It seems that each year, the internet goes viral on a rumor of a doomsday, but NASA assures that no dangerous asteroid is heading toward Earth this century, in spite of “predictions” that one will be impacting our planet next month.
Apparently, the latest rumor to set the world wide web ablaze were initially sparked by Reverend Efrain Rodriguez, who predicted that a giant and hazardous asteroid will be crashing near Puerto Rico and the consequences will be crippling to humanity. Destruction will run rampart across the Atlantic, with the coasts of Central and South America gravely affected, along with parts of Europe.
Chaos will ensue, 30 million people will die upon first impact, and 40 million others will follow due to the ascension of anarchy among the civilized populations. It does sound quite frightening, but NASA has done its best to squash the rumors of an impending little Armageddon.
They made reassurances that our planet does not need a Bruce Willis-like hero to jump on a space shuttle and save us all from an asteroid destined to kill millions of people. That is because there is no asteroid coming our way, and, in fact, no potentially dangerous space object of any kind has a believable chance of hitting Earth within the next 100 years.
According to the manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object office, Paul Chodas, there is absolutely no scientific proof that such a harming celestial object will cause mayhem on our planet. Those at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are in an international collaboration with astronomers and scientists who regularly watch the sky for potentially dangerous asteroids or comets.
If the predicted doomsday would have been coming in between September 15th and September 28th, they would have certainly noticed it by now. In fact, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Programme has recorded a 0.01% chance of any destructive asteroid to collide with our planet in the next century.
It’s slowly becoming a yearly tradition for NASA to crush rumors of apocalyptic predictions that are related to space objects or the sun itself bursting, and the internet is certainly the best conductor for it. There are many “asteroid prophecies” out there, and the population is asked not to buy into every single one of them.
So far, we’ve had numerous “doomsday predictions” that turned out to be false, the most famous and recent one yet being the December 21st, 2012 day of impact when presumably the world should have ended with a large asteroid collision.
However, we’re still here, and the “2012” John Cusack movie released in 2009 certainly made an easy buck out of the viral sensation allegedly based on Mayan calculations. All wrong, and NASA is doing its best to keep the situation under control by combating fear with scientific fact.
Image source: belfasttelegraph.co.uk
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