....Damn it:
The world can breath easy. A giant asteroid is not hurtling towards Earth about to wipe out much of the Americas, NASA has felt compelled to explain following a swirl of online rumors.
Especially on YouTube.
Blogs and off-beat news sites have claimed a major asteroid will impact Earth in mid-to-late September near Puerto Rico, causing major destruction throughout the region.
But effectively forgiving their $72 billion debt. So this isn't an unmixed blessing.
But that theory is entirely baseless, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a post this week, trying to damp down the Doomsday predictions.
Oh, sure, that's what they want us to believe.
"There is no scientific basis - not one shred of evidence - that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates," said the manager of the Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Paul Chodas.
Not one shred of evidence that they know about. But then, it's not the huge asteroids that we would need to worry about anyway - they come in relatively slowly, their orbits can be plotted, and we'd see them coming. It's the smaller city-destroyers that sneak up on us, and we typically don't find out about until after the near-misses. Think Tunguska 107 years ago. And, of course, the comets are hard to miss, but they come at us a lot faster.
The lab explained that all known hazardous asteroids have a less than .01% chance of impacting Earth in the next hundred years.
"If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now," he said. [emphasis added]
So SMOD is arriving in October or November instead? Well, better late than never, I guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment