Gemini vs Gemini

You find out this morning that the world ends tonight – what do you do? I hope you think about the answer a bit before reading on!

Essay A

You hear about it on the news. Tomorrow’s the day. Apophis is going to hit earth, and we’re all doomed. 

You’re not important enough for any government to whisk you away to a deep underground bunker. Nor are you critical enough for anyone else’s immediate survival. No power, and no responsibilities. Also not enough time to check things off your bucket list, go somewhere exotic, learn a new hobby. It’s one day – so no one is even working in their regular jobs – no planes, no restaurants, no public transport.

So, what do you do? 

You could decide to take a walk, go out among the trees in a park, enjoy the sunshine, go visit a zoo so you could look at the animals, and say sorry to them. It’s not really your fault that they are going to die shortly, but all the same you feel sorry that they have no idea that an unfeeling meteor named after the Egyptian god of destruction is hurtling towards them.

You could also curl up in your bed, listen to some good music, watch a good show, read a good book. It doesn’t even have to be good – no one is going to be around to judge if you decide to indulge in some guilty pleasure bingeing at this point. Bring out the bachelor reruns or Victorian spicy romance novels, Apophis doesn’t care!

Or, you could gather your community – family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, distant acquaintances that you haven’t met since that one house party 2 years ago. You could gather in parks, houses, beaches, hikes, and talk about all the amazing times you’ve had. Memories spoken out loud, remembered, cherished and maybe even debated. No one truly remembers whose fault that painful detour off of highway 1 was, but at least we can all laugh about it now because that two hour nightmare quite pales in the face of end of existence, doesn’t it? 

For the love of everything beautiful, I truly hope you don’t spend all of it on your phone, scrolling social media for how others are dealing with this reality in their lives. Some of it may be genuine and inspire resonance, but so much of it will also be inauthentic clickbait designed to trick algorithms into landing on your news feed. 

There is so much beauty in nature, in human artistry and in the real-life two-way connections we have with others, that spending the last 24 hours scanning mediocre user-generated content on the internet seems rather wrong.

So, how would you spend your day? 

And, do you spend your days on the same things today?

Essay B

The news didn’t come with a Hollywood roar. There were no frantic anchors or scrolling red tickers. Instead, it was a quiet, digital consensus: Apophis, the asteroid we’ve been watching like a distant, nervous habit, has finally decided to quit flirting with orbit. It’s coming home. Tomorrow, at roughly 10:14 AM, the human experiment will conclude its final semester.

​There is no Bruce Willis. There is no secret bunker for you. There is only the next twenty-four hours, a span of time you have likely wasted a thousand times over on laundry and mild traffic. But today, the ordinary is suddenly radioactive with meaning. The question isn’t how you’ll die—the asteroid has handled the logistics—but how you’ll spend the final 1,440 minutes of being alive. In that choice, a rather uncomfortable mirror begins to form.

​Your first instinct might be to flee to the “Sacred.” You imagine yourself standing on a cliffside, hair windswept, communing with the ancient trees of a local park. There’s a romantic dignity in returning to the dust while looking at some particularly nice moss. You might even go to the zoo, staring into the eyes of a silverback gorilla, wondering if he knows the cosmic joke is finally over for both of you. There is a profound, quiet sincerity in wanting to feel the sun on your neck one last time, acknowledging the physics of the world before they become overwhelming.

​But then, there is the counter-impulse: the retreat into the curated Cave. Instead of the majestic oak, you might find yourself gravitating toward a specific, worn-out couch. You consider cracking open a Victorian novel, finally finishing those 800 pages of social nuance. But let’s be honest: are you really going to spend your final hours deciphering Dorothea Brooke’s marital woes? More likely, you’ll find yourself drawn to the low-brow comfort of a Bachelor marathon. There is something perversely soothing about watching people cry over roses while a space rock hurtles toward the atmosphere. It’s absurd, it’s petty, and it is quintessentially human. In the face of the infinite, the trivial isn’t just a distraction; it’s a tether.

​Then, there is the phone. In the first few hours, the temptation to scroll will be a physical itch. You’ll want to see how the rest of the world is reacting. Is there a “Last Day” hashtag? You look for validation in the void, hoping for one last notification to prove you were here. But as the hours tick down, the absurdity of the digital world begins to itch. You realize that “liking” a status update is like trying to hydrate with a handful of sand. The performative self—the version of you that posts the “perfect” sunset—starts to evaporate.

​You put the phone face down and look at the people in the room. Community is the most logical choice, yet the most terrifying. You gather the family, the friends, the “should-have-called-them” acquaintances. You don’t discuss the asteroid; you discuss that one road trip where the GPS failed and you argued for three hours about whether a taco is a sandwich. You find yourself laughing at the memory of a burnt Thanksgiving turkey. In these moments, you aren’t “preparing for the end.” You are simply being. The Meaning of Life isn’t a grand philosophical statement; it’s the specific, granular friction of being known by someone else.

​As the sun begins its final set, painting the sky in colors that feel almost too cliché for a world about to end, the humor fades into a cold, clear clarity. The asteroid hasn’t changed what is valuable; it has simply stripped away the noise that allowed you to ignore what was valuable. We spend our lives in a state of “functional immortality.” We live as if there is an infinite supply of Tuesdays. We postpone the difficult conversation because we believe we have to earn joy through a series of productive, performative hoops.

​Apophis reveals that the “right moment” is a fiction we use to manage our fear of actually living. When time is stripped away, we realize that the things we deemed “productive”—the emails, the status seeking, the meticulous planning—were actually the distractions. The “distractions”—the laughter, the sun, the music—were the point.

​The sky is still blue. For now, Apophis is still just a coordinate in a telescope. You have more than twenty-four hours. You likely have thousands. But the question remains, hovering just above the horizon: If you wouldn’t choose to do it on your last day, why are you choosing to do it today?