline:

NASA Spots ‘Potentially Hazardous’ Asteroid Rapidly Approaching Earth

The best part about that article is that it is just four short paragraphs mostly made up of links to other articles and NASA’s explanation of what “potentially hazardous” means. It means there is potential for a fucking hazard. It also leads directly into the site’s list of the 25 Best Sci Fi Movies. I honestly thought that a website finally figured out how to weaponize SEO. The article itself was updated sometime after it was posted. I want to believe that the update was the addition of the sub-header beneath the title that reads, “But don’t fear, it’ll likely miss.” It may not have been that, so don’t take my word for it, but if it was <insert yet to be released Italian stereotype hand emoji here>.

Negligent headlines, aside, I’m not sure I would actually want to know that I only had two days before a galactic bullet tried to fuck our weekend. Especially if I were going to die immediately. Let me just live those last two days without added stress. It isn’t long enough for me forget about all of the other shit that worries me or for me to put it out of my mind and go about my day. It’s just long enough for me to want to go lay down, but literally never sleep again. And you know someone’s shithead boss would be like, “Until they know exactly where it is going to hit, we don’t know how long it will take for extinction and there is still money to be made!” Just imagine the billionaires trying to make their way to their End of Time Bunkers while trying to contact someone at the office to find out why things are slowing down.

The idea of surviving the initial impact to live long enough for the sky to turn black and everything to die around you is so pants-shittingly terrifying that I would just start laughing until I puked blood. I am in no way in any type of shape to survive the atrocities that would follow for the little time left. If it’s going to happen, I want to draw an X in the parking lot of wherever I am and yell, “YOU WON’T!” right at that bullshit piece of rock.

Fortunately, it won’t happen this weekend, because I don’t have any chalk to draw that X. And OH MY GOD I just realized that list of best sci-fi movies is going to have Armageddon on it and fuck that right out of here!