What do you all think of this?

[Cassini12]

I watched a very interesting show on History the other night. It was about the end of earth, on December 21, 2012. And they bring up all this prophet stuff, then they get to the "black hole" in our galaxy that may "shift polarities" of earth.. What do you all think of this?

 

[SpeedFreek]

Not a lot. Certain people seem to think it important that the Mayan calendar is "resetting" in 2012 and our solar system will be passing through the galactic "equator" in the same year. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#ff0000">_______________________________________________<br /></font><font size="2"><em>SpeedFreek</em></font> </p> </div>

 

[origin]

<p><BR/>Replying to:<BR/><DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>I watched a very interesting show on History the other night. It was about the end of earth, on December 21, 2012. And they bring up all this prophet stuff, then they get to the "black hole" in our galaxy that may "shift polarities" of earth.. What do you all think of this? <br />Posted by Cassini12</DIV><br /><br />It is just a bunch of silliness.&nbsp; The history channel can really get caught up in some pseudo-scientific stuff like ghosts, nostradamit and UFO's.</p><p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[doubletruncation]

<p><BR/>Replying to:<BR/><DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>I watched a very interesting show on History the other night. It was about the end of earth, on December 21, 2012. And they bring up all this prophet stuff, then they get to the "black hole" in our galaxy that may "shift polarities" of earth.. What do you all think of this? <br /> Posted by Cassini12</DIV></p><p>This is very popular nonsense that you hear thrown about a lot nowadays. I assume that by "shift polarities" they're refering to the magnetic field of the Earth shifting polarities? There is absolutely no evidence that this is tied to the magnetic field of the Galactic center black hole, nor would you expect it to be. The magnetic field in the center of the galaxy is exceedingly weak (at most 10 milligauss, but probably more like 10 micro-gauss which is about 100,000 times weaker than the magnetic field of the Earth - see http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005astro.ph..5244L ). In any case, how could they predict its occurence to within the accuracy of one day? In the past I've heard it said that the reversing of the Earth's polarities would be caused by the Earth passing through the midplane of the Galaxy on Dec. 21, 2012. This is nonesense. The solar system is currently about 8 +- 4 parsecs ( 26 +- 13 light years) *above* the Galactic midplane and is moving *away* from the midplane - see http://adsabs.harvard.edu.ezp1.harvard.edu/abs/1997ESASP.402..721H ). Even if the solar system were to cross the midplane on Dec. 21, 2012, (which it won't) and the ambient interstellar magnetic field were exceedingly strong (which it isn't), there's really no reason why crossing the midplane of the Galaxy would flip the Earth's magnetic field. I'm guessing that whoever came up with this idea is picturing that the Earth is acting like a bar magnet in the interstellar magnetic field (which it isn't), but in that case the Earth would continue to stay aligned with the interstellar magnetic field as it moved past the midplane without flipping. Finally, even if the Earth's polarity switched on that date, there's no reason to think that it would be catastrophic for life on Earth. Such events have happened in the past (though not due to the Galactic black hole or whatnot), and life continued. To be sure it wouldn't go unnoticed, but I don't see why it would cause the end of the earth.&nbsp;</p><p>As a final note, there's no reason to ever give credence to any sort of "prophecy" - prophecy="making stuff up". Sure sometimes people get it right, usually by making the prophecy extremely vague, or by predicting something that isn't that unlikely to occur in any event, such as that someone in the USA will win a lottery in the next month, or that someone in an audience of a few hundred people has a loved one who is battling cancer. After the fact people will selectively parse through the prophecies and highlight the correct ones without telling you the statistical significance of finding that number of correct "prophecies" out of the total sample that was parsed to find them, and without telling you about the innumerable incorrect ones. A much better way to make predictions is to base them on evidence. </p> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[doubletruncation]

<p><BR/>Replying to:<BR/><DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>I watched a very interesting show on History the other night. It was about the end of earth, on December 21, 2012. And they bring up all this prophet stuff, then they get to the "black hole" in our galaxy that may "shift polarities" of earth.. What do you all think of this? <br /> Posted by Cassini12</DIV><br /></p><p>I should mention that there may be some ways in which the Earth's climate is affected by the Galactic orbit of the Solar System, - though I'd say this hypothesis is fairly speculative. There's an interesting paper on the subject that you can find at:&nbsp; http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503306</p><p>This paper calculates a 3-dimensional orbit for the Solar System about the center of the Galaxy over the last 500 Myr (you can find the data at:&nbsp; http://www.chara.gsu.edu/~gies/solarmotion.dat ) and the authors then point out a possible correlation between long (~100 Myr) cooling epochs in the Earth's history (we are currently in one) and times when the Solar System passes through spiral arms. They hypothesize that this correlation, if it exists, may be due to enhanced cosmic ray flux on the Earth's atmosphere when it crosses spiral arms. I don't find the evidence for this all that compelling, but it's a possibility. In any case, you can use the data from the above website to find that the Solar system last crossed the Galactic midplane (Z = 0) about 1 million years ago, is currently moving away from it, and that there would be an uncertainty of a few hundred thousand years on the exact date when the Sun crossed the midplane. </p> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[qso1]

<p><font color="#800080">I watched a very interesting show on History the other night. It was about the end of earth, on December 21, 2012. And they bring up all this prophet stuff, then they get to the "black hole" in our galaxy that may "shift polarities" of earth.. What do you all think of this? <br /> Posted by Cassini12</font></p><p>To me its just another bunch of predictions based on known events that the predictors exploit because to the uninitiated...something like crossing the galactic plane and black holes sounds so ooooh and ahhh. I would personally be more worried about unknowns such as being run over by a truck because I failed to look.</p><p>I strongly suspect 2013 will arrive as shceduled uneventfully. And if there is some cataclysmic event. It will be one that somehow, humanity (Mayans, etc) failed to predict.&nbsp;</p> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[doubletruncation]

Ah, I just realized that "crossing the Galactic equator", means that the Sun will have an apparent galactocentric latitude of 0 (or that Sgr. A*, the Sun and the Earth will be approximately in line on that date, given that the Galacticentric longitude of the Sun will be ~5 degrees) rather than that the solar system crosses the midplane of the Galaxy. This is also a complete non-event. The same thing happened last Dec. 22, and will happen in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and so on. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[qso1]

Hey there doubletruncation, good to see your still posting. We lost a lot of folks during the changeover. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[doubletruncation]

<p><BR/>Replying to:<BR/><DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>Hey there doubletruncation, good to see your still posting. We lost a lot of folks during the changeover. <br /> Posted by qso1</DIV></p><p>hey qso, good to see you too! </p> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[weeman]

Replying to:<BR/><DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>I watched a very interesting show on History the other night. It was about the end of earth, on December 21, 2012. And they bring up all this prophet stuff, then they get to the "black hole" in our galaxy that may "shift polarities" of earth.. What do you all think of this? Posted by Cassini12To me its just another bunch of predictions based on known events that the predictors exploit because to the uninitiated...something like crossing the galactic plane and black holes sounds so ooooh and ahhh. I would personally be more worried about unknowns such as being run over by a truck because I failed to look.I strongly suspect 2013 will arrive as shceduled uneventfully. And if there is some cataclysmic event. It will be one that somehow, humanity (Mayans, etc) failed to predict.&nbsp; <br />Posted by qso1</DIV><br /><br />I agree. It's not exactly something that I'm losing sleep over each night! Finishing school is my biggest worry for right now. <img src="http://sitelife.space.com/ver1.0/content/scripts/tinymce/plugins/emotions/images/smiley-undecided.gif" border="0" alt="Undecided" title="Undecided" /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><strong><font color="#ff0000">Techies: We do it in the dark. </font></strong></p><p><font color="#0000ff"><strong>"Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.</strong><strong>" -Albert Einstein </strong></font></p> </div>