Hiding someplace within the gloom of house, there’s a gigantic asteroid on a collision course with our planet. If we don’t spot it and by some means thwart its arrival, it’s going to pierce Earth’s environment at 60,000 kilometres per hour and hammer into the bottom, vaporising something it touches.
With tens of millions of asteroids hurtling by means of the interior photo voltaic system, the menace is inevitable: in the end, an affect will occur. However that doesn’t imply Earth needs to be a sitting duck. A worldwide neighborhood is engrossed in planetary defence, fastidiously planning the best way to fend off these extraterrestrial interlopers once they present up – or at the very least minimise the carnage.
Amongst different issues, this work has concerned scanning the sky for threats and testing missions to knock asteroids off beam. But it surely additionally features a stunning quantity of role-playing, the place groups war-game asteroid affect eventualities. “In the real world, we haven’t really gotten to this stage where we actually have to design and build missions, so that’s why we need these exercises,” says NASA’s Paul Chodas, who runs lots of the role-plays. “They make you think about details that you would not otherwise think about.”
Over the approaching paragraphs, you can be within the sizzling seat in a choose-your-own journey model of certainly one of these role-playing video games. You’ll determine the best way to react because the asteroid bears down upon us. Whether or not you decide to slam a spacecraft into it, use sunlight-absorbing paint to shift its path, or just blow it to smithereens, you can see we’ve extra choices…
