The world is coming to an end. Or it just did. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
I seem to remember at least half a dozen ends of the world in my lifetime. I believe the first one was in the 70’s. All nine planets in the solar system (Pluto was still a planet then) were in Syzygy; set up in a straight line, opposite each other with the sun in the center. Astrologers in India predicted the gravitational turmoil would rend poor earth asunder.
Tens of thousands of people in India literally headed for the hills to hide in caves. I remember thinking at the time that if the entire planet was going to be rent asunder what good was it going to do to hide in a cave. It was a moot point, the world didn’t end.
Now we are faced with the horror hiding in comet Elenin. This comet was discovered last December by an amateur Russian astronomer, Leonid Elenin (C/2010 X1), and is the new purveyor of doom. Elenin is now in our inner solar system on an orbit that is very shallow in terms of the ecliptic (plane in which the planets orbit the sun), spewing cyanide from its effervescing tail, and, horror of all horrors, shielding the return of the planet Nibiru, a rogue brown dwarf sister to our sun with three of its own “moons”, travelling on a 3600 year orbit of the solar system that threatens to disrupt the magnetic poles of the earth, destroying our gravitational balance, sometime between now and the end of December. All this leads to a fulfilling of not only Mayan, but Hopi, and “American Indian” predictions for cataclysm in 2012.
For those of you who keep informed, you will remember that it was the inhabitants of the Planet Nibiru that genetically engineered earth monkeys with some of their own DNA to create a race of human slave monkeys to do their bidding and treat them as gods. What might they have in store for us this time?
This scheme is being promoted by people at the RSE Gnostic School, somewhere in Yelm, Washington; and a self-produced radio shock jock on something called “Your Own World Radio” in Arizona. September 15 is supposed to be the crisis day.
Time to head for the hills. Hold on, we’ve established that won’t do any good, cancel the barbecues in the Bronson Caves or Nortonville State Park.
What’s wrong with this picture? Everything. First of all, the comet itself is tiny, 3.5 km in diameter, a speck of a dirty snowball in astronomical terms. Second, it will come no closer than 25 million miles to earth. Third…Planet Nibiru? If it’s a brown dwarf, it is a star with spent fuel (not a planet) and would have planets orbiting it, not moons.
It would also be very heavy and through its gravitation would have easily been detected before now. Suggestions that NASA is suppressing this information have to be nothing short of ludicrous. NASA has difficulty managing it own PR much less censoring information from all the world’s astronomers.
As End of the World scenarios go this one is pretty lame. It pales in comparison to the Cassini/Neptune/Arthur C. Clarke plot which almost destroyed earth last year. Thankfully, NASA extended the Cassini mission saving our planet from frying in gamma or some such other rays. But it looks like we’ll get to deal with that again next year. But more about that next time.
Meanwhile, don’t sweat the small stuff. 2012 will have enough of its own earth-bound difficulties without a gang of headline grabbers trying to exploit the public’s general lack of knowledge regarding the astronomical. Besides, the reptilian space aliens with the base on the dark side of the moon won’t let that happen.
For a look at the course of Elenin’s trajectory through the solar system go to: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-135
BY R. BAILEY