Hidden somewhere in the dark of space, there is a giant asteroid on a collision course with Earth. If we don’t discover it and somehow stop its arrival, it will hurtle through Earth’s atmosphere at 60,000 kilometers per hour and slam into the ground, vaporizing everything it touches.
With millions of asteroids hurtling through the inner solar system, the threat is inevitable. A conflict will occur sooner or later. But that doesn’t mean the Earth has to be a sitting duck. The global community is obsessed with planetary defense, carefully planning how to repel extraterrestrial invaders should they appear, or at least minimize carnage.
Among other things, the research includes scanning the sky for threats and testing a mission to throw an asteroid off course. But it also includes a surprising amount of role-playing, with scenarios in which teams impact asteroids in a war game. “In the real world, we haven’t gotten to this point yet where we need to actually design and build a mission. That’s why we need these exercises,” says NASA, which does a lot of role-playing. Paul Chodas says. “It makes you think about details that you wouldn’t otherwise think about.”
In the coming paragraphs, you’ll be in the hot seat for a choose-your-own-adventure version of one of these role-playing games. You decide how to react when an asteroid comes towards us. Whether you want to crash your spaceship, use sunlight-absorbing paint to change its course, or just blow it to pieces, you’ll realize we have even more options…
