NOTE: This post is not about a comet at all. The title is a line from a Firesign Theater album, and if you’ve heard it, you’ll see that it fits.

There aren’t enough natural disasters occurring on the planet’s surface – we need destruction on a far greater scale, preferably with somewhere around a 10th or even a fifth of the population being wiped out (in the developing world, of course) – so we’re going to import a whopper from space. That’s the ticket.

All this fresh talk about building a moon colony is well and good. At the very least it will kill off that conspiracy theory about the Apollo landings. But apart from the NASA geeks, once the initial video has been sent home, that’s going to be dull, dull, dull.

Chasing asteroids is the way to go. There’s been a lot of brave biblical talk lately about taking on an asteroid, and it centres on one asteroid in particular, originally called 2003 MN4, then renamed Apophis, Greek for “evil destruction”. I have here somewhere among my browser favourites a website that claims Jimi Hendrix had another name for this heavenly wanderer: “Electric Love”, and that NASA’s original designation “MN” stands for mountain, a reference to Hendrix’s lyric from “Voodoo Chile” – “I stand up next to a mountain, etc”

It’s a helluva story either way. First the science.

In November the boys at Cape Canaveral announced that they were going rain a Bruce Willis beating upside the head of an asteroid in an effort to figure out the best way to divert any other such boulders that might be coming our way.

Well, “beating” is definitely too strong a word. “Poke one with a stick” is how Chris McKay of the Nasa Johnson Space Centre put it in a chat with Space.com. A gentle nudge into safer orbit is what they’re going for, reasoning that judding an atomic warhead into it would only smash it into a billion dangerous shards with enough mutual gravity on their side that they could regroup with intent.

One researcher at Imperial College in London reckons that driving a Volkswagen at full thottle into a billion-tonne asteroid would push it out of the way (not really a Volkswagen, just something about that size). The kind of people who are paid (not well) to figure these things out estimate that a rock that scale, whacking into Earth at a 45-degree angle, could generate the equivalent of a 50,000-megatonne nuclear explosion.

An “asteroid expert” at Glasgow University told the Guardian that we could land a digging device on the asteroid, a mechanical gopher, that would chuck dirt out into space at a quick enough rate to alter its course. Then there’s the smoke-and-mirrors approach. Well, paint and mirrors, which would theoretically rob the beast of its light and heat and, over the course of a couple of decades, coax it away to healthier hunting grounds.

In the next three decades, doom-calculators and Vegas bookies say, there’s a one-in-5,500 chance that a smallish asteroid will land a bull’s eye on us. “Smallish” describes 99942 Apophis, poised for a possible strike in 2036, all of 360 metres wide yet capable of taking out New York City. It’s due to whiz past us in 2029, waving at us from 19,000 miles away – closer than a lot of our telecom satellites – then come back for a better look, and possibly stay for breakfast.

Astronauts Rusty Schweickart and Ed Lu have helped establish the B612 Foundation to strong-arm NASA into broadening its Spaceguard Survey, a program that spots and tracks near-Earth objects at least two-thirds of a mile across (so far 807 of them). An asteroid that size could to vaporise France. One that’s six to seven miles across could wipe out the dinosaurs if another one that size hadn’t already done the job.

It’s the little buggers that worry Schweickart and Lu. An estimated 100,000 asteroids have been seen that are capable of setting off a tsunami the size of the great swallower of 2004. “We’re sitting in a shooting gallery,” says Schweickart, “so it’s just a matter of time.”

While the scientists are bickering over policy – including amazingly, whether the point of impact might be shifted from one part of the world to another – we can indulge in a bit of literary whimsy, the better to segue into Hendrix.

The B612 Foundation takes its name from the home asteroid of the Earth-visiting prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “Le Petit Prince”.

This fellow “Saint-Ex”, as he’s often referred to, was quite a bloke in his own right. Saint-Exupéry was an aviator as well as a writer, and he vanished into the sea on the night of July 31, 1944, while flying a recon mission for the French resistance. In 1998 a fisherman hauled up his engraved silver chain bracelet in the waters off an island south of Marseille, still hooked to a chunk of his pilot’s suit. Then in 2004 they found his plane.

In “The Little Prince”, which he both wrote and illustrated, he imagines himself stranded in the desert, where he meets a young boy from a tiny asteroid. They get talking about the follies of this world and others, with a fennec (a desert fox) getting all the best lines, lines that James Dean was fond of spouting, incidentally:

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

Sly, as they say.

The book, which has sold more than 50 million copies and is often used to teach foreign-language students, got at least part of its inspiration from Saint-Exupéry’s 1935 crash in the Sahara – he was trying to win a cash prize for setting the air-speed record between Paris and Saigon.

Gulping sand, both he and his navigator were soon hallucinating. On the fourth day a Bedouin recued them, and St-Ex ended up with his name on French-language schools all over the world and his face on the 50-franc note (until the euro came along).

And asteroids too. Asteroid 2578 Saint-Exupéry was named for him in 1975, and in 1998 asteroid 45 Eugenia I Petit-Prince was named for his book – it orbits the larger asteroid 45 Eugenia, and Empress Eugenia was the mother of Napoleon Eugene, the Prince Imperial, on whom the Little Prince’s character was based. That’s Eugenia and Petit-Prince in the photo.

Then there’s an asteroid called 46610 Bésixdouze, French for “B-six-12″. So there you go!

I never read “The Little Prince”, but I read Wikipedia, and it tells me the kid used to wander around B612 uprooting baobab trees lest they rip his world apart when they get big. As if that isn’t pregnant enough with metaphor, the Prince goes voyaging through the universe and encounters a King who orders the stars to do what they’re already doing, a Conceited Man who wants to be admired but lives alone, a Drunkard who drinks to forget he’s ashamed of drinking …

That was getting too close to home, so I stopped there. Man, did I get off track …

@ @ @

Meanwhile, back in the asteroid belt, the European Space Agency is considering a nudge mission of its own called Don Quixote. That makes it sound like Europe doesn’t have any great expectations for success, but the Cervantes allusion stems from the plan to have one robot spacecraft tilt at a harmless asteroid, and another one take pictures to see if anything happens.

Really, though, is it all that bad? Actually, back in December 2004 (tsunami month, in case anyone needs reminding), Space.com got itself into quite a frenzy because a lot of scientists were throttling their calculators to try and confirm or deny that Apophis – named for the serpentine Egyptian god of darkness and chaos – was getting a bead on us.

On December 27, in fact, Space.com reported at 1.30pm that the asteroid had been given “an unprecedented risk rating of 4 on the Torino Scale” and the odds of a 2029 Earthwhack were 1-in-40. At 8.15pm they called off the alert. As an interesting sidebar, you can read about the scientists’ balancing act between telling the public too much and too little here.

Space.com kept its head. Over at UFOdigest.com you can still find this: “On April 13th, 2029, the asteroid may crush into Earth causing an explosion 100 times bigger than the blast of the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. A large part of Moscow is likely to disappear.” (The website’s source was Pravda.) Then, mere sentences later: “There is a real threat of collision, but it is not so deadly as previously thought [but] it might well destroy a communications satellite.”

And the completely hairbrained NewProphecy.net quotes Nostradamus’ Quatrain 1.69: “The great mountain seven stades round, After peace, war, hunger, inundation: It will roll long, drowning great countries, Even ancient ones and the great foundation.” Blah blah blah.

To find out the truth, I went directly to Apophis.com, but it turned out to be the webpage of the Apophis Sphynx Cattery, announcing that it went out of the cat-breeding business in 2004, and so long and thanks for all the tuna kibble. Now there’s a domain name with some market potential as 2029 approaches!

The photo shows SGC Apophis Nordstrom of Classical Cats, a sphynx cat (aka Canadian Hairless) who won something called the TICA International Alter of the Year in 1999. It cannot be a coincidence that Apophis the god of night is sometimes depicted as a snake, and that one of the reasons the ancient Egyptians loved cats so much was because they could be counted on to kill snakes and thus ensure that there would be another new day in the morning.

Anyway, NASA’s McKay told Space.com, with what can only be understatement, “There’s a lot of public resonance with the notion that Nasa ought to be doing something about killer asteroids.”

Yes, we’re way beyond Bruce Willis. Get Jimi Hendrix in here.

Oh, you mean Part 2?