Avoiding Lembit Opik is pretty much impossible these days. The threat is always looming on the horizon. With every turn of a magazine page, flick of a TV channel, his jutting jawline comes hurtling unstoppably towards your helpless eyeballs. You can run, you can cover your eyes and scream, but you can't escape - impact is unavoidable.
Yet while the Liberal Democrat MP has become the butt of jokes over his relationship with a Cheeky Girl, his views have won respect from an unlikely quarter: the world's leading astronomers.
In the late 1990s, Opik, a keen star-gazer (even then), warned that the world was sleepwalking into armageddon by ignoring the threat of a major asteroid impact.
His warnings were widely lampooned. But when the comet Schumaker Levy 9 left an earth-sized hole in Jupiter, the government quickly changed its mind and set up an all-party task force to assess the risk of a fatal collision with a near-earth object (NEO).
Meanwhile, in the US, Nasa scientists have been hastily developing their own anti-asteroid defence strategy, based on the impending arrival of the 270m-wide Apophis Asteroid, which is due to scrape by our outer atmosphere in the year 2029.
The results were unveiled on Friday and, in true Hollywood style, there will be three options available to whichever plucky US President is tasked with saving the world from oblivion when the time comes.
But, disappointingly for fans of the movie Armageddon, there is no call for any tough-talking Bruce Willis-type hero to sacrifice himself for mankind.
The mission would be piloted by robots, who would blast off in 2021 toward the 21 million-tonne asteroid.
Rather than smashing it to smithereens, the aim would be to give it a gentle shove while still far away - just enough of a bump to alter its course and make it miss the earth.
Nudging a 21 million-tonne boulder would, of course, be no mean feat. To do so, Nasa plans to fire six nuclear missiles, each primed with 1.2 megaton warheads. These would be detonated around 100m from the asteroid, the heat of the explosion causing part of it to vaporise and forcing the remainder to one side. Job - spectacularly - well done.
One alternative is to go further by letting the missiles hit the asteroid, physically knocking it off course. A different tack would be to focus the sun's rays into the asteroid with a giant mirror, which would have the effect of slowly easing it off course.
Exactly which option is chosen will depend on the nature and composition of the asteroid. But Nasa has calculated that the nuclear strategy would be powerful enough to divert a 100m-500m-sized boulder safely off course, given two years' warning.
Meanwhile, other experts have been offering Nasa their tuppence-worth on how the job should be handled. Dr Daniele Fargion, of the University of Rome La Sapienza, in Italy, suggests dropping nuclear-powered rockets, each tipped with a screw-shaped drill, on to the asteroid from a mothership.
After latching into the asteroid's surface - tricky in near-zero gravity - the "screw rocket" will drill deep into the boulder, projecting the rocky spoil behind it and thus propelling the asteroid off course.
According to New Scientist, Dr Fargion's calculations show that, over 10 years, screw-rockets could deflect a one-cubic-kilometre asteroid by 30,000km.
One difficulty is that the asteroid may be rotating, but this could be overcome by equipping the rockets with guidance systems, allowing them to fire only when they are on the right side of the asteroid to push it off course.
The true risk of Apophis striking earth in 2029 is extremely small, although it may knock one or two satellites out of orbit.
However, the bad news is there is a sequel - once Apophis passes earth it will be bent round by the planet's gravity, sending it back towards us in 2036 once more, with the odds of collision calculated at 45,000 to 1 - not quite enough low for us to sit back and forget about it.
By that time, of course, we'll have a new Prime Minister.
Who knows, it might even be Lembit Opik. Bruce Willis?
Eat your heart out.
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