Hard to believe that it's a slow news week. Here an American subculture is dismantling the Republic brick by brick, and some people insist on a variant of the entertainment reality shows, "We are all doomed!"
If you knew for certain that an ELE (extinction-Level Event) were to strike in two weeks, what would a mentally healthy human's reaction be? Gather his extended family and make sure they all spent their final days of life in mental agony or worse? Or allow them a final two weeks of normalcy and enjoying the small and large pleasures of life? No further comment about that...
Now let's talk about lies, damned lies and statistics. Meaningful statistics, by definition, deal with huge chunks of time or myriad events. That's what makes the global warming/weather debate so meaningless. Statisticians know, for example, that if an event occurs once every 600,000 years, and it's been 1,200,000 years since the last one, we are not necessarily expecting one any day now. Depends if the announcement is based on 2 previous events or 2000 of them. And it matters if the record suggest evenly spaced events or random occurences which average once every 600,000 years. Ninety-five percent of educated humans are math ignorant. The resulting hand-wringing is the inevitable result. Even scientists, who should know better, fall into the melodrama trap; hence the glut of poorly made neurotic hysterical computer generated (and meaningless) "documentaries" encouraging total 24/7 phobias. It's adding insult to injury when organizations line National Geographic, The Science Channel and the "Learning" channel lead the hysteria.
Most sane people know that "Ghost Hunters," and other similar TV programs are pointless wastes of time based on acting to maintain a high level of dramatic tension. That the "Science" segment of the entertainment spectrum feel compelled to join the stampede for ratings only makes things worse, and really confounds the underlying issues.
Yes Dorothy, a 200-year event can occur two years in a row, or every 2000 years or every 200,000. That's the math reality. Depends entirely on the total length of the reliable record. This discussion is never presented (most people wouldn't understand it, even if they had the attention span to actually watch it.)
Among the wisest words to live by" Dear God, give me the patience to suffer the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom [and I should add here the effort] to know the difference.
Another significant boloid event apparently occurred on or around August 13, 1930. This would have coincided with the passage of the Perseid Meteor Showers. While it was not as big as Tungusku, it still shook up this sparsely settled area of Brazil.