Slow news day?

Holy crap we're all going to die!

I was confronted with this distressing information while watching BBC News last night. Mars is LITERALLY GOING TO CRASH INTO THE EARTH. Maybe. Possibly in 3 billion years. The BBC even managed to shoehorn their favorite word in by calling it PLANET CRUNCH. Like the credit crunch with millions of deaths not debts!!! The word is literally losing all meaning, just add it after any notable event: credit crunch, job crunch, generation crunch, expenses crunch, swine flu crunch, Gordon Brown crunch, Ronaldo crunch, crunch crunch, crunch crunch crunch...

Anyway this is only, as they mention in the report, if scientist Jacques Laskar (pictured below) has done his maths right.

I can only imagine that this is a computer generated image of how Jacques will cope with the Earth/Mars collision when it happens: cool as fuck. Freshly crowned 'Dynamique' of the solar system by virtue of being the only remaining human, calmly punting around on his lava-proof gondola. "I told you so". Typical smug Frenchman.



I have to say I feel slightly cheated. I love science and I like news. But when they combine it so often goes so very wrong. (for more see Ben Goldacre's great Guardian column). I got sort of semi-excited about the prospect of seeing the world end in a gigantic hot death collision. But it turns out it's billions of years away. I'm still not entirely sure what a billion is (a million million? a hundred million? a trillion million?) But I know it is a lot. Seeing as the world is only 4.5(ish) billion years old, it seems like an awful long wait. So thanks I guess to the BBC for mocking up a digital representation of the event that looks like it should grace the cover of a Sega Saturn game (why fate, you cruel mistress did you so badly want that console to fail).

Interesting as Jacque's findings may be I'm not quite sure how this made the news. It's hardly like this desperately had to go out at ten o'clock for the general good of the public. Stories like this do make it hard to defend science from the idiots who "don't care about it" and think "it doesn't affect them". Namely because this story actually doesn't affect them and even I am dangerously close to not caring about the small possibility of the world ending in 3 billion years time. Even less alarming was the more probable scenario of Mars coming "uncomfortably close" to Earth. Just like when your boss got on the same train as you and you hid in the toilets to avoid conversation. How close exactly would be comfortable? Anyway "uncomfortably close". They did a picture for that too:



The report ended with the 'stop the press' news that Mercury might also crash into Venus but that the planets would simply merge (WHAT?). "The new planet would be a little bit bigger than Venus, and the Solar System would be a little more regular after the collision, but the Earth's orbit would not be affected." Phew. FC