Oh noes!

There are a couple of doom-based news stories floating out there. The general gist is, "We're all gonna die!"

Well, I, for one, am not surprised. I have known, for a long time now, that I was doomed. I didn't intend to make it forever. This is kind of laughable to me. So, in order, my analyses of these stories:

1. Drinking water contains chemicals.

As I understand it, these drugs are the residue left over after people take the drugs, pass a fraction of the drug into the sewer, where it gets processed by the municipal water utility, and a portion gets put back into circulation. No one knows what kind of effect this has on the human body.

Other stuff in the sewer: E. Coli! Oh crap! There's e. coli in the water! No, wait; I'm sure the good people at your local water utility thought of that, and treat the water with antibiotics. Now, all they have to do is figure out how all those damn drugs got in the water supply...

2. Death ray star.

I was reading about the death ray star, and they make the claim that

Since the initial blast would travel at the speed of light, there would be no warning of its arrival.

Further down the article, they point out that

This pinwheel is about 8,000 light years away, roughly a quarter of the way to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

So, it travels at the speed of light, and it's 8000 light years away. Granted, we won't know that the thing exploded until the light from the explosion hits us (right along with the gamma rays), but nobody said "The way this thing looks to us, right now, it appears 7999 years away from going boom.", which would actually scare the hell out of me, since we only see an 8000 year old snapshot of the star. Instead, they're talking in the hundreds of thousands of years range. If we, as a species, don't wipe ourselves out by then, I'm not going to worry too much about this planet getting fried; we might not live here anymore!

At least, I won't.