Michael Bay saves us from asteroids. Really.

In 21 years, an asteroid named Apophis is scheduled to pass within the moon's orbit. Fearing that we'll be smashed into a billion-trillion little bits, someone decided it'd be good to start a competition to see who could come up with the best plan to move the asteroid. Cleverly, this competition was named the Move an Asteroid Competition.

Now, apparently, Michael Bay is some sort of rocket scientist, because he came up with the winning idea in Armageddon. Unfortunately, Billy Bob Thornton laughed at him, and the whole idea was tossed out.

The Register reports that Mary D’Souza recently won the competition for the paper entitled “A Body Solar Sail Concept for the Deflection of 99942 Apophis.” D’Souza’s plan calls for wrapping the asteroid with mylar film, which will cause solar radiation pressure to move the asteroid off of its path.

As I read this news, I realized that I had heard an extremely similar plan long ago: It was one of the solutions presented for the asteroid that threatened to destroy us in Michael Bay’s Armageddon.

For those of you who don’t have 100% recall of that film, remember that before they hire Bruce Willis’ character to sweep in and save Earth, Billy Bob Thornton at NASA entertained a wide variety of solutions to dealing with the asteroid. Here is the exact line from the movie, delivered by one of NASA’s scientists:

"Some of us have got this idea: We want to land a craft, deploy solar sails. You’ll have a great big canopy. Solar winds will be caught by these mylar sails!"

This outlandish and ridiculous plan draws an extremely pissed off response by Billy Bob Thornton:

"C’mon guys! We’ve gotta come up with something realistic here!"

The take-away message here is that Billy Bob Thornton is bad for humanity and Michael Bay is good. If you asked me, which you didn't but I'm telling you anyway, I would prefer Bruce Willis be the savior of humanity.

/film