One of the stated objectives of all this activity is to find an answer to the question: Is there life on Mars? Among my circle of friends the real question is: How are the Martians taking all this? I believe (and, to borrow an expression from the governor of Lagos State, “you can quote me”) that the majority of Martians are thoroughly fed up with the situation, and have decided to fight back. That is the only way to explain the mysterious disappearance of Beagle. No one seems to be considering the possibility of its having been captured and destroyed by trained operatives from the Martian Agency for Homeland Security, specially created by the Martian authorities and for the purpose of preventing earthlings from dumping refuse on Mars.

And now, the indigenes of Mars having become tired of having things dumped on them may have decided to retaliate by dumping a few things of their own on planet Earth. One of the things they have dumped is an asteroid which is now hurtling towards our planet, and is due to hit on Friday February 1, 2019, at about the time when people would be getting into the mood for the weekend. “Thank God it’s Friday,” they would be saying when, in fact, a rogue asteroid is a mere 25,000 kilometres away, and accelerating.

Asteroid, it should be noted, is only a fancy word for a boulder. It is a dangerous weapon — probably the Martians’ weapon of first choice. The impact of the one now dropping earthwards, we are told, could be on a scale big enough to demolish a whole continent, and also raise a dust storm that could be a horrendous environmental disaster. If it should fall into some ocean, the tidal waves that would result could be of monumental proportions. The whole world is baffled that President Bush, with Prime Minister Blair loyally echoing him, has not classified it as a weapon of mass destruction.

We have good cause to be wary of things that fall out of the sky – things like hailstones the size of cricket balls, that kill people, like out-of-control aircraft that crash into crowds at air shows, or bombs that are dropped from airplanes. To come back to our errant asteroid, one of the odd things about it is that, while nobody knows its exact size (two kilometres wide) and the precise date of its expected arrival on our shores, the designated ground zero has been kept a secret. As a result we have no idea of the direction in which we should stampede as we seek to put as much distance as possible between us and this monstrous boulder.

There must be something about heavenly bodies that strikes fear into men’s hearts, and they don’t have to fall out of the sky to cause us unease. In this country, there are societies that have still not come to terms with such phenomena as: eclipses. As a little boy, I once lived in a part of Nigeria where, during an eclipse of the moon, the populace trooped out in their hundreds, creating a frightful din by beating on buckets, pans and anything else that came to hand, acting out their belief that, during a lunar eclipse, a dark monster was swallowing up the moon, and that only by making as much noise as possible would they succeed in forcing the monster to regurgitate its victim. And sure enough, after six to eight minutes of the cacophony the monster would duly comply, and the high priests and medicine men would go home, pleased with the night’s work.

So what do we do on February 1, 2019? Do we come out beating on dustbins and buckets, in the hope of scaring away a rampaging asteroid? It can be assumed that, with most people, the mood will be one of resignation, of accepting the inevitability of this attack from outer space. But there will also be people who will feel that something should be done, and some of them are already considering some options. One such option is to deflect the asteroid from its collision course by detonating a nuclear device near it. “Wait a minute,” others say in horror, “What about fallout, radiation and the possible effect on that old bugbear we call global warming?” The short answer would seem to be that we must weigh what we might gain against what we might lose – i.e. choose between instant oblivion, and slow and painful death. It doesn’t seem like much of a choice.

There will be several fly-by-night property developers who will, as usual, try to make a quick profit out of the situation,  offering to build bomb shelters on the sites of burnt-down  and recently demolished markets. There also will be no shortage of itinerant preachers of the gospel to tell us that February 1, 2019 is the Day of Judgment about which they have sufficiently warned us. If we are lucky they may give us one last chance to repent and be saved. I think it may already have started, if what happened to a friend not long ago is an indication. He was busy in his study one Saturday morning, catching up with some work, when the doorbell rang.

Two young ladies, both of them under thirty, told him that they had come to preach the gospel. Asking himself how much gospel girls under thirty could preach to a man already approaching seventy, my friend politely told the pair that 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning was a most inconvenient time for them to call. “Come back some other day, when I am not so busy,” he told them.

To which one of them replied: “You had better hear us now, for tomorrow may be too late.” Too late, apparently, to book a place on the list of people who would be safely out of the reach of a crashing asteroid. The period immediately preceding February 2019 will also be a boom time for sellers of sure-fire remedies against being crushed by asteroids. These will include potions to be swallowed three times a day; ointments to be rubbed on the body before going to bed; charms to be worn round the neck or waist; ritual magic words to be recited while anxiously gazing at the sky; domestic animals to be slaughtered and offered as sacrifice, and incense to be burnt.

What, you may ask, would this columnist be doing while all this is happening? He is now approaching 72. On February 1, 2019 he would be 86 years 7 month, 8 days and a few hours old, and would certainly not be agile enough to dodge a falling asteroid. Nor would he allow himself to be moved into a “shelter” that may in the end turn out, for all practical purposes, to be just a crater of monumental proportions. Waving aside offers of charms and potions, he would no doubt say to himself that since we will all be ending up in a hole in the ground anyway, the dignified way for a man of eighty-six to arrive at his own hole in the ground is in a casket, borne on the shoulders of singing mourners, not to flee to it in blind panic. The proper response to this imminent Martian attack, if that is what it turns out to be, would be to stay calm and take whatever lumps fate may decide to throw at him.

The good news, for those who like to clutch at straws, is that the Martians are apparently not so hot when it comes to marksmanship, and the probability of the asteroid actually hitting target is only one in a million. In other words, there is a good chance that this boulder from outer space may give us a miss, and harmlessly continue its journey into the great void, where it will become just another star in the galaxy. Thank God for big mercies.