CNN Says Its The End of the World As We Know It
Giant asteroid possibly on collision course with Earth, CNN
“Using their Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), the 10-mile wide object was found approximately 51 million miles from Earth. Scientists believe that during a close encounter with Mars, the asteroid was nudged slightly off its usual orbit and may currently be on a high speed collision course with our fragile planet. The asteroid is calculated to have a potentially lethal encounter with the Earth on March 35, 2041. Astronomers have placed the odds of an impact at 1 in 2.04, which is by far the most unprecedented risk ever faced to humanity, let alone from asteroids. Such an impact could potentially end civilization as we know it.”
Keith’s note: March 35? No comment from NASA. Love the tags: “beiber, war, gaming, stocks, science, cyrus, space, obama, earth, states” Screen grab
Keith’s update: This news story was removed after being online for nearly 24 hours.
Oops. CNN runs bogus story saying asteroid has 1 in 2.04 odds of destroying Earth, Knight Science Journalism at MIT
“I emailed Keith Cowing to find if there was any NASA announcement that might have been misinterpreted or distorted. It looks more like a prank that was way too easy to pull off. “As for what happened: (my guess) long weekend combined with lax review standards,” he said. The post is pretty cleverly written. Marcus575 put some thought into making it read like a real news story. And like most hoaxes, there’s a lesson in it. CNN has not responded to a request for comment. The Tracker would also welcome comments from Marcus575.”
Oops now the link says this: “CNN PRODUCER NOTE NASA has confirmed via email that this story is false. A spokewoman for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that the largest object detected by NEOWISE measures 3 km in diameter and poses no risk to Earth. The iReport has been removed. – davidw, CNN iReport producer”
– CNN destroyed by huge asteroid, Salon
– CNN Asteroid Hoax: No, An Asteroid Will Not Extinguish All Life In 2041, Huffington post UK
– Wait, So There’s Not a Giant Asteroid Hurling Toward Us After All?
Assuming CNN has a better bead on this asteroid than it does on Flight 370, that’s 26 years to get ourselves to where we can reliably steer a 10-mile rock.
Should be a piece of cake. Should be. (Anyone else lack ful confidence in our current institutions?)
Oh well, so much for that apocalypse! A user-posted news story, riiiiiiight….
I really hate it when the world ends over the weekend and I don’t know that it happened.
So tonight I’m going to party like it’s 2040!
It’s an iReport story that has “Not yet been vetted by CNN,” and was posted by a just created account that only has this post to its credit.
And no one “vetted it” for a day until others notice and complained …
Folks:
If you look at the tags at the bottom of the story… it puts the whole thing in perspective:
“TAGS: beiber, war, gaming, stocks, science, cyrus, space, obama, earth, states”
‘nough said!
tinker
It does put it in perspective, it makes it available to everyone. So it flags everyone whom is in the search for animal chin.
But riddle me this Batman.
Would the government tell the world this was happening.
NO
Only until it was to later for the general population to do anything.
Otherwise Chaos would reign supreme until the end of humanity as we know it.
Just sayin’ homie.
actually not from CNN, iReport pages are not offical CNN, “iReport invites you to share your story with CNN, and quite possibly the world. Log in to get started.” but enough to fool the average joe, who is as stupid as the author of the iReport article.
I am all for citizen reporting but no one “vetted it” for a day until others notice and complained …
A good cautionary experience with “citizen reporting.” The reason newspapers gradually became responsible in the 20th century (after printing whatever would sell before that) was the readership’s implied contract with the papers that the facts were just that, and if proven wrong, the paper would publish corrections. How many CNN iReporters have ever done that? (To be fair, network news virtually never did it, either.)
At Musk Mars colony we decided not to use the Darian calendar. We use a system with the same month names as earth, but each month has about 54 days not 27.
After the impact that beautiful blue orb turned white for many years.
Old man Musk is called Noah by most of us.
Mars colonist
Earth surviver
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/w…
You made me spit out my coffee. Great post
That’s the trouble with user posted news (it’s an iReport). As CNN says: “The stories here are not edited fact-checked or screened before they post”, so you get what you pay for. The story has been removed now.
It took 24 hours- and a quarter of a million people viewed it ….
Pulled. And note this was an ‘ireport’, not a piece done by a real journalist. That also explains, at least in part, the tags.
The date could easily be a typo – hitting the ‘2’ instead of the ‘3’. The damning thing is that there was no object catalogue number in the report. All objects that have an even moderately-certain orbit have a catalogue number of one sort or another. The fact that there wasn’t one should have immediately raised eyebrows.
Actually, it’s quite likely that it DID raise eyebrows; it just took CNN that long to react to an abuse report from a reader.
OMG how did this get out? Damn that Edward Snowden! We were trying to keep this hidden till the next election. CLEARLY this is why the government is funding SLS. There is no way Bruce Willis is going to fly on a SpaceX vehicle. This makes the situation with the Russians not selling us engines even more problematic. Barack Obama and the NSA wants to keep us in the dark until he gets Obamacare rolled out. He is not worried about the impact of the program on the debt because he is more worried about the potential impact of an asteroid on his home town in Kenya. Let me know if I missed anything <g>!
Hahaha, thanks.
Benghazi could be worked in somehow perhaps.
Interesting timing as I finished reading John Young’s book “Forever Young” which his last chapters had much discussion of earth killer asteroids. And his concern we are not doing as much as we should because probability is relatively high (I don’t have book in front of me for the numbers he wrote but enough to get attention). John wrote of sending memos to other NASA people on this subject. He wrote several memos on many subjects including going back to the moon for development (a lot of people got kind of mad a John for all his memos he wrote).
Yes the John Young poison pen memos were infamous.
It a big game of risk they are playing,its logical to force all children to wear bike helmets, but not logical to decentralize the human race from earth when we know massive objects kill huge segments of terrestrial life. Stupid humans
salon, I was hoping that we could arrange for Fox news be destroyed by asteroid..
The news media is so lackadaisical about fact checking these days. They would rather be the “…first with breaking news” than checking the validity of a story or sources. What is worse, they hardly ever publish a retraction if they are wrong.
Here’s an interesting thought, re.: the tabs. ‘Gaming’ caught my eye. Could this have been a ham-fisted attempt at viral marketing for some upcoming post-apocalyptic computer game (with the young Mr Bieber providing one of the characters voices)?
And yet here you are posting on NASA Watch, my dog-iconed anonymous friend.
Any chance of a NASAWatch iReport section? 🙂
What about year 2050?
Well the obvious typo was 3-5-2014 March was put in as an after thought, as to high probability large impacts, when I poured over the NASA database of NEO I saw a few in 2020s and one in 2030s, however any of those dates are close passes of very large objects, not projected, impacts. The impacts that get us have little warning, think levy shoemaker 9, how long did we know it was factually going to hit Jupiter, by my recollection it was a month or less. I would gather that we will have some smaller events in the near future, over the US with injuries, and blown out windows like Russia, the reason being our solar system is entering a denser part of the galactic arm, its probable. that some new comet trajectories might be formed in the next couple of years. Perhaps Obama could tie comets in with global warming, as things we can give him money for and he doesn’t need to do anything about.
Why would ANY professional news agency allow citizen news reporting, on their site? Laziness? Stupidity? Unprofessional, at best. I think a lot of people might not read a disclaimer, and naturally assume that something posted on a CNN news page is fact. I mean, it obviously fooled the author of this page.