A newly discovered asteroid has zero chance of colliding with Earth in 11 years, although preliminary data had suggested such a doomsday scenario was possible, astronomers said this week.
New data allowed a more refined projection of the orbit of the space rock, dubbed 2003 QQ47 — ruling out more than a dozen possible strike dates, according to the Near Earth Objects Information Center.
Now, had this been from the White House, with its distinguished record of lying to the American People only when it moves its lips, I’d suggest that it would really be time to worry. But I do love this graf from the story:
Despite cautioning that the odds were almost 1 in a million and that further study would probably rule out any possibility, the center could not stem sensationalist stories from some media outlets worldwide.
My own point was that people routinely accept odds much greater than one in a million in their everyday lives — and that people don’t really thing that “one-in-a-million” is especially rare.
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