Armageddon... in 2014. Almost.

anetic was among several to note a story making the rounds striking fear into the hearts of many. Armageddon will just barely miss us, so make sure to get your panic in the streets over with early.

Comments

Why Panic the Masses?

[aeinome]

Why would you even alert the masses of this? Saying "We were almost all going to die" is akin to saying "You were almost murdered." That would panic the person(s) a lot, and if you didn't tell them they would've been completely happy and fine. Remember, ignorance is bliss!

Re:Chances likely to change?

[p3d0]

No, probabilities are all about uncertainty. After further measurements, there will be less uncertainty, and that affects the probabilities.

Suppose I have rolled 10 six-sided dice. Without any more information, you'd would say there's a 1 in 6 million chance that they are all fours, and you'd be right. But if you look at one of the dice, you will then have more information: if it's a four, then the odds that all dice are fours becomes 1 in 1 million; on the other hand, if it's not a four, the odds become zero. The latter scenario is five times more likely. Therefore, it is accurate to say that "the chances of all-fours are likely to become even slimmer once more measurements of the dice have been made".

Re:Nukes will not work for sponge-like asteriods

[El]

Somehow, I find it difficult to beleive that an extraterestrial object is "mostly air"! Mostly vacuum or mostly some other gas, maybe. Also, what difference does it make if it "absorbs" an impact -- that just means 100% of the impacting objects momemtum has gone into changing the asteroids momemtum. Methinks that would be a GOOD thing if one were trying to deflect an asteroid!