When the Big One Hits!!

The recent prediction of an approaching asteroid made me wonder what would happen if a really big one was predicted to hit the earth. The last one was discovered only a few hours before it was to make entry into the earth's atmosphere. In addition, it was pretty small and it burned up before every reaching the ground.

It is not a question of if the next one hits, but when. We will get hit again at some point in the future. I wonder how the word will get out next time when the big discovery is made. There are a lot of highly funded operations that are actively searching for asteroids, so it is more than likely that some organization will be the first to discover, and then calculate that the object in question is on a direct collision course to earth. Will the government have the muscle to suppress such information if it is going to be a cataclysmic collision? Will they even try to? My guess is that it will depend on the size of the event. If it is a small to mid sized event, then panic and hysteria caused by evacuations themselves could lead to more loss of life than the impact of the object itself.

I imagine that word of an impending disaster will just leak out through the various news wire's and the internet like the last event did. Then the government will have no choice but to act.