Emails have been going around that say that Mars is supposed to look as big as the moon from the Earth's surface on the 23rd or 24th. IT'S A LIE! They made it up for fun. I will prove it (despite the fact that the 24th has come and gone). Mars comes close four times every 284 years. The last time was August 27th, 2003. It has only been two years since then. Plus, it was still 35 million miles away. It just twinkled brighter. They predict an even closer approach in year 2287. Not 2005. And "even closer approach" only means "twinkles even brighter than last time."

Second, and this is funny, is that it would be physically impossible (and the end of the world). Let's say that the email started going around on August 1st. It predicted that the event would take place on the 23d or 24th. Let's say the 24th. Let's say that Mars' average distance from the Earth (when it's at its closest point) is 35 million miles away. Let's estimate a that it would be a million miles away for it to appear as large as the moon (a million's actually too much), so we'll knock off a million. So we'll say that Mars would have to travel 34 million miles between the 1st and the 24th. It has to travel 1.4 million miles a day. 56,667 miles an hour. The only thing that could make it reach that speed in so little time would be for something to push it or for the sun's gravity to increase (impossible; plus, it wouldn't only affect Mars). Now this wouldn't be any normal push. Something would have to collide with it at even more than 56,667 miles an hour and it would have to be a very very large object. In other words, for it to travel that fast, something of a similar size would have to run in to it. It would be destroyed.Let's pretend that it wasn't destroyed. If Mars were to approach the Earth at 56,667 miles an hour, then once it reached that closest point (1 million miles away), it would collide with us within the next 18 hours. And because Mars and Earth are similarly sized, they would both be annihilated by the collision like Alderaan in Star Wars. Now, since we're going along with the theory that Mars wasn't destroyed by its first collision, then we must hold to that theory by saying that Earth wasn't destroyed by this one. Therefore, Earth would bounce off of Mars and fly straight towards the sun where it would be swallowed up in its sea of magma. Whatever way you look at it, the Earth is at its end.

Therefore, that email was predicting the apocalypse.

I used some information from Wikipedia.