According to the internet hysteria surrounding the ancient Mayan calendar, an asteroid could be on its way to wipe out the world on December 21, 2012. Obviously this is pretty unlikely -- but if an asteroid really is on its way, could we take a cue from the disaster movie Armageddon in order to save the planet?
According to science research carried out by University of Leicester physics students, the answer is definitely "no."
In the 1998 film, Bruce Willis plays an oil-drilling platform engineer who lands on the surface of an Earth-bound asteroid, drills to the centre and detonates a nuclear weapon, splitting the asteroid in half.
The two pieces of the asteroid then pass either side of Earth, saving the planet's population from annihilation.
But the group of four MPhys students worked out that this method would not work, as we simply do not have a bomb powerful enough.
Students Ben Hall, Gregory Brown, Ashley Back and Stuart Turner found that the device would need to be about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth -- the Soviet Union's 50 megaton hydrogen bomb "Big Ivan" -- in order to save the world from a similar sized asteroid.
Just all the more reason why it is imperative that humanity expand into deep space, as Stephen Hawking and a number of others have advocated. To read more, click here.