To be serious here for a moment: just because some addle-brained morons post gibberish on the Internet for you to be confused by does not in any way mean that a real controversy exists.
What you quoted was pure gibberish from beginning to end. I could easily point out another dozen things that are pure scientific nonsense in that hash.
The problem is that you did not recognize this as utter gibberish instantly. And I mean instantly. There should not have been any doubt whatsoever. Any basic scientific education would be enough to put the lie to these ridiculous statements.
And that means that you do not have even the smallest or slightest level of scientific education.
I don’t know how old you are or whether you are still in school. But a total lack of scientific understanding about the way the universe functions is a serious detriment to one’s life. As you have already seen, it leaves you wide open to fools, quacks, frauds, messianics, and lunatics.
Science is not something that is irrelevant to one’s life, as many people seem to think. Science is all around us. You cannot understand many of the most important issues in the news, in politics, in debates, or in your daily life without an adequate understanding of basic science.
I strongly advice you to start increasing your level of scientific understanding. If you are in school, sign up for some basic science courses. If not, start reading as much as possible. Looking through threads here at the Dope is a good start, since people ask questions about all aspects of real science and real scientists are available to answer.
You know, I appreciate the amount of somewhat decent respect you hold here, but the fact is that I am not saying that these events are absolutely true, nor did I post this thread simply because I am worried out of my mind; these events I have seen all realated and linked in one way or another ever since I was watching the Discovery channel when I was younger. It was a program centered on the Mayans and one of the topics was their calendar and its possible significance to what worried people label as “the end of the world”. Since then, I have seen correlations with the egyptians, the so called biblical flood, and the precessional equinoxes. It’s so damned pathetic that I received more childish replies on this topic than I did on my last thread, which was utterly ridiculous in its existence as a rumor anyway. What I was looking for here was someone to tell me why these events would be false and most likely not occur. I wasn’t looking for childish morons to poke fun and make jokes. Yeah, science is all around us and has everything to do with anything, I understand that. I also understand a whole lot more about science. What I do not understand, obviously I question, and questioning was what I was doing here, hoping to receive some help. So, in the meantime, how about you park your high horse and give some helpful input instead of assuming that I’m just some worried person that has no clue about anything.
What events? The closest you’ve come to mentioning any sort of “event” was:
Aside from it not being very clear what that means, there is no possible mechanism by which the passage of the earth through an imaginary reference line could have any effect whatsoever on the electromagnetic spectrum.
By what mechanism? I mean, there’s no point in even trying to show that this event is false until some sort of explanation for why it might occur has been presented. So the earth is going to cross the galactic equator. So what? How many other planets and stars are crossing the galactic equator right now? Thousands? Millions? Billions? But when the earth does it, the galactic core’s going to go ultra-nova on us? I don’t think so.
Magnetic pole shifts are fairly common (on geologic time scales), and I have no idea what a “tectonic plate shift” is.
The pole shift might result in higher levels of solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface. We can deal with that pretty easily. As for the “tectonic plate shift”, until someone tells me what it is, I can’t determine how it might effect things.
The reason that people are giving you a hard time is because all of these Armageddon scenarios you posted are laughable. I mean, they’re really quite entertaining, in a I-can’t-believe-that-people-actually-BUY-this-crap sort of way.
Okay, a new question, because the more I read this bit, the less I know what it means. How will our sun be aligned with the center of the galaxy? There’s always a straight line between them. What kind of alignment are we talking about, and why would it amount to a hill of beans? Also, even if you draw a galactic equator, how could the solar system move from one side of it to the other? This solar system is stationary relative to the rest of the galaxy. And again, if it did move a bit, why would this matter?
I think he means a crustal slip. The idea is that loading at the poles leads to a torque that eventually causes the entire crust to slip around the mantle/core.
Take the solar system for example. Planetary orbits tend to be at some angle to the equator of the Sun. Pluto is a good example. Now half the time the planet will be above the equator and the other half below. You can expand this to our Sun orbiting the galactic core though why it would matter escapes me.
Perhaps the OP is confusing the impact of a local super nova on Earth’s bio-sphere? Discovery once had a show on that too. Entertainment “science” strike again.
Well, I’ve always said that the quality of answer you get is directly proportional to the quality of question you propose. The clearer and more straightforward the question, the clearer and more straightforward the answer.
You took the trouble to come back to the thread to defend the nonsense you were “asking” about, not once but twice. You gave not the slightest evidence that you didn’t take this seriously. Just the opposite. All we have to go by are the words you write here.
And despite all that you got long answers taking apart the nonsense point by point. And some people making fun of it as it completely deserves. Exactly what anyone who looked at the SDMB for more than five minutes should have expected. There is no mercy here for people who believe in pseudoscience and mysticism.
You need to get your science someplace other than the Discovery Channel. They lie for profit. They prey on the credulous.
If you were at all serious about questioning this, you did good to ask and you came to right place. But, man, I tell you, you can’t imagine how sad I am about the state of science education in this country that you had to ask instead of understanding immediately how fraudulent this garbage is.
I once talked to a guy in a chat room who insisted that the would would end in 2012 when the Calander expires. THough he also insisted that JFK was killed by his driver as well.
Pretending that your entire post was accurate for a second and that the giant explosion and pole reversal do happen, what would “dramatically increases” mean? The chance goes from one in a googleplex to one in a quadrillion? It goes from 30% to 90%? I’d consider both of those dramatically increasing, but only one of them would be likely to happen.
About that business of the solar system passing through the glactic equator:
Leaving aside for a moment the part about the reversal of the electromagnetic spectrum (although I am definitely not a physicist, I suspect this is gibberish), there seems to be some question as to just when this event might occur.
The galaxy can be pictured as centering around a flat plane, with most of the stars in the galaxy found in this plane. This what causes the Milky Way; when one gets away from city lights one can see a bright concentration of stars in a band across the sky–that is because you are looking into that middle thickness of stars.
According to a NASA site, the solar system does move towards and away from the galactic plane in a regular cyclic rhythm, something like a horse on a marrey-go-round. This cycle is said to take from 30 to 35 million years, which I take to mean that our measurements of this phenomenon, and our understanding of how it may vary over time, is not very precise.
According to The Encyclopedia of the Solar System, published by Academic Press, the solar system is currently moving away from the galactic plane or equator, having last been there between two and three million years ago. If so, to reach the plane and cross through it in 2012 we are going to have to (1) reverse our course and (2) really skedaddle.
As for the cyclic movement of the earth’s axis, I may be completely out of my depth. It seems to me, though, that Charles Fort’s famous remark that one can measure a circle from anywhere may be relevent here. If we are judged to finish a cycle in 2012, could this just reflect on how we have chosen to identify the cycle? In the same way, people treated January 1st 2000 and January 1st 2001 as a big deal, but these dates were merely artifacts of the way calendars have been drawn up. In the same way, the “millennium” just ended as you read this; an instant ago was the end of a thousand year period which began precisely one thousand years ago.
About that business of the solar system passing through the glactic equator:
Leaving aside for a moment the part about the reversal of the electromagnetic spectrum (although I am definitely not a physicist, I suspect this is gibberish), there seems to be some question as to just when this event might occur.
The galaxy can be pictured as centering around a flat plane, with most of the stars in the galaxy foundon or near this plane. This what causes the Milky Way; when one gets away from city lights one can see a bright concentration of stars in a band across the sky–that is because you are looking into that middle thickness of stars.
According to a NASA site, the solar system does move towards and away from the galactic plane in a regular cyclic rhythm, something like a horse on a merry-go-round. This cycle is said to take from 30 to 35 million years, which I take to mean that our measurements of this phenomenon, and our understanding of how it may vary over time, is not very precise.
According to The Encyclopedia of the Solar System, published by Academic Press, the solar system is currently moving away from the galactic plane or equator, having last been there between two and three million years ago. If so, to reach the plane and cross through it in 2012 we are going to have to (1) reverse our course and (2) really skedaddle.
As for the cyclic movement of the earth’s axis, I may be completely out of my depth. It seems to me, though, that Charles Fort’s famous remark that one can measure a circle from anywhere may be relevent here. If we are judged to finish a cycle in 2012, could this just reflect on how we have chosen to identify the cycle? In the same way, people treated January 1st 2000 and January 1st 2001 as a big deal, but these dates were merely artifacts of the way calendars have been drawn up. In the same way, the “millennium” just ended as you read this; an instant ago was the end of a thousand year period which began precisely one thousand years ago.
About that business of the solar system passing through the glactic equator:
Leaving aside for a moment the part about the reversal of the electromagnetic spectrum (although I am definitely not a physicist, I suspect this is gibberish), there seems to be some question as to just when this event might occur.
The galaxy can be pictured as centering around a flat plane, with most of the stars in the galaxy foundon or near this plane. This what causes the Milky Way; when one gets away from city lights one can see a bright concentration of stars in a band across the sky–that is because you are looking into that middle thickness of stars.
According to a NASA site, the solar system does move towards and away from the galactic plane in a regular cyclic rhythm, something like a horse on a merry-go-round. This cycle is said to take from 30 to 35 million years, which I take to mean that our measurements of this phenomenon, and our understanding of how it may vary over time, is not very precise.
According to The Encyclopedia of the Solar System, published by Academic Press, the solar system is currently moving away from the galactic plane or equator, having last been there between two and three million years ago. If so, to reach the plane and cross through it in 2012 we are going to have to (1) reverse our course and (2) really skedaddle.
As for the cyclic movement of the earth’s axis, I may be completely out of my depth. It seems to me, though, that Charles Fort’s famous remark that one can measure a circle from anywhere may be relevent here. If we are judged to finish a cycle in 2012, could this just reflect on how we have chosen to identify the cycle? In the same way, people treated January 1st 2000 and January 1st 2001 as a big deal, but these dates were merely artifacts of the way calendars have been drawn up. In the same way, the “millennium” just ended as you read this; an instant ago was the end of a thousand year period which began precisely one thousand years ago.
What does this mean? A calendar is an artificial construct - it is an arbitrary measurement of time. I don’t understand your claim of ‘perfection’, please elaborate.
