Prediction: Will Earth be Destroyed in 2010? Final Update 2

We all need something to look forward to, especially as an old year ends and a whole new decade dawns before us. Some hope quietly for a bit of improvement in the economy and a health care bill that may fall short but at least leaves out death panels.

Others turn to psychics. World famous Sylvia Browne predicted that the common cold would be eradicated in 2009 or 2010, and since it didn’t happen in 2009, it’ll for sure take place in the new year. A playback of Coast to Coast AM fave Sean David Morton’s predictions for the first quarter of 2010 costs $199, so I’ll leave it to the really curious to find out what Sean prophesied.

I did notice that unknown seer Matt Crowley of Seattle predicts, as he did in 2008 and 2009, “This one guy will go from total obscurity to national fame virtually overnight.”

Nice, but what everybody, deep down, wants to know beforehand is: Will this be the year Earth is destroyed?

Al Gore continues to tell us that global warming will do us in, and faster than he told us before, but only fast enough to thin a few glaciers by December. Al Qaeda has plans, but their track record isn’t what it used to be. The Mayans are sticking with 2012.

So, once again, it’s up to me to do the research and disseminate the facts. Here, then, are the most likely disasters to explode, implode or otherwise make the planet uninhabitable by multi-spore life forms between January 1 and December 31, 2010:

1. Supervolcanoes  Lots of famous people, like TV and TMZ star David Letterman, encourage fans to share their fear of being killed off by global warming. But try to name a celeb who takes the trouble to warn us about volcanoes so powerful they can make the planet uninhabitable in a single eruption. Not even Sacheen Littlefeather touched that one. In fact, these gushers are the most likely natural disaster to wipe us out in the next 360ish days. Sure, the one that spewed lava with the force of 1,000 atom bombs at Indonesia’s Lake Toba 75,000 years ago only destroyed two thirds of the humans then on earth and triggered an ice age that lasted but 1,000 years. Dinky. The coming Yellowstone National Park supervolcano,  which blog Xenophilius says could be ten times bigger than Toba, can cause nuclear meltdowns that wreck everything for years. Noted National Geographic News, even the nation's capital would be buried under 7,200 feet of solidified lava. With an average of about 7,000 years between eruptions, the next one is due, well, now.

2. Asteroids “Earth is hit [by asteroids] on a regular basis,” wrote Jerry Coffey at UniverseToday.com. He figures a mile wide asteroid will hit with the power of a million megatons, “10 million times the energy of the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima… Nearly all life on this planet would be gone within a year. The rest would go as the food supplies dwindled.”  Doomsdayers expect Asteroid 4179 Toutatis to arrive on December 12, 2012. And the chance that Asteroid Apophis will strike on April 13, 2029 was upgraded “to an unprecedented level of risk” in 2004. Though that risk was later lowered, Anatoly Perminov, head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, told Voice of Russia radio in December, 2009, “A scientist recently told me…he has calculated that [Apophis] will surely collide with Earth in the 2030s.” So Roscosmos is planning to launch a spaceship, hopefully with the help of other countries, including the United States,  to divert Apophis’s path. While such a plan currently offers hope that we’ll live through 2010 unless something else…like a supervolcano… gets us, the chance remains that projected dates are off by ten or twenty years and 2010 will be the year that something worse than the stock market crashes.

3. A bunch of other natural and unnatural disasters happening all at once Kind of like the 2012 movie, only not a movie.

4. Do it yourself Blogger Sam Hughes details a number of ways to destroy the planet here, but several are too time consuming to be accomplished by the end of 2010. Method Number Two alone requires a particle accelerator to split each atom on earth, one at a time. That, Sam warns, means, “You're looking at billions of years minimum, folks.” Method Number Ten, hurling Earth into the sun, looks quick enough but requires earthmoving equipment, which may be hard to come by.

5. Celebrity overload This one is a tough call because it’s never happened on this planet. But that is only because 24/7 tabloid journalism has never before reached the global omnipresence it staked out in 2009, coupled with the sheer luck that the world has never experienced a super-cluster of celebrity mishaps all on one day. It is not out of the question for Tiger Woods, Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse to all self-destruct simultaneously, which could conceivably trigger relapses by Mel Gibson, Britney Spears, Kanye West and celebrities off the tabloid radar for decades (Jerry Lewis? Tina Yothers? Danny Bonaduce?). And don’t rule out the ongoing threat that a Tunisian woman currently pregnant with twelve babies could push octomom Nadia over the brink and into another round of multiple births on the same day that Brad leaves Angie and the six kids for Jen after all. The demand this will place on the resources of every TV, radio, print and online news outlet, including Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs, email, remote viewing and walkie-talkies, is mind boggling. The world’s energy supply will dry up in days, perhaps hours. Panic will ensue. Commerce will cease. Life on earth will be unsustainable, maybe only for a month, as the shrieking coverage peaks, but that will be time enough to already have killed off every living thing. I’m not saying this will happen in the next twelve months, only that it can. Oh, and Happy New Year.

UPDATE: The first crack has already occurred in the earth and it's barely the New Year in the Eastern United States.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Russian professor and former KGB analyst Igor Panarin says that the US mainland will collapse morally and intellectually, leading to a civil war and the break up of the country into four smaller countries. The California Republic will belong to China, Atlantic America to the European Union, The Texas Republic to Mexico and  and The Central-North American Republic will merge with Canada. Alaska will join Russia, and Hawaii will go to Japan or China. Panarin has been predicting 2010 as the year of the America's demise for  ten years, and now people are taking him seriously. It is not a physical crack at this juncture but might as well be for the profound effect it will have on North America and the world.  

UPDATE 2: It has come to my attention that blind Bulgarian prophet Baba Vanga, who died in 1996 and yet predicted the 9/ll attacks down to wolves "howling in a bush"--which means she knew who would be president five years after she died!--stated that World War III will start in November. I knew you'd want to know.

UPDATE 3: As three weeks of earthquake swarms at Yellowstone continue, scientists are playing down the importance of the shaking despite increased seismic activity Tuesday and early Wednesday (February 3). Which is what they should be doing, since knowing a Supervolcano is on the verge of destroying the planet doesn't mean we know how to stop it.

UPDATE 4: We've barely made it to the second quarter and Yellowstone is forgotten...because the end of the planet now looks to be gathering steam, and ash, in Iceland. Plus, we still don't know for sure if Larry King is going through with the divorce or not. Can the world get any worse than this and not end?

UPDATE 5: Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption continues, however, Larry King and his wife and her sister have worked out their problems and the world will [almost] definitely not be destroyed before July.

UPDATE 6: Larry King's fairytale eighth marriage and 25 year reign as a CNN talk show host may come to an end in 2010, following wife Shawn's overdose--now thought to be intentional--and an offer made to Piers Morgan to take over a prime time show--possibly Larry's--by fall. Under normal circumstances, this reporter would not put forth conjecture as news. However, the end of the world is at stake, and this would be a good time to stock up on non-perishable, high energy foods.

UPDATE 7: Bad omen: Our only moon is shrinking. And has been for a billion years. Good omen: Both Larry King and his recent guest, semi-Dr. Laura Schlessinger, may last out the rest of the year with their TV and/or radio programs intact. The world can't end before their contracts end. Like, wouldn't they sue?

UPDATE 8: It's already fall and we're still here. Whew. But while that is a good thing, it's not impossible that a lot of little things happening at once could destroy the planet, like Paris H. being found guilty AND denied entry into Japan at virtually the same time that Lindsay L. gets out of rehab early AND fails another drug test. PLUS, Steve J. takes on the lowly job of answering Apple's customer email AND rudely replies to a student customer, “Please leave us alone” at the same time that Facebook founder Mark Z. ranks higher than Steve on this year's Forbes list of  wealthiest Americans AND turns philanthropist. Could be coincidence...or a world about to explode.

UPDATE 9: With less than a month and a half of 2010 to go, Bristol Palin has made the finals in the Dancing With the Stars competition, leading Black Earth, Wisconsin resident Steven Cowan to shoot his television set and threaten to kill himself. "Black Earth" and "Bristol Palin" in the same sentence? The end is nigh.

CORRECTION: Bristol Palin's dancing did not end the world after all. My bad. Still, coming in third could well signify that that long overdue San Andreas fault is about to send California into the ocean. Time to stock up on canned goods and flippers.

FINAL UPDATE: The world was not destroyed in 2010. Sorry about that. However, Judgment Day is scheduled for May 21, 2011 with the actual end of the planet coming on October 21, 2011. These dates have been verified by Christian broadcaster Harold Egbert Camping and several callers to the overnight Coast to Coast AM radio show, so we were not so far off target after all.

FINAL UPDATE 2 : Sorry about the mixup. Today, October 21, 2011, is the end of the world. The evidence? Lindsay Lohan finally showed up for court-ordered community service duty at the morgue. Just wanted to squeeze that in before the final moment.