Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Doomsday scoreboard

doomsday.march1studios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 167 posts

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#101

Post by jancsika »

kulahan wrote: post #59

One mildly interesting fact that MANY Christians get wrong: There is no lead-up to the apocalypse. The Messiah will return "like a thief in the night" and "nobody, except my Father, knows the hour of my return" (I probably butchered those two quotes). Either way, the Bible is pretty clear (as was Jesus): there will be zero indication the apocalypse is coming. None. It'll just... start.

One mildly interesting fact MANY programmers get wrong about the is_computer_on function:

It is threadsafe. The documentation is very clear about this.

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#102

Post by lloeki »

Missing from the list:

1999: Spanish designer Paco Rabanne announces that the Mir space station would crash on and destroy Paris in between the 28 July 1999 lunar eclipse and the 11 August 1999 total solar eclipse, the two somehow interacting to create magnetic interference, leading to the station crashing at 11:22 on the 11, as predicted by a 17th century fresco in some abbey that shows an eclipse, a clock at that hour, and a sentence "you will know the hour of your death but not the day"... Also Mir would have hypothetically contained a Russian atomic bomb, which is what would destroy Paris, and possibly leading to some all-out nuclear war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIsjK7gpSoc

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#103

Post by KronisLV »

marcosdumay wrote: post #55
KronisLV wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we’re back to conventional warfare and the casualties of that. Just look at Russia and Ukraine.

Do you think Russia vs. Ukraine would happen with any similarity with the real conflict if Russia didn't have nuclear weapons? Because, IMO, Russia would be destroyed the first time they threatened NATO.

> Because, IMO, Russia would be destroyed the first time they threatened NATO.

Maybe. Or maybe the big powers might realize that sending hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to die in an all out war (depending on how big it gets and who else gets involved) is a harder sell than settling on appeasement and so smaller states would lose their sovereignty.

I live in Latvia. If there's no risk of MAD, then what's to prevent some opportunistic Russians from invading my country and seeing whether NATO would actually do something about Article 5? Some are pondering whether that's not a direction that Russia could move in even now - stage something relatively small and see how NATO responds. They're already regularly violating our airspace and doing cyber warfare against us and trying to drum up opposition to our government (as flawed as it may be) by the ethnic Russian people.

Could go either way.

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#105

Post by lloeki »

layman51 wrote: post #99
bironran wrote: post #25

It's missing the January 19, 2038, the unix epoch end. Only 12 years and a bit from now. Very much in our time.

Right, but there's no doomsday prophecies around the Year 2038 problem as far as I can tell. I think it falls in the same kind of category of known problems that are certain to happen at some point. Some other things I was thinking of were the theorized ARkStorm, and also an earthquake that could happen in the Cascadia subduction zone.

It's also not impacting _only_ at that time, many tasks involve dates in the future, and a system dealing with a far enough off date _today_ is already impacted.

So it's not as if "everything works" then suddenly "everything doesn't"

And it's only for operations that care about the sign / compute deltas / use signed numbers, otherwise it's 2106-02-07 06:28:16 UTC.

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#106

Post by bloak »

undershirt wrote: post #79
bironran wrote: post #25

It's missing the January 19, 2038, the unix epoch end. Only 12 years and a bit from now. Very much in our time.

9/11 happened 1 trillion milliseconds after the unix epoch.

Then I am a victim of the Mandela Effect because I can clearly remember (time_t)1e9 happening earlier than that.

I've checked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu... and I can't see what I could be muddling it up with, either. Spooky!

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#107

Post by 48terry »

gnabgib wrote: post #95
akerl_ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good thing there's always exactly one pope.

Well that's provably false.. there've been three popes[0] and zero popes happen now and then (2025[1], 2013[2], 2005, 1978..) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Schism [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Leo_XIV [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Francis

That was the joke.

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#108

Post by akerl_ »

48terry wrote: post #107
gnabgib wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's provably false.. there've been three popes[0] and zero popes happen now and then (2025[1], 2013[2], 2005, 1978..) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Schism [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Leo_XIV [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Francis

That was the joke.

Thanks <3

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#109

Post by wartywhoa23 »

jungturk wrote: post #28
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #23

It can show 0 successful predictions all it wants, but we'd been through global lockdowns and forced vaccination, there's an ongoing war in Europe with casualties in hundreds of thousands on both sides, Gaza is being demolished by Israel, Internet as we knew it is about to turn into whitelisted fiberoptic/5G TV, surveillance is rampant, and the rise of the global technofascist police state as the public is being ente…

Don't disagree with any of that, and I don't want to minimize the seriousness of the issues you've cited, but that kind of reinforces the implication of the scorecard? People are persistently presented with perils (plagues, parasites, pollution, power-hungry politicians, propaganda, plutonium-powered projectiles, etc...) and humanity keeps finding a way through (though certainly at great personal and population-wide…

The whole history of the humankind is akin to that passage of Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis. The further into it, the narrower it becomes. And exponentially at that...

Thank you for sharing your hopes for the better outcome no matter what, I'm with you on this.

Re: Doomsday scoreboard

#110

Post by xivzgrev »

I'm surprised at the number of famous folk who have predictions, like Christopher Columbus. Gives new context to Thiels recent musings on the Antichrist.

Step 1: become accomplished in some field Step 2: ??? Step 3: write about the anti Christ and predict when it will occur

Post reply on HN