It’s the end of the world – again…

… if Internet sources are to be believed (which they aren’t, but more on that later). Friday September 22 marks the first day of Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, and Frodo and Bilbo Baggins’ birthday (for you fellow Tolkien fans), but it is the day after that has some hunkering down in their bunkers waiting for the beginning of the end.

According to one David Meade, this Saturday marks the countdown (conveniently of an unknown duration) to the end of Planet Earth. His “evidence” is the fact that September 23 marks the 33rd day after the solar eclipse (itself superstitiously considered an omen of the end) and that a number of the planets appear relatively near each other in the sky on either side of the sun, centered on the constellation Virgo. According to this individual’s personal interpretation of Revelation, this is a “clear” sign that the end is nigh. How will the actual end come about? According to Meade and other doomsday soothsayers who are piggybacking on this pseudoscience train wreck, the infamous (and apparently invisible to all astronomers) rogue planet/alien spacecraft “Nibiru” is finally on its often-claimed-but-never-observed supposed collision course with Earth.

Sigh. And I thought I was done with this after December 21, 2012 passed with a whimper and not a bang.

Let’s BRIEFLY debunk this, point by point. Please consult the embedded links for more information.

1. The total solar eclipse on August 21 was not a harbinger of anything. There have been many total solar eclipses before (some with paths very similar to the one we enjoyed in the US) and there will be many more to come – until, in the distant future, the moon has slowly drifted far enough away from the Earth to no longer cover up the sun and cause a total eclipse. That will be a sad day indeed!
2. While several planets do appear in a nice arrangement on either side of the sun (called a conjunction), there is absolutely nothing unusual about this. The fact that this is happening in the constellation of Virgo is also common. Nothing to see here folks, move along….
3. Nibiru (sometimes called Planet X) is a figment of the imagination of one Zechariah Sitchin that was co-opted by various Internet alien conspiracy theorists and is equal parts bad astronomy and bad archaeology. There is zero evidence for its existence. Nada. Nothing.

   

Having said this, is it possible that the end of the world will be brought about through the influence of outer space? Actually I’d say the odds are 100%, but billions of years from now when the sun swells up into a red giant and turns the inner solar system into a rather unpleasant inferno. But in the meantime, we all have to go to work, pay our taxes, clean the litterboxes, and do the dishes. Life is too short to waste it worrying about pseudoscience. Instead, unplug from the Internet for an hour, go outside, and enjoy the real night sky without worrying that Planet Earth has a large red bull’s-eye painted on it. Like Twinkies, our expiration date is FAR in the future.