catastrophe

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Or not, depending on who you talk to. The latest buzz is that Betelgeuse, a red supergiant and the ninth brightest star in the sky, is about to go supernova in the next few weeks or months. Apparently the panic originated from a forum posting, which claimed to have firsthand information from an astronomer in Mauna Kea. Although not predicting immediate annihilation for Earth, the author postulated that the bright explosion would cause 24-hour daylight and might destroy crops. That posting has been elaborated upon here, and debunked here.

It seems as though every few months we're subjected to warnings of some new disaster that threatens to destroy us. We're told that swine flu could kill hundreds of millions around the globe. We're warned that global warming will melt the polar ice caps and raise the sea levels much sooner than anticipated, wreaking havoc worldwide. We're shown via Hollywood that the world will end in 2012. The world didn't end as predicted in 2000, but it certainly went a little crazy as programmers raced to fix "the millennium bug". And apparently we're under constant threat from unknown and untracked asteroids which could demolish the Earth at any moment.… Continues …