Life & Wisdom Quote by L. Neil Smith

There is a gleeful provocation baked into L. Neil Smith's line: it borrows the cool authority of geologic time to smuggle in a hot-blooded human wish. "Overdue" is the tell. Asteroids do not run schedules; only people do. The word yanks an extinction event into the register of late bills and missed appointments, turning apocalypse into something like a justified correction. Its punch comes from that faux-scientific posture: a statistic-sounding claim that licenses a moral mood.

The intent reads less like literal astronomy than a piece of misanthropic satire aimed at modern civilization. By invoking the dinosaur-killer impact, Smith collapses humanity into the category of overgrown, complacent megafauna - not wicked so much as ripe. The subtext is an impatience with the status quo, an insinuation that the species has become an ecological or cultural dead end and that only an external, indiscriminate force could reset the board. It's catastrophism as a form of critique: if institutions are too entrenched to reform, then the fantasy becomes a clean, cosmic eraser.

Context matters because Smith is a libertarian-leaning science fiction writer, a milieu where "system failure" is a recurring plot engine and where contempt for bureaucratic stasis often masquerades as hard-headed realism. The line performs a particular kind of rhetorical judo: it frames despair (or disgust) as rational calculation, letting the speaker sound clinical while flirting with annihilation. The shock isn't just the death wish; it's how casually it is made to sound like responsible accounting.