3 ms·

Possible? Sure. An asteroid ending all life on earth is possible in the next two years. Better question is how PROBABLE is war with China?

• barbazoo 4y ago
  > An asteroid ending all life on earth is possible in the next two years. That's the first time I hear that. Source?
• jwally 4y ago
  The point I was trying to make is that conflating POSSIBLE with PROBABLE to me smacks of click bait; my opinion. It doesn't really tell you anything meaningful but sounds extremely scary. Weasel words. A more useful quip from the general might be "shooting war with china in next two years all but certain"
• trashtester 4y ago
  Much more probably than an asteroid doing that within our lifetime. Also, an astroid needs to be quite big to destroy ALL life, even bacteria deep within the Earth's crust. I would give a Chinese attempt to invide Taiwan between now and 2035 at least a 25% probability.
  • midoridensha 4y ago
    When people talking about an asteroid "destroying all life", they probably don't usually mean it literally like that, but rather just all multicellular life on the surface.
    • trashtester 4y ago
      Maybe, though my guess is that most people who use this phrase really don't know or even care precisely what they mean, beyond "cause a bigger catastrophy than humanity has ever seen". It's the same for poeple talking about extinction from nuclear war or climate change. There is little support in "The Science" for any prediction of a fatality rate of 100% from either (given current arsenals in the case of Nukes). People simply do not want to imagine what the world would be after a large scale nuclear war. So if they're given advice that would actually significantly increase survival chances (such as duck&cover, having some store of fresh water, etc), they prefer to laugh it off instead of taking it seriously.