Yawn ... it's the end of the world again
PARIS, April 5 (AFP) -
Maybe that Millennium Bug survival kit wasn't such a waste of money after all.
We may all be reaching for the canned food, bottled water and fuel canisters on May 5, when the five planets visible with the naked eye -- Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -- will align with the Sun and the Moon.
Exerting a mighty gravitational pull, these seven celestial bodies will cause the Earth's axis to tilt, unleashing trillions of tons of Antarctic ice and water that will sweep over the planet and swamp all civilisation.
That is the prediction of author Richard Noone, whose 1982 book, "5/5/2000 -- The Ultimate Disaster," paints a grim tableau of death from space, supported by references to Stonehenge, UFOs, the CIA, the Freemasons, the Turin Shroud and an encrypted warning buried in the Pyramids.
Nor is Noone just a no-one. His scenario has inspired several books and innumerable websites by occultists, astrologists and survivalists, some of whom are hawking advice and equipment to help the forewarned, like Noah, endure the Flood.
There's just one problem, say scientists. Virtually nothing is going to happen.
From Thursday, April 6, the naked-eye planets, the Moon and the Sun will gradually inch their way towards each other, culminating on May 5, when they will be clustered together in an arc of less than 26 degrees.
"It's quite rare, but it is not an alignment, it's a grouping," said Belgian astronomer Jean Meeus, who predicted the May 2000 phenomenon way back in 1961, laboriously calculating the planets' paths from tables that dated back to World War I.
The last time the seven bodies grouped up was on February 2 1962, when they were even closer together, in an arc of just over 16 degrees, he told AFP.
According to his arithmetic, over the past 2,000 years, the closest span was in 1186 with 11 degrees; the next grouping will occur on September 9 2040, with an arc of 29 degrees.
But even if all seven bodies were all aligned, and they were at their closest point to the Earth, their impact would be negligible, having a combined effect of less than one six-thousandth of the average tide caused by the Sun, he said.
The Doomsday talk is "utter nonsense", Meeus said, acidly comparing the predictions with a scare caused by two astronomers, John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, who suggested the lineup of all the planets on one side of the Sun in 1982 could unleash solar storms and trigger earthquakes.
"There have been about 45 million such alignments in the history of the Earth," notes US astronomer Brian Monson of the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics.
"Several dozen of these have happened since humans learned to write, so if anything truly horrible had happened as a result of these alignments, it would have been recorded."
Even though cosmic alignment may be neither exceptional nor harmful, it has been a spur for stargazers and the superstitious since civilisation's earliest days.
The first known calendar is believed to have been inspired by a spectacular grouping almost 4,000 years ago, when Chinese astrologers took the conjunction of the planets as an auspicious sign for the country's first royal dynasty.
Floods, earthquakes and other catastrophes were predicted for February 1524, but nothing special happened. A similar scare in 1774 inspired a brilliant Dutch amateur astronomer, Eise Eisinga, to build a hand-cranked model of the solar system to show the true movements of the planets.
For all its rarity, next month's grouping will be a disappointing show, as the glare from the Sun, which is one of the aligned objects, will blot out the other planets whenever they are above the horizon, said David Asher, an astronomer at Britain's Armagh Observatory.
asia.dailynews.yahoo.com |
