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Comment by lainga | Hacker News Reader

I am calling on everyone reading this, to turn in the direction of Yellowstone (rhumb and great-circle bearings both acceptable), and channel your chi into the mantra "NOT NOW"

ed: although, yes, the danger of eruption is not heightened now.

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The season finale of 2020 sounds terrifying.

There's a close pass of a 4km asteroid happening in April. It should miss us.

https://www.space.com/asteroid-1998-or2-earth-flyby-april-20...

I'm just not counting on should at this rate...

What if the asteroid strikes Yellowstone?

That can't happen twice.

Well that would likely eliminate SARS-CVD-2 so there'd be a silver lining...

Why, is this asteroid high in silver? Can we mine it? /s

Perhaps I should have written "silver plating"

"Should" is putting it a bit lightly. It has essentially zero chance of hitting us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(52768)_1998_OR2#2020_approach

What if it turns?

Then we have a much bigger problem than getting hit by an asteroid.

"That's no moon..."

You also have a few close ones coming up this weekend.

https://www.news18.com/news/tech/four-new-asteroids-are-appr...

Please stop spreading FUD. That's not even close to a close pass. From the linked article:

> At its closest approach, which will happen at about 5:56 a.m. EDT (0956 GMT), asteroid 1998 OR2 will be 3.9 million miles (6.3 million km) from Earth. That's more than 16 times the average distance between Earth and the moon.

To be fair, various media outlets are also calling it a "close pass".

You're right, of course, that it's much larger than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, but that doesn't stop mainstream media from calling it a close pass.

At a space scale it's a close pass.

A "close pass" here means "it may even be visible from Earth in a normal observatory sized telescope!"

Close pass isn't some FUD. It's a scientific definition. It's even defined in the article I linked.

I like https://twitter.com/lowflyingrocks which gets its data from https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ the NASA JPL center for near Earth object studies. There aren't many that come closer than the moon...

There was a nice big (5.7) earthquake in Utah recently. It closed an Amazon warehouse.

Has anyone checked the expiry date on Earth?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...

Haha well... Apparently Jean Dixon gave this year as the year a “wave of Armageddon would wipe out the planet”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeane_Dixon

I mean, with as many psychics, and mediums, and holy people as have predicted the end of the world, eventually one will get it write.

A million monkeys with a million typewriters and all that.

Also, there's a literal Dixon Effect that's about ignoring all the bad and focusing on just the one or two correct things.

I've been thinking for a while that this whole millennium has gotten off to a bad start.

Maybe we should regroup and try again.

It's a slight improvement over 1900-1920.

You might be onto something. We've hit the trifecta of health crisis, faltering economies and bars closing their doors except now we've got smartphones and air conditioning.

Turn it off and on again to see if 2020 is a runtime error...

dont worry - in DBZ, channeling an energy attack usually lasts 10 episodes before its ready... so we got until 2030 to prepare

Plot Twist: only Sean Bean survives

He /is/ legend.

Forgive me for making a reddit comment, but this has been me in 2020

https://youtu.be/VmW-ScmGRMA

I'm happy Jeff is capable of filling his dad's comedic shoes.

2020: The Year the Earth Stood Still

I can't even figure out the genre anymore - political drama shifted into a medical procedural, now we're going to end in a full on disaster movie? Pick a lane people.

This just goes to show, "truth is stranger than fiction".

If someone had tried to make a movie that showed the true events of 2020, people would think it's ridiculously unrealistic.

12 Monkeys?

So... Ridiculously unrealistic checks up.

Maybe, but with all the people stuck at home, it really should be on everyone's Netflix to-watch list. Fantastic movie.

Some other good picks relevant for these times: The Andromeda Strain (1971) Outbreak (1995) Contagion (2011) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978 versions) 28 Days Later (2002)

Don't forget that the San Andreas fault is supposed to be "overdue".

Drawing paralels to computer systems, It usually take 3 or more separate events to take a system down. No one thought that we would get both a pandemic, big volcano eruption, and a asteroid hit at the same time. When you roll a dice and get two sixes there is still 1/6 chance to roll a third six in a row.

My guess is, at this scale, it's at least one heist film (more likely a concurrent series of them), with the earmarks of a biblical tragedy providing a smoke screen; starring old white dudes who prefer not to appear on the marquee. I'd imagine the exchange "isn't that illegal?", "not yet!" appears in the script at least once.

Sounds like the Mayans may have been off by a few.

Season? We're looking at SERIES finale...

Plot twist:

It was a huge mistake to ask all of humanity to focus their chi on this as that was what caused the explosion that made Krakatoa look like a piker.

This reminds me of when the .com bubble burst in 2000 PBS's Nova series ran a set of shows on every way humanity could suddenly end from Yellowstone exploding to an asteroid hitting as the solar system passes through the galactic disk to the ice caps melting and changing the salinity of the oceans. It was strangely comforting.

There was a really well done podcast on this topic a couple years ago, The End of the World with Josh Clark. Only 10 episodes https://open.spotify.com/show/7sh9DwBEdUngxq1BefmnZ0?si=WqWF...

just got done with a decent earthquake here in Salt Lake City, we're just waiting for the third thing to drop.

If you're going to do this kind of thing, do it with positive language, not negative. (in a very literal sense) You want to focus on peace, not anti-war. You want to focus on health, not anti-virus. You want to focus on stability in Yellowstone, not "please don't erupt."

Sending bad vibes that way to show my disapproval. Science!

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