I read somewhere that there is a comet moving towards earth and that there is a small possibility that it will destroy the human race forever .
Could that mean the Apocalypse ?
Who knows. I just saw a video (in astronomy) saying the chances of that happening are the same as dying in a plane crash (which seems pretty high to me).
hey by that time maybe we will have huge laser cannons that can shoot into space or maybe they will be on satlites out in space or maybe we will launch a huge rocket with 1000 atomic bombs that will blow it up 
and if not put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye 
oh im sure its gonna hit just the public isnt informed because the goverment(s) are afraid of mass hysteria.
Its not like I’m in a hurry to stay on this earth any way… lol… what ever is in store for us next will be great one way or the other… whether is some other life or rest… i’m down for it 
Actually if you think its the appolypse, then (according to "The Holy Bible) it wont kill all of humanity. But then again, alot of scientific beliefs are athiest beliefs. (not the user)
there’s a hell of a lot supposed to happen in 2012 too…
thing is there’s no point worrying, whatever happens, we’ll weigh up options and take actions as we are already constantly doing
so why not do it without fear?
i personally believe there’s more after physical death
but say there’s not, say it’s a really bad situation for example when you die you don’t go on, not even in void, you just die and at the moment someone is trying to stab you, you can flee fight or die, and you might die nomatter what, you can only weigh up options, info and risk and make decisions based upon them (what we are constantly doing, right?)
then why not set aside fear and worry? there’s no point to them,
you can make your decisions and get to point ‘B’ with or without them…
so why not go without? (i personally think this is a form of accepting death, for why not choose the emotions you keep with you?)
LOL i started rambling without brakes, sorry 
Chi swordsman is right. Even if this comet does hit then it’s not like we can do anything about it, so why worry about something we have no control over.
No that is impossible. If there was a comet coming for us in 2014 we wouldn’t know until a couple of years in advance, at the earliest. It would still be too far away to detect in 2004.
Asteriods are different because they orbit between Mars and Jupiter, where they can be spotted with telescopes (at least the big ones that we are most afraid of). But even a small asteriod could easily slip through undetected and hit us without warning.
Suggest you don’t worry too much about it
It’s not correct to say a lot of scientific beliefs are atheistic ones. This is generalisation, IMHO.
I think we are closer than 2012 to killing ourselves, in that regard.
However:
The apocalypse is about the revelation of Jesus Christ. I would look more towards that and the 2nd coming of Jesus. Apocalypse doesn’t mean the death of the whole world, but the beginning of the “new heavens and new earth” - living forever in peace with God, no work to do, no illnesses, so suffering.
There’s always a comet or something that “could” hit earth. But the truth of the matter is these things are so hard to spot that any rogue asteroid that happens to be on a near-miss or collision corse will have passed/hit us before it’s even spotted.
That said if they knew there was one comming would they bother telling anyone?
Telling people = Mass Hysteria for something no one can change
not Telling people = No mass hysteria till it’s too late to be hysterical.
As for the comet wiping out humanity, it better hurry up or we will have choked ourselves to death on smog 
Well no, comets are rare objects made of ice and dust that seldom venture into the solar system. When they do, the solar wind creates an enormous tail. A comet bound for earth would be visible to the naked eye several days or weeks before it hit. An amateur astronomer would probably spot it first with his telescope months before the impact.
Asteroids are solid rock-like objects that are commonly found in the solar system. They don’t have a tail, which makes small ones hard to track. A small asteroid (100 m in diameter) could easily slip through like you say and kill millions without warning. A big one (10 km in diameter) would be visible to the naked eye the night before the impact, and much earlier to telescopes.
Hundreds of asteroids are being tracked and their orbits calculated. Sometimes astronomers find that there is a possible solution in the equations that takes an asteroid on collision course with earth, and they calculate the probability (which is always small, because the limits of the error in the calculations are enormous unless you have tracked the asteroid for months). Sometimes the media gets a hold of this and interprents it wrong.
Actually, the chances of dying in a plane crash are really low. Cos planes rarely crash. Every single time a plane crashes, it’s on the news (cos so many people are killed in it). How often are plane crashes on the news? Not very often.
You’re alot more likely to die in a car or even walking around town.
It’s difficult to explain in everyday terms (for those of you who hasn’t read the probability math). But the comparison between asteroid impacts and plane chrashes only holds if you count the deaths over millions of years. That is longer than airplanes, or even humanity will exist.
No, I know the odds are relatively low, but they still seem fairly high for the whole Earth being wiped out. I’m not too worried about it all, but I was surprised to hear that.
throughout all the ancient texts the history of this reality is
written in cycles. the mayan culture which set its task to
create so highly accurate calenders that they not only could
calculate happenings in this cycle of event [millions of years]
but in any possible cycle [xn years]. they calculated the
change of this world/dimension for 2012. what does this mean?
according to vedic texts there are 4 ages which represent this
eternal balance of positive and negative energy. right now
we are in the age called the ‘iron/cruel age’ [kali-yuga]
despite this spiritual ‘mambo-jambo’ one only has to consider
recent scientific articles on the destruction of nature / global
warming / carbon sinks / etc / etc to realise that this course
this world is currently taking is not going on for very much longer.
though we could slow this down or even prevent it the industrial
nations think about anything but altering they’re distructive course,
which exponentially uses of all the resources on this planets
throwing most of the beings living here in poverty and chaos.
also astronomical reports on a misterious 9th [or 10th] planet
in our solar system brings us back to the texts of the ancients.
scientifically has this planet always been a part of our solar system
[ie orbiting the sun] but has been so far away that we have never
encountered it during our human history [ie small part of one cycle].
astronomers say that this planet will cause pole shifts and other
funky things when it comes close to earth… spiritual speaking
this planet is an interstellar spacecraft with the name nibiru, which
will bring about the change from negative to positive energy -
the dawn of [once again] a golden age.
word.
okay…
if the odds of a comet hitting us are as good as dying in a plane crash, we’d be dead by now.
If the odds of a comet EVER, at any point in time, throughout human history, wiping us out, are about the same as dying in a plane crash… maybe?
I’m not sure if both are the same?
I mean just like, if constantly, every second, there is a 1 in 100,000 odd of dying (i’m assuming that is what plane crash odds are, but i don’t know) then… to not die… after… a year?
Would be like, astrononically unlikely… after the 100,000 seconds are over, it would start being odds are 100,000 to ONE that we WILL die within the next second.
So… I’m not sure I even see a point in making statisical odds about being hit by one… if we as a species live long enough, quite possibly it could happen… sure.
as for 2012… keep in mind the end is ALWAYS near, everyone says so, at all times… 2000, 1996, 1984 (i think we are about to become a 1984 esque world), 2001… 2012…
Planet X was supposed to come like… March 25, 2003 I think… I remember being a bit freaked out about it… then it was supposed to come before July… it was a bit late… now I don’t even care.
I’d like to think if there is an apocalypse it’ll be a sort of everyone starts evolving and ascending rapidly kind of thing, those that don’t try to, or just sit around and live the rest of their lives out.
But who knows… a lot of people think humanity can’t move on until ALL of humanity is ready, which I think would make us need to see 90% of humanity wiped out by natural disasters beforehand?
Who knows? No one does. I wouldn’t worry about it.
I probably will when 2012 draws near though.
That is an internet scam designed to sell books. It would have made a good episode of The X-Files, but as science it is pure crap.
The difference between plane crashes and asteroid impacts is called the variance, or standard deviation (standard deviation is the square root of the variance…). The variance is a vastly bigger number for asteroids than for aircrashes.
what does that have to do with anything?
if the PROBABILITY of an asteroid hitting us is the same as a probability of you dying in a plane crash… the SD has nothing at all to do with it whatsoever.
I mean… for example… IQ… the mean is 100… the SD is 10 (i believe)
so most IQ scores fall between 80 and 120
the odds of being greater than (3?) SDs away from the mean is considered a statistical unliklihood… now i’m even going to go get my chart here…
the odds of being 3.5 standard deviations above the mean (in a standard normal distribution, as in the case of IQs) are less than .0001 quite considerably less than that if i recall… most examples we use tend to be in the e^-10 or higher power.
So… but anyway that isn’t the point… standard deviation doesn’t have much to do with probability, other than the probablity that x amounts of occurances will happen in contrast to the mean.
I’m in statistics right now… if the probability of being hit by an asteroid is the same as you dying in a plane crash… we would have been hit by an asteroid by now, it’s almost statistically impossible for us to not have been.
If that probability, is say, probability per YEAR… then go figure… we could last 100,000 years without being hit, assuming the odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 100,000.
But I don’t really see how S/S^2 have much to do with what I was saying.
man I’m glad that class is almost over.
and variance is a measurement of dispersion from the mean… I don’t think you can get a variance/standard deviation by comparing two different events… you can certainly (at least I think) take two pools of data and perhaps construct a standard deviation of the difference between the two, though… (i’m not entirely sure on this… i don’t know what good it would do you)
but in order for that to have much relevance you should probably have a correlation between the two events… which we don’t.
comparing the standrad deviations of the number of kids per year who try to fly like harry potter and the number of kids per year who have chicken pox probably wouldn’t help much at all…
Well, the point is that someone once said that the probability of being killed by an asteroid is the same as being killed in an plane crash. I don’t know if this is true or exactly how many times you have to fly for it to be true. But i assume that what it meant was that asteroids kills the same amount of people as plane crashes does over time (in theory!).
If you have 1 billion years (let’s imagine that we ran the 90’s 100 million times and “rewinded” each time), and random variables for each year P1…P1000.000.000 (number of casualties in plane chrashes) A1…A1000.000.000 (Casualties in asteriod impacts). The P:s will form something very similar to a normal bell curve (don’t know the proper english terms) around say 2500 killed passengers, with some standard deviation.
The A:s will be centered around 0 of course, and there will be nothing to the left of the centre (no negative kills). And you were right, the standard deviation will not be a good measure of the deviation in the A-variables. The SD will be small, because most of the A:s will be 0 or 1, extremely few will be in the millions or billions. But I mean, in some way the deviation will be huge! I’ll have to get better at my statistics I think, before the exam. Like, what kind of measurement of deviation measures the deviation between the largest and smallest variables? 
The point is that the sums of the P:s and the A:s divided by the number of years (the average number of deaths per year) would be equal to eachother.