Back in 1998, audiences flocked to theaters for another apocalyptic blockbuster — this time, Armageddon, which went on to pull in more than $500 billion at the worldwide box office. The fascination with cosmic threats was already in the air, largely thanks to a comet named Hale Bopp that had been visible to the naked eye for over 18 months between 1995 and 1997. Astronomers estimated Hale Bopp to be roughly the size of Texas, though there was no cause for alarm: it was simply passing through on its 2,000 + year loop around the sun and posed no collision risk to our planet.
But the bigger question lingered — what would humanity do if a Hale Bopp-like object actually had Earth in its crosshairs? Armageddon caught NASA flat-footed, not because the science was wrong, but because everyday people suddenly grasped that this wasn't just a Hollywood fantasy — it was a genuine possibility. The movie's heroic solutions were still firmly in the realm of theory at the time. Meanwhile, astronomers were quietly grappling behind the scenes with how to respond to a real-world "armageddon" scenario, a threat that Hale Bopp's close pass had made feel all too plausible. It's worth noting that NASA had already been developing countermeasures before the film ever hit screens. Then, on December 27, 2012, the agency publicly revealed its ambitions to capture an asteroid and put humans on it by 2025 — a date that, at the time, felt like the distant future. Jump ahead to the summer of 2022, when NASA launched a mission that sent spacecraft to an asteroid and successfully altered its orbit, demonstrating the concept could actually work. That 2022 mission came 24 years after Armageddon — a striking reminder that science fiction sometimes has an uncanny knack for predicting what's to come.