The End of the World and Believing What You See in the News
Jake M Peters
Jake M Peters
It is very easy to be mislead by the media. Sometimes I get the impression journalists go out of their way to sway you one way or the other. It is like being given the choice between having a lonely lunch break in the coffee shop on a glorious Friday afternoon or coming along to Journalism Club (in the Business Studies room at 13:20). Obviously you are going to choose the latter. Equally, journalists will draw their readers in to an article they have written by making a boring story sound interesting simply by giving it a catchy headline.
One such example of this misleading behaviour was when I read an article with a headline claiming NASA has announced the end of the world. "Gosh!", I thought. "If NASA is saying this then there must be something imminent that Earth is in danger of." (Verbatim from my mind.) Reading on, I discovered this was actually a NASA-funded project. This means NASA did not necessarily have a direct input on the study. Now, I am not saying that everything NASA says is correct, but it is supposed to be a team of experts, and as they are the leaders in space technology I would be inclined to believe most of their claims.
So, who carried out this study which predicts (yet again) the end of the world? A professor at the University of Maryland. This time, however, the explanation is not a freak asteroid or a rogue planet hurtling towards Earth. Instead, the American mathematician believes that society itself will tear the world to pieces with the uneven distribution of wealth potentially causing effects more disasterous than we could have ever predicted. Perhaps this time there is some scary truth in the claim? Then again, the end of the world has been predicted in many forms for thousands of years. What we have to remember is that these are just theories. Theories can be, and often are, wrong!
Here is a cheery topic for debate: How do you think the world will end? Will it be the fault of the human race or will something out of our hands beat us to it? Send us an email with your thoughts at [email protected]!
One such example of this misleading behaviour was when I read an article with a headline claiming NASA has announced the end of the world. "Gosh!", I thought. "If NASA is saying this then there must be something imminent that Earth is in danger of." (Verbatim from my mind.) Reading on, I discovered this was actually a NASA-funded project. This means NASA did not necessarily have a direct input on the study. Now, I am not saying that everything NASA says is correct, but it is supposed to be a team of experts, and as they are the leaders in space technology I would be inclined to believe most of their claims.
So, who carried out this study which predicts (yet again) the end of the world? A professor at the University of Maryland. This time, however, the explanation is not a freak asteroid or a rogue planet hurtling towards Earth. Instead, the American mathematician believes that society itself will tear the world to pieces with the uneven distribution of wealth potentially causing effects more disasterous than we could have ever predicted. Perhaps this time there is some scary truth in the claim? Then again, the end of the world has been predicted in many forms for thousands of years. What we have to remember is that these are just theories. Theories can be, and often are, wrong!
Here is a cheery topic for debate: How do you think the world will end? Will it be the fault of the human race or will something out of our hands beat us to it? Send us an email with your thoughts at [email protected]!