You may have heard about this already, but NASA recently attacked an asteroid. And that's not really hyperbole. In fact, NASA went all in with the DART space probe, literally launching the half-ton probe into Dimorphos, a 500-foot-wide asteroid in orbit around Didymos, a slightly larger asteroid. There's a very good reason they did this: To test whether or not NASA could save Earth from asteroid impact.
It's really simple physics. Slam an object into another object, and that second object's trajectory will be altered. Now, even moving at 14,000 MPH, DART won't alter Dimorphos' orbit by that much. This is a half-ton spacecraft versus a giant boulder weighing millions of tons. But NASA is hopeful that they will see something (they're hoping for shortening the orbital period by 1%, or 10 minutes), which is why they undertook this test on a moon, rather than any old asteroid. It's much easier to see a change in an orbit that's only a few thousand miles long, rather than an asteroid orbiting the sun, where the orbital circumference would be a couple hundred million miles long.
A 1% orbital period change isn't a lot, obviously, but remember, this is space we're talking about. If we detect an asteroid or comet coming straight for Earth from far enough away, a 1% change in trajectory would absolutely make the difference between that object hitting and missing Earth. So, in conclusion, NASA is testing an Earth defense system, and unless physics lets us down, it should work. You can hopefully take "asteroid impact" of the list of potential apocalypses.
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