Nothing will ever get you thinking about your own mortality quite like a giant asteroid, buzzing over your head.

Not just my head, either. All of our heads. It seems that on Monday, an asteroid the size of a 10-story building zipped past the Earth, coming within 45,000 miles of us. To give you some perspective, that's about how many miles it takes to drive across Montana.

I defy anyone to drive across Montana and tell me it isn't 45,000 miles wide.

Ihave to say, now's not a really good week for me to get vaporized by a meteor impact. My sweet Annette is out of the state, on tour with the Washington Generals, doing battle with those showoff Globetrotters. If you ask me, those guys are cheating. Anyway, Imiss her, and if Iam to die at the hands of speeding celestial body, I'd prefer to do so with Annette somewhere within my field of vision.

Also, I became a short-term vegetarian just last week, when Igave up meat for Lent. I'm more than certain that, at the gates of judgment, they're probably going to ask me what Ilast had to eat before that asteroid crushed me, my house and my dog. And Idon't want to have to tell St. Peter that it was a garden salad and eight doughnuts.

I'm going to be an uncle soon. "Watchmen"opens in movie theaters today. Ijust bought milk. I want to see the Twins win the World Series one more time. My list of reasons to live goes on and on. I'm sure the asteroid took all of this into consideration when deciding not to collide with me or my city.

This whole episode has gotten me thinking about what would happen if astronomers should happen to notice an asteroid the size of Texas bearing down on us. Do we want to know about it ahead of time?Do we send Bruce Willis up on a space shuttle with a nuke, a drill and a prayer? Die hard, asteroid! Or do we just not mess with it, since it looks like Texas?

If I've learned anything from Atari, if you shoot the asteroid, it only breaks into smaller, faster-moving asteroids that are even harder to shoot. The best strategy is to just spin your triangle spaceship rapidly in a circle, and spray the whole playing area aka our solar system with missiles haphazardly, until all those polygons are destroyed.

Good to know, right?I offer this advice, hoping only that NASAand the Obama administration are reading my column every week, and they are as interested in protecting our human race as I am. I like to think they do, and they are.

Would you even want to know if an asteroid was on a collision course with our only planet? Seems like we won't have to worry about getting too much advance notice, considering no one bothered to warn us about this one until two days after it had us in the rearview.

What could you do, though?Riot in the streets?Pack a bag? Hide under your desk?

All I'm asking, scientific community, is next time you give me at least an hour's notice, preferably when my significant other is nearby, so I can kiss her goodbye and finish off any open containers of milk in my fridge.

(You may contact columnist Kelly Hagen, hidden deep underground within his asteroid-proof bunker, at 250-8259 or kelly.hagen@bismarcktribune.com.)