Quote Of The Day: Predicting 9/11 Nine Months Early
On Twitter this morning, Tom McCammon sent out a link to an aviation forum that asks an eerily prophetic question:
When the two towers that make up the World Trade Center were built, they were designed to withstand the impact of the largest airliner of the day, the Boeing 707 Intercontinental. The Empire State Building survived a B-25 medium bomber crashing into it on very foggy day. It was during the weekend when most people weren’t there, but still, 14 people died.
Anyone wanna bet that the World Trade Center could survive an 767-300 impact?
The time stamp on that post:
Posted Thu Nov 30 2000 07:39:15 your local time (10 years 1 month 3 hours ago)
Assuming it’s accurate, that’s just over nine months before the September 11th attacks.
A million monkeys at a million keyboards …
It is funny to think that with this much “publishing” going on, someone, somewhere has already named the future. It makes the “formal” definition of a black swan, as something that no one predicted, impossible.
(In this case I think the author was adding some fairly well known historical points, previous airplane impacts on tall buildings and previous attacks on the WTC, in a pretty straightforward way.)
Start looking for somebody writing about icebergs and the Titanic before 1912.
If John Ashcroft was still Attorney General, he would be calling this guy a “person of interest” a la Steven Hatfill.
14 years before the Titanic, Morgan Robertson wrote a short novel called Futility about an Ocean Liner on its maiden voyage across the atlantic hitting an iceberg and sinking. Sound familiar? Here’s the crazy part, the name of Robertson’s ship- The Titan!