alignment of planets: solar-centerd arcs

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
21

Insomnia Plus Being Bed-Ridden Equals This Post:

Here is some mathematical proof that the Jupiter Effect is truly nonesense. Lets assume that all the planets line-up exactly: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc. all form a perfect line. What would the net gravitational pull be? Would you believe less than 1/60th the force of the moon’s gravitational pull!

The following chart shows the mass (in millions of tons) and the average distance from the sun (in kilometers) of the planets. For the moon, I am using the average distance from the earth. Using Newton’s law, one can easily compute the graviational pull on the Earth from the body at it closest point. NOTE: This assumes circular orbits!

Because we merely seek a ratio of two numbers, we can omit the term ‘G’ from all calculations. Why? G divided by G equals 1 and 1 times any number is that number.

Anyway, summing the gravitational pull of the planets on the earth produces a number 1/60th the sum of the moon’s gravitational pull on the earth.
Chart 1 (sorry for the formatting)

Planet Distance From Sun Mass Gravitational Pull on Earth
Mercury 5.79000E+07 3.30000E+11 0.000039762821
Venus 1.08000E+08 4.86000E+12 0.002891136228
Earth 1.49000E+08 5.97000E+12 None
Moon 3.84400E+05 7.34000E+10 0.496740193239
Mars 2.27000E+08 5.41000E+11 0.000088921762
Jupiter 7.78000E+08 1.89000E+15 0.004777057989
Saturn 1.42000E+09 5.58000E+14 0.000345416515
Uruanus 2.87000E+09 8.58000E+13 0.000011588579
Neptune 4.50000E+09 1.02000E+14 0.000005387931
Pluto 5.91000E+09 1.32000E+10 0.000000000398

	Total Planetary Gravity Pull	0.008159272223
	Total Lunar Gravity Pull	0.496740193239
		
		60.88045351

OK. I can admit that this is only a theoretical model. I did not include the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, etc. However, the mass of these bodies are de minimus when compared to their planetary primary. I am using circular, not elipitical orbits to keep the math simple.

Finally, I am limiting my calculations to the force of gravity. I am not considering crystal vibrations, karmic energy flows, or hollistic oneness or anything else not posited in Classical Physics.

22

Why did you leave off the Sun? That would be 200 times the moon’s, so about 100 I guess.

23

I do the same calculation on this page. The key point is not so much that the planets are less than the Moon, but that the changes in the Moon’s effect as it orbits the Earth is larger than all the planets combined (because the Moon’s orbit is an ellipse, bringing it nearer and farther from the Earth).

Since we aren’t destroyed every two weeks, it’s safe to assume the planets won’t do the job either.

24

Getting back to the original comment, regarding Earth-centered arcs vs. Sun-centered arcs, here’s another thought experiment.

Draw your little pretend Solar System on a sheet of paper. It doesn’t matter if the radii of the orbits are in the correct proportions. (If they were, all the inner planets would fit in a pretty teeny circle, and the outer ones would be more spaced out, and Pluto’s would cross Neptune’s a little, …)

Now draw a straight line outward from the Sun, intersecting each of the orbits. Put a dot on each orbit, representing each planet.

Now draw a straight line through Earth, but purposely not through the Sun. (This line doesn’t slice a nice radius of all the orbits, but is instead skewed.) This line will still intersect all the outer planet orbits, but it might miss Mercury and/or Venus. Again, put a point on each orbit, representing each planet.

The Sun-centered line is also an Earth-centered line, but the inverse is not true. And in the Earth-centered (non-Sun-centered) case, all of the planets are farther away from Earth than in the Sun-centered case.

So, from a gravitational standpoint, the Sun-centered case is the limiting (maximum) case. Any Earth-centered, non-Sun-centered alignment would produce less gravitational and less tidal effects than the Sun-centered case.

25

YOU WROTE: Why did you leave off the Sun? That would be 200 times the moon’s, so about 100 I guess.

I left out the Sun’s gravitational pull to keep the calculations simple. The earth is in orbit around the sun - that means that the earth’s forward velocity is balanced with the sun’s gravitational pull. The net effect is that the earth remains a constant distance from the sun. To factor in the sun’s gravitational pull, I would need to use differential equations and in my sleep-deprived, virus-ridden state last week I was in no condition to perform basic calculus. As I said in my previous post, I made some simplifications to keep the math simple.

26

True, but irrelevant unless the proponents of this theory were claiming that the alignment in question was indeed a solar-plus-planetary alignment (In fact, I made reference to such an alignment in the third paragraph of my original post.), or unless you can show that we have already survived that worst-case scenario.

Again, let me emphasize that I’m not trying to defend a claim that could be dismissed by anyone albe to compute the inverse-squares. I’m just saying that, if we’re going to oppose crackpot theories with non-mathematical arguments, those arguments need to be accurate. Putting something forward that can be easily dismissed costs the rationalists their own credibility.

My point was that if I really believed that the planets exerted significant direct influence on us and that alignment caused those influences to add, then the argument that an Earth-centered alignment was not also a solar-centered alignment would be irrelevant to me (unless I was planning on moving my house to the Sun!) Your thought experiment (and my earlier reference to the same situation) simply says that some day things could be much worse than even the Jupiter Effect.

So The Bad Astronomer’s counter that the Jupiter Effect did specify effects of the alignment on the Sun is relevant to my origninal query. But your thought experiment doesn’t really invalidate the “effects on Earth” scenario (unless you can show that a Solar-centered alignment has occurred at some date in history and nothing bad happened). It could be modified slightly to address the “effects on Sol” scenario by noting that the Solar-centered alignment you describe would add Earth’s influence on the Sun to those of the other planets thereby adding to the influence on the Sun. Again though, simply showing that there’s a possible situation in which things could be much worse doesn’t mean that less drastic siutations could be dismissed as harmless, unless you can show that the worst case has actually occurred and that we have evidence that nothing bad happened as a result.

27

ChordedZither;

My “thought experiment” was not so much directed at you, just trying to point out that if the effect is related to distance in any way (gravitational or otherwise), then a Sun-centered arc would also be the worst case scenario for someone on_Earth (assuming Earth was in the arc). As you point out, I was really just illustrating the geometry behind your original 3rd paragraph. I have no idea when the last good Sun-centered arc was (10, 1000, or 1million years), or what cataclysm befell Earth at the time.

Al