Put Bruce Willis on standby
A German schoolboy has corrected calculations made by NASA and discovered we are a hundred times more likely to be hit by an asteroid in the next 25 years than previously thought.
We are scheduled to have a close encounter sometime around 2030 with a massive asteroid called Apophis which, according to NASA's calculations, will come within 33,000 km of the earth and that is rather too close for comfort. Apophis is a chunk of iron 320 meters across, so if it was to crash into the Atlantic, for example, it would create a huge tsunami with catastrophic consequences.
But a 13 year old schoolboy in Germany, Nico Marquardt, has made his own calculations as part of a science project which he entitled "Apophis, the killer asteroid". In it he corrects NASA's estimates and concludes there is an alarmingly large chance (1 in 450) of Apophis hitting the earth. The news was reported in the German newspaper, Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten, on Tuesday 15th April, which also reported that NASA had informed the European Space Agency (ESA) that the schoolboy had got it right.
Within 24 hours, this news had spread like wildfire across the internet, and was repeated on science sites such as physorg.com, as well as numerous mainstream news sites around the world which are all using the AFP Newswire press release verbatim, including the line "the boffins have miscalculated" and saying that NASA agrees with Marquardt's calculations. Bloggers have taken up the cause of warning us of impending doom and lively discussion forums have debated the number of nuclear warheads we are going to need to deflect the beast.
The only problem is that NASA and the ESA don't agree with the schoolboy's calculations. An ESA spokesman in Germany has said "A small boy did these calculations, but he made a mistake. NASA's figures are correct." I suspect someone at NASA may have agreed that a small defelection could lead to a direct strike which would be catastrophic, but this subtlety was lost in translation.
And this highlights one consequence of the information age. There was a time when scientific papers were expensive to publish and distribute, and where they all underwent a strict peer-review process prior to publication. Nowadays anyone can publish pretty well anything without any quality control whatsoever, and a whole army of people repeat it with authority so that they can appear to be knowledgeable. It isn't just science where there is a problem. Everybody these days is a computer expert, or a web design expert, or an accessibility expert, feeding on a wealth of third-hand misinformation out there. I'm sure you find the same. Whatever business you are in, whether it is marketing, finance, or plumbing, you can bet your life there are plenty of people out there who think they know better than you because they read about it on the internet.
16th April 2008
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.