Hey, so surely you’ve heard—unless you’ve been living under a rock—about the asteroid approaching our planet? The possibly perilous one? On December 22, 2032? Yes, that one. We might be living under a 2.2e+8 kg (i.e., size XXL) rock with you by the time that day’s done! (Nothing like a little asteroid-annihilation joke to break the existential ice.)

The smart people over at NASA have identified a 130 to 300 feet wide object hurtling itself towards Earth at 38,000 miles per hour. Like any marketing-minded aerospace engineering organization would do to snag the public’s attention, they creatively named it “2024 YR4.” (Kimmie in the Asteroid PR Department is like, “I can’t wait until 2032; kill me now.”)

(Pre-Asteroid-Annihilation Action Item #1: Rename the asteroid. Let’s get this globe of people psyched about our possibly collective demise! It’s hard to get behind 2024 YR4 but “Alfie the Asteroid”—think of the merch. I’d wear that t-shirt if they made it in a V-neck. Maybe we name the asteroid after the physicist/ outer space AI bot who discovered it? I really hope their name is Alfie.)

Experts just downgraded the odds of Alfie impacting Earth from an eyebrow-raising 3.1 percent to 0.004%. As the daughter of a gambler, I know better than to bet on a longshot (thanks, dad!), so while total-earth-demolition is unlikely, you know what The New York Times recently reported was likely?  If Alfie was ambitious enough to crash into our atmosphere, “people close to ground zero would very likely die.” So a bright spot is that burial plots would be included for those unlucky enough to perish in the crash. As they say, every asteroid has a silver lining.

Let’s take stock of the situation: odds are slim yet still possible that space debris murders some of us in eight years. Our chances of getting Alfied aren’t as likely as dying from a shark attack, but we all saw Jaws.

(Pre-Asteroid-Annihilation Action Item #2: come up with a catchy Alfie the Asteroid theme song—like the ominous dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun Jaws sound we’ll never not make at the beach. Again, we’ve got a brand to hype up and jingles help.)

So we’ve essentially been granted a fair warning that our lives are improbably-but-possibly limited to 406 Mondays from today. Once we get over the 300-foot-wide morbid bummer of it all, this December 22, 2032 deadline might just be very good news for us.

We value “limited time only” situations far more than things that last forever. It’s called temporal scarcity: we tend to savor the flavor of life/ pumpkin spice lattes when we tune into their temporariness.

In our fun little Alfie the Asteroid thought experiment, we’ve been given a hypothetical (but still possible-ish, people) deadline of 2,844 days to get down to the business of living. Does that countdown ignite a sense of urgency in your finite soul? Does it act like the due date you need to stop procrastinating the things you keep meaning to get to? Does it re-prioritize how you’d like to spend your remarkably asteroid-free days? Does it make your life seem that much more precious? Does it make you want to build a bunker?

(Pre-Asteroid-Annihilation Action Item #3: investigate efficacy of bunkers amidst catastrophic planetary impact events.)

We take our lives for granted because that’s just what our species here on Earth does. We slip into autopilot and “go through the motions” because we assume we’ve got a vast expanse of time ahead of us to live like we mean it. We postpone our existence because we believe in an elongated-and-asteroid-free future where we’ll for sure follow through on our dreams and goals and plans and trips and tango lessons.

Imagine for a moment that NASA flubbed a formula on their Asteroid_Collides_With_Blue_Planet_Projection.xlsx file and issued an “Oops! We goofed… Alfie to absolutely crash land into Earth as his new, permanent home in 2032” memorandum to the world. (Astrophysicists: they struggle with Excel, just like us!) What would you do with your 406 Mondays in the meantime? Where would you travel? What relationships would you rekindle? What books would you read? What mountains would you climb? What god would you find? What adventures would you embark upon? How many plates of parmesan truffle fries would you eat? How would you savor your time, if you knew it was limited?

It’s funny how we need a rocky little bugger of a deadline to wake us up to the life we yearn to be living. The asteroid-rage is unlikely at less than 1% but death is pretty much guaranteed at 100%—whether it’s in eight years, eighteen, or eighty. No one’s getting out of here alive, so maybe now’s the time to start living like we have something to lose.

(Pre-Asteroid-Annihilation Action Item #4: count how many Mondays you have left in life—assuming you live to an average, untouched-by-asteroid life expectancy. You can use this calculator here.)

You’re a limited time only piece of work, my friend. Now’s an astonishingly good time to start living—either that or building a bunker. Let’s do both.