Hubble Finds Star Eating a Planet
Reads like an extreme case of global warming … unlike what’s going to happen to Earth is around 5 billion years when the Sun expands enough to consume most of the inner Solar System (one theory), this planet is moving towards its star. The poor thing only has around 10 million years left.
Man, the Hubble keeps finding cool stuff.
So the clock’s ticking (in astronomical terms), it’s time for the one scientist over there who no one is listening to about this planet’s impending destruction to rocket his infant son off into the universe … not too far from Earth. Reports the Hubble Site News Center…
NASA Close to (Dis)Proving the Existence of a ‘Death Star’ in our Solar System
Charlie Jane Anders has a fun post on io9.com about the Nemesis theory, which the WISE telescope will prove or disprove, hopefully, soon.
The reason I say “fun” post is it’s very unlikely a Nemesis star does exist, as we have been able to figure out masses and orbits in the solar system with a high degree of accuracy for quite some time. Meaning if an object this massive was this close — Nemesis is thought to be a red dwarf star or brown dwarf — we’d have to account for it in the astronomy.
In any event, I do expect Nibiru devotees to disagree with this opinion, or if/when WISE doesn’t find it.
Charlie’s post refers to an article in Astrobiology Magazine, which is sponsored by NASA. Check out what they have to say, Leslie Mullen writes:
Is our Sun part of a binary star system? An unseen companion star, nicknamed “Nemesis,” may be sending comets…
Americans Stock Up To Be Ready for End of the World
Paul Harris writes in the Guardian:
Tess Pennington, 33, is a mother of three children, and lives in the sprawling outskirts of Houston, Texas. But she is not taking the happy safety of her suburban existence lightly.
Like a growing army of fellow Americans, Pennington is learning how to grow her own food, has stored emergency rations in her home and is taking courses on treating sickness with medicinal herbs.
“I feel safe and more secure. I have taken personal responsibility for the safety of myself and of my family,” Pennington said. “We have decided to be prepared. There all kinds of disasters that can happen, natural and man-made.”
Pennington is a “prepper”, a growing social movement that has been dubbed Survivalism Lite. Preppers believe that it is better to be safe than sorry and that preparing for disaster — be it a hurricane or the end of civilisation – makes sense.
Unlike the 1990s…
Virginia Delegates Pass Bill That Bans Chip Implants as ‘Mark of the Beast’
Daniel Tencer reports in the always interesting RAW Story:
Concerns over privacy have aligned with apocalyptic Biblical prophecy in a proposed Virginia law that limits the use of microchip implants on humans because of a lawmaker’s concern that the chips will prove to be the Antichrist’s “mark of the beast.”
On Wednesday, Virginia’s House of Delegates passed a bill that forbids companies from forcing their employees to be implanted with tracking devices, a move likely to be applauded by civil libertarians. But Virginia state Delegate Mark Cole’s reasons for proposing the law have as much to do with the Book of Revelation as they do with concerns over privacy in the digital age.
Cole says he is concerned that the implants will turn out to be the “mark of the beast” worn by Satan’s minions. “My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have…
‘Object X’ Likely Related to Prehistoric Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid
David Perlman writes in the SF Chronicle:
A puzzling object that seemed to be a comet flying inside the solar system’s asteroid belt is no comet at all, but the remains of a violent collision between two fossil rocks that populate the belt, astronomers say.
Captured in images by the Hubble Space Telescope, the crash of the asteroids provides scientists with their first opportunity to see clear evidence of the violent activity that has constantly churned the asteroid belt since its formation, probably when the planets themselves were forming about 4.5 billion years ago.
The object was first sighted in early January by astronomers at the Air Force LINEAR project telescope in New Mexico, who reported it as a comet that must have flown into the asteroid belt from the solar system’s outer reaches, as all comets do. It was the fifth presumed comet to be reported in the unlikely region, they said,…
The ‘Doomsday Clock’ Goes Back To 6 Minutes To Midnight
Citing a more “hopeful state of world affairs” in relation to the twin threats posed by nuclear weapons and climate change, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) is moving the minute hand of its famous Doomsday Clock one minute away from midnight. It is now 6 minutes to midnight. The decision by the BAS Science and Security Board was made in consultation with the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 19 Nobel Laureates
BAS announced the Clock change today at a news conference in New York City broadcast live at Turn Back The Clock for viewing around the globe. The new BAS Web platform allows people in all nations to monitor and get involved in efforts to move the Doomsday Clock farther away from midnight.
In a statement supporting the decision to move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock, the BAS Board said: “It is 6 minutes to midnight. We are…
Nearby Nova Could Spell Doom For Far Future Earth
Alasdair Wilkins writes on io9.com:
A white dwarf 3,260 light-years from Earth — mere walking distance in cosmic terms — looks like it could go supernova. And that stellar explosion would have dire consequences for our planet, not to mention our possible descendants.
Located in the binary system T Pyxidis, the white dwarf in question was originally thought to be far more distant from our solar system. Although three thousand light-years might sound like a fairly safe distance away from a potential supernova, it really is quite close by astronomical standards. To put it in some perspective, the diameter of the Milky Way, at roughly 100,000 light-years wide, is multiple orders of magnitude greater than what we’re talking about here.
The huge white dwarf in the T Pyxidis system is known as a recurrent nova because it undergoes relatively minor eruptions at regular intervals. Small nova explosions have been observed every twenty years for over a century, although the last recorded nova burst was in 1967. Astronomers are unsure why the star is overdue.
Russia’s Armageddon Plan to Save Earth from Asteroid Collision
More interesting news from Russia to set your mind at ease. Via the Guardian:
Space scientists in Russia are preparing to boldly go where no man has gone before, except for the actor Bruce Willis.
The head of the Russian space agency said today that it was considering a Hollywood-style mission to send a spacecraft to bump a large asteroid from a possible collision course with Earth.
Anatoly Perminov told the Russian radio station Golos Rossii: “People’s lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people.”
The mission would be aimed at an asteroid called Apophis, he said, which is expected to pass close to the Earth in 2029 and again in 2036. “Calculations show that it’s possible to create a special-purpose spacecraft within…
Failed Prophecies, Good For Business? Everything You Know About God Is Wrong
The following is part of John Gorenfeld’s article “‘End of the World Prophet Found in Error, Not Insane’: A Failed Prophet’s Survival Handbook,” one of over 40 articles in the Disinformation anthology, Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick. For more on John Gorenfeld, check out www.gorenfeld.net.
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Thought about becoming an end-of-the-world prophet? It’s not the make-or-break enterprise you might think, as much as your gut feeling may be that mobs of angry parishioners await the fortune-teller who talks them into making room on the calendar for the final trumpets, the Rapture, World War III, the return of Jesus, global computer meltdowns, or post-game shows on life hosted by great messiahs stepping out of the pages of history — only for the poor dupes to find themselves paying bills the next week.
Time and again, it hasn’t worked that way. The beauty of blown prophecies is that failure is the beginning of success. That is, if you adopt the techniques of history’s most successful faulty prophets. Through time-tested rebranding methods, they’ve reinvented failure as proof that they were righter than anyone could have imagined.
The very glue holding your congregation together can be a mistaken prediction and what you’ve invested in it. Thousands of apostles of Shaini Goodwin of Tacoma, Washington, known to admirers as the “Dove of Oneness” and to the Tacoma News Tribune as a “cybercult queen,” hold out for a Judgment Day that will justify all of her bad guesses.
Lost World War II Letter Promises “Rain Of Atomic Bombs”
On the fascinating site Letters of Note:
At 11:00 a.m. on August 9th, 1945, just a minute before the second atomic bomb in the space of three days was dropped on Japan, a B-29 bomber named The Great Artiste quietly dropped three canisters from the sky. Inside each of the canisters, alongside a shockwave gauge designed by American physicist Luis Alvarez, was an unsigned copy of the following letter.
The letter, written by Alvarez and two fellow scientists, was addressed to Japanese nuclear physicist Ryokichi Sagane —a man with whom Alvarez had previously worked at Berkeley — and pleaded with him to inform his ‘leaders’ of the impending ‘total annihilation’ of their cities.
The letter reached Sagane a month later after being found 50km from the centre of devastation: Nagasaki.
Alvarez and Sagane met again 4 years later, at which point the letter was finally signed.
The Day Earth Survived the Greatest Stellar Attack, Ever
Casey Kazan writes on the Daily Galaxy:
It came suddenly from the distant reaches of the Constellation Sagittarius, some 50,000 light years away. For a brief instant, a couple of tenths of a second, on December 27, 2004 an invisible burst of energy the equivalent of half a million years of sunlight shone on Earth. Many orbiting satellites electronics were zapped and the Earth’s upper atmosphere was amazingly ionized from a massive hit of gamma ray energy.
The source of the invisible attack was a rare magnetar SGR 1806-20 on the other side of the Milky Way. These soft gamma ray repeaters, SGRs, occur when twisted magnetic fields attempt to realign themselves and crack the magetar’s crust releasing the awesome burst or pulse of energy with a death zone of a few light years. Magnetars have magnetic fields 1000 times those of ordinary pulsars — so powerful as to be lethal at…
Jon Stewart: Glenn Beck is a Gold Digger
Dan Abramson writes on Huffington Post:
With the value of gold on the rise, Jon Stewart was determined to get to the bottom of what may have caused the increase. The likely fanner of these flames: yep, Glenn Beck.
After noting that gold goes up when people are panicked or concerned, Stewart sat back and enjoyed the greatest hits from “Beck’s hour-long nightly fear-cast.” That alone wouldn’t be enough to credit Beck for initiating this gold rush, but his role as spokesman for Goldline, an internet site where you buy gold, surely sealed the deal. Stewart recapped:
“Glenn Beck is paid by Goldline to drum up interest in gold, which increases value during times of fear; an emotion reinforced nightly on Fox by Glenn Beck.”
Calling Beck’s ethics into question, Stewart finished by stating, “You can’t spell ‘gold’ without G-O-D.”
To The White House and Beyond: Palin/Beck 2012!
Forget what the Mayans say, magnetic pole reversal, or solar flares for 2012. If these two horsemen of the Apocalypse join forces to take the White House in 2012, the end is near…
Chris Good writes on the Atlantic:
Don’t rule it out, because apparently Palin wouldn’t either in an interview with Newsmax:
Palin initially chuckled when Newsmax broached the idea. But then she had some serious words of praise for the popular Fox personality.
“I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I’m not there yet,” Palin tells Newsmax. “But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He’s a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way. And he’s so bold — I have to respect that. He calls it like he sees it, and he’s very, very, very…
Turn Off Your Brain and Watch the World End in ‘2012′
Lauren Davis writes on io9.com:
Roland Emmerich’s 2012 is jammed with every cliche and trope ever found in a Hollywood disaster movie, while giving the Earth an over-the-top pummeling. It’s a reasonably fun flick at times, if you don’t think about it … at all.
It seems that once Roland Emmerich was done assembling all the CG components for destroying the world and gathering a full complement of “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors, he realized 2012 had no script, and decided to cull characters and situations from every other disaster movie ever made. Despite its massive scale of destruction, 2012 will be familiar to anyone whose seen any movie about an earthquake, volcano, aquatic disaster, or celestial body striking the Earth.
2012 follows the parallel stories of several characters at the end of the world. John Cusack plays the sort of fellow John Cusack always plays, though this time he’s also a struggling writer whose only novel…
Everything You Wanted to Know About 2012 But Were Afraid to Ask
December 21, 2012 is the end date of the sophisticated Long Count Calendar created by the ancient Maya in Central America. But is it a doomsday that is foretold in the Mayan calendar, the Chinese oracle of the I Ching or in an Internet-based prophetic software program? Is there any truth to these doomsday prophecies? Some theorists believe that on that date, the Earth will experience unprecedented, cataclysmic disasters ranging from massive earthquakes and tsunamis to nuclear reactor meltdowns, while yet others see a coming renewal, a rebirth of consciousness.
To help sort out the information, Gary Baddeley, the writer/producer of 2012: Science or Superstition and president of The Disinformation Company will present the current schools of thought and answer questions from a public not certain if they should prepare for survival or something else entirely.
On the day that Roland Emmerich’s mega-budget disaster film 2012 opens nationally, discover the truth about the “End of Days”…
Everything You Wanted to Know About 2012 But Were Afraid to Ask
December 21, 2012 is the end date of the sophisticated Long Count Calendar created by the ancient Maya in Central America. But is it a doomsday that is foretold in the Mayan calendar, the Chinese oracle of the I Ching or in an Internet-based prophetic software program? Is there any truth to these doomsday prophecies? Some theorists believe that on that date, the Earth will experience unprecedented, cataclysmic disasters ranging from massive earthquakes and tsunamis to nuclear reactor meltdowns, while yet others see a coming renewal, a rebirth of consciousness.
To help sort out the information, Gary Baddeley, the writer/producer of 2012: Science or Superstition and president of The Disinformation Company will present the current schools of thought and answer questions from a public not certain if they should prepare for survival or something else entirely.
On the day that Roland Emmerich’s mega-budget disaster film 2012 opens nationally, discover the truth about the “End of Days”…
The Top 5 Plans to Ensure the Continuity of our Species
If you’re really interested in what needs to be done to “ensure” our survival, forget the naysayers and check out a 2012 Evolver Spore this week. If you’re near NYC, some of us from the Disinformation Home Base will be there. The hosts of the Disinformation Podcasts, Raymond Wiley and Joe McFall, will be at the Atlanta Spore.
This is pretty funny, in the 2012 movie the “U.S.-run Institute for Human Continuity” saves the day. Hooray for USA! Robert Lamb writes on Discovery News:
If you’ve seen the trailer for the fall blockbuster-bound 2012, then you pretty much know the entire plot: Earth’s crust collapses like a failed souffle, deadly meteor showers chase John Cusack’s van and ancient Mayans scoff that they totally called it.
In just 157 minutes of screen time, civilization collapses and the U.S.-run Institute for Human Continuity somehow overcomes partisan politics and begin loading survivors onto ships to ride out doomsday.
The…
A Surprising New Way to Survive Nuclear Doomsday
There’s 23,125 active warheads in the world, and this article warns nothing is likely to change “except that 1) more states will acquire nuclear weapons, 2) more non-state-actors will acquire them in some form, and 3) the tactics available to states to win nuclear battles will become unpredictable with new technologies.”
Its solution? “Posthuman Nuclear Doomsday Maneuvers” – using the internet to instantly refabricate any targetted cities over the internet in the ultimate decentralization.
“This is city as signal, nukes as noise.”
Dark Matter ‘Wrecking Ball’ May Have Hit Milky Way
Dan Vergano writes in USA TODAY:
Darth Vader’s Death Star? Ming the Merciless and his war rockets? The awesome power of Chuck Norris?
Piffle, suggests one astrophysicist, at least when it comes to explaining what force could have permanently bent a ring in our Milky Way Galaxy within the last 60 million years. The real explanation may be the power of an invisible wrecking ball made of dark matter — a cloud of the enigmatic physics particles born in the fiery aftermath of the Big Bang and weighing as much as 10 million suns.
Left behind by this “Dark Matter Clump” cataclysm was a tilted swirl of newborn stars circling within the galaxy called the ” Gould Belt,” which incidentally may have sent comets hurtling towards Earth, suggests astrophysicist Kenji Bekki of Australia’s University of New South Wales in a recent Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.
More in USA TODAY
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Evolver: 2012, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Dimensional Shift
Where will you be when the 5,125 year Long Count Calendar of the Classical Maya ends on December, 21, 2012? Will you be hiding in an underground cave from global cataclysm and magnetic polar reversal? Will you be entering a multidimensional realm of hyperspace triggered by mass activation of the pineal gland? Will you be picking up the pieces of a ruined world or dancing the night away at the party at the end of time?
Considering that nobody knows what’s going to happen in 2012, the end of the Mayan Calendar functions as a tremendously intriguing meme upon which we can project our hopes and fears, dreams and desires. Hollywood has now offered up a massive collective shadow projection in the form of a $250 million disaster epic that takes the aesthetics of annihilation to a new pitch of perfection. Paradoxically, this doom-riddled blockbuster could create a great opening to offer…
