Crazy People Battle Stephen Hawking for Public's Attention

As the clock ticks down to May 21, the world media struggles to give the proper proportion of coverage to noted crazy person Harold Camping, noted “actor” Steven Seagal, and noted genius/physicist Stephen Hawking. Naturally, the media has mostly ignored the most intelligent person of the last 100 years in Hawking and instead stuck with Harold Camping and his crazy theory that the rapture will happen on Saturday. Camping's carnival sideshow believes that this Saturday marks the day when Christian believers will ascend to heaven, leaving the rest of humanity to suffer for five months, until God finally destroys the Earth. That date, if you're wondering, is October 21, 2011. Seagal, meanwhile, has his own crazy ideas on where humankind is headed. Seagal wrote an open letter to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, asking Putin to support the "Russia 2045" movement. According to Seagal, "Russia 2045" will use and develop new technologies to significantly improve the quality of life and make humans immortal by the year 2045. So, we have one fake celebrity arguing that he and his friends will be immortal with a little divine intervention...and we also have Harold Camping. Meanwhile, Stephen Hawking gave an interview to the Guardian newspaper in which the brilliant theoretical physicist laid out a simple argument for what happens when we die: we simply cease to exist. "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," Hawking said. "I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he said. In a 2010 interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer, when asked if there was a way to reconcile religion and science, he said, "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works." Unless, of course, the world ends Saturday or Stephen Seagal becomes immortal.