How NOT to calculate end of the world
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
29 May 2011
In the days leading up to 21st May 2011, I got several emails from readers asking whether it was true that the world was going to end. I didn’t want to respond to them during the euphoria because I wanted people to be sober while reading my view.
Of course we now know that the world did not end. In fact most people went about their business as usual and completely ignored the warning. The gullible minority sold their earthly belongings and waited – I am still trying to figure out what they did with the money after selling everything…
This is not the first time that some one has claimed to know when the world is coming to an end. We all still remember the sect from Nyandarua that warned us of an impending nuclear war where all nations holding atomic bombs were supposed to start firing them at one another thereby completely obliterating the whole earth. Well, as I demonstrated here at the time, there aren’t enough bombs in the world to wipe out the planet…and as we know now, the war never happened!
There was also the scare of and asteroid impact in 2005. This came as a
result of two events: a fictional
The current prediction by Harold Camping was based on some fuzzy mathematics that did not make any sense. First of all, he assumed that Jesus Christ was born on 1st January of year one AD. That is not true: Jesus was actually born somewhere between 7BC and 4BC – yes, BEFORE Christ! How that is possible is a story for another day.
Camping then used some mysterious computation that went as follows: 5 is the number of “atonement” and 10 represents “completeness” while 17 is heaven. Therefore, 5 x 10 x 17 = 850. The square of 850 is the number of days since the day Jesus was crucified, that is, 722,500 days.
Now Jesus was crucified on Good Friday on his 33rd year on Earth, that must have been 1st April on year 33. Therefore, adding 722,500 days to that date, we arrive at 21 May 2011. QED…
Ah, not so fast: why did we multiply 5 x 10 x 17, instead of say, adding them? And why square the result? That part was never explained, let alone how he arrived at the three numbers 5, 10 and 17.
If anything, this prediction was a good illustration of how NOT to use mathematics. The starting point of any calculation must be correct or based on valid assumptions, and every step should be explained clearly. Using that principle, my own prediction of when the Earth will end comes to about 5 billion years from now. This is the time the Sun will balloon into a huge red giant star swallowing the first four planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
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