What would have happened if the comet orbiting Jupiter last month had instead orbited the Sun and, as observers estimated, struck Earth rather than Jupiter?
Films were full of stories about humanity using technology to save Earth—sometimes from aliens, sometimes from asteroids. One film told of several astronauts heroically piloting the most advanced spacecraft humanity could build, carrying nuclear bombs and placing them at several fixed points on an asteroid.
Those were several vulnerable points identified through human surveying technology. As long as the nuclear bombs were planted there, the asteroid would shatter into several pieces and then travel along different trajectories. Some would bypass Earth. Even if the risk of an asteroid striking Earth could not ultimately be eliminated, its reduced mass would make it less threatening. What had been a catastrophe on the scale of the dinosaurs' extinction would become losses suffered by individual countries. Those countries might suffer terribly, but Earth and humanity would survive.
The public had the right to know the truth, but no one could predict what people who knew the truth would do. The year 2000 was almost here. Every millennium brought all manner of end-of-the-world legends. Though they always proved to be baseless in the end, people with ulterior motives would use such times to incite the public. Some even planned to "make a big scene" before they died, checking off everything they had once wanted to do but never dared to do, as if completing a bucket list.
Society would descend into unrest, the world into disorder, and disorder would create even more problems. Perhaps, after the efforts of brave people, the asteroid would ultimately miss Earth—only for the people on Earth to press the nuclear button themselves.
Telling the truth was not resistance. It was an earth-shattering revolution. That was