The White House Just Dealt With A Fear You’ve Had Since The ’90s

Whether or not you want to admit it, you've had this fear, lingering, like some undetected disease in your subconscious since you were a child. Even Hollywood, with its blockbuster films and fantastical plots, has trolled you by exposing this fear to you repeatedly over the years. What am I talking about? Asteroids. More specifically killer asteroids, penetrating the earth and taking you and all of civilization down with them. But fear not, the White House has a plan. According to Vice's Motherboard, on December 30 the White House released its Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy in case something like the aforementioned should happen. That's right, while many Americans were readying themselves for New Year's Eve outings and losing track of the days while on vacation, government officials were finalizing a 25-page disaster plan. “If we were to be faced with a serious asteroid impact hazard, it's going to take more than just NASA to try to do something about it in space,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer, told Motherboard. "If there’s not enough time to do something about the asteroid in space, it's going to take efforts by a lot of agencies to prepare to take the hit. This is really the first time we've tried to pull together an all-government preparedness strategy for dealing with this very serious natural disaster." The fact that this is the first time this has ever been mapped out is also kind of scary, no? And Hollywood jokes aside, this is a very real threat (one word: dinosaurs), just not an immediate one. Check out the rest of the plan here. And while we may not know what 2017 has in store, it's great to know we're now prepared for killer asteroids.