We have a tendency to be paranoid about the possibility of anything that happened in a movie starring Ben Affleck coming true ... and that goes double for the "Armageddon" scenario.

So when a new report from the Cardiff University Astrobiology Center was released last week theorizing that the Ice Age was caused by a near-Earth object (or NEO -- that's a meteor, asteroid or comet), it sent us into panic mode.

Do we have a plan in place if something like that were to happen again, or would the few humans who survived be left wandering a bereft, Cormac McCarthy–esque landscape of bleak terror?

We tracked down some people who know a lot more about deadly space rocks than we do to get some answers and hopefully sleep again at night.

We contacted the Secure World Foundation and caught up with Brian Weeden, a former U.S. Air Force officer who currently resides in Montreal, shortly after his return from a conference on space-borne threats in Geneva. We cut right to the chase and asked if we were all going to die by meteor.

"There are a few options for NEO deflection," Weeden explained, some of which sound more promising than others. "They're either direct, [like] kinetic impactors or nukes ... or indirect, using gravity tractors."

While "gravity tractors" sounds like something your cousin just got on Farmville, we were really stoked about the idea of kinetic impact, which is basically just throwing really heavy things at the asteroid in order to try to knock it off its path, sparing Earth.

Weeden warned us that there are challenges with that approach, however. "An asteroid isn't really a solid object," he told us. "It's ice, dust and more. So you run the risk of breaking it into a bunch of smaller pieces. Instead of having one to deal with, you could have several."

Nukes, meanwhile, have problems of their own. "A nuclear detonation is the most compact way to yield a great amount of energy, but in space there's no blast wave, just a lot of heat."

Furthermore, there's the issue of finding a team of intrepid astronauts and/or roughnecks who'd be willing to carry out a mission like that. Weeden explained that, contrary to our hopes, such a group isn't geared up and ready to jump into space at a moment's notice (nor is Steve Buscemi). Further, a report from the International Academy of Astronautics described the odds of either approach working as "unacceptably low."

So, gravity tractors it is.

"A gravity tractor would have its own gravitational pull on the NEO," Weeden explained. "This would be a spacecraft hovering in the vicinity of an asteroid that would use its own mass to pull it off of its orbit. Since it wouldn't have to land, it wouldn't have the same problem as the kinetic impactor, and it could be unmanned."

This approach, also called the "slow pull," sounded the most promising to us. But do we have a ship with enough mass ready to go in the event that we spot an asteroid?

"Not today," Weeden said. "But it wouldn't be too hard to build one."

It's not a totally foolproof plan -- Weeden pointed out that it hasn't ever really been tested, and it'd require enough advance notice that the spacecraft would have time to pull the asteroid off its course, which could take a few years.

That's why the other options are still being discussed: In the event that we were completely blindsided by an asteroid on a collision course with the planet, we'd be likely to start chucking nukes at it or ramming it with kinetic impactors.

But regardless of the deflection technique used, Ben Affleck would presumably have no role in the operation. So we can offer it our full support.