> I don't think anybody would care. A few months ago, an asteroid missed crashing into Earth by only a *very* small margin of time. This event had the potential to wipe out a major amount of life on our planet. It didn't even make front page news, either before or after the near miss.
>
> Most people I spoke to about it had the attitude "Wow, that's really scary, really makes you think, ooh look at this football score on the next page." I am not sure whether this makes me admire the human race or despair of it.
>
> Since there wasn't anything we could personally do to *prevent* the arrival of the massive cosmic death rock, I don't suppose it matters anyway.

To my thinking, that's an admirable thing; I can't speak for the people you spoke to about this, but, for my part, I wouldn't be terribly excited about it either way, for exactly the reason you mentioned: there would be exactly nothing that I could do about it. I'm certain that by the time *I* found out about something like that, the people who may be able to do something about it already would know, so I wouldn't even be able to alert anyone usefully. I don't see any sense in getting all worked up and panicky about something I can't do anything about - if it's just going to come down to a roll of the dice, I may as well just go about things as usual and see what happens.

This, of course, changes slightly depending on scope - something like you say, that would involve the destruction of the Earth (or a significant part thereof), I wouldn't pay too much heed to. Something that has a significant chance of killing just me, though, I would have to attend to a bit more; I would be remiss in my responsibilities at least to my wife if I didn't "put my affairs in order" or somesuch beforehand.