In the next episode, not this one, we'll examine how science fiction has taken on the challenge of imagining life after global warming.

There's drought, flood, grievous loss, and even some optimism.

So, with that in mind, we thought we'd wet your appetite for annihilation by replaying this interview I did with author Ben

Winters a few years back. In his trilogy, The Last Policeman, it isn't the slow creep of

melting glaciers and devastating drought that heralds the end of the world. It's an asteroid.

All the action takes place in the six final months before the

date of impact, which spurs responses ranging from frolicing on beaches to suicide, to murder.

But the central character in Winter's trilogy is a policeman who just wants to do his job.

Early on, there's a bidding war over which news show gets dibs on the final announcement.

In Winter's book, CBS Newsman Scott Pelly wins the ultimate, and I do mean ultimate get.

The scientist with the terminal calculation.

Pelly leans forward, all empathy, asks the magically stupid question that all the world needed

to hear.

So then, doctor, what are our options?

Dr. Leo Tolkien trembling, almost laughing.

Options?

There are no options. And then Tolkien just keeps talking, babbling, really, about how sorry he is on behalf of the

world's astronomical community, how they had studied every realistic scenario.

But this, this never could have been imagined.

An object with such a near Parahillian, with such an epically

long elliptical period, such a staggeringly large object. The odds of such an object's existence

so vanishingly low. And Scott Pelly is staring at him, and all over the world people are

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