Hacker News Reader

I stopped reading at "as planet-X passes earth's orbit".

I skipped ahead to figure out when they claimed it was going to happen. The document is dated 2013. The summary of the results basically says "calculate it yourself, it's not our fault if it's wrong, but 2014 and 2017 look like the best dates."

I wonder why doomsayers keep predicting the end of the world to be in the imminent future? It makes it way too easy to be proven wrong.

I once had an idea for an erratically-scheduled holiday called "arbitrary apocalypse day". The day after each AAD if the world hasn't ended, you'd roll a D-10 3 times to get a number of days between 0 and 999, and that's the new predicted apocalypse date. You'd select a cause at random (i.e. nanobots, aliens, meteor, supervolcano, nuclear war, pandemic, etc...) and tell everyone that doom is nigh.

In the end, I didn't promote it heavily and forgot to celebrate on the appointed day (or choose the next date). Maybe I should start it back up again.

Because no one would care if it was too far in the future?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com