The End of the World, in the 24½th Century
Here is a delightful crank. This lot, who appear to be headed up by someone called – really – “Jacco van der Worp”, believe that the world will end in 2012, upon the return of Planet X. Shockingly, that seems to be one of the less mental things they believe.
Their opening page seems to be fairly standard Aliens Are Here Look At The Crop Circles fodder…
If you still have any doubts that the 2002 Crabwood formation is genuine, you need to watch Maurice’s latest video that details the process of using his computer program to make a crop circle. After viewing it, you’ll see that it would be impossible for debunkers or hoaxers to recreate the 2002 Crabwood formation in a single evening, let alone a single month!
(Yeah, well done you: you’re not as good at computer programming as cynics are at flattening wheat. Therefore aliens exist. Actually, the circle makers are really clever and it’s impressive how much ingenuity goes into making these things interesting.)
…which at first I took in my stride, as I’m used to that kind of thing from this kind of nutcase, but it doesn’t seem to connect to the main thesis, which is “OH NO A BIG STAR IS COMING TO KILL US”. They get from there to here by… er… suddenly stopping talking about aliens and starting talking about PLANET X. That page has five videos about Planet X, of which I watched the first two.
The first was incredible (literally): it raises a load of issues, such as “are things like megatsunamis and superquakes just sexed-up words news companies use to make natural events seem more exciting or is there something more sinister going on?” and then immediately jumping on the stupid option and acting as if that’s the sensible thing to do. Then it concludes that all kinds of mechanical failures are really caused by the gravity of “planet X”.
The second was even better. It explained all about the hunt for Planet X (which was pretty accurate up until the point where scientists realised their mass estimation for Neptune was wrong and the correct mass didn’t support the idea that Planet X existed, which the video oddly failed to mention), then it demonstrated Scientific Proof (their words) that Planet X exists, by citing a 1983 report in US News And World Report and a 1992 NASA press release. That’s it. And the NASA one doesn’t exist. I typed some of the quoted text into Google and got only one hit, and that was the self-same Planet X cranks’ page!
And better still, the 1983 report put this body 50 billion miles away and the 1992 report put it 7 billion miles away. The logical conclusion? Clearly they are the same object, and it’s heading towards us with an average speed of half a million miles per hour (.08% of lightspeed), which must be well above the Sun’s escape velocity at that distance (though it obviously wouldn’t be travelling straight away from the Sun). Their theory is that the gravity from this object is affecting the Earth. This is clearly untrue: the Earth is in freefall, and therefore doesn’t experience any effects of external gravity except when viewed from elsewhere. We can’t even detect the gravity of the Sun. This is General Relativity in a nutshell: the Sun’s gravity cancels out exactly with our acceleration towards it and the net effect on Earth is zero.
All of this assumes the Earth has zero size, but that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption given that we’re discussing distances of billions of miles. The difference in gravitational field from one end of the Earth to the other would be, even with the most generous 7-billion-miles-away numbers (I don’t really know what numbers should be used here; if this thing was really hurtling towards us at that speed it’d have got here in 1993, not 2012), would be (according to Google Calculator) 7.1 — 10-18 ms-2, which is to say that if you dropped a ball in that gravity it would take almost 17 years to fall one metre. And we’re not talking about the effects on 7km-wide planets – the video is talking about the effects on small Minnesotan road bridges. Even a generous mile-long bridge would have to wait a millennium and a half for that ball to drop its single metre. 1500 years!
Yeah, I can see how that kind of stress could be causing ‘mega-tsunamis’.
I’m always amazed at the crap people will narrate.