Les requins, « pas si menaçants, menacés, utiles » Antimatter Detonation & Von Neumann Machines. Sam Hughes, LiveScience Contributor | January 12, 2012 08:45am ET Credit: ESA Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.
You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world. Fools. The Earth was built to last. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer: Do not think this will be easy. ( Editor's Note: This presentation was first published by Sam Hughes on his own website. The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted. 10 Popular Scientific Misconceptions.
5 Historical Misconceptions Rundown. 10 Misconceptions Rundown. 8 Animal Misconceptions Rundown. If You're Reading This, the World Hasn't Ended - Yet. (Photo: Kevin M.
Gill / NASA)Truthout combats corporatization by bringing you trustworthy news: click here to join the effort. But give us another 100 years of climate change and we’ll get there. Recently, a friend in a small Mayan village where I once lived in southern Belize, invited me to attend the wedding of his daughter, who was marrying a boy from a neighboring village. We’ve known the bride and her family since she was a small child, but regrettably we could not break away from our stateside commitments to attend. This was a traditional Maya wedding, joining Kekchi and Mopan Maya families from two different villages and Maya ethnicities together. The reason I bring this up is because people don’t have festivals like this, making lifelong bonds and celebrating the future, a week before the world is supposed to end. In fact, nobody that I know in Belize, in the Maya heartland, surrounded by Mayan ruins and speckled with traditional Mayan villages, expected the world to end.
Maya Calendars Actually Predict That Life Goes On. This December, not everyone is concerned with making plans for the New Year—especially not the people who think doomsday will get here first. Instead of planning parties, they're stockpiling food, refining escape routes, and honing survival skills ahead of the alleged date on which the Maya calendar "ends"—December 21, 2012. So should we all be preparing for imminent apocalypse? According to the scholars, no. The ancient Maya are usually cited as the predictors of the world coming to an end this month: One of their "great cycles" supposedly ends now. But the Maya were brilliant mathematicians and fantastic record keepers. Somewhere along the way a rumor spread about the current great cycle, indicating it ends on December 21, 2012. Rebirth It's not the first time that the possibility of apocalypse has sparked the human imagination.
Indeed, the Maya predicted the world would most certainly not end in 2012. "We keep looking for endings. It Came From Outer Space? Misguided cancer goal. Hope is not a good strategy, in life or in disease research.
So the setting of goals, and the drive to reach them, is to be commended, and cancer is no exception. But a 2020 deadline for ‘ending’ breast cancer that former US President Bill Clinton endorsed earlier this month is misguided. Like other ‘beat cancer’ deadlines that are regularly floated, it is potentially harmful to the public trust that underpins the whole research enterprise, not to mention to the patients who understandably cling to hope, whatever its validity. Clinton, who lost his mother to breast cancer, has become honorary chairman of a two-year-old campaign by the National Breast Cancer Coalition, which declares on its website that it has “One Mission: To End Breast Cancer by January 1, 2020”.