vic wrote:
A very real danger lurks between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter...the asteroid belt (ask the Dinosaurs as Keira says ? ). Now and then these rocks collide with one another and gets thrown out of orbit and into the inner solar system.... Hundreds of small rocks (50cm or less) enter our atmosphere daily but get burnt out on its flight down to the planet. But a few larger ones survive the journey through the atmosphere, impact with a bang and leave clear evidence of the event.(Meteor Crater in Arizona and the Iridium rich layer at the K-T boundary).
Yes, a comet or asteroid impact is a real threat to most, if not all human life on earth. But a very real risk also relates to the frequency of these events. We've only known about the possibility of being annihilated from space for a few decades - while the average rate of our tiny little rock being hit by really damaging objects is measured in hundreds of thousands of years (space has a lot of ... space). I'm not losing sleep over it - especially because it's extremely unlikely at this point that we'll have any warning at all. One second we'll be alive and unaware of impending doom, the next we'll be reduced to a whiff of vapour. Not a bad way to go.
Meanwhile, a fair proportion of the 2012 conspiracy theorists don't get any exercise, or demand anti-biotics whenever they have a bad cold (increasing the risk that we'll all run out of viable anti-biotics within our life times), or smoke, or a thousand other things that are far greater risks to their lives than the imagined links between ancient calendars and sudden apocalypses.
Conspiracy theorists don't usually warn us of things. Usually they put us in greater danger by ignoring plausible threats through implausible conspiracy. Harvard estimated that Mbeki's AIDS denialism led to
300,000 preventable deaths in South Africa (a conservative estimate - if you still doubt, look for a graph showing the decline in AIDS mortality since the anti-retroviral programme was rolled out in SA). The Anti-Vaccination group (their only vaccination-autism linking science (never good enough science anyway - a handful of cases with no controls) has now been shown to have involved massive fraud and collusion with the alternative medicine industry) is threatening the safety of children in developing countries that have largely gone free of measles for 40 years. Already kids have died as a direct result of vaccination rates falling below that needed to confer population immunity.
Likewise, with 9/11 conspiracy (and despite the US hairing around like a mad dog subsequently), underestimating the threat to civilisation by fanatic, militant Muslims would be a dangerous mistake while imagining ludicrous, implausible, unbelievably complex conspiracies within the US government that have no purpose that could not have been achieved far more simply and with far less loss of American life.
