With math, I can justify anything!

Brigantine Amazon entering Marseilles in Novem...
Brigantine Amazon entering Marseilles in November 1861. She was later renamed Mary Celeste, as which she became the well-known ghost ship. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As background, my current writing project tackles the question of mysterious disappearances – sort of. Mostly, its a SyFy Channel treatment of the subject, so future readers shouldn’t get their hopes up for deep discussions (it’s a creature feature story, and I must admit I’m having a lot of fun writing it). But out of curiosity, I did some simple math today, and found this…intriguing pattern.

If you take the difference of these two dates (the 1586 is a bit of a fudge – the colony was out of contact for three years, so it could have happened any time in that time frame), you get 286 years apart. Now these were just the two that popped into mind, and being curious if I could force a pattern out of this, I divided that number in two and got 143 years (under the assumption it happened more often, and because this first answer didn’t quite help me)(I’m writing fiction, I get to make the facts fit!). And 1872 + 143 = 2015!

So, assuming a cycle as long as 143 years (but maybe only 70 something!), we can expect another small population to just vanish this year. You’re welcome.

3 thoughts on “With math, I can justify anything!”

  1. The middle event of this obviously-143-year cycle was marked by the appearance of the LARGEST COMET EVER SEEN:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_of_1729

    It never even got within the asteroid belt, but was still visible to the naked eye for six months because it was up to a hundred kilometers across.

    Those of us “in the know” understand that this was no comet. Obviously it was an alien spacecraft on a 143-year orbit, doing surveillance on the primitive earth when it wasn’t abducting colonists or sailors! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

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