Doomsday—not

Oct 17 2011, Written by Minshu Deng in News, 0 Comments

Y2K. 2012. Mayan prophesies. All the bees dying out. Comets hitting the earth and killing everything. This is what apocalyptic nerds dream of.

So when Comet Elenin happened to miss Earth this weekend by 22 million miles, the world of apocalyptic rumors let out a sigh of relief probably mixed with a bit of sadistic disappointment.

The reality is that this was hardly something to get excited about, in terms of doomsday rumors at least. Henry Greenside, professor and director of undergraduate studies in the physics department, wrote in an email that he puts the event of an Earth collision into scientific perspective.

“Scientists were able to forecast [Comet Elenin’s] position with enough accuracy so that it was not rational of people to believe the comet would strike the Earth,” he said. “The human race should be fearful of a future collision, we could be driven to extinction the same way as the dinosaurs. But we should not be fearful of an “imminent” collision. There is a good chance that no collision will occur until after the human race has spread out to other planets and moons, so no one collision will destroy the human race.”

In March of 2002, an asteroid unexpectedly passed within the Earth’s close vicinity, about 1.2 times the distance of the moon from the Earth. The 70-meter-long rock would have had the impact of a 4-megaton nuclear bomb, had it collided with Earth. Even this asteroid, however, ran “an extremely low risk of Earth collision” based on the elliptical nature of its orbit.

All in all, the chances of a collision seem unlikely, and it seems doomsday enthusiasts will be left waiting until 2012 for their next thrill of the moment. Picturing it in my head, all I can imagine is all-around Mardi Gras-esque festivities and Ricky Martin on repeat. I don’t know if this is something to look forward to or not, but 2012 will come whether we like it or not. The apocalypse? We’ll see.