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Frenchman River Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada

66,050,000 BC (+\-500,000)

If a main battle tank were to suddenly come alive, one could mistake it for an Ankylosaurus. Rows of segmented armour plates (scutes) cover her back. Hard spikes point outward from the sides of her belly and at the very end of her tail is a bony knob that acts like a sledgehammer, to smash the skull of a T-Rex should it mistake her for lunch. Even her eyelids are armored.

Including her tail, the Ankylosaurus is 40ft long and weighs 15 tons, fully grown. Because of her great bulk, she can run at a max speed of 6 mph only but that is hardly a disadvantage, given that other dinosaurs (including Scotty, the T-Rex) don’t like to mess with her.

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The Ankylosaurus has sensed that something is very wrong. Her unease isn’t caused by the approach of a hungry predator. All of a sudden, the ground is rumbling and shifting, like at any moment she might be yanked off her hoofed feet.

Moments earlier the beast had stooped to drink from the edge of a lake, her feet firmly planted on a huge slab of rock that had slanted into the water, like a boat ramp. Dinosaurs know enough not to wade into the water. The lake has no bottom, only a thick ooze of quicksand that swallows anything that falls in to it.

The rock is covered with slippery moss and now it is moving and shuddering, leaving the Ankylosaurus trying desperately to back up. Slipping and sliding she barely makes it out, hooded eyes staring up skyward. “What the fuck just happened?” they seem to say.

Behind the Ankylosaurus, a sudden rush of wind joins the heaving ground to set the trees swaying, performing a macabre dance. A giant Metasequoia leans drunkenly forward at an angle, causing a roosting pterosaur to scramble to take to the sky, squawking in annoyance, its 20ft wings grasping at the air, desperately seeking lift. For a moment it looks as if the huge bird won’t make it but it eventually does.

Then, suddenly the shaking stops. The metasequoia comes back up almost to its original erect bearing and everything goes still, eerily quiet. It is as if nothing at all had been amiss.

The Ankylosaurus freezes, unable to make anything out of what just happened. Nothing in the past 20 years that she has been alive has prepared her for this. She stands stock still and waits. The fact, that 2000 miles to the south a rock has slammed into the earth, is a scenario totally alien, completely incomprehensible, to her.

Frenchman River Valley used to be a noisy place, filled with hoots, squawks, roars, hisses and the thumping of huge hooves, but now there is complete silence. All the inhabitants of French River Valley, the herbivores, the carnivores, the mammals and the reptiles, have frozen in place. Every living being is holding its breath.

The second tremor is far stronger. The slab that the Ankylosaurus had backed up on lifts up suddenly with such massive force that the great beast is flung 50ft into the air like a rag doll. Since the slab had slanted into the lake, the beast does a parabolic arc through the air and plunges into the water with a mighty splash. She flails around with her powerful tail and the more she thrashes about, the faster the quicksand swallows her. She tries desperately, right up until her head disappears under.

The tremors – seismic waves – are now coming in pulses, each stronger than its predecessor, showing no signs of tapering off. All around, giant conifers have been flattened. The nearby inland lake has breached, flooding an area the size of New York State. In 66 million years, all that will remain of the lake is the Frenchman River.

The Chicxulub ELE has claimed its first Canadian victim, 2000 miles to the north, in what is today, Saskatchewan.

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Across the expanse of water now known as the Atlantic Ocean, far to the north-east is an archipelago in the North Sea. 66 million years from now, it will form a part of the European mainland and be known as Norway. It will no longer be hot, dank and fetid and the marshy flatlands will turn into breathtaking snowbound fjords, swept by icy chill winds.

But today it is just a chain of islands, 360 miles north of present-day Russia and the Russian mainland is currently separated from Europe by a vast 150-mile wide shallow sea that is at places only 50 fathoms deep.

Under the waters, away from the oppressive heat, a gigantic Pliosaurus is steadily rising upward to the surface to catch a gulp of air. Like Scotty, the T-Rex, this beast too is an equal-opportunity predator. It devours anything alive that is dumb enough to swim by. Just an hour back, it had grabbed a passing 1-ton, 14-foot plesiosaur, a Morturneria, by its neck and gorged on its thighs.

Sated for the moment, the Pliosauraus powers his way up until his neck breaks surface. Sheets of water cascade from the enormous head down its neck. Rippling waves spread out like as if a ballistic missile SSBN has surfaced. The sun is low over the horizon, a dim ball of light, glowing red.

All of a sudden something plops into the water, something really hot, because it causes hissing steam to rise immediately. The strike causes a mini-waterspout, so fast was the object’s velocity. The ripple hasn’t died down when another hits. Then another and another, until the waters around the pliosaurus’ head are sizzling and churning, as an acrid smoke begins to choke his breathing and block his sense of smell.

Soon it is raining red hot lumps all around, turning the sea into a hissy, choppy cauldron of death.

One thing dinosaurs aren’t is smart. Instead of diving, the Pliosaurus treads water, transfixed, a deer caught in the headlights. It is a matter of time, before one refrigerator-sized lump hits him square between the large mirthless grey eyes. The effect is spectacular. One minute there is a head attached to a neck and the next, the air is saturated with red-white vapour, millions of tiny pieces of brain, bone and tissue.

The headless Plesiosaur floats away, bobbing furiously in the violently churning waters. By now the ambient water temperature has escalated from 39°C to 52°C. The air has turned into a haze of steam, visibility down to near zero. The sun, still above the horizon, is no longer visible, except for a diffused patch of light in the west.

The Chicxulub ELE has claimed its first Eurasian victim, in another continent, 6000 miles from ground zero.

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No two impacts produce exactly the same damage. The impactor’s size and speed, the angle of incidence at which it hits, the environment it strikes, all these decide the extent of damage an asteroid can cause.

The Chicxulub asteroid had the worst of all the above circumstances. It came in at 72000 miles per hour, a streak of glowing red light, too fast for the eye to comprehend. It wasn’t a vertical impact. The 7-mile wide rock rammed home, slanted at 45°. One moment everything was as it had always been and the next, this spot on the earth’s skin burst open like a popped pimple.

The force of the impact was so great that quantifying it, giving it a value in teratonnes and zettajoules would border on the ridiculous. There is simply no way anyone can imagine the sheer magnitude of the strike. Not since the formation of the early earth had there been an impact like this one-in-a-million random event, this culmination of a series of random events.

The asteroid hit the earth’s crust, in the shallow continental shelf of what is now the Gulf of Mexico, it’s force driving it 12 miles deep melting and vaporizing stone and rock and ejecting the debris 70 miles into the upper layers of the atmosphere. Like a water droplet hitting the surface of a still pond, the rock created a circular ridge which fell back, creating a middle peak at the centre of the strike spot. And then, the middle peak collapsed, leaving a bowl shaped crater 186 miles in diameter.

All this, within the first 5 minutes.

All that force had to go somewhere and it did, in the form of repeated waves of shock, inadvertently announcing the arrival of the rock to the world. Several hours passed, as repeated 300ft-high super tsunami waves hit the Yucatan coastline, tossing huge dinosaurs around like little plastic toy figures.

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All through the billions of years of its existence, the earth has been the target of numerous asteroid impacts. The large number of impact craters (some easily recognizable by sight and others through imaging techniques) stand testament to this.

Of all the direct hits that the earth received, the Chicxulub crater in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula is estimated to be the largest and most devastating, at a whopping 186 miles in diameter.

There have been near-misses too. In 2013, the 30-metre wide Duende passed within 17240 miles of us, far closer than some geostationary satellites. It it had hit, it would have delivered a forced equal to that of a 4.8-Megaton atom bomb. That would be the equivalent of 320 Hiroshima detonations all at once and it could have taken out, not only Hiroshima, but also Tokyo and all the other big cities in the 88000 sq.mile Honshu Island, had it been a direct hit.

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Among identified asteroids that will either actually hit or be really close is Apophis, a 370-metre diameter chunk of rock that is still 180 million miles from us, right now somewhere in the constellation of Taurus.

In 2029, while bypassing the earth, Apophis will go through what is known as a gravitational keyhole, which in layman’s terms is a narrow window created by the earth’s gravitation that deflects the path of an asteroid just enough to ensure that it will hit the earth the next time it comes around the sun. For Apophis, this window is just 500 miles wide.

Then, in 2036, Apophis will be back and this time, as per present calculations, slam into us with the force of a 37-Megaton thermo-nuclear bomb. It will not be an Extinction Level Event (ELE) but wherever it strikes it will instantly wipe out everything within a 1000-mile radius.

My son – and millions of sons and daughters – will be 36 in 2036.

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Fortunately, no ELEs are expected for the next 100 years. Whenever a future extinction level event does become certain, I wonder what life will be like, in the months before impact…..

Since there will be no place of safety to escape to – other than the ISS, which itself will be a short respite – will humans realize the futility of maintaining societal structures, laws, norms, ethics, etiquette, morality, virtue? Will they turn into animals and simply do what they feel like? Would I be able to make Scarlett Johanssen say yes? Will organized religion cease to exist? Will the Abbess cry out to the Bishop, “To hell with Jesus, fuck me anywhere, holy father!”

I’ll probably be dead long before any abbess says those words but I’d still like to know, dammit.

Or…..

Would governments ensure citizens are blissfully unaware untill the moment they see the enormous flash turn night into day and stare at the 200-metre high tsunami bearing down on them at 150 mph?

I think so, yes, most definitely. Government(s) have a good argument for not divulging this type of information. The panic, rioting and general breakdown of society as we know it will hinder any plans that are in place to protect what, if anything, can be protected and that includes a list of people I am most likely not going to be on.

One way to absolutely ensure that I am prepared for the end is to treat every day as if it is my last. Sooner or later it will happen anyway, ELE or no ELE.