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Actually, I don't think there's a mystery behind the deadline given; it was simply a prediction for "one year from now", made on that date in 2008. So, the oracle gave us that date plus some integer number of years, because, well, we humans seem to place significance on integer years for such purposes. (We're all a little nutty that way. : )

I dunno, though, it certainly would have been safer to go with, say, 5 years or so. If I were in the prediction biz, I wouldn't give myself impossible one-year deadlines! Too easy for listeners to remember those.