This is (another) way the world ends

There's clearly a strong eschatological bent amongst the commissioning editors of Horizon, given their tendency to stick in the regular 'and here's another way we're all going to die horribly' edition amongst the usual programmes on various frontiers of science. But, it gives regular employment to Bill Paterson and Brian Cox, the official Voiceovers of Doom, so it's not all bad.

Tonight's edition - Averting Armageddon (originally shown in January) - was firmly in that vein, looking at the various methods scientists have discussed for destroying or deflecting any asteroids that could collide with the Earth. Of course, it suffered from the problem all discussions of this type have, which is that it's very hard to get people to take the idea seriously when the only asteroid they've found that may well hit us won't do so until 2880. Though, given our propensity to leave major global decisions for later generations to handle, I wouldn't be surprised if there's no real action on that until late 2879.

It is one of those areas that while it's not the sort of subject you want to think about too much, you're glad that someone somewhere is thinking about ways to stop it from happening. Watching some of the scientists involved in the field does give you the feeling that some of them would like to discover an asteroid that was going to hit us in the near future just so they can say 'See? I told you my work was worthwhile!'