Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Apophis asteroid hitting Earth (fake?)

First I read the news today on slashdot that the asteroid Apophis has a 1 in 450 chance of hitting Earth, which is a revelation from the calculation of a 13 years old boy in Berlin. Seems like his calculation refuted an earlier claim from NASA that predicted a 1 in 45,000 chance. The boy's assumption took into account that the asteroid may hit one of those 40,000 orbiting satellites, which may then change the course of the asteroid. If the boy is right, our planet may be doomed by 2036, i.e. 28 years from now.

My immediate reaction was... shit... it is more likely I'll be killed by an outer-space asteroid than for me to win the group 1 Toto (i.e. lottery) prize... so I'm more likely to be greeted by a flying object from space than the million dollars Toto prize ... zzz... zzz... zz. z... stupidly amazing wor.

Then I started surfing Yahoo Answers... and found out that the story on slashdot is not true...!!!
The person pointed out that wiki has some entry about it. Wiki got its source from The Register, which has some NASA quotes.

That was the second amazing part for me today...that a false rumour could spread so fast from a German article to the German tabloid to slashdot, back to Europe, and I'm merely an observer from Asia, picking up various pieces of facts (and fictions) from other Internet users around the world... all that in less than 8 hours....wah! The world is smaller... zzz....

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