New history and new expectations are associated with an asteroid moving to Earth. On April 29, an asteroid 1998 OR2 will fly near the Earth. Scientists, referring to its size (4.1 km in diameter), call the celestial body potentially dangerous.
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Photo: Forbes.com
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So we exhale: life on the planet will be interrupted by something more terrible. Or do not exhale? After all, humanity for some reason stably waits for someone to kill it
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As follows from NASA data, the next time an asteroid that hit the video of astronomers from the Virtual Telescope will approach the Earth on May 18, 2031. The distance between it and the planet will be 19 million kilometers.
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Right now, few people take the topic of the disappearance of life on the planet because of this asteroid seriously; it flies at a very bad time:
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- There is a coronavirus that has swept the whole world;
- An asteroid will fly 6 million kilometers from Earth – not such a distance as to invent expeditions for the sake of its destruction (as the heroes of the film “Armageddon” did). But NASA still wants to shoot a space object.
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In theory, the Doomsday was predicted by the Maya Indians. They said that something terrible would happen to us in December 2012: either a meteorite would come and hit, or some kind of catastrophe, or a black hole would go wild, or something else should erase life on the planet. But no one so precisely understood how many people should have waited for the doomsday (December 21 or 23 – the first date is considered official, but many sources refer to the second). Like whether it was a prediction at all.
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A few years ago, NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered an unusual meteorite on the Red Planet. Look how it looks in our gallery:
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Religion
In 2016, Pacific Standard published a text on how religion affects people’s perceptions of the end of the world. You can read the material here.
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Photo: History.com
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We will give the main points of this text:
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1. The main religions and their branches have a lot of explanations of how exactly life will end on Earth. Some relate to this absolutely neutral – as the next part of the history of mankind. Some talk about the end of the world with inspiration – they connect this event with something global and unbelievable.
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2. People, using mathematics, tried to predict the probable day when the end of the world would come. At different times different dates were called: starting from the first years and the first centuries of our era, ending with the start of the third millennium.
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3. Some followers of their religions on special radio broadcasts made statements about the day when the end of the world would come. As a result, they later apologized because their predictions did not come true.
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4. Many believers seriously think that due to the end of the world they will become closer to God.
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5. There is a certain group of believers that believes that the end of the world will become the logical end of the evolution of mankind as a species.
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Photo: The Register
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Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Wheaton College Evangelism Center, said: “The apocalypse these days is destruction and murder. At the same time, for Christians, he is associated with purification. ”
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People still believe in the predictions of the Mayans, a civilization that disappeared about a thousand years ago. Robert Sitler, a professor at the University of Stetson in Florida who studies Latin American cultures, in one of his works examined the predictions of the Indians and their influence on modern man.
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For this, Sitler read a lot of religious documents that have survived from those times. Plus, he found the closest ancestors of the Indians in Mexico and the USA and asked them: a) About the attitude to the predictions made more than a thousand years ago; b) About what they are doing now.
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Sitler found that modern representatives of the Mayan clan are ordinary people who do not adhere to the orders and lifestyle of their ancestors. They do not particularly believe in predictions about the end of the world, although they are pleased that everyone is still talking about Maya. Sitler put forward the theory why precisely the predictions of the end of the world are so strongly imprinted in the consciousness of religious people. In his opinion, the sad scenario predicted by the Indians was closely intertwined with the beliefs of many faiths.
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Due to this, people not only believed in the apocalypse, but still believe.
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People understand that the end of the world will come, because humanity is actively striving for this. Some make a profit of it
“The Walking Dead”, “War of the Worlds Z”, “I am a legend” – these films and series contain the history of people after a global event that destroyed almost all of humanity on earth.
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Photo: AMC official website
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In a monumental study by The Washington Post it is said that now most modern people do not believe in a well-established date for the end of the world. At the same time, they understand that the planet is inevitably heading towards this. The reasons are different.
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The aggravated political situation, which in the case of a particularly “sharp movement” on either side, will result in nuclear disassembly. Numerous dangerous viruses – many are assigned pandemic status to many (a striking example is the new coronavirus COVID-19). Global warming. People are convinced that it is their mistakes that lead to the massive genocide that nature will commit. Earthquakes, melting glaciers are the result of human activity.
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People are so accustomed to the idea that someday their universal history will end in a sad end, that right now they are predicting an approximate date when this will come. A vivid example is Doomsday Clock, a project of the University of Chicago, founded by leading nuclear scientists.
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The essence of this watch is as follows: scientists and several invited experts (including Nobel Prize winners) evaluate the current political situation and, on its basis, move the arrow to midnight. When the arrow reaches midnight, then, according to the commission, there will be a nuclear war that will destroy humanity.
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Now the arrow has stopped a minute and 40 seconds from midnight – it was moved due to the deterioration of relations between the US and Iran. The last time the world was so close to Doomsday, judging by this watch, in 2017, when Trump announced his intention to expand the US nuclear arsenal. But so close as now – never.
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Some people believe in the death of all living things, others profit from the naivety of the former. There are a lot of cases when the most gullible bought places in bunkers in case of a nuclear war. Or they booked a place in a house on some isolated island – so they (for their own reasons) minimize the risk of being bitten if people massively turn into zombies.
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This is an illegal business. But there is also legal – movies, comics, books, merch. People make millions of dollars on the theme of the apocalypse, although they themselves may not really believe it. Religious myths are currently turned into stories under the film adaptation and are considered by most as entertainment.
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See an unusual gallery of exciting space photos:
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This is also interesting:
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