As long as we are obsessing about armageddon, just what is the best way to defend against impacts from space debris?

The best method, called “mirror bees,” entails sending a group of small satellites equipped with mirrors 30 to 100 feet wide into space to “swarm” around an asteroid and trail it, Vasile explains. The mirrors would be tilted to reflect sunlight onto the asteroid, vaporizing one spot and releasing a stream of gases that would slowly move it off course. Vasile says this method is especially appealing because it could be scaled easily: 25 to 5,000 satellites could be used, depending on the size of the rock. . .

a half-mile-wide asteroid or larger, of which there are more than 700 that come close to Earth’s orbit, could have an impact equal to 60 billion tons of TNT. While it is not likely to happen, you still want to be prepared. “You don’t panic, you don’t have to run around screaming and waving your hands,” Gaffey says. “But you do need to devote resources to it.

Nonsense. Let's set our tails on fire and run in circles, as we do for other problems. What we need here is leadership, someone who can whip up a rhetorical frenzy and ride it to power. Perhaps this will be Gore's next incarnation.