As the movie ‘Armageddon’ played recently on my TV. dur­ing a dreary, over­cast day, I came to a realization.

That real­iza­tion being, if God-forbid, any­thing even remotely close to the story line hap­pened in real life, we as a peo­ple, are done for. The human race will be adios, toast, stick a fork in us because this goose is cooked.

Now before I go any far­ther, I want to let it be known that I am an extremely opti­mistic per­son. I always try to look for the good in every­thing, and no mat­ter how bad a sit­u­a­tion gets I feel like myself and any oth­ers involved will be able to pull through it just fine. With that said, if the hor­rors of ‘Armageddon’ came to life we would be absolutely done for, our expi­ra­tion date is up, homo sapi­ens have bought the farm. Go to the DVD menu and pick the alter­nate end­ing because this one is not end­ing in hugs and kisses.

Now here is my rea­son­ing behind why I feel so cer­tain that this would be the case. In the movie, N.A.S.A. becomes aware of an aster­oid the size of Texas which is on a col­li­sion course with Earth. They have 18 days to come up with a plan before this humon­gous rock turns the Earth into one big fire­works extrav­a­ganza. According to Hollywood, the plan works and Bruce Willis saves the day. Maybe I am just gullible, but when I first saw the movie I had thought, or at the very least hoped, that this was some­what plausible.

Thanks to the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill though, we have all been dealt a healthy dose of real­ity. If we can’t even fix a dis­as­ter of that mag­ni­tude in a rea­son­able time frame, how are we going to save our­selves when faced with cer­tain extinction.

I feel that the vast major­ity of Americans, includ­ing President Obama, would qual­ify the oil spill as a dis­as­ter. Some say it is the great­est envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter of all-time. With some of the ‘best’ minds in the world work­ing on the prob­lem, it still took us 113 days (April 20 — Aug. 11) just to plug a hole a few thou­sand feet under­wa­ter. With that kind of fast think­ing, how are we going to develop a plan which will actu­ally suc­ceed in us trav­el­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of miles to stop a global-killing rock hurl­ing through space in under 18 days.

Looking at the one bright spot in all of this, at least the oil pipe is finally capped. After the sev­eral months of plan­ning sci­en­tists were able to use a pro­ce­dure called a sta­tic kill to stop the pipe from gush­ing oil. What the sta­tic kill involved was fill­ing the pipe with mud and cement. It took some of the best minds in the world 113 days to fig­ure out this whole dis­as­ter could be ended by some mud and cement.

Now, while I real­ize that I am most likely com­pletely and totally over sim­pli­fy­ing the prob­lem of the oil spill, the point remains the same. With some fore­thought, the blunt of this dis­as­ter most likely could have been reduced greatly.

There are obsta­cles in life, some big­ger then oth­ers. Some expected and some unex­pected. We as a species need to start plan­ning for obsta­cles before they hap­pen instead of wait­ing for them to come to fruition. The longer we take to start plan­ning for the unknown the worse off we are going to be. Whether it is plan­ning on how to pay an unex­pected bill, or how to stop an aster­oid. We as indi­vid­u­als, and as a species would ben­e­fit from a lit­tle extra forethought.

Having a plan for some­thing that never hap­pens, is a whole lot bet­ter then not hav­ing a plan for some­thing that does. n