Maybe you saw the recent movie Don’t Look Up, with the tagline: “Based on real events … that haven’t happened — yet.”

Or maybe you’ve seen the competing 1998 movies Deep Impact or Armageddon based on the same premise: A large celestial object is on a collision course with Earth and will result in a mass extinction event on the scale of the one that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.