“An asteroid may have snuffed the dinosaurs. Are we next?” the TV commercial asks. Primitive fears and innate curiosity stirred, you tune in at prime time to see if indeed Iowa will soon become ground zero for a cosmic collision.

But your anticipation of havoc and mayhem-to-come go unrewarded and you tune into “Cops” to resolve your frustration cathartically through the misfortunes of others.

You have been duped by statistics. The chances of an asteroid hitting the earth, much less Iowa, are astronomically slim. How do you think they came up with the word ‘astronomical’ in the first place? The distances between the careening heavenly bodies is mind-bogglingly huge.

If you placed an orange in the middle of a football field and dropped a grape from a crop duster overhead, your chances of hitting the orange would be much better than the chances of an asteroid pulverizing the globe.

But given enough time, like a few million years, it does happen occasionally, even in Iowa. If you dropped the grape every day for a million years (or just assign a graduate student to the task) you would surely hit the orange on more than one occasion.

The operative word is ‘slim.’ Anyhow, we can worry all we want and it won’t do any good. There is nothing we can do about asteroids with our present technology. The best computer models that predict the motion of heavenly bodies are not without some degree of error. And trying to blow up a threatening asteroid, as some have suggested, is equally chancy. Chaos forbids a lot of accuracy in predicting the outcome of galactic snooker.

What people need is a healthy dose of skepticism, not sensationalistic hype and fear-mongering. In our collective ignorance we pose a greater threat to ourselves than any asteroid.

As we near the year 2000 there is an unprecedented amount of cultism, fear of technology, rejection of science, religious terrorism and alien-invasion films. All the ingredients for Armageddon.

The turn of the millennium is a profitable time for the soothsayers of doom with their prophecies of Biblical wrath. The end of the world could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Gods don’t kill people, people kill people.

If there are any alien civilizations out in space, they probably aren’t “vastly superior.” Chances are they face the same kinds of fallibilities that humans do. Failing economies, political unrest, social strife and the Psychic Friends Network … all wastefully sucking up money and creativity, and undermining the potential for more productive ventures.

But come 2001, the soothsayers of doom had best be looking for real jobs.