It’s only the first week of the semester and I’m afraid we are settling down too fast into the grind of college life. So I think it’s especially important that we pause now and be reminded about the many ways our world could go up in a fiery blaze – and perhaps shout out an “Amen!” It’s current news that Pakistan and India, two countries that once only existed in the average American’s consciousness as possible answers to Final Jeopardy questions, are facing a nuclear standoff. If that doesn’t pan out, then there’s always the proliferation of nukes on the black market that could allow rogue nations such as Iraq or Mike Tyson to cause havoc in the future.

Don’t worry, non-nuclear fans; there are some good old-fashioned ways for you to go kicking and screaming into the night. For example, it was announced last week that an asteroid about thrice the size of Shakira’s hips had come within a “whisker” of smashing into Earth.

The asteroid, officially known as 2001 YB5, was just 600,000 km away. For those of you who can’t comprehend large metric distances, that’s twice the distance from here to the moon. Had the asteroid collided with us it would’ve produced the force of hundreds of nukes. For those of you unfamiliar with large nuclear forces, that’s enough devastation to bring tears of laughter to Russian and American military leaders as they polish the triggers to several thousand nukes, making sure that some klutz from the biological weapons program didn’t accidentally spill leftover anthrax onto the firing mechanisms.

But what is really alarming, though, is that astronomers were only able to detect 2001 YB5 within weeks of the near collision. For all we know, the next time an asteroid comes by we’ll have barely five minutes notice.

So instead of dying with dignity by using our last precious moments to watch digital cable and inject Corona and Haagen-Dazs directly into our bloodstreams, we might have died doing something very undignified like Christmas shopping, which includes trampling each other in Wal-Mart in order to buy the last George Foreman’s Cappuccino Maker.

Dignity, after all, is a very valuable trait. Especially for its ability to take a back seat to just about every other human trait, like the trait that causes us to drop our trousers or consume large invertebrates when double-dared. Just last week there was a troubling incident involving dignity and an armed Kentuckian named Bob Bowling. Before you ask in disbelief, “How could Kentucky and the Second Amendment go wrong?”, I want to emphasize that this is not a tragic story. Bowling simply decided that Carter County wasn’t big enough for both him and the town snowman and wanted a showdown. In what will go down as the greatest upset in the recorded history of human-snowman conflict, Bowling then accidentally shot himself in the thigh when trying to quick-draw. But rather this being your shameful man-gets-caught-in-compromising-position-with-inanimate-object story, it is a triumphant story of the human will to live.

I say this because whereas most people would’ve happily bled to death on the snow in this humiliating situation, Bowling swallowed his dignity and let himself be administered to by doctors and nurses, who were probably using one hand to heal the wound and the other to inject themselves with nitric oxide to prevent their spleens from rupturing with laughter.

But let’s not change the subject. I was talking about ways of how the world might end before something tragic such as finals week occurs. Although 2001 YB5 missed us this time, astronomers say that we can expect at least one major asteroid every 5,000 years to strike Earth.

I’d like to think dignity would stay around until then, but the number of nukes and snowmen built by that time would probably force dignity to file a restraining order against us.

Dan Nguyen is a senior in computer engineering and journalism and mass communication from Iowa City.