A mathematician by training, amateur musician and composer, first learnt to program in the early 1970s, and developer of Tune Smithy - music generator and microtonal composition tool and Bounce Metronome Pro, Activity Timer , Lissajous 3D and Virtual Flower. I've had a long term interest in space and astronomy - and exploration of space, since the 1960s. In 2014, I started writing articles on these subjects, as well as music, for my column at Science 20. I have written two books advocating a Moon first approach: Case for Moon First and MOON FIRST: Why Humans on Mars Right Now Are Bad for Science. Both are available for kindle and also to read online for free.
I have a first class honours degree in Maths from York university and I studied for a PhD at Wolfson College Oxford (though I didn't get the degree). I also have a M.Hum from York University - that's a second undergraduate degree (in Philosophy) taken as a Masters.
I am not Robert Walker the Trump space adviser. Also I am not Robert Walker the composer. Mine is a common name and there are many “Robert Walkers”.
You can find out more about me in my Science20 profile
These lead to a fair bit of interest, and including a couple of appearances on David Livingston's Space Show. See Dr. David Livingston's Space Show - guest Robert Walker Appearances
I've started a quora blog on Mars and Space
Some of my most popular articles on Quora (all time) are my answers to
My most popular articles on Science20, currently, with from 10,000 to 100,000 views are
CONFUSIONS WITH OTHER ROBERT WALKER’S
I sometimes get confused with Robert Walker, space advisor to Donald Trump. It’s a common name and there is no connection. I am also not in any way connected with the composer Robert Walker who has a special interest in gamelan music. In both cases it’s a coincidence.
Robert Walker the Trump space adviser says we should go to the Moon first. On that I am in agreement but there the resemblance ends. My own political inclinations, as for perhaps 90% of the UK population, are with Bernie Sanders who advocates policies that have cross party support here and indeed are already implemented in the UK.
As for Robert Walker the composer - I am a completely untrained amateur composer, have written some short microtonal pieces and I once joined an amateur Gamelan orchestra, one that anyone can join who walks in off the street, and went every week for a year or two. That’s where the resemblance ends.
This combines together Mehul Mohan's answer to Can you download all Quora answers from one person? and Ariel Williams' answer to What is the best way to backup content on Quora?
This backs up all your content as a single very long web page (for me, it’s over 7,000 pages long). To back up your content as separate pages see How to back up all your Quora answers to your computer - short version
The idea is to go to your profile page and scroll to the end, and then expand all the “More” buttons. You now have all your answers as a single web page. Now you need a way to save that page to y our local hard disk.
There are two ways to do it. You can print it to a pdf, or you can save it as “Web Page Complete” in Chrome or use the MHTML format in other browsers. Both methods save the page itself, just as you see it and not the dynamic incomplete page that you get when you first visit the page.
This shows the result, all my Quora answers as a single web page. You may have to wait for the page to load. It’s 24 MB of text and a similar download size for the images. all my answers as a single web page
So how can you do that for your own answers?
I’m doing this tutorial on Windows and I’m using Chrome as the browser, instructions will be similar on other browsers and operating systems.
HOW TO SHOW ALL YOUR ANSWERS ON THE PROFILE PAGE
If you only have a few answers it is easy.
First keep scrolling down until you reach the end. Easiest way (on Windows) is to keep typing Ctrl + End until it is done.
Now you have to expand all the (more) links. To do that search the page for “(more)”.
A quick way to do this is to type F3 which is the windows shortcut for “Find”. Then copy / paste “(more)” into the search field. Then go through the page doing F3, click, F3, click - until you have expanded all the (more) links.
If you have many answers, you need to automate this and I’ll say how in a minute. But you can do it manually for a few answers just for testing, first, to make sure the method works on your computer.
HOW TO BACK THE PAGE UP ONCE DONE
To export as a web page, go to More Tools >> Save Page As >> Web page (complete)” in Chrome

Then just click save and that’s it done. You need to wait for it to save the page which may take a while. Then you can go and look wherever you saved it and you should see a single web page with all your answers in one go. All the images will be included too. For some reason it doesn’t save the embedded videos as embedded content or links, but rather, as thumbnails and you can’t play them. Everything else is fine.
To export as a pdf, bring up the print dialog Ctrl + P on Windows. Make sure you choose to save as pdf as the printer. This may be very slow if you have lots of answers to print.

The Print button will change into a Save button

Click Save and you are done. It may take a while to print the pdf if it has hundreds, or thousands of pages.
For this to work obviously you have to be able to display all your answers as a single web page. But - well at least up to over a thousand answers in my case with over 7,000 pages of content, many of them very long and graphic heavy, and on an old computer it did this fine.
However my computer struggled when I did the print to pdf - after a long pause, eventually I got this.

So I had to cancel the print. Mind you this is on an old computer with only 8 GB of memory and with an aging hard disk with slow read access.
COPYING IT TO ANOTHER PAGE FOR EDITING FIRST
Or you can just do Ctrl + A to select all the content on the page, and start a new quora blog post, and paste all the content there with Ctrl + V. Edit it to remove the navigation at the head of the page, and you now have all your content as a single page which you can now save, but you can also edit it as a single page too before saving, printing to a pdf or whatever you do
AUTOMATING THE SCROLL TO END AND EXPANDING THE (MORE) LINKS
Right click on white screen area -> Inspect Element
Bring up the Console tab.
Copy / paste this code into the console
- var interval = setInterval(function() {
- window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);}, 100);
Press return
This shows the result.

Note it pops up GET warnings for any youtube videos for some reason. I’m not sure what that’s about but it works fine.
Now you’ll see the page of answers scrolling continuously. Just leave it doing its thing. It may take many minutes if you have lots of answers, but it’s a lot faster than the Ctrl + End approach.
When it reaches the end of the page, then copy this into the console and press return.
clearInterval(interval);
That’s to stop it autoscrolling so you can navigate the page.
Now we need to expand all the “More” buttons. So copy this into the console and press return.
[...document.querySelectorAll('.more_link')].map( e => e.click() );
This may take a while again. Wait until all the more buttons are expanded.
Now you are done. Continue with the save as complete web page or print to pdf as before.
Added 5h ago
Your answer to Is the world going to end because of a solar eclipse next year (2017)?
Added 6h ago
Your answer to Is this true about Nibiru, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8SElpqjHVFo? ...
Added 6h ago
Your answer to Is there any scientific and factual proof that Nibiru is fake?
Added 6h ago
Your answer to Is it safe to observe a partial solar eclipse?
Added 18h ago
Your answer to Why does the observation path for a solar eclipse move from west to east?
Added 19h ago
How to back up all your Quora answers to your computer - short version
Added Wed
How to back up all your quora answers to your computer (shorter version)
Added Wed
Your answer to Why doesn't Quora allow the use of emoticons, when it would make the site more interactive?
Added Wed
Some Ideas about Buddhism to download with HTTrack
Added Wed
Added Wed
Added Wed
How to back up all your quora answers to your computer
Added Wed
List of answers to download with HTTrack
Added Wed
Added Tue
List of my answers to date for downloading with HTTrack
Added Tue
Your answer to How vulnerable are we to a catastrophic asteroid impact? Are there people whose job is to watch for them?
Added Tue
Your answer to Will the world end on September 23rd, 2017? I'm worried.
Added Mon
Added Mon
Your answer to Is answering a question with a question an answer?
Added Mon
Your answer to “Which Tank will Will Fill up First? (example with 12 tanks, A to L, see question source for image)
Added Mon
“Which Tank will Will Fill up First? (example with 12 tanks, A to L, see question source for image)
Asked Sun
Your answer to Why were question details removed from Quora on August 3, 2017?
Added Sun
Your answer to How am I supposed to ask complex questions without question details?
Added Sun
Your answer to Are Buddhist attached to being unattached?
Added Sun
Your answer to Why can't you post pictures into your Quora questions anymore?
Added Sun
Your answer to Should Quora bring back question details? Why or why not?
Added Aug 5
Your answer to How do you feel about question details being eliminated?
Added Aug 5
Your answer to If a super volcano erupts in Yellowstone national park, where is the safest place to be?
Added Aug 4
Your answer to How would you explain all this talk about Nibiru, David Meade, the solar eclipse? The world is ending everywhere, now.
Added Aug 4
Does a Nichiren Buddhist reject other Buddhist schools?
Followed Aug 2
Added Jul 23
Why the eclipse this August is a wonder of nature and not something to be scared of
Added Jul 23
Your answer to Why is Russian news talking about Nibiru?
Added Jul 22
Added Jul 21
How can you prove that [(x+x(x+1)−m−−−−−−−−−−−√)2n] is an odd number?
Followed Jul 21
Your answer to Is 22/7 the nearest rational number approximation to π?
Added Jul 21
Your answer to What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don't seem like they would have?
Added Jul 18
Your answer to If you had to fall 2000 feet into a liquid what would you pick?
Added Jul 18
Your answer to Once the sun dies and the solar system goes dark, would Europa (if it had life) continue to provide a liquid ocean and a biosphere?
Added Jul 17
Added Jul 16
Debunked: Nemesis is Nibiru - updated
Added Jul 16
Your answer to Is Nibiru a real place that will hit Earth? I’m very scared, is the BBC lying?
Added Jul 16
Your answer to Can an 800 meter asteroid destroy life on earth?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to How can we make 2+2=5?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to How do mathematicians approach proving a theorem?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to If Buddhists don't, and never have, "evangelized" or "proselytized", how did/does Buddhism spread?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to Theoretically, what's the largest object by mass that could be orbiting the sun currently that hasn't been discovered?
Added Jul 14
Your answer to What would mathematicians do if someone proved that it is not possible to create a consistent system of axioms?
Added Jul 14
Your answer to Tibetan Buddhism: What's the difference between crazy wisdom and just plain crazy?
Added Jul 11
Your answer to Why has not His Holiness Dalai Lama become fluent in English yet?
Added Jul 9
Your answer to A meteorite will crash to earth in a year destroying the Western world. Do you think this information should be made public?
Added Jul 9
Your answer to Should I believe the Nibiru YouTubers?They seem pretty legit.
Added Jul 8
Your answer to How dark would a human see the moon?
Added Jul 7
Your answer to Would there be any wind inside an underground colony on the moon?
Added Jul 6
Added Jul 6
Your answer to I believe Nibiru is coming and no one else believes me. Does anybody agree?
Added Jul 6
Your answer to Will Nibiru end the world in October 2017?
Added Jul 4
Your answer to How do I tell my kids that Nibiru is going to kill us all in the next few months?
Added Jul 1
Your answer to Is Nibiru going to hit the Earth in 2017?
Added Jun 28
Your answer to Is Nibiru going to hit the Earth in 2017?
Added Jun 28
Your answer to When is planet X or Nibiru expected to pass by Earth?
Added Jun 28
Your answer to Will the heat shield of the Webb telescope reflect enough sunlight so that it appears as a star to earth based telescopes?
Added Jun 26
Your answer to How did the search for the reincarnated Dalai Lama from humble origins become instituted historically?
Added Jun 26
Your answer to How credible is the Daily Mail?
Added Jun 26
Your answer to Why can't one jump from everest with a parachute instead of walking down?
Added Jun 21
Your answer to How did a person jump without parachute from thousands of feet, landing on a trampoline without breaking his neck?
Added Jun 21
Your answer to What are the least amount of changes that would have to happen for Mars to be habitable like Earth?
Added Jun 21
Your answer to Why did Londoners elect a Muslim as their mayor? Was it to prove that they're not racist?
Added Jun 20
Your answer to Why do protons have a mass exactly 1837 times that of an electron?
Added Jun 20
Your answer to What happened to Gautama Buddha after he died?
Added Jun 19
Your answer to Which tree gives the most oxygen?
Added Jun 17
Your answer to How much oxygen does a tree produce?
Added Jun 17
Your answer to Do trees consume oxygen?
Added Jun 17
Debunked: the Earth’s natural Schummann resonances are being manipulated by HAARP etc.
Added Jun 17
Your answer to Is it possible to build a mid-air city?
Added Jun 16
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Jun 16
Debunked: hidden asteroids in new branch of Taurid stream will devastate Earth
Added Jun 16
Debunked: Asteroid called 3BC2017 will kill millions in June
Added Jun 16
Added Jun 16
Debunked: Our sun was born with an “evil twin” which may have wiped out the dinosaurs
Added Jun 16
Your answer to Is the Waterseer a scam ?
Added Jun 15
Your answer to Why are there so few enlightened people in the world? Is the success rate of Buddhism really that low?
Added Jun 13
Your answer to Why do dust storms happen on Mars?
Added Jun 13
Your answer to Since no one can "own" Outer Space because of the "Outer Space Treaty", what do we do about countries that don't acknowledge this?
Added Jun 12
Your answer to Why do the British accept to pay the high expenses of their monarchy?
Added Jun 11
Your answer to In what realistic scenario(s) would a Mars colony significantly increase the likelihood of the survival of the human species?
Added Jun 11
Your answer to What would have happened if the Fellowship went with Frodo to Mt. Doom?
Added Jun 10
Your answer to For a=b, does that mean b-a=a-b?
Added Jun 10
Your answer to What are the most notable software bugs in the software aboard the Mars Curiosity Rover?
Added Jun 9
Your answer to Why is no government helping with or is interested in the Skylon spaceplane? Is it overrated?
Added Jun 7
Your answer to If the purpose of a Buddhist is to stop reincarnating by achieving Nirvana, why does the Dalai Lama reincarnate?
Added Jun 7
Your answer to Are the rich building bunkers for Nibiru's arrival?
Added Jun 6
Added Jun 6
Your answer to Would someone please explain to me in plain terms what the Dalai Lama is?
Added Jun 5
Your answer to If all the ice in Antarctica melts, which countries in the world will be entirely covered in water?
Added Jun 4
Your answer to What do you think of Trump pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement?
Added Jun 3
Your answer to If we had scientists on Mars, how long would it take before we knew whether Mars ever had life?
Added Jun 3
Your answer to Is Mars habitable?
Added Jun 1
Your answer to What would a Buddhist say about the self being an emergent phenomenon?
Added Jun 1
Your answer to Why is the Earth’s moon not considered a planet?
Added May 29
Your answer to Why it is said that two perpendicular lines meet at infinity? How so?
Added May 29
Your answer to How do I know if I am a Buddha?
Added May 29
Your answer to If I wanted to live and practice as a Buddhist monk, as a westerner (more specifically Australia) how would I go about this?
Added May 28
Your answer to Why do buddhists talk N lifetimes for enlightenment when the only time anyone will get enlightenment is in this lifetime right now?
Added May 28
Your answer to How does one become a bodhisattva?
Added May 25
Added May 24
Your answer to Is it possible to survive if you lie along the rail tracks and a train passes over you?
Added May 23
Your answer to Why do some Buddhist teachers appear to lack compassion?
Added May 23
Followed May 18
Your answer to Is there something that could ruin your karma (Buddhism, etc.) for life?
Added May 15
Your answer to How does the concept of rebirth (samsara, karma, etc.) differ between Buddhism and Hinduism?
Added May 15
Your answer to What is the difference between Buddhist and Christian compassion?
Added May 13
Your answer to Is Quora converting Wikipedians (Wikipedia Editors) to Quorans?
Added May 12
Your answer to How much bigger can the ISS get?
Added May 10
Debunked: Stephen Hawking says humans have only 100 years left on this planet
Added May 10
Your answer to Am I the only frustrated former Wikipedia editor? (The English Wikipedia is not as bad as the German one, though)
Added May 9
Your answer to For Buddhists, how does the concept of "attachment" apply to the closest people in your life?
Added May 9
Added May 8
Your answer to How many nukes would it take to completely and permanently irradiate a planet the size of Earth?
Added May 8
Your answer to Are pictures on Windows desktop background authentic?
Added May 8
Your answer to Is it true that some Buddhist monks can die while sitting in meditation? How do they know they are about to die?
Added May 7
Your answer to Why does it take 2 days for a spacecraft to dock the International Space Station?
Added May 7
Added May 5
Your answer to What and where did this dark energy come from?
Added May 5
Your answer to Did Buddha teach how to be Happy?
Added May 4
Debunked: 'This is NOT a hoax' Asteroid strike will kill millions in JUNE, shocking video claims
Added Apr 28
Added Apr 21
Your answer to How does one get born in other planes in Buddhism?
Added Apr 19
Your answer to How much vegetation do you need to provide oxygen for six astronauts on the ISS?
Added Apr 17
Your answer to What would the radius of a centrifugal space station need to be to avoid getting sick or going crazy from the endless spinning?
Added Apr 16
Added Apr 16
Your answer to Why not simply create a ship with artificial gravity for the journey to Mars?
Added Apr 16
Tense situation concerning North Korea
Added Apr 14
Added Apr 12
List of some of my quora answers on Buddhism
Added Apr 10
Your answer to Can Mars support human life?
Added Apr 10
Your answer to What does the UK have that does not exist in the US?
Added Apr 8
Your answer to In which of the 6 realms do Buddhist deities such as Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri & Vajrapani reside?
Added Apr 8
Your answer to What are your thoughts on Planet Nibiru/X sightings?
Added Apr 5
Your answer to Was Buddha literate?
Added Apr 4
Your answer to How is the Buddhist idea of dependent origination related to cause and effect?
Added Apr 3
Analogy of an African elephant with Planet X / Nibiru
Added Apr 2
Your answer to Is Nibiru going to hit the Earth in 2017?
Added Apr 1
Your answer to Is there anything of economic value on Mars that would allow trade to finance a colony on Mars?
Added Apr 1
Your answer to If one million people prepaid the $200,000 Elon Musk estimates it will cost to go to Mars, could we do it within a decade?
Added Apr 1
Your answer to What will the next ISS be like?
Added Mar 31
Your answer to Are Russian space crafts death traps?
Added Mar 29
Added Mar 29
Debunked: Planet 9 is Nibiru (Again)
Added Mar 28
Your answer to Do we know anything more about the "word of command" that Gandalf refers to in Moria?
Added Mar 28
Your answer to Is it true that when we colonize Mars, our chances of going extinct drop to nearly 0%?
Added Mar 27
Added Mar 26
Your answer to Was there any procedure set up for the Apollo mission astronauts in case they found alien life on the moon? And if so, what was it?
Added Mar 26
Debunked: A huge black hole 8 billion light years away endangers Earth
Added Mar 25
Your answer to What is the Buddhism afterlife like?
Added Mar 24
Your answer to Can a Buddhist change and become a Christian?
Added Mar 24
Debunked: TRAPPIST 1 is Nibiru
Added Mar 23
Added Mar 23
Debunked: Galactic superwave theory
Added Mar 22
Your answer to Can Magnetar Starquakes really end the world by stripping it's atmosphere?
Added Mar 20
Proposed origami robots for Mars, Europa, Moon etc
Added Mar 20
How we know the Sun is not just a few thousand miles away
Added Mar 20
Added Mar 19
Why are world political and religious leaders meeting up in Antarctica
Added Mar 19
What are your thoughts on project “Blue beam”?
Added Mar 19
Do you believe in UFO'S and the different species of alien life they have named???
Added Mar 19
Debunked: crack in the firmament
Added Mar 19
How does the ISS avoid being hit by micrometeoroids?
Added Mar 19
How did Apollo get through the Van Allen belts?
Added Mar 19
Your answer to Did Obama warn about the coming of Nibiru?
Added Mar 19
Your answer to What was the mission for Laika the space dog?
Added Mar 18
Your answer to Does the government and the worlds elite believe in Nibiru's existence and have they built fallout shelters?
Added Mar 17
Your answer to Will Nibiru end the world in October 2017?
Added Mar 17
Why I see Science as part of the Buddhist path
Added Mar 17
Your answer to Do you follow the Buddha's prohibition on alcohol?
Added Mar 17
Are the Trappist planets “orbit clearing”?
Added Mar 16
Your answer to Why did it take NASA decades to land on Mars after landing on the Moon?
Added Mar 16
Your answer to If distance was not an issue, would it be easier to build a colony on Mars or on the moon and why?
Added Mar 16
Your answer to In your opinion, do you think Pluto is still a planet?
Added Mar 16
Debunked: this bank note shows the orbit of “Nibiru”
Added Mar 15
Your answer to Why do people still think Islam is peaceful?
Added Mar 13
Your answer to Why decommission the ISS in 2024 when it could have so much more potential usage (just like the space shuttles)?
Added Mar 12
Your answer to What are Dalai Lama’s views about Islam?
Added Mar 12
Your answer to Should we inseminate our solar system with life?
Added Mar 11
Your answer to Why does listening to a metronome drive me crazy?
Added Mar 10
Your answer to Is the author David Meade correct about the arrival of Nibiru in October 2017?
Added Mar 7
Your answer to What kind of formal education does the Dalai Lama have?
Added Mar 7
Your answer to If a distant star is red, does it mean it's really far away?
Added Mar 7
Added Mar 5
Your answer to Was life discovered in a meterorite from Mars?
Added Mar 5
Your answer to Does SpaceX have the capability to send people around the moon?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Did Quora deactivate realtime notifications for comments due to scaling challenges?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to What's the status of the missing comment notifications bug?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Why am I no longer getting topic or comment notifications?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Why does Quora not show comments in my notifications?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Who will lead the Tibetan Buddhists when His Holiness the Dalai Lama dies?
Added Mar 3
Your answer to It's impossible to percept or imagine that nothing happens after death, are you sure that's what happens?
Added Mar 2
Your answer to Who is the Dalai Lama?
Added Mar 1
Your answer to What are your opinions on the SpaceX ‘tourist flight around-the-Moon’ in 2018?
Added Feb 28
Your answer to Are there any slight differences between the G-flat major and the F-sharp major?
Added Feb 28
Your answer to Is there an area in our solar system that we haven't yet seen or can't see?
Added Feb 24
Debunked: NASA do all the asteroid tracking and hide information about Nibiru
Added Feb 13
Debunked: We are headed towards a new ice age
Added Feb 13
Why a bright light shining on clouds during a sunset is not a passing planet
Added Feb 11
Added Feb 9
What it would be like if we really had two suns (or three in this case)
Added Feb 8
List of my Nibiru articles in Debunking Doomsday to date
Added Feb 8
Debunked: the Large Hadron Collider will create mini black holes that will destroy the world
Added Feb 6
Debunked - The obituary of the teenage girl who committed suicide in 2011 is fake
Added Feb 6
Debunked: birds singing at night are a sign the world will end
Added Feb 5
Why you probably don’t have a “phobia” if you are scared of asteroid impacts, two suns, Nibiru, etc
Added Feb 5
Debunked: Mountain sized asteroid 2014 UR116 headed towards Earth
Added Feb 2
Debunked: We are in danger from a magnetic pole shift in the near future
Added Jan 31
Added Jan 31
Your answer to Is NASA covering up Nibiru's existence?
Added Jan 29
Your answer to What are the chances that an asteroid less then ten kilometers can hit earth in this century?
Added Jan 29
Your answer to If a super big magnetic meteorite fly near earth, will it be possible to attract the earth away from its original route around the sun?
Added Jan 28
Your answer to Do Buddhists believe that we come back as grass and trees as well as animals and insects?
Added Jan 27
Added Jan 27
Debunked: Earth is threatened by a supernova
Added Jan 27
Could a spaceship enter the Earth’s atmosphere slowly - shortened answer
Added Jan 26
Debunked: Doomsday becoming one minute closer
Added Jan 26
Why we don’t need to be scared of the “Doomsday clock” (short version)
Added Jan 25
Added Jan 25
Your answer to Are there any scientifically inaccurate parts in the Martian?
Added Jan 23
Debunked: Nibiru fragment to strike Earth in February
Added Jan 22
Added Jan 22
Your answer to If there is no ‘self' in Buddhism, how is there a belief in reincarnation?
Added Jan 21
Your answer to Would it be possible to put a colony on the moon, or would the gravity be too weak?
Added Jan 21
Your answer to Is there a limit to mountain height on earth?
Added Jan 21
Your answer to Why do people believe Nibiru (Planet X) exists?
Added Jan 20
Added Jan 20
Your answer to What is the possibility of Earth being affected by a Gamma Ray Burst?
Added Jan 19
Added Jan 19
Your answer to Is 2017 the return of the ancient ones from Nibiru?
Added Jan 19
Your answer to How do we know Nibiru isn't real?
Added Jan 19
Added Jan 19
Debunked: Rich people are buying bunkers to escape from Nibiru
Added Jan 17
Your answer to Why didn't Apollo land on earth like the moon?
Added Jan 17
Your answer to Is it safe to touch Mars? Just imagine that a sample of Mars’ soil has been taken back to Earth. Would it be safe to touch it?
Added Jan 17
Added Jan 15
List of news sites that have run false reports that Earth is about to be hit by an asteroid
Added Jan 15
Your answer to Can Mars be claimed by a person or group?
Added Jan 15
Added Jan 15
Your answer to Are there solar systems without a Galaxy?
Added Jan 14
Your answer to Are there any organizing units between a solar system and a Galaxy?
Added Jan 14
List of newspapers that run fake or unchecked Doomsday “news”
Added Jan 14
Added Jan 14
Added Jan 12
Your answer to Why are Buddhists certain that other people suffer, even if they are not feeling like it?
Added Jan 12
Debunked: A new star that will appear in the sky in 2022 is a sign of the end of the world
Added Jan 11
Your answer to If a pure water planet could develop would its core be solid?
Added Jan 11
Your answer to Does ice evaporate in a vacuum?
Added Jan 11
Your answer to What are the chances of an asteroid or comet hitting the U.S. in the next 50 years?
Added Jan 11
Added Jan 11
Your answer to What would happen if galaxies were bright enough to be seen in our earthly sky?
Added Jan 10
Your answer to Is there a Tibetan Buddhist practice that doesn't involve deity visualization?
Added Jan 10
Are we in danger from “Hidden monster black holes found near the Milky Way” - NO!
Added Jan 9
Added Jan 8
Your answer to Are there any videos or simulations of how orbits in our solar system actually work?
Added Jan 8
Your answer to In Buddhism, why would an enlightened person defend themself, if their "self" doesn't really exist?
Added Jan 7
Added Jan 6
Your answer to How do Top Writers on Quora write such detailed answers to several questions in the span of an hour?
Added Jan 4
Debunked: Dire predictions for 2017 by Nostradamus
Added Jan 4
Your answer to What are the Nostradamus Predictions for the 2017?
Added Jan 4
Fake doomsday and disaster news from 2015 through to 2017
Added Jan 3
Added Jan 2
Debunked: Melissa Huffman did a video of Planet X
Added Jan 2
Debunked: The Vatican built a huge telescope, one of the largest in the world, to track Nibiru
Added Jan 2
Your answer to Can I be both Christian and Buddhist?
Added Jan 1
Your answer to Is Buddhism true?
Added Jan 1
Debunked: You should always read both sides of the argument about Nibiru - or indeed anything
Added Dec 30, 2016
Your answer to Are there any specific organisms that could conceivably survive on Mars in its current state?
Added Dec 29, 2016
Your answer to Is the Dalai Lama a god king?
Added Dec 29, 2016
Debunked: ALMA’s Gna (if it exists) is Nibiru
Added Dec 28, 2016
Your answer to A company wants to buy my site for $1.6 million dollars. I'm currently making $8k to $11k per month with it. Should I take the deal?
Added Dec 28, 2016
Added Dec 26, 2016
Your answer to When will the next ice age happen?
Added Dec 25, 2016
Added Dec 23, 2016
Your answer to Would it be prudent to migrate away from west coast in advance of Nibiru?
Added Dec 18, 2016
Your answer to Will a Magnetar Shockwave hit earth in 9-10 days?
Added Dec 18, 2016
Debunked: Asteroid 2012 DA to hit Earth in 2020
Added Dec 16, 2016
Your answer to What is the fastest moving known celestial body?
Added Dec 15, 2016
Added Dec 15, 2016
Your answer to If we started to harvest all helium-3 from the moon for all energy requirements of the earth, how long it would last?
Added Dec 14, 2016
Debunked: 2002 NT7 is going to hit Earth in 2019
Added Dec 14, 2016
Added Dec 14, 2016
Debunked: Earth faces a century of 400 giant impacts starting in 2017
Added Dec 14, 2016
Added Dec 13, 2016
Your answer to Is Nibiru and planet 9 the same thing?
Added Dec 13, 2016
Why is the Youtube interface so bewildering?
Added Dec 13, 2016
Your answer to I can't see any comments on youtube videos, what can I do to see them again?
Added Dec 13, 2016
Errors in the Wikipedia Four Noble Truths article
Added Dec 13, 2016
Debunked: Pastor Paul Bagley predicts that Magnetar SGR 1806-20 is going to send a gamma ray blast on 26th December which will be devastating to Ea...
Added Dec 13, 2016
Debunked: A gamma ray burst could make humans extinct
Added Dec 12, 2016
Debunked: “Doomsday” clock, Brexit “Doomsday” and use of “Doomsday” as hyperbole
Added Dec 12, 2016
Your answer to What is a parallel universe?
Added Dec 10, 2016
Debunked: Trump (or any other president or president elect) is the Anti Christ
Added Dec 10, 2016
Your answer to Could Donald Trump be the Antichrist?
Added Dec 10, 2016
Your answer to Is there any evidence, as Donald Trump suggests, that "windmills are devastating to the bird population"?
Added Dec 9, 2016
Your answer to What is dark matter?
Added Dec 8, 2016
Your answer to What if the super-large exoplanet is 0.01 ly form our planet?
Added Dec 8, 2016
Added Dec 8, 2016
Your answer to Where can I download the Silmarillion?
Added Dec 7, 2016
Why so many people post sightings of “Nibiru” - and why not “Santa” instead?
Added Dec 6, 2016
Debunked: Nemesis or Tyche is Nibiru
Added Dec 6, 2016
Bullshit Detector Plugin for Chrome for Fake News Sites
Added Dec 6, 2016
Debunked: Nibiru is Wormwood so must be real
Added Dec 5, 2016
Your answer to Where is Nibiru right now?
Added Dec 5, 2016
Your answer to Is Nibiru a YouTube phenomenon or is it real? How could they keep it secret with all those astronomers out there?
Added Dec 5, 2016
Debunked: Astronomers get murdered by the secret agencies if they “speak out” about Nibiru
Added Dec 5, 2016
Your answer to How are major content disputes adjudicated and resolved in Wikipedia?
Added Dec 5, 2016
Debunked: Those who say Nibiru is real say that we should be scared and worried - are they right?
Added Dec 5, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible to develop harmonic progressions in a 17-note scale?
Added Dec 4, 2016
Your answer to Why does NASA avoid contamination of other worlds?
Added Dec 4, 2016
Debunked: Doomsday scenarios predicted using an Ouija board
Added Dec 3, 2016
Your answer to How can I abandon atheism?
Added Dec 3, 2016
Your answer to What will happen during the Galactic Alignment?
Added Dec 3, 2016
Your answer to How far away is Nibiru/Planet X now?
Added Dec 2, 2016
What you can do about the Alice through the Looking Glass world of Wikipedia Editing - Right Now
Added Dec 1, 2016
Ideas for wikipedia reform for the long term
Added Dec 1, 2016
List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date.
Added Nov 30, 2016
Your answer to Is there a space treaty to buy and own other planets?
Added Nov 29, 2016
Added Nov 27, 2016
Nibiru Debunked: Yes, we deserve to know the truth about Nibiru
Added Nov 27, 2016
Your answer to How would we communicate with a probe that we send to Alpha Centauri?
Added Nov 27, 2016
Your answer to What is the maximum range for which we can maintain contact with a space probe?
Added Nov 27, 2016
Your answer to How frequent does the Mars' surface gets bombarded by asteroids, comets or meteoroids? How severe are these impacts?
Added Nov 27, 2016
Debunked: This is a “Winged planet” and is Nibiru
Added Nov 27, 2016
Debunked: Paul Cox said that we have two suns
Added Nov 26, 2016
Your answer to Could a pandemic wipe out humanity?
Added Nov 24, 2016
Your answer to Is there any plausible reason for aliens to wipe out or enslave humanity?
Added Nov 24, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for Earth to have 2 binary moons orbiting each other?
Added Nov 23, 2016
Debunked: Nibiru is at coordinates …
Added Nov 22, 2016
Debunked: The US government is building vast underground bunkers to escape from Nibiru
Added Nov 22, 2016
Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy
Added Nov 22, 2016
Debunked: Nostrodamus predicted the end of the world on [insert date here]
Added Nov 22, 2016
Debunked: The Doomsday argument
Added Nov 22, 2016
Your answer to Would it be a very big failure for USA if Russia managed to make a manned mission to Mars and colonize mars?
Added Nov 21, 2016
Your answer to Why is it dangerous to contaminate other planets with human bacteria?
Added Nov 21, 2016
Your answer to Should Quora remove links to fake news websites in questions?
Added Nov 20, 2016
Debunked: Have these three sisters predicted the Apocalypse
Added Nov 20, 2016
Debunked: Earth could be struck by a huge asteroid hundreds of kilometers across
Added Nov 20, 2016
Debunked: Mysterious sphere spotted in NASA’s Sun Images
Added Nov 20, 2016
Debunked: A nuclear war would make Earth uninhabitable - and humans extinct
Added Nov 20, 2016
Your answer to Who would you like to see play The Doctor in 2018? And maybe companions too?
Added Nov 20, 2016
Your answer to I agree we should colonize Mars. But what are the reasons to not colonize Mars other than the costs?
Added Nov 20, 2016
Added Nov 19, 2016
Why Climate Change is No Longer a Political Debate Outside the US
Added Nov 19, 2016
Debunked: Everyone who says Nibiru is not real is lying
Added Nov 18, 2016
Debunked: This tablet from the ancient Sumerians depicts 12 planets including Nibiru
Added Nov 18, 2016
Debunked: NASA has found a brown dwarf in our solar system
Added Nov 17, 2016
What really happens if Yellowstone erupts as a supervolcano, or if some other supervolcano erupts?
Added Nov 17, 2016
Debunked: Carlos Muñoz Ferrada discovered Nibiru
Added Nov 17, 2016
Added Nov 17, 2016
Debunked: Soon we won’t be able to feed everyone because the world population is growing so quickly
Added Nov 16, 2016
Debunked - Stephen Hawking puts an expiry date on humanity
Added Nov 16, 2016
Added Nov 16, 2016
Debunked - The world will end because the Bible (or some other sacred book) says so
Added Nov 16, 2016
Nibiru is so scary because it isn’t real - what can you do to prevent something that isn’t real?
Added Nov 16, 2016
Your answer to What is the theoretical furthest outer orbit a planet could have around the sun? Does the answer depends on its size and mass?
Added Nov 15, 2016
Debunked - Nibiru will hit Earth between January and March 2017 - or any range of dates like that
Added Nov 15, 2016
Added Nov 15, 2016
Your answer to Will it be necessary for safety reasons (such as deadly martian viruses) to ban the return to Earth of persons who travelled to Mars?
Added Nov 14, 2016
Your answer to In what phase was the moon during the Apollo landing?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Your answer to Since there is no mechanism in the USA to stop President Trump from launching a nuke, what is the chance of it happening?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Debunked: Supermoon on 14th November is the beginning of the end of the world
Added Nov 13, 2016
Your answer to If an astronaut accidentally became untethered from the ISS during a spacewalk, could the ISS be maneuvered to rescue him/her?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Your answer to How does reincarnation happen with a growing population?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Added Nov 12, 2016
Why the idea of Nibiru seems non refutable - and how does astronomy really work?
Added Nov 12, 2016
Your answer to Do Chinese people consider Dalai Lama a traitor?
Added Nov 12, 2016
Your answer to What are the most frustrating aspects of being a Wikipedia editor?
Added Nov 12, 2016
Your answer to How certain are we about the existence of Planet Nine?
Added Nov 11, 2016
Your answer to What do Buddhists think of the afterlife?
Added Nov 11, 2016
Added Nov 10, 2016
Debunked: How can the videos and photos be hoaxes when so many people believe them?
Added Nov 10, 2016
Debunked: Ancient astronomers knew things we don’t about planets and stars
Added Nov 10, 2016
Added Nov 9, 2016
Debunked: Climate change will make the world too hot for humans
Added Nov 9, 2016
Added Nov 9, 2016
Debunked: The IRAS infrared satellite found Nibiru in 1983
Added Nov 9, 2016
Where can I get support if I’m scared of Nibiru / Doomsday maybe even suicidal?
Added Nov 9, 2016
Debunked: Nibiru has been found on Google Sky
Added Nov 9, 2016
Added Nov 9, 2016
Added Nov 8, 2016
Your answer to Does the International Space Station ever get dirty on the outside?
Added Nov 8, 2016
Added Nov 7, 2016
Your answer to What are the Four Noble Truths?
Added Nov 6, 2016
Debunked: A Solar Storm Put A Crack In Earth's Magnetic Field
Added Nov 4, 2016
Your answer to What research is being done on the potential pandemic of Morgellons?
Added Nov 4, 2016
Your answer to Is Wikipedia biased?
Added Nov 4, 2016
Your answer to Are Morgellons and chemtrails connected?
Added Nov 3, 2016
Your answer to How do I get infected with Morgellons disease?
Added Nov 3, 2016
Your answer to Can a sheep live without a shepherd?
Added Nov 3, 2016
Debunked: The eclipse in the US in August 2017 will mark the start of the end of the world
Added Nov 1, 2016
Debunked: NASA warns that 1000 asteroids might hit Earth in the next five years
Added Oct 31, 2016
Dazzathecameraman’s amusing parody about HCT2014 (Huge Chocolate Teapot)
Added Oct 31, 2016
Added Oct 31, 2016
Debunking: Inuit elders say that the Earth’s poles have shifted position
Added Oct 31, 2016
Your answer to Do water planets exist?
Added Oct 31, 2016
Your answer to Could the Interplanetary Transportation System proposed by Musk be potentially weaponised by governments and/or competing companies?
Added Oct 31, 2016
Debunked: Universe will end with a “Big Rip”
Added Oct 30, 2016
Who else says Nibiru is nonsense?
Added Oct 30, 2016
Your answer to If and when humanity colonizes the solar system which planets and moons will be viable targets?
Added Oct 30, 2016
Your answer to What are some challenges associated with interplanetary travel?
Added Oct 30, 2016
Your answer to An AI that has been correct at predicting the last 3 elections has predicted Trump to win. Thoughts?
Added Oct 29, 2016
Added Oct 29, 2016
Debunked: A planet in a 3600 year orbit can hide behind the sun for years on end
Added Oct 29, 2016
Your answer to Is humanity’s venture to Mars the modern version of people moving to the new world?
Added Oct 28, 2016
Added Oct 28, 2016
Debunking: Think how stupid you will feel if Nibiru is real
Added Oct 27, 2016
Debunked: NASA has been tracking “Planet X” for decades
Added Oct 27, 2016
Your answer to What photos look Photoshopped but are actually real?
Added Oct 27, 2016
Added Oct 27, 2016
Debunked: This is a photograph of two suns
Added Oct 26, 2016
Your answer to What area on Mars is the most interesting for us?
Added Oct 26, 2016
I understand that Nibiru is not real but still feel scared all the time - what can I do?
Added Oct 26, 2016
Your answer to What is the largest size meteorite that could hit the earth without us detecting it before impact? How much damage would it do?
Added Oct 26, 2016
Doomsday Debunked Kindle Book Draft Cover
Added Oct 26, 2016
Added Oct 26, 2016
Your answer to Is the world gonna end on October 31 2016?
Added Oct 25, 2016
Debunked: Why the World will End Surely on 17th February 2017? Shocking Facts
Added Oct 25, 2016
Added Oct 25, 2016
Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]
Added Oct 24, 2016
Debunked: We are endangered by “Star Quakes”
Added Oct 24, 2016
Debunked: NASA is getting ready to Capture Planet X / Nibiru on Camera
Added Oct 24, 2016
Debunked: Doomsday Stories like Nibiru must be true because lots of people believe they are true
Added Oct 24, 2016
Debunking: a president of the US could order a nuclear attack at a moments notice on a whim
Added Oct 24, 2016
Your answer to Did the landing sequence of the Mars lander Schiaparelli really have to be so complex?
Added Oct 24, 2016
Your answer to Does the President of the United States have the authority to launch a nuclear attack without proper justification?
Added Oct 24, 2016
Debunked: NASA says that Earth will enter total darkness for 15 days in November
Added Oct 23, 2016
How did we miss the Chelyabinsk asteroid?
Added Oct 23, 2016
Added Oct 23, 2016
Debunking: Halley’s comet is going to hit Earth this week.
Added Oct 23, 2016
Added Oct 23, 2016
Added Oct 23, 2016
Debunk: Planet 9 is tilting our solar system
Added Oct 23, 2016
Added Oct 23, 2016
Debunking: Solar Storms to end all life on Earth
Added Oct 23, 2016
Your answer to Can Halley's comet strike a planet in the solar system?
Added Oct 21, 2016
Added Oct 21, 2016
Your answer to Why couldn't the Mars landers be equipped with a video camera, so that people could see moving images of the planet's surface?
Added Oct 20, 2016
Your answer to Does the new batch of WikiLeaks really show evidence for Nibiru?
Added Oct 20, 2016
Your answer to When will Nibiru hit Earth?
Added Oct 20, 2016
Added Oct 20, 2016
Added Oct 19, 2016
Your answer to Why do people want to colonize planets when space colonies would be the better choice for an expanding, technological civilization?
Added Oct 19, 2016
Your answer to Is asteroid 2009ES approaching to Earth?
Added Oct 18, 2016
Your answer to Why do some people still believe in Nibiru?
Added Oct 17, 2016
Your answer to Could I pay my way into outer space?
Added Oct 17, 2016
Your answer to Why don't the British have a space programme?
Added Oct 16, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that they found liquid water on Mars? And what does this mean for us?
Added Oct 15, 2016
Added Oct 15, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for another planet to collide with another?
Added Oct 15, 2016
Your answer to What is the real image of Earth seen from space including space junk?
Added Oct 14, 2016
Your answer to Are the YouTube results personalized, when a keyword is searched for?
Added Oct 14, 2016
Your answer to Will it be viable one day to mine the Moon and extract the resources there for something useful?
Added Oct 13, 2016
Your answer to Why don't we send humans to the moon instead of to Mars?
Added Oct 12, 2016
Your answer to What will happen after we die? What about our thoughts?
Added Oct 11, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if a large asteroid ten times the size of the earth missed it by a few kilometers?
Added Oct 8, 2016
Your answer to Will Mars colony always need a special suit or did Elon plan to inject oxygen in the air?
Added Oct 7, 2016
Your answer to Is there a future opportunity to become rich from the colonization of Mars?
Added Oct 2, 2016
Your answer to What would be the ethical implications of letting a private company colonize Mars?
Added Oct 1, 2016
Your answer to How can Mars be "warmed up" as Elon Musk implied during his September 2016 presentation?
Added Oct 1, 2016
Your answer to Shouldn't Musk try colonizing Venus instead of Mars?
Added Oct 1, 2016
Your answer to Shouldn't we focus on colonizing Antarctica and the Sahara before colonizing Mars?
Added Sep 30, 2016
Your answer to Is there any form of Earth life that could currently live on Mars?
Added Sep 30, 2016
Your answer to What are your views about interplanetary travel plans of Elon Musk?
Added Sep 28, 2016
Your answer to Are the Dry Valleys of Antarctica similar to surface of Mars?
Added Sep 25, 2016
Your answer to Is Corbyn right about the Bomb?
Added Sep 24, 2016
Your answer to What surprising activity has NASA found in Jupiter's moon Europa?
Added Sep 23, 2016
Added Sep 22, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that Mars experienced retrograde motion? How does it happen, and what are the changes that happened in the planet?
Added Sep 18, 2016
Your answer to Why do we not deploy airships to explore other planets?
Added Sep 17, 2016
Your answer to Could colonizing Mars be a lucrative or potentially profitable venture?
Added Sep 17, 2016
Added Sep 15, 2016
List of Hypothetical Biogenic features in ALH84001
Added Sep 15, 2016
Your answer to How did meteorites from Mars escape its orbit and reach the Earth, for instance, ALH84001, in Antarctica?
Added Sep 15, 2016
Your answer to Would a tidally-locked planet be merely a planet of two extremes or would there be temperate zones where life might be sustained?
Added Sep 12, 2016
Your answer to Why haven't we found any broken planets?
Added Sep 12, 2016
Your answer to What's the hardest bug you've debugged?
Added Sep 11, 2016
Your answer to Is there a minor inconsistency in the 11th chapter of The Hobbit?
Added Sep 11, 2016
Your answer to Could Hubble take a picture of voyager 1?
Added Sep 11, 2016
Added Sep 11, 2016
Your answer to Were there two Buddhas?
Added Sep 10, 2016
Your answer to Which Buddhist sutras are what the Buddha said?
Added Sep 10, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible that a planet is entirely made of liquid much like Saturn and Jupiter are made entirely of gas?
Added Sep 10, 2016
Added Sep 9, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if a 15 km diameter comet hit the outback of Australia?
Added Sep 8, 2016
Added Sep 8, 2016
Your answer to I've heard many people claim the moon landing was a hoax, what are the odds they are true?
Added Sep 8, 2016
Added Sep 8, 2016
Your answer to What procedures were in place, if the Apollo 11 astronauts had beencontaminated with a living organism from their stay on the moon?
Added Sep 8, 2016
Your answer to What kind of computers were used in Apollo 11 Mission (of 1969) that resulted in the moon-landing?
Added Sep 7, 2016
Added Sep 7, 2016
Your answer to Is it a good idea to introduce Chroococcidiopsis to Mars?
Added Sep 7, 2016
Added Sep 6, 2016
Your answer to If a 9km asteroid were approaching earth right now, at what point will it be visible during daytime? How many days away from impact?
Added Aug 31, 2016
Your answer to What are some interesting facts about Usain Bolt?
Added Aug 30, 2016
Your answer to How close are we to launching supplies to ISS with a rail gun?
Added Aug 30, 2016
Your answer to A new planet orbiting Proxima Centauri could be habitable. Should we be going there instead of Mars?
Added Aug 29, 2016
Added Aug 28, 2016
Added Aug 27, 2016
Your answer to Will the use of nuclear weapons at the poles of mars make it inhabitable? Aren't there any risks to the earth if we do so?
Added Aug 26, 2016
Your answer to Has humanity reached the Moon and Mars thanks to the bombing of London by the Nazi Germany?
Added Aug 11, 2016
Your answer to What are some things non-programmers say that frustrate programmers?
Added Aug 10, 2016
Added Aug 8, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible to use an ICBM missile to send man to the moon?
Added Aug 7, 2016
Your answer to How expensive would it be to convert all of the US's ICBMs into Space Rocket Transportation to places like the Moon or even Mars?
Added Aug 7, 2016
Added Aug 7, 2016
Added Aug 7, 2016
Your answer to When does curiosity come back from mars and how will this help us?
Added Aug 6, 2016
Your answer to What will really happen when the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts?
Added Aug 6, 2016
Your answer to Who is scarier to be elected as president, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?
Added Aug 3, 2016
Your answer to Why is "Nibiru" still being forced on some of us?
Added Aug 3, 2016
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to Is Nibiru a face-palm to astronomy?
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to Planet X will hit 2015?
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to Will a 490 metre wide asteroid end all life on Earth if it hits?
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to How can Curiosity survive the strong Martian wind storms and how doesn't it get damaged as Martian dust is very erosive?
Added Aug 1, 2016
Your answer to Why didn't Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings pick up the Ring after Bilbo dropped it in the Shire?
Added Aug 1, 2016
Your answer to Does Tom Bombadil predate the Istari?
Added Jul 31, 2016
Your answer to Thermodynamics: For a given pressure and temperature, how fast does water-based ice sublimate?
Added Jul 31, 2016
Your answer to Are continuous earthquakes a sign of the world's end?
Added Jul 30, 2016
Your answer to Will the world really end on July 29, 2016?
Added Jul 29, 2016
Added Jul 27, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if earth poles shifted drastically?
Added Jul 25, 2016
Your answer to What if planet X and Nemesis are the same thing?
Added Jul 25, 2016
Your answer to What would it take to effectively alter a meteor's path using electromagnetism?
Added Jul 24, 2016
Your answer to Would we be in a stable orbit if Nibiru were just behind the Sun?
Added Jul 24, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if a very small moon or mars colony declares independence?
Added Jul 22, 2016
Your answer to How much does a spacesuit cost?
Added Jul 22, 2016
Your answer to What do you think about Melania Trump's speech at the RNC and the plagiarism accusations?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if there were no police?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to Will global warming prevent the next Ice Age?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to When can we expect the next ice age?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to How does the average lobster die? What is the average lobster? What are its characteristics?
Added Jul 20, 2016
Your answer to Do moons have moons?
Added Jul 20, 2016
Your answer to Why do composers use double sharps or double flats?
Added Jul 17, 2016
Your answer to Which people have been most influential in developing longitude and latitude theories?
Added Jul 17, 2016
Added Jul 16, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that scientists have found a new dwarf planet?
Added Jul 15, 2016
Your answer to To be totally unconventional, should a piano with keys of E# and B# be produced? Would it be more versatile and more interesting?
Added Jul 15, 2016
Added Jul 14, 2016
Your answer to Where did the pan come from for Sam Gamgee to cook the rabbit in LOTR "The Two Towers"?
Added Jul 13, 2016
Your answer to How many amateur astronomers are there in the world?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to How many G's would Juno experience while passing so closely near Jupiter?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to What is this bright object next to the sun?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to Is planet 9 real?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to What usually happens to some Buddhist children who don't fully realize the implications of the life they have committed to?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to Are humans destined to colonize the universe?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to How are astronauts protected from radiation during space walks?
Added Jul 10, 2016
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Jul 9, 2016
Your answer to What are some of the most widely circulated fake pictures?
Added Jul 9, 2016
Your answer to Will humans become extinct before we can colonize other planets?
Added Jul 8, 2016
Your answer to Since the moon has no atmosphere, and thus drag would not be present, could something orbit the moon indefinitely?
Added Jul 8, 2016
Your answer to Would it be possible to create a seamless stop-motion video of the Curiosity's journey on Mars with all the available photos?
Added Jul 8, 2016
Your answer to Why doesn't NASA send a rover to Europa?
Added Jul 7, 2016
Added Jul 7, 2016
Your answer to What would the cost be to build a Stanford torus in earth orbit?
Added Jul 6, 2016
Your answer to What is the Muslim - Arab influence on Science and Western civilization?
Added Jul 6, 2016
Your answer to If China and Russia build bases on the Moon, will the U.S. do the same?
Added Jul 6, 2016
Your answer to If a manned moon landing was attempted today, how would it differ from previous missions?
Added Jul 5, 2016
Your answer to How does the Junocam on JUNO work?
Added Jul 5, 2016
Your answer to What are the LOTR books about?
Added Jul 4, 2016
Your answer to How can scientists be sure that asteroid 2016 HO3 won't ever hit the Earth?
Added Jul 4, 2016
Your answer to What are some of the obstacles we will face when we colonize the moon?
Added Jul 4, 2016
Your answer to Imagine that SpaceX has established a small habitable base on Mars. What are some ways to make the base profitable?
Added Jul 3, 2016
How to edit wikipedia without getting into trouble
Added Jul 3, 2016
Your answer to I've heard that early Venus could have supported life. Is it possible that a civilization could have arose there billions of years ago?
Added Jul 3, 2016
Your answer to Would Lava Tubes be a feasible location for a future moon base?
Added Jul 2, 2016
Your answer to Can anyone give more details about the discovery of new moon that is revolving the earth?
Added Jul 2, 2016
Your answer to When will humans build base stations and moon bases?
Added Jul 1, 2016
Your answer to If we terraformed Mars via polar asteroid collision, how would the climate be affected by the new ocean and nitrogen?
Added Jun 30, 2016
Your answer to Do we have the moral right to Terra-Form Mars if we find life existing there already, even single-celled?
Added Jun 29, 2016
Added Jun 29, 2016
Your answer to What are you banned from? Why?
Added Jun 28, 2016
Your answer to Are we headed towards a new ice-age?
Added Jun 27, 2016
Your answer to Is Brexit not a right decision? How can everyone claim it’s bad if Britain's democracy voted for it?
Added Jun 27, 2016
Your answer to What building or structure would remain after a thousand years? What should an architect design to be sure it will last a millennium?
Added Jun 25, 2016
Your answer to Why is the Dalai Lama seen as evil in China?
Added Jun 24, 2016
Your answer to What will happen if the Earth's magnetic poles reverse? Will we have a catastrophe on our hands?
Added Jun 22, 2016
Your answer to Have the people of Tibet been generally successful in choosing their Dalai Lama?
Added Jun 21, 2016
Your answer to What are the best Mars analogue sites on Earth?
Added Jun 21, 2016
Your answer to Why are we attempting to colonize Mars before the moon?
Added Jun 21, 2016
Your answer to If there is a possibility of life on Europa, then why did NASA land a craft on Titan and not Europa?
Added Jun 20, 2016
Your answer to How did the universe come into existence according to Buddhism?
Added Jun 19, 2016
Your answer to Why didn't Sauron see Bilbo at his birthday party or see Samwise at Cirith Ungol?
Added Jun 19, 2016
Your answer to In your opinion, what is the best way to end the "moon landing was fake" debate?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to How does a Bhikkhu (Buddhist Monk) handle house bugs?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to What are some generally unknown facts about the Apollo Moon landings?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to Did NASA fake the moon landing? If so, how can you tell using the images?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to How big would an asteroid or comet have to be to end life on Earth?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Added Jun 17, 2016
Your answer to Am I enlightened?
Added Jun 17, 2016
Your answer to When we colonize the Moon, will we be able to see our buildings from earth?
Added Jun 16, 2016
Your answer to Can I be a Zen monk or at least study it under a Master and still get to marry, have kids, have a job and not leave the urban life?
Added Jun 15, 2016
Your answer to Is the Dalai Lama justified in withholding his duty to reincarnate?
Added Jun 11, 2016
Your answer to Did Buddha intend Buddhism?
Added Jun 7, 2016
Added Jun 6, 2016
Your answer to Are there any other fractions "like" x/7?
Added Jun 4, 2016
Your answer to Can a Buddhist give me their perspective on Buddhism?
Added Jun 4, 2016
Your answer to What do we know about the subsurface ocean of Europa?
Added Jun 2, 2016
Your answer to Which is the "Bible" of Buddhism?
Added Jun 1, 2016
Your answer to What is the purpose of the guru in Tibetan Buddhism?
Added Jun 1, 2016
Your answer to Is there proof that Buddha existed? If so, what is the strongest proof about his historical existence that we have?
Added May 31, 2016
Your answer to Does my dog know he is a dog?
Added May 28, 2016
Your answer to Did astronauts in the Apollo space program observe an alien spacecraft?
Added May 28, 2016
Added May 28, 2016
Added May 26, 2016
Buddhist sources on the Four Noble Truths
Added May 26, 2016
Your answer to Wouldn`t it be better for mankind to explore the Moon, rather than go to Mars?
Added May 20, 2016
Your answer to Is ordaining as a Tibetan Buddhist monk a lifetime commitment?
Added May 17, 2016
Your answer to What is Punya, and how does it feel?
Added May 17, 2016
Your answer to What are the primary tenets of Buddhism?
Added May 14, 2016
Your answer to How heavy of a gas could form an atmosphere on the moon?
Added May 14, 2016
Your answer to Will the James Webb Space Telescope be any more useful in the hunt for Planet Nine?
Added May 13, 2016
Added May 10, 2016
Your answer to Would a Hale-Bopp collision terraform Mars?
Added May 10, 2016
Added May 9, 2016
Your answer to Are there any planets that aren't spherical?
Added May 9, 2016
Your answer to Is going to Mars the right choice?
Added May 8, 2016
Your answer to How can I rapidly reduce my bad karma?
Added May 8, 2016
Your answer to How far are we from being able to use Mars as a pit stop on our way to other planets?
Added May 7, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for a planet to be ejected from a solar system and later captured by another solar system? If so, how?
Added May 6, 2016
Your answer to What is the likelihood that SpaceX will obtain its goal for colonizing Mars being that Elon's track record is pretty solid?
Added May 5, 2016
Your answer to Have there been any materials or phenomena encountered in space that were not already discovered or known about on or from Earth?
Added May 4, 2016
Added May 3, 2016
Your answer to Why does Buddhism automatically assume that life is full of suffering for "everyone"?
Added May 2, 2016
Your answer to Why does Buddhism posit existence of other realms and supernatural beings if there is no obvious evidence of such?
Added May 2, 2016
Your answer to Besides Mars, where else in the Solar System should rovers be sent? Where else could we currently reach?
Added May 1, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible that a government could be hiding evidence of extraterrestrial beings/activities?
Added Apr 29, 2016
Your answer to Why did both Gautama Buddha and Vardhamana Mahavira aim to escape from the cycle of birth and rebirth?
Added Apr 29, 2016
Your answer to Why do Buddhists perceive the cycle of rebirth to be a cycle of suffering and why do they wish to liberate themselves from this cycle?
Added Apr 18, 2016
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Is possible to modify the International Space Station (ISS) and use it as a vehicle to travel to the moon?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to How likely is it that ExoMars will discover life on Mars?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to What is it like to practice Vajrayana Buddhism?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Could we have established a colony on the moon by now if NASA had continued its lunar program?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Are there Buddhists who don't believe in reincarnation?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Are partly or completely autonomous Mars rovers possible? How advanced could rovers become?
Added Apr 14, 2016
Your answer to Is Mars's gravity healthy for humans?
Added Apr 14, 2016
Your answer to Was Dalai Lama enlightened? Why or why not?
Added Apr 13, 2016
Your answer to If buddhists don't believe in the idea of a "soul", why do they say the Dalai Lama is reincarnated from a specific person?
Added Apr 13, 2016
Your answer to What is the subject matter of mathematics from Buddhist point of view?
Added Apr 11, 2016
Your answer to Should we land on the Moon or go straight to Mars?
Added Apr 9, 2016
Your answer to Do you ever feel guilty for hanging up on a telemarketer?
Added Apr 8, 2016
Your answer to Does human body contain radioactive elements? How do they affect our body?
Added Apr 7, 2016
Your answer to If we get to colonize Mars, as planned by Elon Musk, would the sunlight available on Mars be adequate like it is on Earth?
Added Apr 7, 2016
Your answer to What are the problems behind Terraforming Mars?
Added Apr 4, 2016
Added Apr 3, 2016
Your answer to What are the chances the earth will be hit by another asteroid that will wipe out all life on earth in the next 1000 years?
Added Apr 3, 2016
Your answer to How far is NASA from sending a robot to explore the ocean of Europa?
Added Apr 3, 2016
Your answer to What is the last 4 digit of 333^444+444^333?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Followed Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to Why is using a metronome while studying an instrument helpful?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to How long till we have a fully self supporting colony on Mars?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to Would you rather be in space or earth now, if you get to choose?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to Do the four noble truths of Buddhism constitute an empirical method that is falsifiable?
Added Apr 1, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible that civilizations existed in planets before the birth of our sun itself?
Added Apr 1, 2016
Your answer to Could a domed city be built on the Moon or Mars?
Added Mar 31, 2016
Added Mar 31, 2016
Your answer to Could a large nuclear weapon detonated on Mars melt enough CO2 to cause a global warming cycle?
Added Mar 31, 2016
Your answer to How does Mars have more solar radiation than Earth when Earth is closer to the sun?
Added Mar 29, 2016
Your answer to If human civilization is wiped out sometime before 2025, what would the most likely cause be?
Added Mar 27, 2016
Your answer to How much computing power does Google's Alpha Go use?
Added Mar 26, 2016
Your answer to Of the things humans can currently do better than computers, which seem most likely to still be this way in 20 years?
Added Mar 25, 2016
Added Mar 23, 2016
Should Humans Fill the Galaxy?
Added Mar 21, 2016
Your answer to If ants or roaches lived on Mars could we detect them with the equipment we have one the planet?
Added Mar 20, 2016
Your answer to Have humans reached the technological point where they can start a colony on Mars?
Added Mar 19, 2016
Your answer to If there were another planet exactly like Earth but with no life and we were to add bacteria to the surface, what would happen?
Added Mar 19, 2016
Your answer to What is better: ALAP (as late as possible) or ASAP approach to send astronauts to the Moon or Mars?
Added Mar 5, 2016
Your answer to How do seasons on Mars compare and contrast with seasons on Earth?
Added Mar 3, 2016
Your answer to So an asteroid is aiming toward Earth, it has a 15000km to 1000000km margin for error?
Added Mar 3, 2016
Your answer to Has NASA ever recorded sound on the surface of Mars?
Added Mar 2, 2016
Your answer to How does "memory transfer" happen in rebirth according to Buddhism?
Added Mar 2, 2016
Your answer to Buckminster Fuller (architect): Why hasn't anybody built a cloud nine (tensegrity sphere)?
Added Mar 1, 2016
Your answer to How can humans survive the Van Allen radiation belts?
Added Mar 1, 2016
Added Feb 29, 2016
Your answer to What are reasons (not including his appearance or wealth) why people think Donald Trump would be a bad president?
Added Feb 29, 2016
Your answer to What should I do if the pilot passes out and I (with no flight training) have to land the plane?
Added Feb 29, 2016
Added Feb 29, 2016
Added Feb 28, 2016
Your answer to What can NASA realistically do to stop an asteroid from hitting the Earth?
Added Feb 28, 2016
Your answer to If Bernie Sanders is 74, why would anyone realistically vote for him?
Added Feb 27, 2016
Your answer to What do AI researchers think about the Wait But Why article on AI?
Added Feb 27, 2016
Your answer to Why didn't Tolkien give the One Ring more offensive powers?
Added Feb 26, 2016
Your answer to What does the Dalai Lama mean when he says that man never really lives because he pursues money?
Added Feb 25, 2016
Your answer to Why do so many people from Europe want Bernie Sanders to be the president of the United States?
Added Feb 25, 2016
Your answer to Why shouldn't we colonize other planets?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Does Buddhism allow fun?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to What is considered unethical about taking earth based life to other planets?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Why haven't we sent a robotic rock/soil sample return mission to Mars yet?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible, in the near future, that NASA will be able to send missions to Alpha Centauri?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Why doesn't Quora oblige or encourage users to provide sources/references for their answers?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Can two people repopulate Earth? Is it possible?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Why do we send astronauts if we can control droids with VR?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to What constraints to AI and machine learning algorithms are needed to prevent AI from becoming a dystopian threat to humanity?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to What are the launch windows for different planets?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to What planets/moons can you see humans setting foot on by 2100?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that a neutron star will hit the Earth in 75 years from now?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to Can you suggest a second Earth aside from Mars, considering climate, resources, and distance from Earth?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to Would Elon Musk have the right to sell property on Mars if he is the first to establish a permanent colony?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to I saw a Buddhist nun window shopping in a mall. Is it deplorable of me to judge her for it?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to Would SpaceX need permission to send people to Mars?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to If Mars was warmed up, would it release enough CO2 to allow people to walk around with only an oxygen mask?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Added Feb 20, 2016
Your answer to With our current technology, how long could we make a space probe like Voyager last before it would shut down/lose contact with us?
Added Feb 19, 2016
Your answer to How does hell work in dominant religions, such as Islam, Buddhism, Christian etc?
Added Feb 19, 2016
Your answer to Is NASA's asteroid redirect mission a little bit too dangerous?
Added Feb 19, 2016
Your answer to What could we learn from a manned mission to mars that we wouldn't know from an unmanned mission?
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that the core of the Sun is Plutonium?
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that the chinese robots didn't find anything on the moon?
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Should we focus on colonization of space to save the future of our species? Assuming we cannot sustain life on earth indefinitely.
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Is Mars full of rust?
Added Feb 17, 2016
Your answer to Are airbags a good solution for 'soft lunar landing'?
Added Feb 17, 2016
Your answer to Is Pluto a planet?
Added Feb 17, 2016
Your answer to Let's say I don't believe the world is round. How can one prove the world is round to me?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to Will Earth ever be as inhospitable to humans as Mars is now?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to Compared to Chinese or Japanese Buddhism, is Tibetan Buddhism more focused on gaining control over imagination and thoughts?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to What should be the first words from Mars? What topics could be involved?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if humanity learned that our planet is part of a huge territory claimed by extraterrestrials?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to If the Starship Enterprise were in a "standard orbit" around Earth, how bright would it appear to the naked eye?
Added Feb 14, 2016
Your answer to Could the Mars rover have contaminated Mars with earth based life forms?
Added Feb 14, 2016
Your answer to Which side of the Moon did the Americans land on: the "dark side" or the "other side"?
Added Feb 14, 2016
Your answer to Is there any possible way to make a black hole orbit the Earth?
Added Feb 13, 2016
Your answer to What do I need to be able to see the ISS?
Added Feb 13, 2016
Your answer to What would happen to the Solar System, if we created an artificial planet?
Added Feb 10, 2016
Added Feb 8, 2016
Your answer to Is Planet 9 responsible for mass asteroid impact made here on Earth?
Added Feb 7, 2016
Your answer to How big should a planet be (radius,mass) and how far away from it's star to have (for example) four natural satellites?
Added Feb 7, 2016
Added Feb 7, 2016
Your answer to Why are there no Mars photos of the daytime sun?
Added Feb 7, 2016
Added Feb 2, 2016
Your answer to Is it really true that before 2050 we would be living on moon in dome shaped houses?
Added Feb 1, 2016
Your answer to Could Planet X explain why the Oort Cloud releases comets that enter our solar system?
Added Jan 31, 2016
Your answer to How could you move 'Planet 9' into a circular orbit within the solar system's habitable zone?
Added Jan 29, 2016
Your answer to How could you slow 'planet 9' down enough for it to achieve a stable orbit around the sun like the 'inner' planets?
Added Jan 28, 2016
Your answer to What is the purpose of the Asteroid Belt and is it a former planet?
Added Jan 28, 2016
Your answer to Is it clear whether the putative "ninth planet" has cleared its neighbourhood?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to What does the rest of the world think about the controversy over the TMT (thirty meter telescope) in Hawaii?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to Would it be possible to significantly impact the orbit of the Earth if I kept performing sling-shot maneuvers across the solar system?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to Should we (human race) explore more of space and start colonizing it?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to What is it known about this hypothesized ninth planet in the solar system?
Added Jan 26, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for a planet to have an oxygen-rich atmosphere without having life on it?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to Is Mars capable of supporting life?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to Quoran Astronomers: How close will planet 9 get to the Sun and to the Earth in its perihelion and perigee?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to What type of scientists will be the first to be selected to go to Mars?
Added Jan 24, 2016
Your answer to What is the probability of human race being immigrants to Earth a long time ago?
Added Jan 24, 2016
Added Jan 23, 2016
Your answer to What is the maximum distance a planet could be from the sun and still consistently orbit it?
Added Jan 22, 2016
Your answer to If Planet Nine exists, could it be the first of many additional planets we find in our solar system?
Added Jan 22, 2016
Your answer to Should I be worried about the possible 9th planet?
Added Jan 21, 2016
Your answer to How important would be the finding of another planet in our solar system?
Added Jan 21, 2016
Your answer to Why is this flower's blooming in outer space special?
Added Jan 19, 2016
Added Jan 18, 2016
Added Jan 18, 2016
Your answer to Can it be possible to colonize a planet without any non-human animals?
Added Jan 18, 2016
Your answer to What are reasons terraforming Mars would not work?
Added Jan 17, 2016
Your answer to Is there any evidence contradicting the Cornice Avalanches on Mars theory?
Added Jan 16, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for us to send humans to Mars and bring them back before 2030?
Added Jan 15, 2016
Your answer to Is the FizzBuzz task an effective way to interview engineers? Does this task accurately differentiate engineering candidates?
Added Jan 15, 2016
Your answer to What are some things that those who have won lotteries have done to benefit society with their winnings?
Added Jan 14, 2016
Your answer to What is the full plan of Elon Musk to terraform Mars from the fusion of the poles to the magnetic field in creation?
Added Jan 12, 2016
Your answer to What if we exchanged the position of the Earth and Mars? Would the Earth still continue supporting the life as now?
Added Jan 12, 2016
Programming Tips For Better Code
Added Jan 10, 2016
Your answer to Which organisation will be the first to put a human on Mars?
Added Jan 10, 2016
Your answer to Was there or is there life on Mars.? . And are extraterrestrial beings such as the tall whites etc.. Visit or even occupy this earth?
Added Jan 9, 2016
Your answer to How did our ancestors know that there are 9 planets?
Added Jan 8, 2016
Your answer to Can we destroy the Earth?
Added Jan 6, 2016
Your answer to Why is a trip to mars one-way but to moon not one-way?
Added Jan 5, 2016
Your answer to What shape is a rainbow from view of the pilot?
Added Jan 4, 2016
Your answer to What would you do if the whole planet was going to be destroyed next week?
Added Jan 2, 2016
Your answer to What do we do to survive an asteroid hitting the earth?
Added Jan 1, 2016
Added Jan 1, 2016
Your answer to If you were on a different planet, could you eat organisms on the planet? Would they be made from DNA?
Added Jan 1, 2016
Your answer to Hypothetical Scenarios: An asteroid 10 miles wide is headed for earth, how soon will we be able to detect it?
Added Dec 23, 2015
Your answer to How much can the Falcon9 lower the launch cost?
Added Dec 23, 2015
Your answer to Can humans live generationally on Mars with its low gravity?
Added Dec 21, 2015
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Dec 21, 2015
Your answer to Why are people saying that a rogue Planet X (Nibiru) will hit the Earth? I'm very worried.
Added Dec 15, 2015
Your answer to If we can 'square' and 'cube' numbers, could we also 'sphere', or 'triangle', or <insert arbitrary shape> a number?
Added Dec 12, 2015
Added Dec 12, 2015
Your answer to Is motivation all that matters in morality, ethics or a mahayana path?
Added Dec 7, 2015
Added Dec 6, 2015
Your answer to Why did the Buddhist monk talk to me like I was a very special person?
Added Dec 5, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if someone violated the Outer Space Treaty?
Added Dec 3, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Dec 2, 2015
Assuming Nibiru is real, what would be the azimuth and elevation at which to watch for it?
Followed Dec 2, 2015
Your answer to Is planet Niburu real?
Added Dec 2, 2015
Added Dec 1, 2015
Your answer to Did Tolkien read, or was he influenced by, H.P. Lovecraft?
Added Nov 30, 2015
Your answer to Is there life after death?
Added Nov 30, 2015
Your answer to How do I find out if this assertium is logically valid?
Added Nov 30, 2015
Your answer to What data points lead us to believe there was life on Mars?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to Would a NASA Scientist be able to find Earth if they were to travel from the Andromeda galaxy?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to see Jupiter's moons with the naked eye from Earth?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to What cultures have used microtonality in their music?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to Which types of Tibetan Buddhist monks would seek to avoid sitting next to women? What are their reasons?
Added Nov 28, 2015
Your answer to Could the Mars rover have contaminated Mars with earth based life forms?
Added Nov 28, 2015
Added Nov 27, 2015
Your answer to How common is it for buddhist monks to regret their decision?
Added Nov 27, 2015
Your answer to If the ISS had powerful lighting, could it be seen at night? (Not in twilight)
Added Nov 27, 2015
Your answer to Why does Tibetan Buddhism have been conducting so many human sacrifices?
Added Nov 26, 2015
Your answer to Why is the Dalai Lama allowed entrance into the United States?
Added Nov 26, 2015
Your answer to Why do so many people want to believe in an afterlife?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to What is Planet X?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to Is Planet X gonna crash into earth?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to When will Peter Capaldi be replaced as Doctor Who?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to be buddhist but have different views of the afterlife?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to If we detected a planet-killing asteroid, is there anything we could do about it at the present time?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to If life is found on Mars, which religions would be the most compatible with this finding?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to Is the question of prior or current Martian life more important the potential of terraforming Mars?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Added Nov 24, 2015
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to How do unknown authors achieve success with their first books?
Added Nov 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the largest item humans ever discarded into outer space?
Added Nov 22, 2015
Your answer to Flying: Why have I not seen another plane in the sky while traveling on an airliner?
Added Nov 21, 2015
Your answer to How hard would it be to stow away on an unmanned SLS launch?
Added Nov 21, 2015
Added Nov 20, 2015
Your answer to Could we feasibly make many large space colonies that orbit the Earth?
Added Nov 20, 2015
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Nov 19, 2015
Your answer to What are some ideas to protect the earth against a potentially human-destroying meteorite impact?
Added Nov 19, 2015
Your answer to Why are we so interested in Pluto but no one talks about Neptune or Uranus?
Added Nov 18, 2015
Added Nov 18, 2015
Your answer to Why are most science fictions movies about aliens invading Earth rather than humans invading alien-inhabited places?
Added Nov 18, 2015
Added Nov 18, 2015
Your answer to How much of a concern were meteors during the Apollo missions?
Added Nov 18, 2015
Your answer to If somehow we found a way to ignite fusion on Jupiter and turn it into a small star, would any of its moons be habitable?
Added Nov 17, 2015
Your answer to What happens to a particle when its entangled partner falls into a black hole?
Added Nov 17, 2015
Your answer to When was the last time Mars was struck by an asteroid? Or is it always happening?
Added Nov 16, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to make an artificial black-hole?
Added Nov 16, 2015
Your answer to What are some tasks that took months to complete 100 years ago that today a computer can do in a few seconds?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Why do you only hear of meteorites hitting the Earth but not asteroids or comets?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Now that Curiosity has landed on Mars and made some discoveries, what's the next mission likely to be? What's the next step?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to If there was living creatures in Mars, in which year we would be able to "detect" them?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Outer Space: Is interstellar space full of "Oort objects"?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to If we are truly the only intelligent life form in the universe, does this mean the universe is ours for the taking?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Have all the chemical elements in the universe been discovered? How can we ever know for sure?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Could there be life in any form inside the Sun or other stars?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Why didn't Apollo 11 mission stay longer on the surface of the moon?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to If all earth's landmass was distributed homogenous how high would the oceanlevel be?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Is sun gazing safe?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Added Nov 13, 2015
Your answer to Why do we remove spacecraft from orbit at the end of missions?
Added Nov 13, 2015
Your answer to Why is the Cassini mission ending in 2017?
Added Nov 13, 2015
Your answer to If something went wrong with the ISS and it became inoperable, what would we do with it?
Added Nov 12, 2015
Your answer to Why is there significantly more water in planet Earth than in other planets of the solar system?
Added Nov 12, 2015
Added Nov 12, 2015
Your answer to If there is not a Self to find anywhere in Buddhism, what if anything continues after death?
Added Nov 11, 2015
Your answer to Do we know if complex life existed on earth before the moon impacted it?
Added Nov 11, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that some administration (NASA or other) has already sent astronauts to Mars and haven't told us?
Added Nov 10, 2015
Your answer to Why wasnt the asteroid explosion over Russia in 2013 predicted? Why did no space agency see it coming?
Added Nov 10, 2015
Your answer to What is the greatest misconception most people have about a specific event in The Lord of the Rings?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that humans, if they live long enough on Mars, can adapt to live without life support systems?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to How do we know there isn't another planet beyond Pluto's orbit?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Did NASA have a rescue plan for Apollo 11 if they failed to leave the Moon?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Hypothetical Scenarios: If aliens teraformed Mars, and left it alone, how long would it remain capable of supporting earth life?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to NASA claims that Mars atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds. Why hasn't the same fate occurred to earth?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Considering all of Mars’s flaws, is it really worth the hassle of colonizing it?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to My dad loves weird science-like things and space/astronomy. What are good Christmas gift suggestions?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to Why do we think of colonizing mars while we are ruining the mother earth?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to What are some mind blowing facts about the solar system?
Added Nov 7, 2015
Your answer to How do perchlorate on Mars impact human exploration of Mars?
Added Nov 6, 2015
Added Nov 6, 2015
Your answer to What will happen when I look at the sun with a telescope?
Added Nov 4, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible for a sun planet moon system to exist such that the moon stays in the sky of the planet for months? Read description.
Added Nov 4, 2015
Your answer to What if a private firm announced a mission to Ganymede or Europa?
Added Nov 4, 2015
Your answer to If a chunk of dry ice 10 miles in diameter struck Mars, would it instantly melt and create a dense atmosphere?
Added Nov 3, 2015
Your answer to How visible would a Texas sized asteroid be to the naked eye as it approached earth?
Added Nov 2, 2015
Your answer to Will space travel to Mars be worthwhile in our lifetimes?
Added Nov 2, 2015
Your answer to Peak Humanity: What if the population stops growing in the year 2050 and declines forever?
Added Nov 2, 2015
Your answer to If a bird is trapped in my house and banging itself constantly against the window, should I just kill it to relieve it of its misery?
Added Oct 30, 2015
Your answer to What do the Buddhists of Quora think of Steven Seagal?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to If the population of the Earth keeps on increasing indiscriminately, will there be an effect on the Earth's orbital patterns?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to As Deimos, Mars's moon, has an escape velocity of only 5.5m/s, if I jump high from Deimos' surface will I escape from it forever?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to Do we have the technology to create an automated greenhouse on Mars that could grow and store food for an upcoming manned mission?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to What Earth life forms have the potential to thrive on Mars as it is now?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to What are some movie tropes that annoy you?
Added Oct 28, 2015
Added Oct 27, 2015
Your answer to What objects from space are going to hit earth Nov 13th, 2015?
Added Oct 27, 2015
Your answer to How can one build a spaceship that can pass right through the sun?
Added Oct 27, 2015
Added Oct 26, 2015
Your answer to How does the dust storm in The Martian movie trailer trow stones through the air despite mars having just 1% of earths air density?
Added Oct 24, 2015
Your answer to Could Mars' thin atmosphere conceivably allow for a dust storm of the magnitude seen in The Martian?
Added Oct 24, 2015
Your answer to What are the exact steps to transform Mars atmosphere to suit for human living?
Added Oct 24, 2015
Your answer to Can you leave the space station when you want?
Added Oct 23, 2015
Added Oct 20, 2015
Your answer to What is required to put an Earth like atmosphere over Mars?
Added Oct 20, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Oct 18, 2015
Your answer to Why aren't there fossils on mars?
Added Oct 17, 2015
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Oct 15, 2015
Your answer to Can we force trigger an evolution cycle on mars by maybe sending microbes which can resist the extreme climate on mars?
Added Oct 14, 2015
Added Oct 13, 2015
Your answer to Do you think NASA's "Journey to Mars" report is feasible to get us to Mars?
Added Oct 12, 2015
Added Oct 12, 2015
Added Oct 12, 2015
Added Oct 11, 2015
Your answer to If there was a lake on Mars, how would swimming in it be different?
Added Oct 11, 2015
Added Oct 11, 2015
Your answer to How is it possible for liquid water to exist on the Martian surface and how will the recent discovery affect future missions?
Added Oct 10, 2015
Added Oct 7, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible or probable that there was a very ancient civilization on Mars that died out but whose remains will be discovered soon?
Added Oct 6, 2015
Added Oct 5, 2015
Your answer to Could there be liquid reserves of water below the surface on Mars?
Added Oct 4, 2015
Your answer to Water on Mars: What if it is the wrong "type" of water for life?
Added Oct 4, 2015
Added Oct 4, 2015
Your answer to When terraforming Mars, will there be protected areas?
Added Oct 2, 2015
Your answer to Water flows on Earth because of rains. If there is flowing water on Mars, does that also means it rains there?
Added Sep 29, 2015
Added Sep 29, 2015
Your answer to What does the earth look like from the moon during a "blood moon"?
Added Sep 28, 2015
Your answer to Can humans walk on martian (Mars) soil?
Added Sep 27, 2015
Your answer to Why hasn't Envisat been brought down or destroyed or brought to a graveyard orbit?
Added Sep 24, 2015
Your answer to Why don't people populate Greenland first before trying out on Mars?
Added Sep 23, 2015
Your answer to Is John Hagee correct about the Blood Moon Prophecy?
Added Sep 23, 2015
Added Sep 23, 2015
Your answer to Why didn't NASA send an aerial vehicle to explore Mars?
Added Sep 23, 2015
Your answer to Who is Renee M? Are her predictions about the world ending true?
Added Sep 23, 2015
Your answer to Why should I use Quora instead of just searching the Internet?
Added Sep 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the probability of asteroids which are not in the visible spectrum (invisible asteroids) to hit the Earth?
Added Sep 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the position of women in Tibetan Buddhism?
Added Sep 21, 2015
Your answer to If Space X reaches Mars first, can they claim the planet as their property?
Added Sep 21, 2015
Your answer to Are Buddhist monks leeches in society who only beg for food and meditate, or do they provide some sort of service to the people?
Added Sep 20, 2015
Your answer to Who owns the right to go to Mars and contaminate the Martian atmosphere with contaminants from Earth?
Added Sep 20, 2015
Your answer to Could we heat Mars' poles by nuking them?
Added Sep 20, 2015
Your answer to What were the primary religions in the world before Islam/Christianity/Buddhism became popular?
Added Sep 19, 2015
Your answer to Can Buddha Reincarnate?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that there is a small group of nonhuman hominids hidden somewhere on earth?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to breathe and survive on Mars with an oxygen tank, but without a space suit?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Followed Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to Another shadow or a real Alien? Is this a real Mars Crab and if yes will we still try and send a mission to Mars?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to What is the best reason for sending a manned expedition to Mars?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to What is the realistic top speed of an asteroid that might threaten the Earth and would we still be able to detect its approach?
Added Sep 17, 2015
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Your answer to Is it legal to drop a nuke on Mars?
Added Sep 16, 2015
Your answer to Do we have a positioning system for space objects and planets similar to GPS?
Added Sep 15, 2015
Your answer to What exactly is a "Super Blood Moon" and why is it so rare?
Added Sep 15, 2015
Your answer to Could humanity construct a new Earth-like planet in the solar system?
Added Sep 15, 2015
Your answer to Does NASA use Photoshop?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Wouldn't sending a manned mission to Mars violate NASA's policy of not infecting other worlds with life forms from Earth?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Have any of you encountered issues with the Wikipedia system of arbitration, and if so, how do you think it can be improved?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to What is the best way to encourage collaborative editing in an online encyclopedia - and how could wikipedia be improved in this aspect?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Quora Bugs: Why doesn't the "rephrase question" tag remove itself when I have actually rephrased the question?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Are there any advantages of exploring Mars' moon Phobos?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Why don't Mars rovers move faster?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to If the Sun disappeared completely, what would happen to the Earth and the rest of our solar system?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Could we survive without the sun?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to How do you imagine the Earth without the Sun?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to If the Sun disappeared completely, what would happen to the Earth and the rest of our solar system?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Without the sun, can oxygen be present on Earth?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to What is the expected life of earth?
Added Sep 12, 2015
Your answer to What is the common scientific opinion about Elon Musk's plan to nuke Mars' poles to accelerate the creation of an atmosphere?
Added Sep 11, 2015
Your answer to Could a planet like Mars or Venus be equipped with an artificial magnetic field similar to Earth's?
Added Sep 11, 2015
Your answer to What is the common scientific opinion about Elon Musk's plan to nuke Mars' poles to accelerate the creation of an atmosphere?
Added Sep 11, 2015
Your answer to Why the edges of Martian Polar Caps are not being searched for liquid water?
Added Sep 10, 2015
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Your answer to Can bombardment by comets significantly add up to the amount of water on Mars within realistic human timescales (i.e. a few centuries)?
Added Sep 10, 2015
Your answer to Can you describe how detonating thermonuclear charges on Mars' poles can lead to the planet becoming hospitable?
Added Sep 10, 2015
Your answer to What is going to happen in September 2015?
Added Sep 10, 2015
Your answer to Can an astronaut re-enter the atmosphere with just a spacesuit and a jetpack?
Added Sep 9, 2015
Your answer to Is the comet really hitting the earth in the month of September?
Added Sep 9, 2015
Your answer to Why don't Mars rovers move faster?
Added Sep 9, 2015
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Your answer to Could it have been feasible to boost Shuttle main tanks into orbit?
Added Sep 6, 2015
Your answer to What is the deep/dark web and how do you access it?
Added Sep 6, 2015
Your answer to Why can't humans spend more on exploring the remaining 95% of the oceans, rather than on space exploration?
Added Sep 5, 2015
Your answer to Between the moon and the sun which one was created first?
Added Sep 5, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to upgrade space suits so that they can survive re-entry and then parachute down like Felix Baumgartner?
Added Sep 5, 2015
Your answer to If SpaceX was responsible for destroying a huge asteroid that was headed for earth, do you think they would be successful?
Added Sep 4, 2015
MY POSTS AS KINDLE BOOKS - WHICH ONES NEXT?
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Your answer to If a 1km sized rock was, for certain, to hit Earth in 6 months, what could we do about it?
Added Sep 3, 2015
Your answer to How are plants growing in the ISS? Is it different from normal? If so, in what ways?
Added Sep 3, 2015
Your answer to Can the International Space Station be brought back to Earth if it were to be dismantled?
Added Sep 3, 2015
Your answer to How will space tourism work?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to How do I go about ignoring the end of the world predictions and live my life to the fullest?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Is the world going to end in September 2015?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Who says our world will end in September and why are they wrong?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Is the world going to end in September 2015?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Is Quora just a glorified Yahoo! Answers?
Added Aug 31, 2015
Your answer to Why did God create the world if he was just going to destroy it at Armageddon?
Added Aug 31, 2015
Your answer to What are the odds of a bigtime asteroid hitting the Earth a la Armageddon and Deep Impact?
Added Aug 31, 2015
Your answer to Why can Buddhist monks in Japan get married?
Added Aug 30, 2015
Your answer to What are disadvantages of self-studying?
Added Aug 29, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible for a star to orbit a planet? Has it ever been observed?
Added Aug 29, 2015
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Your answer to If life on Earth would have been observable for a million years, why has there been no contact?
Added Aug 28, 2015
Your answer to Are there any advantages in setting up a telescope (operated remotely from Earth) on other planets (such as Mars)?
Added Aug 26, 2015
Your answer to Why is it so difficult to sterilize spacecrafts?
Added Aug 25, 2015
Your answer to How are human skin thangkas being made?
Added Aug 25, 2015
Your answer to What is the estimated cost of the International Space Station (ISS)?
Added Aug 24, 2015
Your answer to Why are there rocks scattered on the sandy plains on Mars?
Added Aug 23, 2015
Added Aug 23, 2015
Why won't this "if" statement work?
Followed Aug 23, 2015
Your answer to Talking about real spacecraft, not the fictional ones seen in Star Wars and Star Trek, what is the best looking spacecraft ever made?
Added Aug 23, 2015
Added Aug 22, 2015
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Your answer to Assuming that human travel to Mars is possible, what are the other hazards that prevent establishing a permanent settlement on Mars?
Added Aug 22, 2015
Your answer to Why can't the ISS split astronaut's exhaled CO2 and recycle the oxygen?
Added Aug 22, 2015
Added Aug 22, 2015
Your answer to Why does Elon Musk believe that we can't electrify transportation to space?
Added Aug 21, 2015
Your answer to What keeps trolls away from Quora?
Added Aug 20, 2015
Your answer to How can I put my "experience" as a troll to good use?
Added Aug 20, 2015
Your answer to How many trolls does it take to change a light bulb?
Added Aug 19, 2015
Your answer to Why do Christians not believe in the concept of reincarnation?
Added Aug 19, 2015
Your answer to Why has the new pentagonal tiling received so much attention in the press?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Why can't I add a comment at this time?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Are some Buddhists also Christians?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Why is it important that on the launching day of the Mars rover, the two planets should be close to each other?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Is Quora required to include attribution for reproductions of my content?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Assume a, b, c are integers. What is the proof that abc(a³–b³)(b³–c³)(c³–a³) is a multiple of 7?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Added Aug 17, 2015
Your answer to When will the probability of a life-threatening space object hitting Earth reach significant levels?
Added Aug 17, 2015
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Your answer to How is New Horizons of NASA powered?
Added Aug 17, 2015
Your answer to Will Uranus and Neptune ever switch back?
Added Aug 17, 2015
Your answer to Is it illegal to download something that one has the corresponding physical version of?
Added Aug 16, 2015
Your answer to Is it illegal to download a pdf version of a book if you own the original book?
Added Aug 16, 2015
Your answer to Are there any die-hard Lord of the Rings fans that can't stand the movie trilogy? If so, why?
Added Aug 15, 2015
Your answer to Was the journey of Voyager so calculated that it didn't crash into a meteor or was it destined to go into interstellar space?
Added Aug 15, 2015
Your answer to How far could we travel within our solar system with our current technology, if we were to send a manned spaceship ?
Added Aug 14, 2015
Your answer to Is NASA presently capable of fending off a collision if a meteor or any other celestial body were to strike the earth?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to If a meteor collided with the Sun, how big would it need to be in order to be a concern?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to How certain is the claim that the ISS is the most-expensive single item ever built, taking inflation into account?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to Buildings: How much in today's dollars is the cost of a medieval cathedral?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to Does NASA care more about finding the first alien life or setting up human colonies on other worlds?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to Should there be a limit on the size of answers on Quora?
Added Aug 12, 2015
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Your answer to How practical is it to put a satellite to orbit ISS?
Added Aug 11, 2015
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Your answer to What would happen if someone proves P=NP or P!=NP?
Added Aug 10, 2015
Your answer to Is there water on the moon?
Added Aug 9, 2015
Your answer to What are your current all time stats on Quora?
Added Aug 7, 2015
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Added Aug 6, 2015
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Your answer to If the Sun disappeared completely, what would happen to the Earth and the rest of our solar system?
Added Aug 5, 2015
Your answer to If someone made an exact duplicate of you with everything in the same place, would the duplicate have your same memories?
Added Aug 5, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if the Pacific Ocean was suddenly teleported to the surface of Mars?
Added Aug 5, 2015
Your answer to Was this pile of code written by a single team of software engineers?
Added Aug 4, 2015
Added Aug 3, 2015
What Quora stats or lists (e.g., most active users, best recent answers) would users like to see?
Followed Aug 2, 2015
Your answer to How fast is Quora growing on a weekly basis? What are the growth metrics?
Added Aug 2, 2015
Your answer to Is a cheaper computer as good as the more expensive computers?
Added Aug 2, 2015
Your answer to What should be humanity's approach to exploring space and discovering alien races once we're able to travel to other planets?
Added Aug 1, 2015
Your answer to Are we technologically close to a feasible "von Neumann probe" for exploration?
Added Jul 31, 2015
Added Jul 31, 2015
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Your answer to I just came up with an amazing theory. Where would I post that?
Added Jul 31, 2015
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Your answer to Which line of work or profession has had the most impact on the course of human history? Why?
Added Jul 30, 2015
Added Jul 29, 2015
Your answer to Death and Dying: What could kill us so quickly that we wouldn't even notice?
Added Jul 29, 2015
Your answer to Why don't ISS photos show any of the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth? Is it a matter of being in different orbits?
Added Jul 29, 2015
Your answer to Can Earth create self-assembling or self-replicating nanoparticles and nanorobots or assembly linear nanostructures naturally?
Added Jul 29, 2015
Added Jul 29, 2015
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to Do the best programmers use the fewest lines of code, as is consistent with my experience?
Added Jul 28, 2015
Added Jul 28, 2015
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to Does the Moon always rise in the East?
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to If we could harness 100% of the sunlight that earth receives in a day, is it enough to replace the fossil fuels consumed in a day?
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to Does anyone actually like or enjoy mathematics?
Added Jul 27, 2015
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to How do I convert Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to How can Pluto be called a "dwarf planet" if it's not a planet?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to Is it safe to pick up a meteorite with my bare hands?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to If NASA sent the most developed spaceship to Pluto right now, how long would it take them to reach Pluto?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to What are the chances that a solar system with four rocky planets would go haywire and destroy itself?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to Why do companies like Facebook and Uber need so many developers?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to Why has NASA so far not found alien artifacts on the worlds of the solar system?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Added Jul 25, 2015
Your answer to Why doesn't the New Horizons mission put the spacecraft into orbit around Pluto?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Added Jul 25, 2015
Your answer to Space Travel: Who is going to Mars next year, 2016? Or was it just media hype?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Your answer to Now that NASA has discovered Kepler-452b, is there any possibility to reach this planet considering that it's 1400 light years away?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to How similar is Kepler 452b to our Earth?
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to How can NASA be assured of potentially favourable living conditions just by looking at Kepler 452B?
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to How much can we learn about the new Kepler planet?
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to Is there a way to detect if there is intelligent life on Kepler-452b?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to How realistic is the book "The Martian"?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Our own moon will eventually escape Earth. Are any of the moons of other planets losing altitude, on course to collide?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that Pluto is heated by meteorite impacts?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Is there anything of worth on the planets in our solar system like gold or something like helium 3?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Is the sunlight on Pluto bright enough to read by?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to In how many years will we be able to construct viable Stanford toruses?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to In The Lord of the Rings (creative franchise), were Frodo and Sam gay?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to terraform just a portion of Mars by enclosing it in a dome?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to If a pen were able to draw in three dimensions, would there be any notable traceable patterns, e.g. Platonic solids?
Added Jul 15, 2015
Your answer to When did science determine that the Moon, Mars, and Venus were uninhabited?
Added Jul 4, 2015
Your answer to How does one read poetry aloud?
Added Jul 3, 2015
Your answer to Could our human eyes see normally on other planets or their moons?
Added Jul 2, 2015
Your answer to Is it true that NASA is building a city in Mars?
Added Jul 1, 2015
Your answer to Does Tom Bombadil even know who or what he is or has it been so long he forgot?
Added Jun 30, 2015
Your answer to How could/would the ISS be weaponized?
Added Jun 30, 2015
Your answer to Why are wyverns so much more popular than dragons in modern fantasy shows like Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and Lord of The Rings?
Added Jun 30, 2015
Your answer to How do lottery winners pick their numbers?
Added Jun 29, 2015
Your answer to What are some cultural faux pas when working as a member of the Fellowship of the Ring?
Added Jun 29, 2015
Added Jun 29, 2015
Added Jun 29, 2015
Your answer to Were any humans aboard the SpaceX CRS-7 rocket that exploded during ascent on June 28, 2015?
Added Jun 28, 2015
Your answer to How could we barely feel a 160 km/h wind on Mars because of its thin atmosphere?
Added Jun 28, 2015
Your answer to Could a Lake Vostok exist on Mars today?
Added Jun 28, 2015
Your answer to What would Mars be like if it was heated up enough to melt all its water ice and dry ice?
Added Jun 27, 2015
Your answer to Why did Tom Bombadil permit evil to exist in the Old Forest and Barrow-downs?
Added Jun 27, 2015
Your answer to Could the Rosetta Satellite, which is currently orbiting comet 67P, have a significant effect on that comet's orbit? Why or why not?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to What are the weirdest orbits or trajectories ever observed among celestial bodies?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if an asteroid hit earth while you were in a plane?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to How realistic is the book "The Martian"?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to How realistic is the book "The Martian"?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to What is the largest known solid object in the universe that isn't spherical or almost spherical?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to Politically, how will the Moon and Mars be colonized by humans?
Added Jun 25, 2015
Added Jun 25, 2015
Your answer to When astronauts go to Mars, will we be able to watch them on TV like we did with the moon landing?
Added Jun 25, 2015
Your answer to What are the odds that alien food from an Earth-type planet would kill us?
Added Jun 25, 2015
Your answer to How common is homelessness among Buddhists?
Added Jun 24, 2015
Your answer to Could the ring in 'Lord of the Rings' be destroyed on purpose?
Added Jun 23, 2015
Your answer to When is the next anticipated supernova that will be visible to the naked eye in daylight?
Added Jun 23, 2015
Your answer to Are there any pictures taken by Curiosity of Deimos and Phobos showing up in the sky at the same time? In case there is not, why?
Added Jun 23, 2015
Your answer to Why hasn't anyone made an "analog" computer, where 0.5 could equal both on/off like a quantum computer?
Added Jun 22, 2015
Added Jun 21, 2015
Your answer to What do religions say about life on other planets?
Added Jun 20, 2015
Your answer to How and why are planets spherical? What makes them round?
Added Jun 18, 2015
Your answer to How long ago did the moon begin to form?
Added Jun 18, 2015
Your answer to Will the asteroid mining by private companies be regulated by "Outer Space Treaty" (or any other international agreement)?
Added Jun 17, 2015
Your answer to If there is an icy part of Mars, then why do scientists seem to have a problem with producing water on the Red Planet?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Your answer to Why is it so hard to create a human-like AI?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Your answer to How big would a meteorite have to be in order to be a "planet killer"?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Added Jun 14, 2015
Your answer to What will Philae do now? Will it explore the surface like a rover, or remain stationary indefinitely?
Added Jun 14, 2015
Added Jun 14, 2015
Your answer to What in layman's terms is Russell's Paradox?
Added Jun 13, 2015
Your answer to How reliable or practical would it be to use liquid mirror telescope in zero gravity?
Added Jun 11, 2015
Your answer to Might there be life on other planets but we just can't see it?
Added Jun 10, 2015
Your answer to How hard would it be for a rogue nation to start a Kessler syndrome event?
Added Jun 10, 2015
Your answer to What is LightSail's apparent magnitude?
Added Jun 9, 2015
Your answer to What are some innovative uses for the Molniya orbit?
Added Jun 8, 2015
Your answer to Does the fact that we can see (with naked eye) only a few thousand stars have any significance for Olbers' paradox?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to If the planet earth stopped producing oxygen, for how long could life exist?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Could a probe be put in orbit around a Martian moon by amateurs using a few cubesat launches?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to turn the moon into a spaceship and have all the humans live on it?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Can you de-orbit a tennis ball (or baseball) by hand from the ISS during EVA?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Should we visit Europa?
Added Jun 3, 2015
Your answer to Is Morgellons a real disease?
Added May 30, 2015
Your answer to Could an asteroid strike change the rotation of the Earth to spin in the opposite direction?
Added May 29, 2015
Your answer to Other than navigational, solar flare, ozone layer, and power grid dangers, what will happen when the magnetic poles shift?
Added May 29, 2015
Your answer to Is there any strong scientific evidence on this prediction about the 9.5 earthquake to hit California on May 28th, 2015?
Added May 28, 2015
Your answer to How and why are planets spherical? What makes them round?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Can a planet have an orbit shaped like a figure 8?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Would it be arrogant to refer to one of my findings as a theorem in my paper?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to have life within the Earth's core?
Added May 25, 2015
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to If I have a regular mediation practice, does that make me a Buddhist?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Is the hype surrounding the upcoming "Four Blood Moons" limited to Christians, or is it of secular interest as well?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to How often do solar storms occur? Can they hit earth or cause harm to use?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Why didn't the universe collapse into a black hole just seconds after the Big Bang? I imagine it was very dense at that moment.
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to What are the chances of Asteroid 2012 TT5 hitting the Earth on September 24, 2015?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to When looking at a planet like Mars, is there 0% life or are there microorganisms like Earth's germs?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to Can tardigrades survive on Mars?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to What is the concept of retrograde planets? Does it mean the planet becomes stronger or does the planet impact opposite to its nature?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to Meteorites: Should we urgently take measures to make it easy to spot a meteor about to impact Earth?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to Are there gliders that can be flown at night?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to How was all the perchlorate on Mars formed?
Added May 23, 2015
Added May 22, 2015
Your answer to Would a Rover mission to Venus be possible with current technology?
Added May 22, 2015
Your answer to Is it easier to colonize the surface of Mars or the cloud tops of Venus?
Added May 22, 2015
Your answer to If and when we colonize Mars, how will we prevent contaminating the planet with our own bacteria and microbial life?
Added May 21, 2015
Added May 20, 2015
Your answer to As the universe had an origin and a finite size, how can it now be infinite?
Added May 20, 2015
Added May 19, 2015
Added May 19, 2015
Your answer to Why are goto, break and continue statements bad in computer science?
Added May 18, 2015
Your answer to If we were sitting on Pluto looking towards Earth, would we be able to see our planet with an unaided eye?
Added May 17, 2015
Your answer to Are we inside a black hole?
Added May 17, 2015
Your answer to If you stand on the moon, can you see its surface curving?
Added May 17, 2015
Your answer to At what altitude is there no orbital decay?
Added May 16, 2015
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to Can a planet have a diamond as its center?
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to When will we have high resolution photos of Pluto from the New Horizons Mission?
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to What is a black hole made of?
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to Would a car accelerating to the escape velocity of the earth fly off?
Added May 14, 2015
Your answer to Does the Dalai Lama speak for all Buddhists?
Added May 14, 2015
Your answer to If earth were spinning faster than its escape velocity what would happen?
Added May 13, 2015
Your answer to How and why are planets spherical? What makes them round?
Added May 13, 2015
Your answer to Why does the moon appear in random places?
Added May 13, 2015
Your answer to Is it physically possible for a moon (not ours) to orbit a double-planet system?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to Could an Earth-like planet have a sizeable moon in a geosynchronous orbit?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to Is this website to be trusted about an asteroid striking earth on May 14th of this year?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to Where do Buddhists get their robes?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if we fired all nuclear missiles on earth at the sun?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to What is the most likely death of the Earth? Is it the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies colliding, or is it the sun dying and expanding?
Added May 11, 2015
Added May 10, 2015
Your answer to What are the odds that a viable population of humankind will escape to another planet before the earth becomes uninhabitable?
Added May 10, 2015
Your answer to Does Mars have a blue sky?
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to How deep would you have to bury a Mars or lunar colony in order to protect it from solar radiation?
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to Is there wind on Mars?
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to How do developers retain so much knowledge?
Added May 9, 2015
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to Why doesn't our moon have Trojan satellites, much like the Trojan asteroids leading and following Jupiter?
Added May 8, 2015
Your answer to Why is the moon often visible during the day?
Added May 8, 2015
Added May 7, 2015
Your answer to What will happen if Russia denies the US use of the Soyuz, which is currently required to access the International Space Station?
Added May 6, 2015
Your answer to Roughly, how many lifetimes would it take to be a mathematical universalist?
Added May 6, 2015
Your answer to Are you slow when it takes more than 10 seconds to respond to someone's question?
Added May 5, 2015
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to How can I produce sounds of musical instruments using Fourier series?
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to In this scenario, what would happen to the moon (and the astronaut)?
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to Why do Tibetan Buddhists visualize deities?
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to When will Mercury collide with the Sun?
Added May 5, 2015
Added May 4, 2015
Your answer to Are there any stars that will come close to our solar system in the future?
Added May 3, 2015
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to What kinds of technologies are currently used to deflect asteroids?
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to Why is unmanned exploration prefered to manned exploration?
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to If there is life in the universe, how do we explain the so far failure of SETI to find it?
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to What is an EmDrive?
Added May 2, 2015
Your answer to How were martian canyons formed?
Added May 2, 2015
Your answer to What are the chances of Asteroid 2012 TT5 hitting the Earth on September 24, 2015?
Added May 2, 2015
Added Apr 29, 2015
Added Apr 28, 2015
Your answer to Would mankind attempt to recover a Voyager type spacecraft from another world if it entered our solar system?
Added Apr 28, 2015
Your answer to Why are Quorans so stingy about giving upvotes? Doesn’t more participation make us a better community? Why not upvote?
Added Apr 27, 2015
Added Apr 27, 2015
Your answer to How long will it take us to be able to send robots to planets like Kepler 438b,"earth's twin", which is 470 light years away?
Added Apr 27, 2015
Your answer to Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001 movie): How do goblins climb along the walls and ceilings of Moria?
Added Apr 27, 2015
Your answer to Is there any video of Mars? If not, why?
Added Apr 26, 2015
Added Apr 26, 2015
Your answer to If NASA said that in a decade that they will prove that life exists on other planets, then what do they really know now?
Added Apr 24, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if someone took off his space suit in the Martian atmosphere?
Added Apr 21, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to see lightning from the ISS?
Added Apr 21, 2015
Your answer to How if Saturn became our moon?
Added Apr 19, 2015
Your answer to Do moons have moons?
Added Apr 17, 2015
Your answer to What are some teachings for me?
Added Apr 17, 2015
Your answer to How is the picture of our Milky Way galaxy taken from the outside if we are inside the galaxy?
Added Apr 16, 2015
Your answer to How is the picture of our Milky Way galaxy taken from the outside if we are inside the galaxy?
Added Apr 16, 2015
Added Apr 15, 2015
The mathematics of sloth canon number sequences and Per Nørgård's infinity series
Added Apr 13, 2015
Added Apr 12, 2015
Your answer to Would the US be lawfully allowed to claim Mars?
Added Apr 12, 2015
Your answer to What is the procedure for dealing with astronauts that die in space?
Added Apr 10, 2015
Your answer to Why are some spacecraft required to launch vertically while others can launch horizontally?
Added Apr 9, 2015
Your answer to What building materials would we use to build buildings on Ceres?
Added Apr 6, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible for human beings to adapt to new planets like Mars? If so, how long will it take?
Added Apr 5, 2015
Your answer to How difficult is it to colonize the entire Galaxy and still have full governance over it when FTL technology is non-existent?
Added Apr 5, 2015
Your answer to In your school of Buddhism, is time beginningless?
Added Apr 4, 2015
Your answer to Dependent origination: since everything is a result of dependent origination, there is nothing which appears accidentally, right?
Added Apr 2, 2015
Your answer to How much does it cost per minute to keep an astronaut alive in space?
Added Apr 2, 2015
Added Apr 1, 2015
Your answer to What is the other habitable planet for humanity in case we blow up the earth?
Added Mar 31, 2015
Your answer to Why is there a greater emphasis to colonize Mars instead of the Moon?
Added Mar 31, 2015
Your answer to Why were Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson all opposed to SpaceX?
Added Mar 31, 2015
Your answer to Space Colonization: Would it be possible to build machines that replicate themselves with just the materials around them?
Added Mar 29, 2015
Added Mar 29, 2015
Your answer to How do Mars rovers stay upright on their wheels in severe storms? Has there ever been any incident where something toppled the rovers?
Added Mar 28, 2015
Added Mar 28, 2015
Life of the Buddha according to the sutras
Added Mar 27, 2015
Your answer to Did Gandalf actually believe that Frodo had been captured when the Mouth of Sauron showed him the mithril shirt and Sam's blade?
Added Mar 26, 2015
Your answer to Is the ISS finished? What are future plans for it? Could it ever double as a spaceship? Why wasn't it build this way from the start?
Added Mar 26, 2015
Added Mar 26, 2015
Your answer to Do enlightened people get hungry?
Added Mar 25, 2015
Your answer to Are the Curiosity and Opportunity mars rovers scheduled to meet each other?
Added Mar 23, 2015
Your answer to Some Buddhists believe in rebirth. If there is "no self" or "no soul", then for these Buddhists what is being reborn?
Added Mar 23, 2015
Added Mar 22, 2015
Your answer to It is possible to create a circle using cellular automata?
Added Mar 21, 2015
Your answer to Are there any Buddhists who believe in Atman or True Self?
Added Mar 21, 2015
Added Mar 21, 2015
Your answer to Could the Mars rover have contaminated Mars with earth based life forms?
Added Mar 20, 2015
Your answer to Is there evidence that Siddhartha Gautama is a real historical person?
Added Mar 19, 2015
Your answer to Aurora Borealis: Why is Antarctic Auroral Oval always off center over the South Pole?
Added Mar 19, 2015
Your answer to If we colonize other planets, will we eventually reach a point where wars of independence will become common again?
Added Mar 18, 2015
Your answer to Do we have to give up fighting for what is right if we follow the Buddhist precept of letting go of attachment and desire?
Added Mar 18, 2015
Added Mar 18, 2015
Your answer to Can the modern adult truly be a Buddhist?
Added Mar 17, 2015
Your answer to What if something like a small meteorite or debris penetrated the ISS?
Added Mar 17, 2015
Added Mar 17, 2015
Your answer to Was Steve Jobs a Buddhist? Did he meditate every day?
Added Mar 17, 2015
Your answer to How hard would it be to grow food on Mars?
Added Mar 16, 2015
Your answer to How many habitable planets can you fit in a solar system?
Added Mar 16, 2015
Your answer to If scientists were to send an orbiter to Mars, how would the features and technology on board be different, in comparison to the ISS?
Added Mar 16, 2015
Your answer to Why don't we send a rover back to the moon?
Added Mar 15, 2015
Your answer to What are some theories on why we haven't been visited by aliens yet?
Added Mar 13, 2015
Your answer to Is terraforming bioethically irresponsible?
Added Mar 13, 2015
Added Mar 13, 2015
Added Mar 12, 2015
Your answer to Would it be harder to dig underground tunnels on the Moon or on Mars?
Added Mar 11, 2015
Your answer to Can a Buddhist be aggressive or assertive when it is appropriate?
Added Mar 10, 2015
Your answer to How can a Buddhist have a relationship if that creates attachment?
Added Mar 8, 2015
Your answer to What is the historical proof that Buddha actually taught the Middle Way?
Added Mar 8, 2015
Your answer to Would the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 hold up today?
Added Mar 8, 2015
Magic at the Heart of the Buddha's Teachings - Two Kinds of Truth
Added Mar 7, 2015
Your answer to Could I make a profit by going to the moon with Golden Spike and bringing back a barrel of Helium 3?
Added Mar 6, 2015
Your answer to Buddhist philosophy states that all suffering is caused by attachment. However, is it possible to live a life without any attachment?
Added Mar 5, 2015
Your answer to Does Tibetan Buddhism involve animal sacrifice?
Added Mar 4, 2015
Your answer to A great part of the Bible and the Buddhist scriptures are fabricated by later people, so how can we believe them?
Added Mar 3, 2015
Your answer to Is Buddhism the only religion that believes in life outside of the earth?
Added Mar 2, 2015
Your answer to What way into Mordor would have been better (safer) than Minas Ithil and the pass of Cirith Ungol?
Added Mar 1, 2015
Your answer to Would people born and raised on Mars be able to withstand Earth's gravity?
Added Feb 28, 2015
Your answer to Can a Japanese monk get married?
Added Feb 28, 2015
Your answer to Besides Buddhism, what other atheistic religions exist?
Added Feb 27, 2015
Your answer to What provisions did the Apollo astronauts have if the lunar rover irretrievably broke down while they were out driving it?
Added Feb 27, 2015
Your answer to Why are the Rosetta maneuvers so extreme?
Added Feb 24, 2015
Your answer to Why doesn't NASA build a Mars spaceship in orbit, the same way they built the space station?
Added Feb 24, 2015
Added Feb 23, 2015
Added Feb 21, 2015
Your answer to Whom would you send on Mars One?
Added Feb 21, 2015
Added Feb 21, 2015
Your answer to What do you guys think of the finalists who are ready to die on Mars?
Added Feb 19, 2015
Your answer to Why has NASA not changed the spacesuits?
Added Feb 19, 2015
Your answer to Do Buddhists have a higher external locus of control or a higher internal locus of control?
Added Feb 19, 2015
Your answer to Why do people choose Buddhism? What does Buddhism provide? Where do the other religions fall short?
Added Feb 18, 2015
Your answer to Is Tibetan Buddhism different from other types of Buddhism? If so, how?
Added Feb 18, 2015
Why Forests are not the "Lungs of the planet"
Added Feb 18, 2015
Your answer to What is the teaching of Buddhism about images and relationship with images?
Added Feb 13, 2015
Your answer to What is the Buddhist answer to the state of mind which is related to 'feeling lonely'?
Added Feb 13, 2015
Your answer to If either SpaceX or Mars One were to overcome technological challenges to colonizing Mars, what political challenges would stop them?
Added Feb 10, 2015
Your answer to Could computers do astronauts' jobs at the ISS?
Added Feb 1, 2015
Your answer to What made the Dalai Lama capable of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?
Added Jan 31, 2015
Your answer to Who owns the planets of our Solar System? Are the planets anyone's property?
Added Jan 30, 2015
Your answer to Should a Buddhist be proud of being a Buddhist? If not, what?
Added Jan 27, 2015
Your answer to What are the bad things about Great Britain?
Added Jan 26, 2015
Your answer to Why do space explorations go horizontally along the plane of the ecliptic and not vertically, perpendicular to the ecliptic?
Added Jan 26, 2015
Origins of the Buddhist Sutras - were they the Teachings of the Buddha?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to Can the Beagle 2 be remotely repaired if one of the future Mars rovers manages to travel to its location?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to How would an asteroid collision affect Mars?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to Will the fear of exterminating any potential life native to Mars prevent us from ever colonizing the planet?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to How much does it cost to ferry an astronaut to the International Space Station?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to What are the genuine flaws in Buddhism, if any?
Added Jan 24, 2015
Your answer to Why is Elon Musk so obsessed with Mars? Who would want to go there?
Added Jan 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the most pernicious and persistent myth about The Lord of the Rings that is believed by people who have seen Peter Jackson's movies but haven't read the books?
Added Jan 20, 2015
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Jan 15, 2015
Your answer to What do Buddhists think of consuming meat and drinking alcohol?
Added Jan 15, 2015
Your answer to Excluding The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, why is Tolkien's work so dull?
Added Jan 13, 2015
Your answer to Do Tibetans want to be a part of China?
Added Jan 9, 2015
Your answer to Does Buddhism involve individualism as much as Western practitioners assume it does?
Added Jan 9, 2015
Your answer to Is "Buddhistic temple" acceptable English?
Added Jan 9, 2015
Your answer to How can I save myself from being reincarnated in the Tibetan Buddhist hell realms?
Added Jan 7, 2015
Added Jan 6, 2015
Your answer to Are the Tibetan people better off under Chinese communism compared to the past?
Added Jan 6, 2015
Your answer to What will happen after the current Dalai Lama dies?
Added Jan 6, 2015
Added Jan 5, 2015
Your answer to Are there any ideas or speculations as to where the water went on Mars?
Added Jan 4, 2015
Your answer to Does Mars have water?
Added Jan 3, 2015
Your answer to Should the Chinese Government control the succession of the Dalai Lama?
Added Jan 3, 2015
Your answer to Do Gödel's theorems imply that there are limits to the laws of physics?
Added Jan 3, 2015
Your answer to Would Tibetan Buddhism lose some of its credibility if the Dalai Lama abandons the tradition of reincarnation?
Added Jan 2, 2015
Your answer to Is Mars' Curiosity rover designed to study anything biological or living?
Added Dec 26, 2014
Six Urban Legends - the Western Doom and Gloom idea of Karma
Added Dec 22, 2014
Six Urban Legends - the Western Doom and Gloom idea of Karma
Added Dec 19, 2014
Your answer to What will be next step by NASA if we discover water and methane on Mars?
Added Dec 18, 2014
Added Dec 17, 2014
Your answer to What are the biggest technical problems with nuclear thermal propulsion systems?
Added Dec 17, 2014
Your answer to Does Jupiter's moon Europa have encouraging signs of life?
Added Dec 13, 2014
Your answer to How can I calculate the ratio of Si to O atoms in SiO2, or the empirical formula of it, based on its structure?
Added Dec 12, 2014
Your answer to I've seen a picture in which Dalai Lama converses with Carl Sagan about the universe, any details?
Added Dec 12, 2014
Your answer to What would be the most profitable activity on Mars that would justify its colonization?
Added Dec 10, 2014
Which is more likely to first be colonized by settlements of millions of humans, Antarctica or Mars?
Followed Dec 8, 2014
Your answer to Which is more likely to first be colonized by settlements of millions of humans, Antarctica or Mars?
Added Dec 8, 2014
Your answer to Are there intervals in Eastern music using the eleventh harmonic, such as the neutral third 11/9?
Added Dec 7, 2014
Where is the fallacy in the following argument?
Followed Dec 6, 2014
Your answer to Where is the fallacy in the following argument?
Added Dec 6, 2014
Are there intervals in Eastern music using the eleventh harmonic, such as the neutral third 11/9?
Asked Dec 5, 2014
What is the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism?
Followed Dec 5, 2014
Your answer to What is the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism?
Added Dec 5, 2014
Followed Dec 4, 2014
Your answer to How close to us would an Earth-like planet have to be for its settlement to be economically viable, using current technology?
Added Dec 4, 2014
How much of the detectable information coming to earth from space is SETI detecting and recording?
Followed Dec 3, 2014
Your answer to How much of the detectable information coming to earth from space is SETI detecting and recording?
Added Dec 3, 2014
What is the British way of typing numbers?
Followed Dec 3, 2014
Your answer to What is the British way of typing numbers?
Added Dec 3, 2014
Followed Dec 2, 2014
Your answer to Why do we find the number 10 (and its multiples) such a satisfactory benchmark number and its arithmetic application so simple?
Added Dec 2, 2014
Followed Dec 2, 2014
Added Dec 2, 2014
Followed Dec 1, 2014
Your answer to Are airships useful on Mars?
Added Dec 1, 2014
Are there serious doubts from scientists about the descent of man on the moon?
Followed Nov 30, 2014
Your answer to Are there serious doubts from scientists about the descent of man on the moon?
Added Nov 30, 2014
Is moon Europa all ice and water, or is there any rocky surface there too?
Followed Nov 30, 2014
Your answer to Is moon Europa all ice and water, or is there any rocky surface there too?
Added Nov 30, 2014
What is the cheapest, legitimate, and realistic manned mission to Mars proposal on record?
Followed Nov 29, 2014
Your answer to What is the cheapest, legitimate, and realistic manned mission to Mars proposal on record?
Added Nov 29, 2014
Wrong View - that Intention = Karma in Buddhism
Added Nov 28, 2014
Followed Nov 27, 2014
Added Nov 27, 2014
Why you often can't do anything in a wikipedia content dispute
Added Nov 26, 2014
Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, on issues arising from introduction of Buddhism into the West
Added Nov 26, 2014
Recently Destroyed Wikipedia Articles on Karma in Buddhism and the Four Noble Truths by Dorje108
Added Nov 26, 2014
Is there a viable business model for a permanent Mars colony?
Followed Nov 24, 2014
Your answer to Is there a viable business model for a permanent Mars colony?
Added Nov 24, 2014
Followed Nov 24, 2014
Added Nov 24, 2014
Followed Nov 23, 2014
Your answer to In what succession of concrete steps should we colonize and ultimately terraform Mars, according to current science?
Added Nov 23, 2014
When will there be a mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter, to check for life?
Followed Nov 23, 2014
Your answer to When will there be a mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter, to check for life?
Added Nov 23, 2014
Which is more important to the private space race, colonization or commercialization of space?
Followed Nov 22, 2014
Your answer to Which is more important to the private space race, colonization or commercialization of space?
Added Nov 22, 2014
Followed Nov 20, 2014
Your answer to What other space exploration surprises await us that are 10+ years in the making, similar to Rosetta?
Added Nov 20, 2014
What should I do when I get stuck on a mathematical problem?
Followed Nov 16, 2014
Your answer to What should I do when I get stuck on a mathematical problem?
Added Nov 16, 2014
What makes Mars more interesting than the Moon?
Followed Nov 16, 2014
Your answer to What makes Mars more interesting than the Moon?
Added Nov 16, 2014
Why do people want to settle on Mars?
Followed Nov 13, 2014
Your answer to Why do people want to settle on Mars?
Added Nov 13, 2014
How exactly does Rosetta communicate with the earth?
Followed Nov 12, 2014
Your answer to How exactly does Rosetta communicate with the earth?
Added Nov 12, 2014
What are the green lasers I see in simulated footage showing the Rosetta mission?
Followed Nov 12, 2014
Your answer to What are the green lasers I see in simulated footage showing the Rosetta mission?
Added Nov 12, 2014
Will there be a mission like Apollo 10 before actually landing on Mars?
Followed Nov 10, 2014
Your answer to Will there be a mission like Apollo 10 before actually landing on Mars?
Added Nov 10, 2014
Your answer to Is it fair to compare Tibet under Dalai Lama to the Confederacy?
Added Nov 9, 2014
Followed Nov 8, 2014
Your answer to What is the likelihood humans will ever achieve interstellar space travel? Given we don't kill ourselves off first.
Added Nov 8, 2014
What is the best way to deal with combative or condescending editors on Wikipedia?
Followed Nov 8, 2014
Your answer to What is the best way to deal with combative or condescending editors on Wikipedia?
Added Nov 8, 2014
Added Nov 6, 2014
Tolkein, Lord of the Rings etc
Added Nov 6, 2014
Buddhism, Meditation, Tibet, the Dalai Lama
Added Nov 6, 2014
Added Nov 6, 2014
Added Nov 6, 2014
Computers, Artificial Intelligence, and Programming
Added Nov 6, 2014
Added Nov 6, 2014
Added Nov 6, 2014
★
If one meditates all one's waking hours as (some) Buddhist monks do, isn't one throwing away one's life?
Added Nov 6, 2014
Followed Nov 3, 2014
Added Nov 3, 2014
Followed Nov 3, 2014
Added Nov 3, 2014
What are the real primary colours?
Followed Nov 3, 2014
Your answer to What are the real primary colours?
Added Nov 3, 2014
Mars (planet): Why isn't the light red in this picture?
Followed Nov 2, 2014
Your answer to Mars (planet): Why isn't the light red in this picture?
Added Nov 2, 2014
Followed Oct 31, 2014
Your answer to What reasons do beginners have to be cautious of trying new meditation techniques without guided training?
Added Oct 31, 2014
How many years down the line would living on Mars become possible?
Followed Oct 30, 2014
Your answer to How many years down the line would living on Mars become possible?
Added Oct 30, 2014
How much would it cost for humans to build a habitable space craft comparable to Earth?
Followed Oct 30, 2014
Your answer to How much would it cost for humans to build a habitable space craft comparable to Earth?
Added Oct 30, 2014
Could a cockroach survive on Mars?
Followed Oct 29, 2014
Your answer to Could a cockroach survive on Mars?
Added Oct 29, 2014
In Lord of the Rings, who is the "Lord"?
Followed Oct 28, 2014
Your answer to In Lord of the Rings, who is the "Lord"?
Added Oct 28, 2014
Added Oct 28, 2014
Has NASA purposefully sent any life forms to other planets?
Followed Oct 28, 2014
Your answer to Has NASA purposefully sent any life forms to other planets?
Added Oct 28, 2014
Followed Oct 27, 2014
Added Oct 27, 2014
If the Dalai Lama is peaceful, why is he ignoring Rohingya prosecution?
Followed Oct 26, 2014
Your answer to If the Dalai Lama is peaceful, why is he ignoring Rohingya prosecution?
Added Oct 26, 2014
What is the religion of China? If it's Buddhism, then why is China against the Dalai Lama?
Followed Oct 25, 2014
Your answer to What is the religion of China? If it's Buddhism, then why is China against the Dalai Lama?
Added Oct 25, 2014
Why do we never see any videos from NASA missions, but only pictures or animations?
Followed Oct 23, 2014
Your answer to Why do we never see any videos from NASA missions, but only pictures or animations?
Added Oct 23, 2014
Followed Oct 23, 2014
Added Oct 23, 2014
How did the Mars orbiters maneuver their orbits to hide behind Mars when the comet was approaching?
Followed Oct 20, 2014
Your answer to How did the Mars orbiters maneuver their orbits to hide behind Mars when the comet was approaching?
Added Oct 20, 2014
Will space travel to Mars be affordable in our lifetimes?
Followed Oct 20, 2014
Your answer to Will space travel to Mars be affordable in our lifetimes?
Added Oct 20, 2014
Your answer to If NASA really went to the moon, why don't they prove it to people who disbelieve them?
Added Oct 20, 2014
Why does Elon Musk want to send us to Mars?
Followed Oct 19, 2014
Your answer to Why does Elon Musk want to send us to Mars?
Added Oct 19, 2014
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Oct 19, 2014
Why are tides caused by the Moon rather than the Sun?"
Followed Oct 19, 2014
Your answer to Why are tides caused by the Moon rather than the Sun?"
Added Oct 19, 2014
Who wants to go to mars in 2020?
Followed Oct 18, 2014
Your answer to Who wants to go to mars in 2020?
Added Oct 18, 2014
What were the most pointless/useless space missions in history?
Followed Oct 18, 2014
Your answer to What were the most pointless/useless space missions in history?
Added Oct 18, 2014
Why do Tibetan Monks stare indirectly at the Sun, and what does it mean to them?
Followed Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to Why do Tibetan Monks stare indirectly at the Sun, and what does it mean to them?
Added Oct 17, 2014
Followed Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to What are some current issues with planetary rovers such as the Curiosity that NASA and others would like to improve upon?
Added Oct 17, 2014
Is it possible to be spiritually enlightened and stupid?
Followed Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to Is it possible to be spiritually enlightened and stupid?
Added Oct 17, 2014
Followed Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to If one meditates all one's waking hours as (some) Buddhist monks do, isn't one throwing away one's life?
Added Oct 17, 2014
When will the Earth become like Mars?
Followed Oct 16, 2014
Your answer to When will the Earth become like Mars?
Added Oct 16, 2014
Is life possible on a planet which isn't orbiting a star?
Followed Oct 15, 2014
Your answer to Is life possible on a planet which isn't orbiting a star?
Added Oct 15, 2014
Followed Oct 15, 2014
Your answer to Is it time to send a Voyager 3 space probe with a mission mandate of better exploration of interstellar space?
Added Oct 15, 2014
What is the most likely planet to be colonized after Mars and the Moon?
Followed Oct 14, 2014
Your answer to What is the most likely planet to be colonized after Mars and the Moon?
Added Oct 14, 2014
Followed Oct 13, 2014
Your answer to After we're done terraforming Mars, what crops should we choose that would have the best nutrient yield and fastest growth rates?
Added Oct 13, 2014
Followed Oct 12, 2014
Your answer to Who owns Mars?
Added Oct 12, 2014
Your answer to Elon Musk wants to send one million people to Mars. Can he do it?
Added Oct 12, 2014
Followed Oct 12, 2014
Added Oct 12, 2014
Is there any other planet or moon besides Mars where humans can actually land?
Followed Oct 10, 2014
Your answer to Is there any other planet or moon besides Mars where humans can actually land?
Added Oct 10, 2014
What could be the pros and cons about proposed travel to, and settling down/living on, Mars?
Followed Oct 10, 2014
Your answer to What could be the pros and cons about proposed travel to, and settling down/living on, Mars?
Added Oct 10, 2014
Followed Oct 9, 2014
Added Oct 9, 2014
Are there any plans for terraforming Mars in the foreseeable future?
Followed Oct 9, 2014
Your answer to Are there any plans for terraforming Mars in the foreseeable future?
Added Oct 9, 2014
Are all modern computers built using Boole’s theorems? Why?
Followed Oct 9, 2014
Your answer to Are all modern computers built using Boole’s theorems? Why?
Added Oct 9, 2014
How long ago did the water on Mars disappear?
Followed Oct 7, 2014
Your answer to How long ago did the water on Mars disappear?
Added Oct 7, 2014
Followed Oct 7, 2014
Added Oct 7, 2014
What are the scientific ways to test to see if a person is enlightened?
Added Oct 6, 2014
What will travel to Mars be like?
Followed Oct 6, 2014
Your answer to What will travel to Mars be like?
Added Oct 6, 2014
Meditators in Interplanetary and Interstellar Spaceships
Added Oct 5, 2014
Lord of the Rings as online Google book - useful for searching for quotes
Added Oct 5, 2014
Followed Oct 5, 2014
Added Oct 5, 2014
Followed Oct 4, 2014
Added Oct 4, 2014
The Curious Case - Is This A Spirit or a Buddha?
Added Oct 3, 2014
Followed Oct 2, 2014
Added Oct 2, 2014
Suppressing Thoughts and the Mandala principle
Added Oct 1, 2014
Cave in the Snow: A Western Woman's Quest for Enlightenment
Added Oct 1, 2014
Yidams or "Tutelary deities" in Tibetan Buddhism - as "Medicine"
Added Sep 30, 2014
The Heart and Essence of the Buddhist Teachings
Added Sep 30, 2014
What gives Planetary Resources the right to mine asteroids in outer space?
Followed Sep 29, 2014
Your answer to What gives Planetary Resources the right to mine asteroids in outer space?
Added Sep 29, 2014
Why the Dalai Lama is not a Pope or Dictator
Added Sep 28, 2014
Followed Sep 27, 2014
Added Sep 27, 2014
Your answer to In The Lord of the Rings, why didn't Frodo just fly/ride some beast (e.g. the Eagles) to Mount Doom, or at least some of the way there?
Added Sep 27, 2014
Are there any plans for reducing the lag time when it comes to communicating with rovers on Mars?
Followed Sep 26, 2014
Your answer to Are there any plans for reducing the lag time when it comes to communicating with rovers on Mars?
Added Sep 26, 2014
So far as I've seen there are no caves on the Moon or Mars, what's with that?
Followed Sep 24, 2014
Your answer to So far as I've seen there are no caves on the Moon or Mars, what's with that?
Added Sep 24, 2014
If an event has a probability of happening does that mean it could happen?
Followed Sep 23, 2014
Your answer to If an event has a probability of happening does that mean it could happen?
Added Sep 23, 2014
What does it mean when people say "free Tibet"?
Followed Sep 22, 2014
Your answer to What does it mean when people say "free Tibet"?
Added Sep 22, 2014
Followed Sep 21, 2014
Added Sep 21, 2014
The much misunderstood idea of a "Guru" in Buddhism
Added Sep 18, 2014
Your answer to What is the best thing you can do at age 30 to benefit your life at age 50 and beyond?
Added Sep 18, 2014
How do you compose music? What is the process? And what do you wish you'd figured out long ago?
Followed Sep 18, 2014
Your answer to How do you compose music? What is the process? And what do you wish you'd figured out long ago?
Added Sep 18, 2014
Are there any current or planned attempts to try to contact intelligent extraterrestrial life?
Followed Sep 16, 2014
Your answer to Are there any current or planned attempts to try to contact intelligent extraterrestrial life?
Added Sep 16, 2014
Followed Sep 16, 2014
Your answer to When we say there is no life on Mars, doesn't it only mean that life do not exist there as we understand it?
Added Sep 16, 2014
Is it better for Quora that I answer any question I can or only the ones I really know?
Followed Sep 15, 2014
Your answer to Is it better for Quora that I answer any question I can or only the ones I really know?
Added Sep 15, 2014
Followed Sep 15, 2014
Added Sep 15, 2014
Followed Sep 15, 2014
Added Sep 15, 2014
Will various countries establishing permanent bases on the Moon lead to war?
Followed Sep 15, 2014
Your answer to Will various countries establishing permanent bases on the Moon lead to war?
Added Sep 15, 2014
Karma in the Buddha's teachings - how is Free Will possible in Buddhism?
Added Sep 14, 2014
Followed Sep 13, 2014
Added Sep 13, 2014
Followed Sep 12, 2014
Your answer to If NASA really wanted to could they have done a successful mars landing mission right after the apollo program?
Added Sep 12, 2014
Can we engineer an oxygen producing bacteria capable of surviving on Mars?
Followed Sep 11, 2014
Your answer to Can we engineer an oxygen producing bacteria capable of surviving on Mars?
Added Sep 11, 2014
Followed Sep 8, 2014
Added Sep 8, 2014
Can an astronaut jump to Mars or Jupiter?
Followed Sep 8, 2014
Your answer to Can an astronaut jump to Mars or Jupiter?
Added Sep 8, 2014
Followed Sep 8, 2014
Your answer to What would be the biggest challenges to building a hose that extends from the Earth to a space station to supply air, water, fuel, etc?
Added Sep 8, 2014
Followed Sep 7, 2014
Added Sep 7, 2014
Added Sep 7, 2014
Followed Sep 6, 2014
Added Sep 6, 2014
When did people start for the first time to prepare for space exploration?
Followed Sep 6, 2014
Your answer to When did people start for the first time to prepare for space exploration?
Added Sep 6, 2014
Is there any good reason to colonize space in the near-term future (i.e. next 100, 500 years)?
Followed Sep 5, 2014
Your answer to Is there any good reason to colonize space in the near-term future (i.e. next 100, 500 years)?
Added Sep 5, 2014
What space missions are currently in the works?
Followed Sep 5, 2014
Your answer to What space missions are currently in the works?
Added Sep 5, 2014
Followed Sep 5, 2014
Your answer to Hypothetically, could the ISS inject itself into lunar orbit with its current engines and fuel capacity?
Added Sep 5, 2014
Where will the first places outside Earth to be settled by humans be?
Followed Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Where will the first places outside Earth to be settled by humans be?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Does Peter Jackson's change of The Hobbit in the Desolation of Smaug anger Tolkien fans?
Followed Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Does Peter Jackson's change of The Hobbit in the Desolation of Smaug anger Tolkien fans?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Followed Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Is there Oxygen in Mars?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Added Sep 4, 2014
Why are “The Hobbit” movies considerably different from the book?
Followed Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Why are “The Hobbit” movies considerably different from the book?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Followed Sep 3, 2014
Your answer to Will self-driving cars be able to drive above the speed limit, or will speed limits be raised or abolished due to them?
Added Sep 3, 2014
Followed Sep 3, 2014
Your answer to Is it pity that pi is an irrational number? Does it mean there is something wrong about our understanding of mathematics?
Added Sep 3, 2014
Followed Sep 3, 2014
Your answer to Will Russia's actions in the Ukraine result in the US unilaterally stopping all cooperation with Soyuz flights and ISS operations?
Added Sep 3, 2014
Followed Sep 3, 2014
Added Sep 3, 2014
Followed Sep 3, 2014
Added Sep 3, 2014
Could any of our current winged aircrafts fly in Mars' thin atmosphere?
Followed Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to Could any of our current winged aircrafts fly in Mars' thin atmosphere?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Followed Sep 2, 2014
How does Voyager 1 and 2 still have enough fuel to continuously fly since the 70's?
Followed Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to How does Voyager 1 and 2 still have enough fuel to continuously fly since the 70's?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Why are Gödel's incompleteness theorems so misunderstood and abused?
Followed Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to Why are Gödel's incompleteness theorems so misunderstood and abused?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Followed Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to What are some proposed solution recommendations when building a lunar lander in pursuit of the Google XPRIZE?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Followed Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to Is mankind currently capable of sending a manned mission to orbit the moon (similar to Apollo 10's mission)?
Added Sep 1, 2014
Prove that Fn∣Fm⟺n∣m,∀n,m∈N,n≥3, where Fi is a Fibonacci number ∀i∈N0
Followed Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to Prove that Fn∣Fm⟺n∣m,∀n,m∈N,n≥3, where Fi is a Fibonacci number ∀i∈N0
Added Sep 1, 2014
Followed Sep 1, 2014
Added Sep 1, 2014
Followed Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to What is the longest time an astronaut can spend in space before it is too hard to re-acclimatize to Earth?
Added Sep 1, 2014
Followed Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to Are there more, fewer or the same number of numbers between zero and one as there are larger than one?
Added Sep 1, 2014
How might the mathematics of extra-terrestrials differ from our own?
Followed Aug 30, 2014
Your answer to How might the mathematics of extra-terrestrials differ from our own?
Added Aug 30, 2014
Followed Aug 29, 2014
Added Aug 29, 2014
Followed Aug 29, 2014
Your answer to If mathematics is, at its core, inconsistent, does that mean that the Universe itself is, at its core, inconsistent?
Added Aug 29, 2014
Can I get a metronome that guesses the tempo when I'm playing?
Followed Aug 28, 2014
Your answer to Can I get a metronome that guesses the tempo when I'm playing?
Added Aug 28, 2014
Followed Aug 27, 2014
Added Aug 27, 2014
Let's say someone proves the twin prime conjecture. What should he/she do with it?
Followed Aug 27, 2014
Your answer to Let's say someone proves the twin prime conjecture. What should he/she do with it?
Added Aug 27, 2014
What are concepts in other languages for which there is no English word/phrase?
Followed Aug 26, 2014
Your answer to What are concepts in other languages for which there is no English word/phrase?
Added Aug 26, 2014
Followed Aug 25, 2014
Added Aug 25, 2014
Why do so many people think they are smarter than Elon Musk?
Followed Aug 25, 2014
Your answer to Why do so many people think they are smarter than Elon Musk?
Added Aug 25, 2014
Followed Aug 25, 2014
Your answer to Should every programmer or coder be able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide two-digit numbers on the fly?
Added Aug 25, 2014
When will we be able to confirm or deny if Jupiter's moon Europa has life?
Followed Aug 24, 2014
Your answer to When will we be able to confirm or deny if Jupiter's moon Europa has life?
Added Aug 24, 2014
Can satellites orbit the Earth over a fixed geographical location?
Followed Aug 24, 2014
Your answer to Can satellites orbit the Earth over a fixed geographical location?
Added Aug 24, 2014
India's mission on Mars: Will a budget of INR 450 crore suffice to take a man on Mars?
Followed Aug 24, 2014
Your answer to India's mission on Mars: Will a budget of INR 450 crore suffice to take a man on Mars?
Added Aug 24, 2014
Followed Aug 24, 2014
Your answer to If we are able to send earth life and extremophiles to other planets or moons so they can reproduce, should we?
Added Aug 24, 2014
Followed Aug 23, 2014
Added Aug 23, 2014
Can anybody with the right equipment mine an asteroid?
Followed Aug 23, 2014
Your answer to Can anybody with the right equipment mine an asteroid?
Added Aug 23, 2014
Did man really land on the moon?
Followed Aug 23, 2014
Your answer to Did man really land on the moon?
Added Aug 23, 2014
Are there any organisms on Earth which could live and propagate on another body in our solar system?
Followed Aug 22, 2014
Your answer to Are there any organisms on Earth which could live and propagate on another body in our solar system?
Added Aug 22, 2014
Why wasn't the ISS designed as a rotating wheel space station?
Followed Aug 20, 2014
Your answer to Why wasn't the ISS designed as a rotating wheel space station?
Added Aug 20, 2014
Followed Aug 20, 2014
Added Aug 20, 2014
Followed Aug 19, 2014
Your answer to Why didn't man go to Mars?
Added Aug 19, 2014
Followed Aug 19, 2014
Your answer to Would a space elevator significantly change the Earth's center of gravity or rate of spin? Would the length of days change?
Added Aug 19, 2014
Why don't we use a system similar to a railgun to accelerate space ships to escape velocity?
Followed Aug 19, 2014
Your answer to Why don't we use a system similar to a railgun to accelerate space ships to escape velocity?
Added Aug 19, 2014
Followed Aug 19, 2014
Added Aug 19, 2014
Is there a number that cannot be expressed in any way due to limitations of our universe?
Followed Aug 18, 2014
Your answer to Is there a number that cannot be expressed in any way due to limitations of our universe?
Added Aug 18, 2014
Followed Aug 18, 2014
Added Aug 18, 2014
Is there a Russian equivalent to NASA's Voyager space probes?
Followed Aug 17, 2014
Your answer to Is there a Russian equivalent to NASA's Voyager space probes?
Added Aug 17, 2014
Followed Aug 17, 2014
Your answer to It is possible to adapt the atmosphere of Mars for the existence of life similar to Earth over a period of 100 years?
Added Aug 17, 2014
Your answer to If the earth is rotating at a high speed and we jump up, why doesn't the earth move below us at high speed?
Added Aug 17, 2014
Followed Aug 17, 2014
Added Aug 17, 2014
What is the significance of prime numbers?
Followed Aug 16, 2014
Your answer to What is the significance of prime numbers?
Added Aug 16, 2014
Followed Aug 16, 2014
Added Aug 16, 2014
Followed Aug 16, 2014
Added Aug 16, 2014
Followed Aug 16, 2014
Your answer to If the earth is rotating at a high speed and we jump up, why doesn't the earth move below us at high speed?
Added Aug 16, 2014
Followed Aug 14, 2014
Added Aug 14, 2014
Could diamonds potentially be found on Mars?
Followed Aug 14, 2014
Your answer to Could diamonds potentially be found on Mars?
Added Aug 14, 2014
Followed Aug 14, 2014
Your answer to Does Mars have any moons?
Added Aug 14, 2014
Why do we make an effort not to contaminate other planets with Earth life?
Followed Aug 13, 2014
Your answer to Why do we make an effort not to contaminate other planets with Earth life?
Added Aug 13, 2014
What is the oldest mathematical conjecture?
Followed Aug 12, 2014
Your answer to What is the oldest mathematical conjecture?
Added Aug 12, 2014
Followed Aug 12, 2014
Your answer to If humans were to setup a civilization on Mars, would flying cars be realistic considering the gravity there is 38% that of Earth?
Added Aug 12, 2014
What has Great Britain (UK) achieved with regards to space exploration?
Followed Aug 12, 2014
Your answer to What has Great Britain (UK) achieved with regards to space exploration?
Added Aug 12, 2014
How long will it be until humans have space ships like in Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar, etc?
Followed Aug 11, 2014
Your answer to How long will it be until humans have space ships like in Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar, etc?
Added Aug 11, 2014
Followed Aug 11, 2014
Added Aug 11, 2014
Followed Aug 11, 2014
Added Aug 11, 2014
What are the best arguments for debunking Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories?
Followed Aug 11, 2014
Your answer to What are the best arguments for debunking Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories?
Added Aug 11, 2014
Why have humans never been back to the Moon after 1972?
Followed Aug 10, 2014
Your answer to Why have humans never been back to the Moon after 1972?
Added Aug 10, 2014
In what ways is writing for Quora more fun than writing for Wikipedia, or vice-versa?
Followed Aug 10, 2014
Your answer to In what ways is writing for Quora more fun than writing for Wikipedia, or vice-versa?
Added Aug 10, 2014
Has it been conjectured that ppn+1n+pn+pn+1 is prime?
Followed Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to Has it been conjectured that ppn+1n+pn+pn+1 is prime?
Added Aug 9, 2014
Followed Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to What should we do to ensure the peaceful exploration of other planets, in particular Mars? Is it even possible?
Added Aug 9, 2014
In terms of colonizing other planets, is it more a matter of "Is it possible?" or "How do we do it?"
Followed Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to In terms of colonizing other planets, is it more a matter of "Is it possible?" or "How do we do it?"
Added Aug 9, 2014
Followed Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to How difficult would it be to colonize mars? How soon could such an endeavor happen? Is there any utility in doing so?
Added Aug 9, 2014
Followed Aug 9, 2014
Added Aug 9, 2014
What would it take to move Venus closer to Earth, making Earth/Venus a twin planet?
Followed Aug 8, 2014
Your answer to What would it take to move Venus closer to Earth, making Earth/Venus a twin planet?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Followed Aug 8, 2014
Your answer to Can the entire world's energy demands be met with 100% renewable energy and 0% coal, petroleum, nuclear?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Is it relevant to race for Mars settlement when our own planet is in risk?
Followed Aug 8, 2014
Your answer to Is it relevant to race for Mars settlement when our own planet is in risk?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Does "survival of the fittest" imply or require a will to survive?
Followed Aug 8, 2014
Your answer to Does "survival of the fittest" imply or require a will to survive?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Added Aug 7, 2014
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Added Aug 7, 2014
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to What do you say to the people who turn down space exploration & research in favor of fixing things on Earth first instead?
Added Aug 7, 2014
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to I want to try the Riemann hypothesis. What required area of mathematics and other supportive areas do I have to study?
Added Aug 7, 2014
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Added Aug 7, 2014
How expensive is the colonisation of space?
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to How expensive is the colonisation of space?
Added Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to What are the best arguments for debunking Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Is it possible to create artificial intelligence? Why or how?
Followed Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to Is it possible to create artificial intelligence? Why or how?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to What are the best arguments for debunking Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Followed Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to Can we make Mars habitable?
Added Aug 5, 2014
If money was not a constraint, what could be done to avoid an AI apocalypse?
Followed Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to If money was not a constraint, what could be done to avoid an AI apocalypse?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to Where should manned exploration programs focus first, the Moon or Mars?
Added Aug 4, 2014
How do you show mathematical symbols on a webpage?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to How do you show mathematical symbols on a webpage?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Is there a human corpse in orbit or deep space?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Is there a human corpse in orbit or deep space?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Are astronauts allowed to make autonomous decisions?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Are astronauts allowed to make autonomous decisions?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Why does it matter if there was ever life on Mars?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Why does it matter if there was ever life on Mars?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Added Aug 4, 2014
Did Earth life begin on Mars? If so, could we find evidence and or prove it?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Did Earth life begin on Mars? If so, could we find evidence and or prove it?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Could a direct hit by comet Siding Spring make Mars more hospitable for life?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Could a direct hit by comet Siding Spring make Mars more hospitable for life?
Added Aug 4, 2014
What are the possible origins of the "spidery black things" on Mars?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to What are the possible origins of the "spidery black things" on Mars?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Followed Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to Is Mars One a scam?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Followed Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to What do you think about the decision taken by the United Arab Emirates to establish their own space program?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Followed Aug 3, 2014
Added Aug 3, 2014
Do you think that humans are just an invasive species on earth? If so, who does the earth belong to?
Followed Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to Do you think that humans are just an invasive species on earth? If so, who does the earth belong to?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Could one survive on Mars with only a pressure demand regulator and warm cloths?
Followed Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to Could one survive on Mars with only a pressure demand regulator and warm cloths?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Should we steer comets into Mars to give it oceans?
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to Should we steer comets into Mars to give it oceans?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to If we had the ability to terraform a planet to support human life, but in the process changed it irrevocably, should we?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Is Mars a little too close to the Asteroid Belt for serious consideration for terraforming?
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to Is Mars a little too close to the Asteroid Belt for serious consideration for terraforming?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to If it was possible to collect half of the atmosphere of Venus, and deposit it on Mars, would this make both planets more habitable?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to What country/company will be the second to land a person on the Moon and which will be the first to do so on Mars?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to What are some technologies or approaches being developed to make prolonged trips in space more tenable as regards human biology?
Added Aug 2, 2014
What is the minimum size for a ring-shaped, rotating space station?
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to What is the minimum size for a ring-shaped, rotating space station?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to If a private company had the money and the resources, is there any law that would prevent them from building a moon colony?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Added Aug 1, 2014
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Can Mars be terraformed?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Can any of the planets of the solar system be terraformed for human habitation?
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Can any of the planets of the solar system be terraformed for human habitation?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Why hasn't NASA put onboard microscopes on their rovers to look for Martian microfossils?
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Why hasn't NASA put onboard microscopes on their rovers to look for Martian microfossils?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to What was the perfect reason for the Kalpana Chawla's Space shuttle failure while returning from space? How did she feel at that moment?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Would cave systems on the Moon or Mars be anywhere near as varied and intricately formed as ones on Earth?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to If you are in a spaceship that is traveling very close to the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Added Jul 31, 2014
Is life possible on a planet without liquid water? Why wouldn't life develop on a different fluid?
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to Is life possible on a planet without liquid water? Why wouldn't life develop on a different fluid?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Added Jul 31, 2014
Is it true that if life had existed on Mars evidence of it would likely be quite obvious?
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to Is it true that if life had existed on Mars evidence of it would likely be quite obvious?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Why are there no pictures of the abandoned NASA lunar modules, rovers, etc.?
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to Why are there no pictures of the abandoned NASA lunar modules, rovers, etc.?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to The Moon: What was the argument to not accept project Horizon in 1959? What were the main issues with the project?
Added Jul 31, 2014
What are the reasons for man to not go to Mars?
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to What are the reasons for man to not go to Mars?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Added Jul 31, 2014
Can a computer be made analog and has it been done?
Followed Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to Can a computer be made analog and has it been done?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Can deserts be made habitable?
Followed Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to Can deserts be made habitable?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Followed Jul 30, 2014
Can we create a spaceship with centrifugal artificial gravity with today's technology?
Followed Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to Can we create a spaceship with centrifugal artificial gravity with today's technology?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to What is a true personal story that people have a hard time believing?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Is it true that there are more lifeforms on your skin than there are people on the planet?
Followed Jul 29, 2014
Your answer to Is it true that there are more lifeforms on your skin than there are people on the planet?
Added Jul 29, 2014
Your answer to Grammar: Which is grammatically correct: "I hope we can keep this between you and me," or "I hope we can keep this between you and I"?
Added Jul 29, 2014
How can Spotify be written in C++ when it works on the web?
Followed Jul 29, 2014
Your answer to How can Spotify be written in C++ when it works on the web?
Added Jul 29, 2014
Do all living organisms on Earth share a common ancestor, or did life begin more than once?
Followed Jul 28, 2014
Your answer to Do all living organisms on Earth share a common ancestor, or did life begin more than once?
Added Jul 28, 2014
Followed Jul 28, 2014
Your answer to What would be the most effective way to fight overpopulation: to colonize a new planet or to efficiently manage terrestrial resources?
Added Jul 28, 2014
Followed Jul 28, 2014
Added Jul 28, 2014
Music Theory: What is the circle of fifths?
Followed Jul 25, 2014
Your answer to Music Theory: What is the circle of fifths?
Added Jul 25, 2014
Why are pitches classified the way they are in music?
Followed Jul 25, 2014
Your answer to Why are pitches classified the way they are in music?
Added Jul 25, 2014
What can be the best telescope under $500?
Followed Jul 25, 2014
Your answer to What can be the best telescope under $500?
Added Jul 25, 2014
How do different musical keys sound different from each other?
Followed Jul 24, 2014
Your answer to How do different musical keys sound different from each other?
Added Jul 24, 2014
Followed Jul 24, 2014
Your answer to If evolution has no inherent goal how did such complex forms of life arise when bacteria goes about reproducing just fine?
Added Jul 24, 2014
Followed Jul 24, 2014
Added Jul 24, 2014
Is the development of sentient AI highly probable within this century?
Followed Jul 24, 2014
Your answer to Is the development of sentient AI highly probable within this century?
Added Jul 24, 2014
Would a child be able to grow and develop safely if raised in a microgravity environment?
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to Would a child be able to grow and develop safely if raised in a microgravity environment?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Added Jul 23, 2014
Do you think Homo sapiens will spread across the cosmos?
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to Do you think Homo sapiens will spread across the cosmos?
Added Jul 23, 2014
To what degree is evolution determined by self-selection rather than natural selection?
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to To what degree is evolution determined by self-selection rather than natural selection?
Added Jul 23, 2014
What planets/moons do scientists expect to find life in our solar system? I only know of Europa?
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to What planets/moons do scientists expect to find life in our solar system? I only know of Europa?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to How long has our galaxy harbored Class F, G, and K stars with potentially life-sustaining terrestrial planets?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Is human colonization of Ceres feasible?
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to Is human colonization of Ceres feasible?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Added Jul 23, 2014
James Lovelock's 1970s argument for no life on Mars - what does it mean for us today?
Added Jul 22, 2014
What is your preferred answer to the Fermi paradox?
Followed Jul 22, 2014
Your answer to What is your preferred answer to the Fermi paradox?
Added Jul 22, 2014
Is there any possibility that a species more intelligent than human exists on earth?
Followed Jul 22, 2014
Your answer to Is there any possibility that a species more intelligent than human exists on earth?
Added Jul 22, 2014
What is the probability of a significant asteroid impact event by 2100?
Followed Jul 21, 2014
Your answer to What is the probability of a significant asteroid impact event by 2100?
Added Jul 21, 2014
Your answer to What are good ways to avoid bugs while programming?
Added Jul 21, 2014
Are there programmers who write virtually bug-free code?
Followed Jul 21, 2014
Your answer to Are there programmers who write virtually bug-free code?
Added Jul 21, 2014
Followed Jul 20, 2014
Added Jul 20, 2014
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Jul 20, 2014
Followed Jul 20, 2014
Added Jul 20, 2014
Followed Jul 20, 2014
Added Jul 20, 2014
What resources on Mars could benefit humanity?
Followed Jul 19, 2014
Your answer to What resources on Mars could benefit humanity?
Added Jul 19, 2014
Followed Jul 19, 2014
Your answer to Is there ever likely going to be a time when humans colonize another celestial body in our solar system?
Added Jul 19, 2014
What cool things can we do with a permanent base on the Moon?
Followed Jul 19, 2014
Your answer to What cool things can we do with a permanent base on the Moon?
Added Jul 19, 2014
Are the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, also suitable for off-world colonization?
Followed Jul 19, 2014
Your answer to Are the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, also suitable for off-world colonization?
Added Jul 19, 2014
Is it ethical or wise for parents of young children to volunteer for the one-way mission to Mars?
Followed Jul 18, 2014
Your answer to Is it ethical or wise for parents of young children to volunteer for the one-way mission to Mars?
Added Jul 18, 2014
Is it a special feature of Peano axioms that Godel can prove incompleteness from them?
Followed Jul 18, 2014
Your answer to Is it a special feature of Peano axioms that Godel can prove incompleteness from them?
Added Jul 18, 2014
Followed Jul 18, 2014
Added Jul 18, 2014
Followed Jul 18, 2014
Your answer to If we actually find a habitable planet with liquid water, how long will it be until people start living there?
Added Jul 18, 2014
What kind of people will be the first to colonize mars?
Followed Jul 18, 2014
Your answer to What kind of people will be the first to colonize mars?
Added Jul 18, 2014
What is the most probable next step in space exploration?
Followed Jul 18, 2014
Your answer to What is the most probable next step in space exploration?
Added Jul 18, 2014
Followed Jul 17, 2014
Added Jul 17, 2014
Your answer to Can we be 100% sure space is infinite?
Added Jul 17, 2014
Can we be 100% sure space is infinite?
Followed Jul 17, 2014
Where should Earth's 1st off-planet colony start?
Followed Jul 17, 2014
Your answer to Where should Earth's 1st off-planet colony start?
Added Jul 17, 2014
Mathematical Fallacies: Can we prove that 1=2 or 2=3 or 3=4 and so on?
Followed Jul 16, 2014
Your answer to Mathematical Fallacies: Can we prove that 1=2 or 2=3 or 3=4 and so on?
Added Jul 16, 2014
If we could travel faster than the speed of light, would time travel backwards?
Followed Jul 16, 2014
Your answer to If we could travel faster than the speed of light, would time travel backwards?
Added Jul 16, 2014
Your answer to Why should I provide my knowledge to Quora for free?
Added Jul 16, 2014
Added Jul 16, 2014
They found a possible lake in a crater on Mars. What types of fish were in the lake?
Followed Jul 15, 2014
Your answer to They found a possible lake in a crater on Mars. What types of fish were in the lake?
Added Jul 15, 2014
Followed Jul 15, 2014
Your answer to What software would be the best for 3D procedural geometry generation (fractals and patterns formed by algorithms)?
Added Jul 15, 2014
Is something still morally wrong if the victim is unaffected by it?
Followed Jul 15, 2014
Your answer to Is something still morally wrong if the victim is unaffected by it?
Added Jul 15, 2014
Is it really likely future space colonies would try to gain "independence?"
Followed Jul 15, 2014
Your answer to Is it really likely future space colonies would try to gain "independence?"
Added Jul 15, 2014
What are some reasons that many intelligent species don't colonize space and other planets?
Followed Jul 14, 2014
Your answer to What are some reasons that many intelligent species don't colonize space and other planets?
Added Jul 14, 2014
What are some microbes which could be 'seeded' into Venus' atmosphere, to consume the CO2?
Followed Jul 14, 2014
Your answer to What are some microbes which could be 'seeded' into Venus' atmosphere, to consume the CO2?
Added Jul 14, 2014
Followed Jul 14, 2014
Added Jul 14, 2014
How dangerous is it to live in a space station?
Followed Jul 14, 2014
Your answer to How dangerous is it to live in a space station?
Added Jul 14, 2014
How would I own a piece of land on Mars?
Followed Jul 13, 2014
Your answer to How would I own a piece of land on Mars?
Added Jul 13, 2014
Followed Jul 13, 2014
Added Jul 13, 2014
Followed Jul 13, 2014
Added Jul 13, 2014
Is your mind part of your body?
Followed Jul 13, 2014
Your answer to Is your mind part of your body?
Added Jul 13, 2014
Followed Jul 13, 2014
Added Jul 13, 2014
Followed Jul 12, 2014
Added Jul 12, 2014
Is it practical to store data into PI?
Followed Jul 12, 2014
Your answer to Is it practical to store data into PI?
Added Jul 12, 2014
How many people would we need to send to a distant planet to colonise it?
Followed Jul 12, 2014
Your answer to How many people would we need to send to a distant planet to colonise it?
Added Jul 12, 2014
Followed Jul 12, 2014
Your answer to If one day we find a planet able to sustain human life and we decide to colonize, what kind of systems should we establish?
Added Jul 12, 2014
When we colonize the Moon, what will the colonists do to fight the low G effects?
Followed Jul 11, 2014
Your answer to When we colonize the Moon, what will the colonists do to fight the low G effects?
Added Jul 11, 2014
Followed Jul 11, 2014
Your answer to Would it be preferable to colonize space by self-supporting spaceships, as compared to terraforming planets?
Added Jul 11, 2014
Followed Jul 11, 2014
Your answer to If some day we develop spaceships with wormhole technology, how many years would it take to colonize the entire galaxy?
Added Jul 11, 2014
Followed Jul 11, 2014
Added Jul 11, 2014
Followed Jul 11, 2014
Your answer to If we used the resources from the asteroid belt could we create a space station big enough to house 10 million people?
Added Jul 11, 2014
Followed Jul 11, 2014
Added Jul 11, 2014
Followed Jul 9, 2014
Your answer to Is the Space Age dead?
Added Jul 9, 2014
Followed Jul 6, 2014
Added Jul 6, 2014
What is the highest meaningful number in mathematics?
Followed Jul 5, 2014
Your answer to What is the highest meaningful number in mathematics?
Added Jul 5, 2014
How many people are required for a self-sustaining Mars colony?
Followed Jul 5, 2014
Your answer to How many people are required for a self-sustaining Mars colony?
Added Jul 5, 2014
When will humans colonize Mars?
Followed Jul 4, 2014
Your answer to When will humans colonize Mars?
Added Jul 4, 2014
Is colonization of Mars needed? What are your thoughts?
Followed Jul 4, 2014
Your answer to Is colonization of Mars needed? What are your thoughts?
Added Jul 4, 2014
Followed Jul 2, 2014
Your answer to How long can humans live in space and what is the worst case scenario for someone who lives too long in space?
Added Jul 2, 2014
Your answer to Do most programmers/software engineers tend to be the quiet type? Why?
Added Jul 1, 2014
Do we kill aliens or let them kill us, or are there better options?
Followed Jun 30, 2014
Your answer to Do we kill aliens or let them kill us, or are there better options?
Added Jun 30, 2014
Added Jun 29, 2014
Followed Jun 28, 2014
Your answer to Should we terraform Mars?
Added Jun 28, 2014
What effects on the moon could colonizing it have on it?
Followed Jun 28, 2014
Your answer to What effects on the moon could colonizing it have on it?
Added Jun 28, 2014
Added Jun 27, 2014
Your answer to What would a competent alien invasion force do differently from the normal Hollywood portrayals?
Added Jun 27, 2014
How much would it cost to colonize Mars including R&D?
Followed Jun 26, 2014
Your answer to How much would it cost to colonize Mars including R&D?
Added Jun 26, 2014
Followed Jun 26, 2014
Your answer to If some person or organization wants to stop anyone from colonizing and contaminating Mars, how are they going to do this?
Added Jun 26, 2014
Is His Holiness the Dalai Lama a liar?
Followed Jun 25, 2014
Your answer to Is His Holiness the Dalai Lama a liar?
Added Jun 25, 2014
Do dragons and gnomes really live in my source code?
Followed Jun 24, 2014
Your answer to Do dragons and gnomes really live in my source code?
Added Jun 24, 2014
Impossibility of counting most mathematical objects
Added Jun 24, 2014
Followed Jun 21, 2014
Your answer to Is it possible that an alien civilization has completely different mathematics than ours? Is mathematics absolute?
Added Jun 21, 2014
What have been the top findings on Mars so far?
Followed Jun 21, 2014
Your answer to What have been the top findings on Mars so far?
Added Jun 21, 2014
Followed Jun 20, 2014
Your answer to Is it worth it to send humans to Mars to build a settlement? Is it practical and possible given the timeline and budget?
Added Jun 20, 2014
Your answer to If a meteor half the size of earth was approaching our planet, would we possess the firepower to neutralize the threat?
Added Jun 20, 2014
Followed Jun 20, 2014
Added Jun 20, 2014
Your answer to What do people think about the "Mars One" project?
Added Jun 19, 2014
Should we travel to Mars for $55 billion?
Followed Jun 17, 2014
Your answer to Should we travel to Mars for $55 billion?
Added Jun 17, 2014
If NASA chose you to help colonize Mars, would you do it?
Followed Jun 16, 2014
Your answer to If NASA chose you to help colonize Mars, would you do it?
Added Jun 16, 2014
Followed Jun 15, 2014
Your answer to With the Moon and Mars colonisation plans underway (Mars One, SpaceX, Chinese space program) what laws will govern the colony?
Added Jun 15, 2014
What economic incentives are there to colonize Mars or any other planet?
Followed Jun 15, 2014
Your answer to What economic incentives are there to colonize Mars or any other planet?
Added Jun 15, 2014
What goods could Mars colonists export to Earth?
Followed Jun 15, 2014
Your answer to What goods could Mars colonists export to Earth?
Added Jun 15, 2014
Followed Jun 15, 2014
Added Jun 15, 2014
Is it practical to send humans to distance of Mars orbit (say) using technology of the ISS
Added Jun 15, 2014
What will drive people to colonize Mars and when can that theoretically happen?
Followed Jun 14, 2014
Your answer to What will drive people to colonize Mars and when can that theoretically happen?
Added Jun 14, 2014
Is Mars worth mining for Earth purposes?
Followed Jun 14, 2014
Your answer to Is Mars worth mining for Earth purposes?
Added Jun 14, 2014
Followed Jun 14, 2014
Your answer to Would it be cheaper to send a person to Mars and back or to send him there with the ability to be self-sustaining?
Added Jun 14, 2014
Followed Jun 14, 2014
Added Jun 14, 2014
Followed Jun 13, 2014
Your answer to Will humans ever visit Mars?
Added Jun 13, 2014
How successful will Mars One turn out to be?
Followed Jun 12, 2014
Your answer to How successful will Mars One turn out to be?
Added Jun 12, 2014
Why not send cockroaches to Mars?
Followed Jun 12, 2014
Your answer to Why not send cockroaches to Mars?
Added Jun 12, 2014
Your answer to If C and C++ give the best performance, why do we still code in other languages?
Added Jun 12, 2014
Your answer to Has a computer passed the Turing Test, from a mathematical and computer science point of view?
Added Jun 12, 2014
Why Mars Microbes Matter - Like Tigers - And More So? - Microbial ETs
Added Jun 11, 2014
Will humans ever colonize Mars, our solar system, or the entire universe? Or will they go extinct?
Followed Jun 11, 2014
Your answer to Will humans ever colonize Mars, our solar system, or the entire universe? Or will they go extinct?
Added Jun 11, 2014
Your answer to Why does the statement int i==4 yield an error in this C program?
Added Jun 11, 2014
Added Jun 10, 2014
Followed Jun 7, 2014
Added Jun 7, 2014
If humans were to inhabit Mars would they carry religion and countries there too?
Followed Jun 6, 2014
Your answer to If humans were to inhabit Mars would they carry religion and countries there too?
Added Jun 6, 2014
Why haven't we introduced life on Mars yet?
Followed Jun 5, 2014
Your answer to Why haven't we introduced life on Mars yet?
Added Jun 5, 2014
How do I view and understand source code?
Followed Jun 5, 2014
Your answer to How do I view and understand source code?
Added Jun 5, 2014
Your answer to Has the first person to live to 200 years old been born yet?
Added Jun 5, 2014
Will humans eventually live on Mars? Why?
Followed Jun 5, 2014
Your answer to Will humans eventually live on Mars? Why?
Added Jun 5, 2014
Followed Jun 4, 2014
Your answer to The one-way Mars One colonization mission is kinda crazy. But would you take a 100-day roundtrip to Mars, if you had the means?
Added Jun 4, 2014
Followed Jun 4, 2014
Added Jun 4, 2014
Followed Jun 4, 2014
Your answer to 5 manned missions to Mars, including SpaceX, have been announced so far. Will any of the 5 likely make it?
Added Jun 4, 2014
If we live on Mars in future should these people have the right to keep and bear weapons? Why?
Followed Jun 4, 2014
Your answer to If we live on Mars in future should these people have the right to keep and bear weapons? Why?
Added Jun 4, 2014
What would it be like to live on Mars?
Followed Jun 1, 2014
Your answer to What would it be like to live on Mars?
Added Jun 1, 2014
Has the first person to live to 200 years old been born yet?
Followed Jun 1, 2014
If I were to build a permanent colony on either Mars or the Moon, which would be the better choice?
Followed May 31, 2014
Your answer to If I were to build a permanent colony on either Mars or the Moon, which would be the better choice?
Added May 31, 2014
Why does everyone plan to settle on Mars when we are not even done with the Moon?
Followed May 31, 2014
Your answer to Why does everyone plan to settle on Mars when we are not even done with the Moon?
Added May 31, 2014
Your answer to Why do people want to settle on Mars?
Added May 31, 2014
Followed May 29, 2014
Added May 29, 2014
Your answer to What are some things films have led us to believe that are actually not true?
Added May 28, 2014
Your answer to What little habits made you a better software engineer?
Added May 28, 2014
Space Show webinar - Partial and Artificial Gravity for Human Spaceflight
Added May 28, 2014
How much of Mars' surface is unexplored?
Followed May 28, 2014
Your answer to How much of Mars' surface is unexplored?
Added May 28, 2014
What is the most cost effective way for us to terraform Mars?
Followed May 28, 2014
Your answer to What is the most cost effective way for us to terraform Mars?
Added May 28, 2014
How do the Mars One applicants imagine their life on Mars?
Followed May 27, 2014
Your answer to How do the Mars One applicants imagine their life on Mars?
Added May 27, 2014
How long would it take to terraform Mars?
Followed May 27, 2014
Your answer to How long would it take to terraform Mars?
Added May 27, 2014
Followed May 26, 2014
Your answer to Do you think people who have been defamed on the internet can ever live normal and healthy lives again?
Added May 26, 2014
Did the Buddha ever personally visit Hell to lecture the dharma to the hell-beings?
Followed May 24, 2014
Your answer to Did the Buddha ever personally visit Hell to lecture the dharma to the hell-beings?
Added May 24, 2014
Why won't NASA consider a one-way mission to Mars?
Followed May 23, 2014
Your answer to Why won't NASA consider a one-way mission to Mars?
Added May 23, 2014
Followed May 23, 2014
Your answer to What are some good resources for web developers who want to make their products more accessible for people with disabilities?
Added May 23, 2014
Followed May 19, 2014
Added May 19, 2014
Do we really need to send people to Mars?
Followed May 19, 2014
Your answer to Do we really need to send people to Mars?
Added May 19, 2014
Your answer to How will the land on the moon be distributed among all of the countries?
Added May 18, 2014
How will the land on the moon be distributed among all of the countries?
Followed May 18, 2014
Should I buy an electronic metronome or an analog one?
Followed May 18, 2014
Your answer to Should I buy an electronic metronome or an analog one?
Added May 18, 2014
Is colonizing Mars biologically possible?
Followed May 18, 2014
Your answer to Is colonizing Mars biologically possible?
Added May 18, 2014
Added May 18, 2014
What are some ways to become more rhythmically precise when playing a musical instrument?
Followed May 13, 2014
Your answer to What are some ways to become more rhythmically precise when playing a musical instrument?
Added May 13, 2014
Added May 12, 2014
How do top programmers work, e.g., Fabrice Bellard?
Followed May 11, 2014
Your answer to How do top programmers work, e.g., Fabrice Bellard?
Added May 11, 2014
Followed Apr 30, 2014
Added Apr 30, 2014
What would happen if we released a helium balloon from the Moon's surface?
Followed Apr 29, 2014
Your answer to What would happen if we released a helium balloon from the Moon's surface?
Added Apr 29, 2014
If a colony of water bears were released on the surface of Mars, what would happen?
Followed Apr 29, 2014
Your answer to If a colony of water bears were released on the surface of Mars, what would happen?
Added Apr 29, 2014
Followed Apr 28, 2014
Added Apr 28, 2014
Is there any promising research into achieving artificial gravity?
Followed Apr 27, 2014
Your answer to Is there any promising research into achieving artificial gravity?
Added Apr 27, 2014
Followed Apr 27, 2014
Added Apr 27, 2014
Could we get a space probe to Alpha Centauri by 2121 if it got top priority?
Followed Apr 26, 2014
Your answer to Could we get a space probe to Alpha Centauri by 2121 if it got top priority?
Added Apr 26, 2014
Followed Apr 25, 2014
Added Apr 25, 2014
Is it feasible to move an iron rich asteroid into a geosynchronous or geostationary low earth orbit and build a steel works on or in the asteroid to manufacture a steel cable that could be lowered to earth?
Followed Apr 25, 2014
Your answer to Is it feasible to move an iron rich asteroid into a geosynchronous or geostationary low earth orbit and build a steel works on or in the asteroid to manufacture a steel cable that could be lowered to earth?
Added Apr 25, 2014
What are the scientific ways to test to see if a person is enlightened?
Followed Apr 21, 2014
Your answer to What are the scientific ways to test to see if a person is enlightened?
Added Apr 21, 2014
How feasible is Elon Musk's idea to establish a colony on Mars in the 2020s?
Followed Apr 20, 2014
Your answer to How feasible is Elon Musk's idea to establish a colony on Mars in the 2020s?
Added Apr 20, 2014
Followed Apr 8, 2014
Added Apr 8, 2014
Followed Apr 5, 2014
Your answer to Are Buddhists in America ignoring the message of ancient Buddhist doctrine that opposes both homosexuality and abortion? If so, why?
Added Apr 5, 2014
Added Mar 16, 2014
Followed Feb 27, 2014
Your answer to Why have untruths about China's treatment of Tibet continued and why do we continue to believe Tibetans when facts support other views?
Added Feb 27, 2014
How many scales are there in music?
Followed Feb 24, 2014
Your answer to How many scales are there in music?
Added Feb 24, 2014
Your answer to How does President Obama meeting with Dalai Lama "interfere" in China's internal affairs?
Added Feb 24, 2014
What happens if you travel faster than the speed of light?
Followed Jan 30, 2014
Your answer to What happens if you travel faster than the speed of light?
Added Jan 30, 2014
Finding the Dalai Lama reincarnation: Could it be in ethnically non-tibetians and/or women as well?
Followed Jan 15, 2014
Your answer to Finding the Dalai Lama reincarnation: Could it be in ethnically non-tibetians and/or women as well?
Added Jan 15, 2014
Does the Dalai Lama believe in reincarnation? Does he purport this as truth?
Followed Jan 13, 2014
Your answer to Does the Dalai Lama believe in reincarnation? Does he purport this as truth?
Added Jan 13, 2014
What's the best way the human species can inhabit Mars?
Followed Jan 12, 2014
Your answer to What's the best way the human species can inhabit Mars?
Added Jan 12, 2014
Followed Jan 11, 2014
Your answer to Could building "worlds" like the Stanford Torus be cheaper than terraforming dead planets like Mars or Venus?
Added Jan 11, 2014
Has the Dalai Lama ever done anything evil?
Followed Jan 6, 2014
Your answer to Has the Dalai Lama ever done anything evil?
Added Jan 6, 2014
Could a woman ever be the Dalai Lama?
Followed Jan 6, 2014
Your answer to Could a woman ever be the Dalai Lama?
Added Jan 6, 2014
Followed Jan 6, 2014
Your answer to What is the main perspective of Dalai Lama And his followers? What does they do in cities they travel. What changes this bring.
Added Jan 6, 2014
Which one would be easier to terraform: Venus or Mars?
Followed Jan 5, 2014
Your answer to Which one would be easier to terraform: Venus or Mars?
Added Jan 5, 2014
Has it ever been tried to implant life from earth on another planet?
Followed Aug 2, 2013
Your answer to Has it ever been tried to implant life from earth on another planet?
Added Aug 2, 2013
Your answer to What happens if you travel faster than the speed of light?
Added Jul 11, 2013
Has anything ever been returned from Mars?
Followed Jul 11, 2013
Your answer to Has anything ever been returned from Mars?
Added Jul 11, 2013
New Interest in the Possibility of Microbes on the Surface of Mars
Added Jun 12, 2013
Your answer to What were the most accurate predictions of all time?
Added May 26, 2013
What are the thoughts on the Mars One plan for settling humans on Mars?
Followed May 1, 2013
Your answer to What are the thoughts on the Mars One plan for settling humans on Mars?
Added May 1, 2013
Added Feb 11, 2013
Many Ways to Use a Metronome - Enjoyment, Relaxation and Precision in Metronome Technique
Added Feb 6, 2013
Are there visual analogs of music? If so are they more appreciated by those who are deaf?
Followed Jan 25, 2013
Your answer to Are there visual analogs of music? If so are they more appreciated by those who are deaf?
Added Jan 25, 2013
What do we currently know about the history and future possibility of life on Mars?
Followed Jan 9, 2013
Your answer to What do we currently know about the history and future possibility of life on Mars?
Added Jan 9, 2013
Your answer to Could the Mars rover have contaminated Mars with earth based life forms?
Added Jan 9, 2013
Your answer to Is Dalai Lama a deposed feudal theocratic dictator?
Added Jan 9, 2013
Added Jan 8, 2013
Can temporal self-similarity done deliberately, yield music?
Followed Jan 8, 2013
Your answer to Can temporal self-similarity done deliberately, yield music?
Added Jan 8, 2013
What do music fractals look like?
Followed Jan 8, 2013
Your answer to What do music fractals look like?
Added Jan 8, 2013
Why don't more composers explore time signatures containing irrational numbers?
Followed Jan 8, 2013
Your answer to Why don't more composers explore time signatures containing irrational numbers?
Added Jan 8, 2013
Followed Dec 19, 2012
Your answer to Why has the Dalai Lama not called for an end to the spate of self-immolations in Tibet and culturally Tibetan parts of China?
Added Dec 19, 2012
Followed Dec 16, 2012
Your answer to What astronomically will happen on Dec. 12, 2012? What event did the Maya believe would end the world as we know it?
Added Dec 16, 2012
How did Western music “settle” on a 12-tone scale?
Followed Nov 23, 2012
Your answer to How did Western music “settle” on a 12-tone scale?
Added Nov 23, 2012
Music Theory: Why are there 1200 cents to an octave? Is it just to match with the 12 tones?
Followed Nov 23, 2012
Your answer to Music Theory: Why are there 1200 cents to an octave? Is it just to match with the 12 tones?
Added Nov 23, 2012
Added 5h ago
Your answer to Is the world going to end because of a solar eclipse next year (2017)?
Added 6h ago
Your answer to Is this true about Nibiru, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8SElpqjHVFo? ...
Added 6h ago
Your answer to Is there any scientific and factual proof that Nibiru is fake?
Added 6h ago
Your answer to Is it safe to observe a partial solar eclipse?
Added 18h ago
Your answer to Why does the observation path for a solar eclipse move from west to east?
Added 19h ago
How to back up all your Quora answers to your computer - short version
Added Wed
How to back up all your quora answers to your computer (shorter version)
Added Wed
Your answer to Why doesn't Quora allow the use of emoticons, when it would make the site more interactive?
Added Wed
Some Ideas about Buddhism to download with HTTrack
Added Wed
Added Wed
Added Wed
How to back up all your quora answers to your computer
Added Wed
List of answers to download with HTTrack
Added Wed
Added Tue
List of my answers to date for downloading with HTTrack
Added Tue
Your answer to How vulnerable are we to a catastrophic asteroid impact? Are there people whose job is to watch for them?
Added Tue
Your answer to Will the world end on September 23rd, 2017? I'm worried.
Added Mon
Added Mon
Your answer to Is answering a question with a question an answer?
Added Mon
Your answer to “Which Tank will Will Fill up First? (example with 12 tanks, A to L, see question source for image)
Added Mon
“Which Tank will Will Fill up First? (example with 12 tanks, A to L, see question source for image)
Asked Sun
Your answer to Why were question details removed from Quora on August 3, 2017?
Added Sun
Your answer to How am I supposed to ask complex questions without question details?
Added Sun
Your answer to Are Buddhist attached to being unattached?
Added Sun
Your answer to Why can't you post pictures into your Quora questions anymore?
Added Sun
Your answer to Should Quora bring back question details? Why or why not?
Added Aug 5
Your answer to How do you feel about question details being eliminated?
Added Aug 5
Your answer to If a super volcano erupts in Yellowstone national park, where is the safest place to be?
Added Aug 4
Your answer to How would you explain all this talk about Nibiru, David Meade, the solar eclipse? The world is ending everywhere, now.
Added Aug 4
Does a Nichiren Buddhist reject other Buddhist schools?
Followed Aug 2
Added Jul 23
Why the eclipse this August is a wonder of nature and not something to be scared of
Added Jul 23
Your answer to Why is Russian news talking about Nibiru?
Added Jul 22
Added Jul 21
How can you prove that [(x+x(x+1)−m−−−−−−−−−−−√)2n] is an odd number?
Followed Jul 21
Your answer to Is 22/7 the nearest rational number approximation to π?
Added Jul 21
Your answer to What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don't seem like they would have?
Added Jul 18
Your answer to If you had to fall 2000 feet into a liquid what would you pick?
Added Jul 18
Your answer to Once the sun dies and the solar system goes dark, would Europa (if it had life) continue to provide a liquid ocean and a biosphere?
Added Jul 17
Added Jul 16
Debunked: Nemesis is Nibiru - updated
Added Jul 16
Your answer to Is Nibiru a real place that will hit Earth? I’m very scared, is the BBC lying?
Added Jul 16
Your answer to Can an 800 meter asteroid destroy life on earth?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to How can we make 2+2=5?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to How do mathematicians approach proving a theorem?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to If Buddhists don't, and never have, "evangelized" or "proselytized", how did/does Buddhism spread?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to Theoretically, what's the largest object by mass that could be orbiting the sun currently that hasn't been discovered?
Added Jul 14
Your answer to What would mathematicians do if someone proved that it is not possible to create a consistent system of axioms?
Added Jul 14
Your answer to Tibetan Buddhism: What's the difference between crazy wisdom and just plain crazy?
Added Jul 11
Your answer to Why has not His Holiness Dalai Lama become fluent in English yet?
Added Jul 9
Your answer to A meteorite will crash to earth in a year destroying the Western world. Do you think this information should be made public?
Added Jul 9
Your answer to Should I believe the Nibiru YouTubers?They seem pretty legit.
Added Jul 8
Your answer to How dark would a human see the moon?
Added Jul 7
Your answer to Would there be any wind inside an underground colony on the moon?
Added Jul 6
Added Jul 6
Your answer to I believe Nibiru is coming and no one else believes me. Does anybody agree?
Added Jul 6
Your answer to Will Nibiru end the world in October 2017?
Added Jul 4
Your answer to How do I tell my kids that Nibiru is going to kill us all in the next few months?
Added Jul 1
Your answer to Is Nibiru going to hit the Earth in 2017?
Added Jun 28
Your answer to Is Nibiru going to hit the Earth in 2017?
Added Jun 28
Your answer to When is planet X or Nibiru expected to pass by Earth?
Added Jun 28
Your answer to Will the heat shield of the Webb telescope reflect enough sunlight so that it appears as a star to earth based telescopes?
Added Jun 26
Your answer to How did the search for the reincarnated Dalai Lama from humble origins become instituted historically?
Added Jun 26
Your answer to How credible is the Daily Mail?
Added Jun 26
Your answer to Why can't one jump from everest with a parachute instead of walking down?
Added Jun 21
Your answer to How did a person jump without parachute from thousands of feet, landing on a trampoline without breaking his neck?
Added Jun 21
Your answer to What are the least amount of changes that would have to happen for Mars to be habitable like Earth?
Added Jun 21
Your answer to Why did Londoners elect a Muslim as their mayor? Was it to prove that they're not racist?
Added Jun 20
Your answer to Why do protons have a mass exactly 1837 times that of an electron?
Added Jun 20
Your answer to What happened to Gautama Buddha after he died?
Added Jun 19
Your answer to Which tree gives the most oxygen?
Added Jun 17
Your answer to How much oxygen does a tree produce?
Added Jun 17
Your answer to Do trees consume oxygen?
Added Jun 17
Debunked: the Earth’s natural Schummann resonances are being manipulated by HAARP etc.
Added Jun 17
Your answer to Is it possible to build a mid-air city?
Added Jun 16
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Jun 16
Debunked: hidden asteroids in new branch of Taurid stream will devastate Earth
Added Jun 16
Debunked: Asteroid called 3BC2017 will kill millions in June
Added Jun 16
Added Jun 16
Debunked: Our sun was born with an “evil twin” which may have wiped out the dinosaurs
Added Jun 16
Your answer to Is the Waterseer a scam ?
Added Jun 15
Your answer to Why are there so few enlightened people in the world? Is the success rate of Buddhism really that low?
Added Jun 13
Your answer to Why do dust storms happen on Mars?
Added Jun 13
Your answer to Since no one can "own" Outer Space because of the "Outer Space Treaty", what do we do about countries that don't acknowledge this?
Added Jun 12
Your answer to Why do the British accept to pay the high expenses of their monarchy?
Added Jun 11
Your answer to In what realistic scenario(s) would a Mars colony significantly increase the likelihood of the survival of the human species?
Added Jun 11
Your answer to What would have happened if the Fellowship went with Frodo to Mt. Doom?
Added Jun 10
Your answer to For a=b, does that mean b-a=a-b?
Added Jun 10
Your answer to What are the most notable software bugs in the software aboard the Mars Curiosity Rover?
Added Jun 9
Your answer to Why is no government helping with or is interested in the Skylon spaceplane? Is it overrated?
Added Jun 7
Your answer to If the purpose of a Buddhist is to stop reincarnating by achieving Nirvana, why does the Dalai Lama reincarnate?
Added Jun 7
Your answer to Are the rich building bunkers for Nibiru's arrival?
Added Jun 6
Added Jun 6
Your answer to Would someone please explain to me in plain terms what the Dalai Lama is?
Added Jun 5
Your answer to If all the ice in Antarctica melts, which countries in the world will be entirely covered in water?
Added Jun 4
Your answer to What do you think of Trump pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement?
Added Jun 3
Your answer to If we had scientists on Mars, how long would it take before we knew whether Mars ever had life?
Added Jun 3
Your answer to Is Mars habitable?
Added Jun 1
Your answer to What would a Buddhist say about the self being an emergent phenomenon?
Added Jun 1
Your answer to Why is the Earth’s moon not considered a planet?
Added May 29
Your answer to Why it is said that two perpendicular lines meet at infinity? How so?
Added May 29
Your answer to How do I know if I am a Buddha?
Added May 29
Your answer to If I wanted to live and practice as a Buddhist monk, as a westerner (more specifically Australia) how would I go about this?
Added May 28
Your answer to Why do buddhists talk N lifetimes for enlightenment when the only time anyone will get enlightenment is in this lifetime right now?
Added May 28
Your answer to How does one become a bodhisattva?
Added May 25
Added May 24
Your answer to Is it possible to survive if you lie along the rail tracks and a train passes over you?
Added May 23
Your answer to Why do some Buddhist teachers appear to lack compassion?
Added May 23
Followed May 18
Your answer to Is there something that could ruin your karma (Buddhism, etc.) for life?
Added May 15
Your answer to How does the concept of rebirth (samsara, karma, etc.) differ between Buddhism and Hinduism?
Added May 15
Your answer to What is the difference between Buddhist and Christian compassion?
Added May 13
Your answer to Is Quora converting Wikipedians (Wikipedia Editors) to Quorans?
Added May 12
Your answer to How much bigger can the ISS get?
Added May 10
Debunked: Stephen Hawking says humans have only 100 years left on this planet
Added May 10
Your answer to Am I the only frustrated former Wikipedia editor? (The English Wikipedia is not as bad as the German one, though)
Added May 9
Your answer to For Buddhists, how does the concept of "attachment" apply to the closest people in your life?
Added May 9
Added May 8
Your answer to How many nukes would it take to completely and permanently irradiate a planet the size of Earth?
Added May 8
Your answer to Are pictures on Windows desktop background authentic?
Added May 8
Your answer to Is it true that some Buddhist monks can die while sitting in meditation? How do they know they are about to die?
Added May 7
Your answer to Why does it take 2 days for a spacecraft to dock the International Space Station?
Added May 7
Added May 5
Your answer to What and where did this dark energy come from?
Added May 5
Your answer to Did Buddha teach how to be Happy?
Added May 4
Debunked: 'This is NOT a hoax' Asteroid strike will kill millions in JUNE, shocking video claims
Added Apr 28
Added Apr 21
Your answer to How does one get born in other planes in Buddhism?
Added Apr 19
Your answer to How much vegetation do you need to provide oxygen for six astronauts on the ISS?
Added Apr 17
Your answer to What would the radius of a centrifugal space station need to be to avoid getting sick or going crazy from the endless spinning?
Added Apr 16
Added Apr 16
Your answer to Why not simply create a ship with artificial gravity for the journey to Mars?
Added Apr 16
Tense situation concerning North Korea
Added Apr 14
Added Apr 12
List of some of my quora answers on Buddhism
Added Apr 10
Your answer to Can Mars support human life?
Added Apr 10
Your answer to What does the UK have that does not exist in the US?
Added Apr 8
Your answer to In which of the 6 realms do Buddhist deities such as Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri & Vajrapani reside?
Added Apr 8
Your answer to What are your thoughts on Planet Nibiru/X sightings?
Added Apr 5
Your answer to Was Buddha literate?
Added Apr 4
Your answer to How is the Buddhist idea of dependent origination related to cause and effect?
Added Apr 3
Analogy of an African elephant with Planet X / Nibiru
Added Apr 2
Your answer to Is Nibiru going to hit the Earth in 2017?
Added Apr 1
Your answer to Is there anything of economic value on Mars that would allow trade to finance a colony on Mars?
Added Apr 1
Your answer to If one million people prepaid the $200,000 Elon Musk estimates it will cost to go to Mars, could we do it within a decade?
Added Apr 1
Your answer to What will the next ISS be like?
Added Mar 31
Your answer to Are Russian space crafts death traps?
Added Mar 29
Added Mar 29
Debunked: Planet 9 is Nibiru (Again)
Added Mar 28
Your answer to Do we know anything more about the "word of command" that Gandalf refers to in Moria?
Added Mar 28
Your answer to Is it true that when we colonize Mars, our chances of going extinct drop to nearly 0%?
Added Mar 27
Added Mar 26
Your answer to Was there any procedure set up for the Apollo mission astronauts in case they found alien life on the moon? And if so, what was it?
Added Mar 26
Debunked: A huge black hole 8 billion light years away endangers Earth
Added Mar 25
Your answer to What is the Buddhism afterlife like?
Added Mar 24
Your answer to Can a Buddhist change and become a Christian?
Added Mar 24
Debunked: TRAPPIST 1 is Nibiru
Added Mar 23
Added Mar 23
Debunked: Galactic superwave theory
Added Mar 22
Your answer to Can Magnetar Starquakes really end the world by stripping it's atmosphere?
Added Mar 20
Proposed origami robots for Mars, Europa, Moon etc
Added Mar 20
How we know the Sun is not just a few thousand miles away
Added Mar 20
Added Mar 19
Why are world political and religious leaders meeting up in Antarctica
Added Mar 19
What are your thoughts on project “Blue beam”?
Added Mar 19
Do you believe in UFO'S and the different species of alien life they have named???
Added Mar 19
Debunked: crack in the firmament
Added Mar 19
How does the ISS avoid being hit by micrometeoroids?
Added Mar 19
How did Apollo get through the Van Allen belts?
Added Mar 19
Your answer to Did Obama warn about the coming of Nibiru?
Added Mar 19
Your answer to What was the mission for Laika the space dog?
Added Mar 18
Your answer to Does the government and the worlds elite believe in Nibiru's existence and have they built fallout shelters?
Added Mar 17
Your answer to Will Nibiru end the world in October 2017?
Added Mar 17
Why I see Science as part of the Buddhist path
Added Mar 17
Your answer to Do you follow the Buddha's prohibition on alcohol?
Added Mar 17
Are the Trappist planets “orbit clearing”?
Added Mar 16
Your answer to Why did it take NASA decades to land on Mars after landing on the Moon?
Added Mar 16
Your answer to If distance was not an issue, would it be easier to build a colony on Mars or on the moon and why?
Added Mar 16
Your answer to In your opinion, do you think Pluto is still a planet?
Added Mar 16
Debunked: this bank note shows the orbit of “Nibiru”
Added Mar 15
Your answer to Why do people still think Islam is peaceful?
Added Mar 13
Your answer to Why decommission the ISS in 2024 when it could have so much more potential usage (just like the space shuttles)?
Added Mar 12
Your answer to What are Dalai Lama’s views about Islam?
Added Mar 12
Your answer to Should we inseminate our solar system with life?
Added Mar 11
Your answer to Why does listening to a metronome drive me crazy?
Added Mar 10
Your answer to Is the author David Meade correct about the arrival of Nibiru in October 2017?
Added Mar 7
Your answer to What kind of formal education does the Dalai Lama have?
Added Mar 7
Your answer to If a distant star is red, does it mean it's really far away?
Added Mar 7
Added Mar 5
Your answer to Was life discovered in a meterorite from Mars?
Added Mar 5
Your answer to Does SpaceX have the capability to send people around the moon?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Did Quora deactivate realtime notifications for comments due to scaling challenges?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to What's the status of the missing comment notifications bug?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Why am I no longer getting topic or comment notifications?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Why does Quora not show comments in my notifications?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Who will lead the Tibetan Buddhists when His Holiness the Dalai Lama dies?
Added Mar 3
Your answer to It's impossible to percept or imagine that nothing happens after death, are you sure that's what happens?
Added Mar 2
Your answer to Who is the Dalai Lama?
Added Mar 1
Your answer to What are your opinions on the SpaceX ‘tourist flight around-the-Moon’ in 2018?
Added Feb 28
Your answer to Are there any slight differences between the G-flat major and the F-sharp major?
Added Feb 28
Your answer to Is there an area in our solar system that we haven't yet seen or can't see?
Added Feb 24
Debunked: NASA do all the asteroid tracking and hide information about Nibiru
Added Feb 13
Debunked: We are headed towards a new ice age
Added Feb 13
Why a bright light shining on clouds during a sunset is not a passing planet
Added Feb 11
Added Feb 9
What it would be like if we really had two suns (or three in this case)
Added Feb 8
List of my Nibiru articles in Debunking Doomsday to date
Added Feb 8
Debunked: the Large Hadron Collider will create mini black holes that will destroy the world
Added Feb 6
Debunked - The obituary of the teenage girl who committed suicide in 2011 is fake
Added Feb 6
Debunked: birds singing at night are a sign the world will end
Added Feb 5
Why you probably don’t have a “phobia” if you are scared of asteroid impacts, two suns, Nibiru, etc
Added Feb 5
Debunked: Mountain sized asteroid 2014 UR116 headed towards Earth
Added Feb 2
Debunked: We are in danger from a magnetic pole shift in the near future
Added Jan 31
Added Jan 31
Your answer to Is NASA covering up Nibiru's existence?
Added Jan 29
Your answer to What are the chances that an asteroid less then ten kilometers can hit earth in this century?
Added Jan 29
Your answer to If a super big magnetic meteorite fly near earth, will it be possible to attract the earth away from its original route around the sun?
Added Jan 28
Your answer to Do Buddhists believe that we come back as grass and trees as well as animals and insects?
Added Jan 27
Added Jan 27
Debunked: Earth is threatened by a supernova
Added Jan 27
Could a spaceship enter the Earth’s atmosphere slowly - shortened answer
Added Jan 26
Debunked: Doomsday becoming one minute closer
Added Jan 26
Why we don’t need to be scared of the “Doomsday clock” (short version)
Added Jan 25
Added Jan 25
Your answer to Are there any scientifically inaccurate parts in the Martian?
Added Jan 23
Debunked: Nibiru fragment to strike Earth in February
Added Jan 22
Added Jan 22
Your answer to If there is no ‘self' in Buddhism, how is there a belief in reincarnation?
Added Jan 21
Your answer to Would it be possible to put a colony on the moon, or would the gravity be too weak?
Added Jan 21
Your answer to Is there a limit to mountain height on earth?
Added Jan 21
Your answer to Why do people believe Nibiru (Planet X) exists?
Added Jan 20
Added Jan 20
Your answer to What is the possibility of Earth being affected by a Gamma Ray Burst?
Added Jan 19
Added Jan 19
Your answer to Is 2017 the return of the ancient ones from Nibiru?
Added Jan 19
Your answer to How do we know Nibiru isn't real?
Added Jan 19
Added Jan 19
Debunked: Rich people are buying bunkers to escape from Nibiru
Added Jan 17
Your answer to Why didn't Apollo land on earth like the moon?
Added Jan 17
Your answer to Is it safe to touch Mars? Just imagine that a sample of Mars’ soil has been taken back to Earth. Would it be safe to touch it?
Added Jan 17
Added Jan 15
List of news sites that have run false reports that Earth is about to be hit by an asteroid
Added Jan 15
Your answer to Can Mars be claimed by a person or group?
Added Jan 15
Added Jan 15
Your answer to Are there solar systems without a Galaxy?
Added Jan 14
Your answer to Are there any organizing units between a solar system and a Galaxy?
Added Jan 14
List of newspapers that run fake or unchecked Doomsday “news”
Added Jan 14
Added Jan 14
Added Jan 12
Your answer to Why are Buddhists certain that other people suffer, even if they are not feeling like it?
Added Jan 12
Debunked: A new star that will appear in the sky in 2022 is a sign of the end of the world
Added Jan 11
Your answer to If a pure water planet could develop would its core be solid?
Added Jan 11
Your answer to Does ice evaporate in a vacuum?
Added Jan 11
Your answer to What are the chances of an asteroid or comet hitting the U.S. in the next 50 years?
Added Jan 11
Added Jan 11
Your answer to What would happen if galaxies were bright enough to be seen in our earthly sky?
Added Jan 10
Your answer to Is there a Tibetan Buddhist practice that doesn't involve deity visualization?
Added Jan 10
Are we in danger from “Hidden monster black holes found near the Milky Way” - NO!
Added Jan 9
Added Jan 8
Your answer to Are there any videos or simulations of how orbits in our solar system actually work?
Added Jan 8
Your answer to In Buddhism, why would an enlightened person defend themself, if their "self" doesn't really exist?
Added Jan 7
Added Jan 6
Your answer to How do Top Writers on Quora write such detailed answers to several questions in the span of an hour?
Added Jan 4
Debunked: Dire predictions for 2017 by Nostradamus
Added Jan 4
Your answer to What are the Nostradamus Predictions for the 2017?
Added Jan 4
Fake doomsday and disaster news from 2015 through to 2017
Added Jan 3
Added Jan 2
Debunked: Melissa Huffman did a video of Planet X
Added Jan 2
Debunked: The Vatican built a huge telescope, one of the largest in the world, to track Nibiru
Added Jan 2
Your answer to Can I be both Christian and Buddhist?
Added Jan 1
Your answer to Is Buddhism true?
Added Jan 1
Debunked: You should always read both sides of the argument about Nibiru - or indeed anything
Added Dec 30, 2016
Your answer to Are there any specific organisms that could conceivably survive on Mars in its current state?
Added Dec 29, 2016
Your answer to Is the Dalai Lama a god king?
Added Dec 29, 2016
Debunked: ALMA’s Gna (if it exists) is Nibiru
Added Dec 28, 2016
Your answer to A company wants to buy my site for $1.6 million dollars. I'm currently making $8k to $11k per month with it. Should I take the deal?
Added Dec 28, 2016
Added Dec 26, 2016
Your answer to When will the next ice age happen?
Added Dec 25, 2016
Added Dec 23, 2016
Your answer to Would it be prudent to migrate away from west coast in advance of Nibiru?
Added Dec 18, 2016
Your answer to Will a Magnetar Shockwave hit earth in 9-10 days?
Added Dec 18, 2016
Debunked: Asteroid 2012 DA to hit Earth in 2020
Added Dec 16, 2016
Your answer to What is the fastest moving known celestial body?
Added Dec 15, 2016
Added Dec 15, 2016
Your answer to If we started to harvest all helium-3 from the moon for all energy requirements of the earth, how long it would last?
Added Dec 14, 2016
Debunked: 2002 NT7 is going to hit Earth in 2019
Added Dec 14, 2016
Added Dec 14, 2016
Debunked: Earth faces a century of 400 giant impacts starting in 2017
Added Dec 14, 2016
Added Dec 13, 2016
Your answer to Is Nibiru and planet 9 the same thing?
Added Dec 13, 2016
Why is the Youtube interface so bewildering?
Added Dec 13, 2016
Your answer to I can't see any comments on youtube videos, what can I do to see them again?
Added Dec 13, 2016
Errors in the Wikipedia Four Noble Truths article
Added Dec 13, 2016
Debunked: Pastor Paul Bagley predicts that Magnetar SGR 1806-20 is going to send a gamma ray blast on 26th December which will be devastating to Ea...
Added Dec 13, 2016
Debunked: A gamma ray burst could make humans extinct
Added Dec 12, 2016
Debunked: “Doomsday” clock, Brexit “Doomsday” and use of “Doomsday” as hyperbole
Added Dec 12, 2016
Your answer to What is a parallel universe?
Added Dec 10, 2016
Debunked: Trump (or any other president or president elect) is the Anti Christ
Added Dec 10, 2016
Your answer to Could Donald Trump be the Antichrist?
Added Dec 10, 2016
Your answer to Is there any evidence, as Donald Trump suggests, that "windmills are devastating to the bird population"?
Added Dec 9, 2016
Your answer to What is dark matter?
Added Dec 8, 2016
Your answer to What if the super-large exoplanet is 0.01 ly form our planet?
Added Dec 8, 2016
Added Dec 8, 2016
Your answer to Where can I download the Silmarillion?
Added Dec 7, 2016
Why so many people post sightings of “Nibiru” - and why not “Santa” instead?
Added Dec 6, 2016
Debunked: Nemesis or Tyche is Nibiru
Added Dec 6, 2016
Bullshit Detector Plugin for Chrome for Fake News Sites
Added Dec 6, 2016
Debunked: Nibiru is Wormwood so must be real
Added Dec 5, 2016
Your answer to Where is Nibiru right now?
Added Dec 5, 2016
Your answer to Is Nibiru a YouTube phenomenon or is it real? How could they keep it secret with all those astronomers out there?
Added Dec 5, 2016
Debunked: Astronomers get murdered by the secret agencies if they “speak out” about Nibiru
Added Dec 5, 2016
Your answer to How are major content disputes adjudicated and resolved in Wikipedia?
Added Dec 5, 2016
Debunked: Those who say Nibiru is real say that we should be scared and worried - are they right?
Added Dec 5, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible to develop harmonic progressions in a 17-note scale?
Added Dec 4, 2016
Your answer to Why does NASA avoid contamination of other worlds?
Added Dec 4, 2016
Debunked: Doomsday scenarios predicted using an Ouija board
Added Dec 3, 2016
Your answer to How can I abandon atheism?
Added Dec 3, 2016
Your answer to What will happen during the Galactic Alignment?
Added Dec 3, 2016
Your answer to How far away is Nibiru/Planet X now?
Added Dec 2, 2016
What you can do about the Alice through the Looking Glass world of Wikipedia Editing - Right Now
Added Dec 1, 2016
Ideas for wikipedia reform for the long term
Added Dec 1, 2016
List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date.
Added Nov 30, 2016
Your answer to Is there a space treaty to buy and own other planets?
Added Nov 29, 2016
Added Nov 27, 2016
Nibiru Debunked: Yes, we deserve to know the truth about Nibiru
Added Nov 27, 2016
Your answer to How would we communicate with a probe that we send to Alpha Centauri?
Added Nov 27, 2016
Your answer to What is the maximum range for which we can maintain contact with a space probe?
Added Nov 27, 2016
Your answer to How frequent does the Mars' surface gets bombarded by asteroids, comets or meteoroids? How severe are these impacts?
Added Nov 27, 2016
Debunked: This is a “Winged planet” and is Nibiru
Added Nov 27, 2016
Debunked: Paul Cox said that we have two suns
Added Nov 26, 2016
Your answer to Could a pandemic wipe out humanity?
Added Nov 24, 2016
Your answer to Is there any plausible reason for aliens to wipe out or enslave humanity?
Added Nov 24, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for Earth to have 2 binary moons orbiting each other?
Added Nov 23, 2016
Debunked: Nibiru is at coordinates …
Added Nov 22, 2016
Debunked: The US government is building vast underground bunkers to escape from Nibiru
Added Nov 22, 2016
Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy
Added Nov 22, 2016
Debunked: Nostrodamus predicted the end of the world on [insert date here]
Added Nov 22, 2016
Debunked: The Doomsday argument
Added Nov 22, 2016
Your answer to Would it be a very big failure for USA if Russia managed to make a manned mission to Mars and colonize mars?
Added Nov 21, 2016
Your answer to Why is it dangerous to contaminate other planets with human bacteria?
Added Nov 21, 2016
Your answer to Should Quora remove links to fake news websites in questions?
Added Nov 20, 2016
Debunked: Have these three sisters predicted the Apocalypse
Added Nov 20, 2016
Debunked: Earth could be struck by a huge asteroid hundreds of kilometers across
Added Nov 20, 2016
Debunked: Mysterious sphere spotted in NASA’s Sun Images
Added Nov 20, 2016
Debunked: A nuclear war would make Earth uninhabitable - and humans extinct
Added Nov 20, 2016
Your answer to Who would you like to see play The Doctor in 2018? And maybe companions too?
Added Nov 20, 2016
Your answer to I agree we should colonize Mars. But what are the reasons to not colonize Mars other than the costs?
Added Nov 20, 2016
Added Nov 19, 2016
Why Climate Change is No Longer a Political Debate Outside the US
Added Nov 19, 2016
Debunked: Everyone who says Nibiru is not real is lying
Added Nov 18, 2016
Debunked: This tablet from the ancient Sumerians depicts 12 planets including Nibiru
Added Nov 18, 2016
Debunked: NASA has found a brown dwarf in our solar system
Added Nov 17, 2016
What really happens if Yellowstone erupts as a supervolcano, or if some other supervolcano erupts?
Added Nov 17, 2016
Debunked: Carlos Muñoz Ferrada discovered Nibiru
Added Nov 17, 2016
Added Nov 17, 2016
Debunked: Soon we won’t be able to feed everyone because the world population is growing so quickly
Added Nov 16, 2016
Debunked - Stephen Hawking puts an expiry date on humanity
Added Nov 16, 2016
Added Nov 16, 2016
Debunked - The world will end because the Bible (or some other sacred book) says so
Added Nov 16, 2016
Nibiru is so scary because it isn’t real - what can you do to prevent something that isn’t real?
Added Nov 16, 2016
Your answer to What is the theoretical furthest outer orbit a planet could have around the sun? Does the answer depends on its size and mass?
Added Nov 15, 2016
Debunked - Nibiru will hit Earth between January and March 2017 - or any range of dates like that
Added Nov 15, 2016
Added Nov 15, 2016
Your answer to Will it be necessary for safety reasons (such as deadly martian viruses) to ban the return to Earth of persons who travelled to Mars?
Added Nov 14, 2016
Your answer to In what phase was the moon during the Apollo landing?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Your answer to Since there is no mechanism in the USA to stop President Trump from launching a nuke, what is the chance of it happening?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Debunked: Supermoon on 14th November is the beginning of the end of the world
Added Nov 13, 2016
Your answer to If an astronaut accidentally became untethered from the ISS during a spacewalk, could the ISS be maneuvered to rescue him/her?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Your answer to How does reincarnation happen with a growing population?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Added Nov 12, 2016
Why the idea of Nibiru seems non refutable - and how does astronomy really work?
Added Nov 12, 2016
Your answer to Do Chinese people consider Dalai Lama a traitor?
Added Nov 12, 2016
Your answer to What are the most frustrating aspects of being a Wikipedia editor?
Added Nov 12, 2016
Your answer to How certain are we about the existence of Planet Nine?
Added Nov 11, 2016
Your answer to What do Buddhists think of the afterlife?
Added Nov 11, 2016
Added Nov 10, 2016
Debunked: How can the videos and photos be hoaxes when so many people believe them?
Added Nov 10, 2016
Debunked: Ancient astronomers knew things we don’t about planets and stars
Added Nov 10, 2016
Added Nov 9, 2016
Debunked: Climate change will make the world too hot for humans
Added Nov 9, 2016
Added Nov 9, 2016
Debunked: The IRAS infrared satellite found Nibiru in 1983
Added Nov 9, 2016
Where can I get support if I’m scared of Nibiru / Doomsday maybe even suicidal?
Added Nov 9, 2016
Debunked: Nibiru has been found on Google Sky
Added Nov 9, 2016
Added Nov 9, 2016
Added Nov 8, 2016
Your answer to Does the International Space Station ever get dirty on the outside?
Added Nov 8, 2016
Added Nov 7, 2016
Your answer to What are the Four Noble Truths?
Added Nov 6, 2016
Debunked: A Solar Storm Put A Crack In Earth's Magnetic Field
Added Nov 4, 2016
Your answer to What research is being done on the potential pandemic of Morgellons?
Added Nov 4, 2016
Your answer to Is Wikipedia biased?
Added Nov 4, 2016
Your answer to Are Morgellons and chemtrails connected?
Added Nov 3, 2016
Your answer to How do I get infected with Morgellons disease?
Added Nov 3, 2016
Your answer to Can a sheep live without a shepherd?
Added Nov 3, 2016
Debunked: The eclipse in the US in August 2017 will mark the start of the end of the world
Added Nov 1, 2016
Debunked: NASA warns that 1000 asteroids might hit Earth in the next five years
Added Oct 31, 2016
Dazzathecameraman’s amusing parody about HCT2014 (Huge Chocolate Teapot)
Added Oct 31, 2016
Added Oct 31, 2016
Debunking: Inuit elders say that the Earth’s poles have shifted position
Added Oct 31, 2016
Your answer to Do water planets exist?
Added Oct 31, 2016
Your answer to Could the Interplanetary Transportation System proposed by Musk be potentially weaponised by governments and/or competing companies?
Added Oct 31, 2016
Debunked: Universe will end with a “Big Rip”
Added Oct 30, 2016
Who else says Nibiru is nonsense?
Added Oct 30, 2016
Your answer to If and when humanity colonizes the solar system which planets and moons will be viable targets?
Added Oct 30, 2016
Your answer to What are some challenges associated with interplanetary travel?
Added Oct 30, 2016
Your answer to An AI that has been correct at predicting the last 3 elections has predicted Trump to win. Thoughts?
Added Oct 29, 2016
Added Oct 29, 2016
Debunked: A planet in a 3600 year orbit can hide behind the sun for years on end
Added Oct 29, 2016
Your answer to Is humanity’s venture to Mars the modern version of people moving to the new world?
Added Oct 28, 2016
Added Oct 28, 2016
Debunking: Think how stupid you will feel if Nibiru is real
Added Oct 27, 2016
Debunked: NASA has been tracking “Planet X” for decades
Added Oct 27, 2016
Your answer to What photos look Photoshopped but are actually real?
Added Oct 27, 2016
Added Oct 27, 2016
Debunked: This is a photograph of two suns
Added Oct 26, 2016
Your answer to What area on Mars is the most interesting for us?
Added Oct 26, 2016
I understand that Nibiru is not real but still feel scared all the time - what can I do?
Added Oct 26, 2016
Your answer to What is the largest size meteorite that could hit the earth without us detecting it before impact? How much damage would it do?
Added Oct 26, 2016
Doomsday Debunked Kindle Book Draft Cover
Added Oct 26, 2016
Added Oct 26, 2016
Your answer to Is the world gonna end on October 31 2016?
Added Oct 25, 2016
Debunked: Why the World will End Surely on 17th February 2017? Shocking Facts
Added Oct 25, 2016
Added Oct 25, 2016
Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]
Added Oct 24, 2016
Debunked: We are endangered by “Star Quakes”
Added Oct 24, 2016
Debunked: NASA is getting ready to Capture Planet X / Nibiru on Camera
Added Oct 24, 2016
Debunked: Doomsday Stories like Nibiru must be true because lots of people believe they are true
Added Oct 24, 2016
Debunking: a president of the US could order a nuclear attack at a moments notice on a whim
Added Oct 24, 2016
Your answer to Did the landing sequence of the Mars lander Schiaparelli really have to be so complex?
Added Oct 24, 2016
Your answer to Does the President of the United States have the authority to launch a nuclear attack without proper justification?
Added Oct 24, 2016
Debunked: NASA says that Earth will enter total darkness for 15 days in November
Added Oct 23, 2016
How did we miss the Chelyabinsk asteroid?
Added Oct 23, 2016
Added Oct 23, 2016
Debunking: Halley’s comet is going to hit Earth this week.
Added Oct 23, 2016
Added Oct 23, 2016
Added Oct 23, 2016
Debunk: Planet 9 is tilting our solar system
Added Oct 23, 2016
Added Oct 23, 2016
Debunking: Solar Storms to end all life on Earth
Added Oct 23, 2016
Your answer to Can Halley's comet strike a planet in the solar system?
Added Oct 21, 2016
Added Oct 21, 2016
Your answer to Why couldn't the Mars landers be equipped with a video camera, so that people could see moving images of the planet's surface?
Added Oct 20, 2016
Your answer to Does the new batch of WikiLeaks really show evidence for Nibiru?
Added Oct 20, 2016
Your answer to When will Nibiru hit Earth?
Added Oct 20, 2016
Added Oct 20, 2016
Added Oct 19, 2016
Your answer to Why do people want to colonize planets when space colonies would be the better choice for an expanding, technological civilization?
Added Oct 19, 2016
Your answer to Is asteroid 2009ES approaching to Earth?
Added Oct 18, 2016
Your answer to Why do some people still believe in Nibiru?
Added Oct 17, 2016
Your answer to Could I pay my way into outer space?
Added Oct 17, 2016
Your answer to Why don't the British have a space programme?
Added Oct 16, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that they found liquid water on Mars? And what does this mean for us?
Added Oct 15, 2016
Added Oct 15, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for another planet to collide with another?
Added Oct 15, 2016
Your answer to What is the real image of Earth seen from space including space junk?
Added Oct 14, 2016
Your answer to Are the YouTube results personalized, when a keyword is searched for?
Added Oct 14, 2016
Your answer to Will it be viable one day to mine the Moon and extract the resources there for something useful?
Added Oct 13, 2016
Your answer to Why don't we send humans to the moon instead of to Mars?
Added Oct 12, 2016
Your answer to What will happen after we die? What about our thoughts?
Added Oct 11, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if a large asteroid ten times the size of the earth missed it by a few kilometers?
Added Oct 8, 2016
Your answer to Will Mars colony always need a special suit or did Elon plan to inject oxygen in the air?
Added Oct 7, 2016
Your answer to Is there a future opportunity to become rich from the colonization of Mars?
Added Oct 2, 2016
Your answer to What would be the ethical implications of letting a private company colonize Mars?
Added Oct 1, 2016
Your answer to How can Mars be "warmed up" as Elon Musk implied during his September 2016 presentation?
Added Oct 1, 2016
Your answer to Shouldn't Musk try colonizing Venus instead of Mars?
Added Oct 1, 2016
Your answer to Shouldn't we focus on colonizing Antarctica and the Sahara before colonizing Mars?
Added Sep 30, 2016
Your answer to Is there any form of Earth life that could currently live on Mars?
Added Sep 30, 2016
Your answer to What are your views about interplanetary travel plans of Elon Musk?
Added Sep 28, 2016
Your answer to Are the Dry Valleys of Antarctica similar to surface of Mars?
Added Sep 25, 2016
Your answer to Is Corbyn right about the Bomb?
Added Sep 24, 2016
Your answer to What surprising activity has NASA found in Jupiter's moon Europa?
Added Sep 23, 2016
Added Sep 22, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that Mars experienced retrograde motion? How does it happen, and what are the changes that happened in the planet?
Added Sep 18, 2016
Your answer to Why do we not deploy airships to explore other planets?
Added Sep 17, 2016
Your answer to Could colonizing Mars be a lucrative or potentially profitable venture?
Added Sep 17, 2016
Added Sep 15, 2016
List of Hypothetical Biogenic features in ALH84001
Added Sep 15, 2016
Your answer to How did meteorites from Mars escape its orbit and reach the Earth, for instance, ALH84001, in Antarctica?
Added Sep 15, 2016
Your answer to Would a tidally-locked planet be merely a planet of two extremes or would there be temperate zones where life might be sustained?
Added Sep 12, 2016
Your answer to Why haven't we found any broken planets?
Added Sep 12, 2016
Your answer to What's the hardest bug you've debugged?
Added Sep 11, 2016
Your answer to Is there a minor inconsistency in the 11th chapter of The Hobbit?
Added Sep 11, 2016
Your answer to Could Hubble take a picture of voyager 1?
Added Sep 11, 2016
Added Sep 11, 2016
Your answer to Were there two Buddhas?
Added Sep 10, 2016
Your answer to Which Buddhist sutras are what the Buddha said?
Added Sep 10, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible that a planet is entirely made of liquid much like Saturn and Jupiter are made entirely of gas?
Added Sep 10, 2016
Added Sep 9, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if a 15 km diameter comet hit the outback of Australia?
Added Sep 8, 2016
Added Sep 8, 2016
Your answer to I've heard many people claim the moon landing was a hoax, what are the odds they are true?
Added Sep 8, 2016
Added Sep 8, 2016
Your answer to What procedures were in place, if the Apollo 11 astronauts had beencontaminated with a living organism from their stay on the moon?
Added Sep 8, 2016
Your answer to What kind of computers were used in Apollo 11 Mission (of 1969) that resulted in the moon-landing?
Added Sep 7, 2016
Added Sep 7, 2016
Your answer to Is it a good idea to introduce Chroococcidiopsis to Mars?
Added Sep 7, 2016
Added Sep 6, 2016
Your answer to If a 9km asteroid were approaching earth right now, at what point will it be visible during daytime? How many days away from impact?
Added Aug 31, 2016
Your answer to What are some interesting facts about Usain Bolt?
Added Aug 30, 2016
Your answer to How close are we to launching supplies to ISS with a rail gun?
Added Aug 30, 2016
Your answer to A new planet orbiting Proxima Centauri could be habitable. Should we be going there instead of Mars?
Added Aug 29, 2016
Added Aug 28, 2016
Added Aug 27, 2016
Your answer to Will the use of nuclear weapons at the poles of mars make it inhabitable? Aren't there any risks to the earth if we do so?
Added Aug 26, 2016
Your answer to Has humanity reached the Moon and Mars thanks to the bombing of London by the Nazi Germany?
Added Aug 11, 2016
Your answer to What are some things non-programmers say that frustrate programmers?
Added Aug 10, 2016
Added Aug 8, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible to use an ICBM missile to send man to the moon?
Added Aug 7, 2016
Your answer to How expensive would it be to convert all of the US's ICBMs into Space Rocket Transportation to places like the Moon or even Mars?
Added Aug 7, 2016
Added Aug 7, 2016
Added Aug 7, 2016
Your answer to When does curiosity come back from mars and how will this help us?
Added Aug 6, 2016
Your answer to What will really happen when the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts?
Added Aug 6, 2016
Your answer to Who is scarier to be elected as president, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?
Added Aug 3, 2016
Your answer to Why is "Nibiru" still being forced on some of us?
Added Aug 3, 2016
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to Is Nibiru a face-palm to astronomy?
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to Planet X will hit 2015?
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to Will a 490 metre wide asteroid end all life on Earth if it hits?
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to How can Curiosity survive the strong Martian wind storms and how doesn't it get damaged as Martian dust is very erosive?
Added Aug 1, 2016
Your answer to Why didn't Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings pick up the Ring after Bilbo dropped it in the Shire?
Added Aug 1, 2016
Your answer to Does Tom Bombadil predate the Istari?
Added Jul 31, 2016
Your answer to Thermodynamics: For a given pressure and temperature, how fast does water-based ice sublimate?
Added Jul 31, 2016
Your answer to Are continuous earthquakes a sign of the world's end?
Added Jul 30, 2016
Your answer to Will the world really end on July 29, 2016?
Added Jul 29, 2016
Added Jul 27, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if earth poles shifted drastically?
Added Jul 25, 2016
Your answer to What if planet X and Nemesis are the same thing?
Added Jul 25, 2016
Your answer to What would it take to effectively alter a meteor's path using electromagnetism?
Added Jul 24, 2016
Your answer to Would we be in a stable orbit if Nibiru were just behind the Sun?
Added Jul 24, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if a very small moon or mars colony declares independence?
Added Jul 22, 2016
Your answer to How much does a spacesuit cost?
Added Jul 22, 2016
Your answer to What do you think about Melania Trump's speech at the RNC and the plagiarism accusations?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if there were no police?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to Will global warming prevent the next Ice Age?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to When can we expect the next ice age?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to How does the average lobster die? What is the average lobster? What are its characteristics?
Added Jul 20, 2016
Your answer to Do moons have moons?
Added Jul 20, 2016
Your answer to Why do composers use double sharps or double flats?
Added Jul 17, 2016
Your answer to Which people have been most influential in developing longitude and latitude theories?
Added Jul 17, 2016
Added Jul 16, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that scientists have found a new dwarf planet?
Added Jul 15, 2016
Your answer to To be totally unconventional, should a piano with keys of E# and B# be produced? Would it be more versatile and more interesting?
Added Jul 15, 2016
Added Jul 14, 2016
Your answer to Where did the pan come from for Sam Gamgee to cook the rabbit in LOTR "The Two Towers"?
Added Jul 13, 2016
Your answer to How many amateur astronomers are there in the world?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to How many G's would Juno experience while passing so closely near Jupiter?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to What is this bright object next to the sun?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to Is planet 9 real?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to What usually happens to some Buddhist children who don't fully realize the implications of the life they have committed to?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to Are humans destined to colonize the universe?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to How are astronauts protected from radiation during space walks?
Added Jul 10, 2016
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Jul 9, 2016
Your answer to What are some of the most widely circulated fake pictures?
Added Jul 9, 2016
Your answer to Will humans become extinct before we can colonize other planets?
Added Jul 8, 2016
Your answer to Since the moon has no atmosphere, and thus drag would not be present, could something orbit the moon indefinitely?
Added Jul 8, 2016
Your answer to Would it be possible to create a seamless stop-motion video of the Curiosity's journey on Mars with all the available photos?
Added Jul 8, 2016
Your answer to Why doesn't NASA send a rover to Europa?
Added Jul 7, 2016
Added Jul 7, 2016
Your answer to What would the cost be to build a Stanford torus in earth orbit?
Added Jul 6, 2016
Your answer to What is the Muslim - Arab influence on Science and Western civilization?
Added Jul 6, 2016
Your answer to If China and Russia build bases on the Moon, will the U.S. do the same?
Added Jul 6, 2016
Your answer to If a manned moon landing was attempted today, how would it differ from previous missions?
Added Jul 5, 2016
Your answer to How does the Junocam on JUNO work?
Added Jul 5, 2016
Your answer to What are the LOTR books about?
Added Jul 4, 2016
Your answer to How can scientists be sure that asteroid 2016 HO3 won't ever hit the Earth?
Added Jul 4, 2016
Your answer to What are some of the obstacles we will face when we colonize the moon?
Added Jul 4, 2016
Your answer to Imagine that SpaceX has established a small habitable base on Mars. What are some ways to make the base profitable?
Added Jul 3, 2016
How to edit wikipedia without getting into trouble
Added Jul 3, 2016
Your answer to I've heard that early Venus could have supported life. Is it possible that a civilization could have arose there billions of years ago?
Added Jul 3, 2016
Your answer to Would Lava Tubes be a feasible location for a future moon base?
Added Jul 2, 2016
Your answer to Can anyone give more details about the discovery of new moon that is revolving the earth?
Added Jul 2, 2016
Your answer to When will humans build base stations and moon bases?
Added Jul 1, 2016
Your answer to If we terraformed Mars via polar asteroid collision, how would the climate be affected by the new ocean and nitrogen?
Added Jun 30, 2016
Your answer to Do we have the moral right to Terra-Form Mars if we find life existing there already, even single-celled?
Added Jun 29, 2016
Added Jun 29, 2016
Your answer to What are you banned from? Why?
Added Jun 28, 2016
Your answer to Are we headed towards a new ice-age?
Added Jun 27, 2016
Your answer to Is Brexit not a right decision? How can everyone claim it’s bad if Britain's democracy voted for it?
Added Jun 27, 2016
Your answer to What building or structure would remain after a thousand years? What should an architect design to be sure it will last a millennium?
Added Jun 25, 2016
Your answer to Why is the Dalai Lama seen as evil in China?
Added Jun 24, 2016
Your answer to What will happen if the Earth's magnetic poles reverse? Will we have a catastrophe on our hands?
Added Jun 22, 2016
Your answer to Have the people of Tibet been generally successful in choosing their Dalai Lama?
Added Jun 21, 2016
Your answer to What are the best Mars analogue sites on Earth?
Added Jun 21, 2016
Your answer to Why are we attempting to colonize Mars before the moon?
Added Jun 21, 2016
Your answer to If there is a possibility of life on Europa, then why did NASA land a craft on Titan and not Europa?
Added Jun 20, 2016
Your answer to How did the universe come into existence according to Buddhism?
Added Jun 19, 2016
Your answer to Why didn't Sauron see Bilbo at his birthday party or see Samwise at Cirith Ungol?
Added Jun 19, 2016
Your answer to In your opinion, what is the best way to end the "moon landing was fake" debate?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to How does a Bhikkhu (Buddhist Monk) handle house bugs?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to What are some generally unknown facts about the Apollo Moon landings?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to Did NASA fake the moon landing? If so, how can you tell using the images?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to How big would an asteroid or comet have to be to end life on Earth?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Added Jun 17, 2016
Your answer to Am I enlightened?
Added Jun 17, 2016
Your answer to When we colonize the Moon, will we be able to see our buildings from earth?
Added Jun 16, 2016
Your answer to Can I be a Zen monk or at least study it under a Master and still get to marry, have kids, have a job and not leave the urban life?
Added Jun 15, 2016
Your answer to Is the Dalai Lama justified in withholding his duty to reincarnate?
Added Jun 11, 2016
Your answer to Did Buddha intend Buddhism?
Added Jun 7, 2016
Added Jun 6, 2016
Your answer to Are there any other fractions "like" x/7?
Added Jun 4, 2016
Your answer to Can a Buddhist give me their perspective on Buddhism?
Added Jun 4, 2016
Your answer to What do we know about the subsurface ocean of Europa?
Added Jun 2, 2016
Your answer to Which is the "Bible" of Buddhism?
Added Jun 1, 2016
Your answer to What is the purpose of the guru in Tibetan Buddhism?
Added Jun 1, 2016
Your answer to Is there proof that Buddha existed? If so, what is the strongest proof about his historical existence that we have?
Added May 31, 2016
Your answer to Does my dog know he is a dog?
Added May 28, 2016
Your answer to Did astronauts in the Apollo space program observe an alien spacecraft?
Added May 28, 2016
Added May 28, 2016
Added May 26, 2016
Buddhist sources on the Four Noble Truths
Added May 26, 2016
Your answer to Wouldn`t it be better for mankind to explore the Moon, rather than go to Mars?
Added May 20, 2016
Your answer to Is ordaining as a Tibetan Buddhist monk a lifetime commitment?
Added May 17, 2016
Your answer to What is Punya, and how does it feel?
Added May 17, 2016
Your answer to What are the primary tenets of Buddhism?
Added May 14, 2016
Your answer to How heavy of a gas could form an atmosphere on the moon?
Added May 14, 2016
Your answer to Will the James Webb Space Telescope be any more useful in the hunt for Planet Nine?
Added May 13, 2016
Added May 10, 2016
Your answer to Would a Hale-Bopp collision terraform Mars?
Added May 10, 2016
Added May 9, 2016
Your answer to Are there any planets that aren't spherical?
Added May 9, 2016
Your answer to Is going to Mars the right choice?
Added May 8, 2016
Your answer to How can I rapidly reduce my bad karma?
Added May 8, 2016
Your answer to How far are we from being able to use Mars as a pit stop on our way to other planets?
Added May 7, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for a planet to be ejected from a solar system and later captured by another solar system? If so, how?
Added May 6, 2016
Your answer to What is the likelihood that SpaceX will obtain its goal for colonizing Mars being that Elon's track record is pretty solid?
Added May 5, 2016
Your answer to Have there been any materials or phenomena encountered in space that were not already discovered or known about on or from Earth?
Added May 4, 2016
Added May 3, 2016
Your answer to Why does Buddhism automatically assume that life is full of suffering for "everyone"?
Added May 2, 2016
Your answer to Why does Buddhism posit existence of other realms and supernatural beings if there is no obvious evidence of such?
Added May 2, 2016
Your answer to Besides Mars, where else in the Solar System should rovers be sent? Where else could we currently reach?
Added May 1, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible that a government could be hiding evidence of extraterrestrial beings/activities?
Added Apr 29, 2016
Your answer to Why did both Gautama Buddha and Vardhamana Mahavira aim to escape from the cycle of birth and rebirth?
Added Apr 29, 2016
Your answer to Why do Buddhists perceive the cycle of rebirth to be a cycle of suffering and why do they wish to liberate themselves from this cycle?
Added Apr 18, 2016
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Is possible to modify the International Space Station (ISS) and use it as a vehicle to travel to the moon?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to How likely is it that ExoMars will discover life on Mars?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to What is it like to practice Vajrayana Buddhism?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Could we have established a colony on the moon by now if NASA had continued its lunar program?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Are there Buddhists who don't believe in reincarnation?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Are partly or completely autonomous Mars rovers possible? How advanced could rovers become?
Added Apr 14, 2016
Your answer to Is Mars's gravity healthy for humans?
Added Apr 14, 2016
Your answer to Was Dalai Lama enlightened? Why or why not?
Added Apr 13, 2016
Your answer to If buddhists don't believe in the idea of a "soul", why do they say the Dalai Lama is reincarnated from a specific person?
Added Apr 13, 2016
Your answer to What is the subject matter of mathematics from Buddhist point of view?
Added Apr 11, 2016
Your answer to Should we land on the Moon or go straight to Mars?
Added Apr 9, 2016
Your answer to Do you ever feel guilty for hanging up on a telemarketer?
Added Apr 8, 2016
Your answer to Does human body contain radioactive elements? How do they affect our body?
Added Apr 7, 2016
Your answer to If we get to colonize Mars, as planned by Elon Musk, would the sunlight available on Mars be adequate like it is on Earth?
Added Apr 7, 2016
Your answer to What are the problems behind Terraforming Mars?
Added Apr 4, 2016
Added Apr 3, 2016
Your answer to What are the chances the earth will be hit by another asteroid that will wipe out all life on earth in the next 1000 years?
Added Apr 3, 2016
Your answer to How far is NASA from sending a robot to explore the ocean of Europa?
Added Apr 3, 2016
Your answer to What is the last 4 digit of 333^444+444^333?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Followed Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to Why is using a metronome while studying an instrument helpful?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to How long till we have a fully self supporting colony on Mars?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to Would you rather be in space or earth now, if you get to choose?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to Do the four noble truths of Buddhism constitute an empirical method that is falsifiable?
Added Apr 1, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible that civilizations existed in planets before the birth of our sun itself?
Added Apr 1, 2016
Your answer to Could a domed city be built on the Moon or Mars?
Added Mar 31, 2016
Added Mar 31, 2016
Your answer to Could a large nuclear weapon detonated on Mars melt enough CO2 to cause a global warming cycle?
Added Mar 31, 2016
Your answer to How does Mars have more solar radiation than Earth when Earth is closer to the sun?
Added Mar 29, 2016
Your answer to If human civilization is wiped out sometime before 2025, what would the most likely cause be?
Added Mar 27, 2016
Your answer to How much computing power does Google's Alpha Go use?
Added Mar 26, 2016
Your answer to Of the things humans can currently do better than computers, which seem most likely to still be this way in 20 years?
Added Mar 25, 2016
Added Mar 23, 2016
Should Humans Fill the Galaxy?
Added Mar 21, 2016
Your answer to If ants or roaches lived on Mars could we detect them with the equipment we have one the planet?
Added Mar 20, 2016
Your answer to Have humans reached the technological point where they can start a colony on Mars?
Added Mar 19, 2016
Your answer to If there were another planet exactly like Earth but with no life and we were to add bacteria to the surface, what would happen?
Added Mar 19, 2016
Your answer to What is better: ALAP (as late as possible) or ASAP approach to send astronauts to the Moon or Mars?
Added Mar 5, 2016
Your answer to How do seasons on Mars compare and contrast with seasons on Earth?
Added Mar 3, 2016
Your answer to So an asteroid is aiming toward Earth, it has a 15000km to 1000000km margin for error?
Added Mar 3, 2016
Your answer to Has NASA ever recorded sound on the surface of Mars?
Added Mar 2, 2016
Your answer to How does "memory transfer" happen in rebirth according to Buddhism?
Added Mar 2, 2016
Your answer to Buckminster Fuller (architect): Why hasn't anybody built a cloud nine (tensegrity sphere)?
Added Mar 1, 2016
Your answer to How can humans survive the Van Allen radiation belts?
Added Mar 1, 2016
Added Feb 29, 2016
Your answer to What are reasons (not including his appearance or wealth) why people think Donald Trump would be a bad president?
Added Feb 29, 2016
Your answer to What should I do if the pilot passes out and I (with no flight training) have to land the plane?
Added Feb 29, 2016
Added Feb 29, 2016
Added Feb 28, 2016
Your answer to What can NASA realistically do to stop an asteroid from hitting the Earth?
Added Feb 28, 2016
Your answer to If Bernie Sanders is 74, why would anyone realistically vote for him?
Added Feb 27, 2016
Your answer to What do AI researchers think about the Wait But Why article on AI?
Added Feb 27, 2016
Your answer to Why didn't Tolkien give the One Ring more offensive powers?
Added Feb 26, 2016
Your answer to What does the Dalai Lama mean when he says that man never really lives because he pursues money?
Added Feb 25, 2016
Your answer to Why do so many people from Europe want Bernie Sanders to be the president of the United States?
Added Feb 25, 2016
Your answer to Why shouldn't we colonize other planets?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Does Buddhism allow fun?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to What is considered unethical about taking earth based life to other planets?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Why haven't we sent a robotic rock/soil sample return mission to Mars yet?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible, in the near future, that NASA will be able to send missions to Alpha Centauri?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Why doesn't Quora oblige or encourage users to provide sources/references for their answers?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Can two people repopulate Earth? Is it possible?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Why do we send astronauts if we can control droids with VR?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to What constraints to AI and machine learning algorithms are needed to prevent AI from becoming a dystopian threat to humanity?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to What are the launch windows for different planets?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to What planets/moons can you see humans setting foot on by 2100?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that a neutron star will hit the Earth in 75 years from now?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to Can you suggest a second Earth aside from Mars, considering climate, resources, and distance from Earth?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to Would Elon Musk have the right to sell property on Mars if he is the first to establish a permanent colony?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to I saw a Buddhist nun window shopping in a mall. Is it deplorable of me to judge her for it?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to Would SpaceX need permission to send people to Mars?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to If Mars was warmed up, would it release enough CO2 to allow people to walk around with only an oxygen mask?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Added Feb 20, 2016
Your answer to With our current technology, how long could we make a space probe like Voyager last before it would shut down/lose contact with us?
Added Feb 19, 2016
Your answer to How does hell work in dominant religions, such as Islam, Buddhism, Christian etc?
Added Feb 19, 2016
Your answer to Is NASA's asteroid redirect mission a little bit too dangerous?
Added Feb 19, 2016
Your answer to What could we learn from a manned mission to mars that we wouldn't know from an unmanned mission?
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that the core of the Sun is Plutonium?
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that the chinese robots didn't find anything on the moon?
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Should we focus on colonization of space to save the future of our species? Assuming we cannot sustain life on earth indefinitely.
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Is Mars full of rust?
Added Feb 17, 2016
Your answer to Are airbags a good solution for 'soft lunar landing'?
Added Feb 17, 2016
Your answer to Is Pluto a planet?
Added Feb 17, 2016
Your answer to Let's say I don't believe the world is round. How can one prove the world is round to me?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to Will Earth ever be as inhospitable to humans as Mars is now?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to Compared to Chinese or Japanese Buddhism, is Tibetan Buddhism more focused on gaining control over imagination and thoughts?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to What should be the first words from Mars? What topics could be involved?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if humanity learned that our planet is part of a huge territory claimed by extraterrestrials?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to If the Starship Enterprise were in a "standard orbit" around Earth, how bright would it appear to the naked eye?
Added Feb 14, 2016
Your answer to Could the Mars rover have contaminated Mars with earth based life forms?
Added Feb 14, 2016
Your answer to Which side of the Moon did the Americans land on: the "dark side" or the "other side"?
Added Feb 14, 2016
Your answer to Is there any possible way to make a black hole orbit the Earth?
Added Feb 13, 2016
Your answer to What do I need to be able to see the ISS?
Added Feb 13, 2016
Your answer to What would happen to the Solar System, if we created an artificial planet?
Added Feb 10, 2016
Added Feb 8, 2016
Your answer to Is Planet 9 responsible for mass asteroid impact made here on Earth?
Added Feb 7, 2016
Your answer to How big should a planet be (radius,mass) and how far away from it's star to have (for example) four natural satellites?
Added Feb 7, 2016
Added Feb 7, 2016
Your answer to Why are there no Mars photos of the daytime sun?
Added Feb 7, 2016
Added Feb 2, 2016
Your answer to Is it really true that before 2050 we would be living on moon in dome shaped houses?
Added Feb 1, 2016
Your answer to Could Planet X explain why the Oort Cloud releases comets that enter our solar system?
Added Jan 31, 2016
Your answer to How could you move 'Planet 9' into a circular orbit within the solar system's habitable zone?
Added Jan 29, 2016
Your answer to How could you slow 'planet 9' down enough for it to achieve a stable orbit around the sun like the 'inner' planets?
Added Jan 28, 2016
Your answer to What is the purpose of the Asteroid Belt and is it a former planet?
Added Jan 28, 2016
Your answer to Is it clear whether the putative "ninth planet" has cleared its neighbourhood?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to What does the rest of the world think about the controversy over the TMT (thirty meter telescope) in Hawaii?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to Would it be possible to significantly impact the orbit of the Earth if I kept performing sling-shot maneuvers across the solar system?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to Should we (human race) explore more of space and start colonizing it?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to What is it known about this hypothesized ninth planet in the solar system?
Added Jan 26, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for a planet to have an oxygen-rich atmosphere without having life on it?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to Is Mars capable of supporting life?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to Quoran Astronomers: How close will planet 9 get to the Sun and to the Earth in its perihelion and perigee?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to What type of scientists will be the first to be selected to go to Mars?
Added Jan 24, 2016
Your answer to What is the probability of human race being immigrants to Earth a long time ago?
Added Jan 24, 2016
Added Jan 23, 2016
Your answer to What is the maximum distance a planet could be from the sun and still consistently orbit it?
Added Jan 22, 2016
Your answer to If Planet Nine exists, could it be the first of many additional planets we find in our solar system?
Added Jan 22, 2016
Your answer to Should I be worried about the possible 9th planet?
Added Jan 21, 2016
Your answer to How important would be the finding of another planet in our solar system?
Added Jan 21, 2016
Your answer to Why is this flower's blooming in outer space special?
Added Jan 19, 2016
Added Jan 18, 2016
Added Jan 18, 2016
Your answer to Can it be possible to colonize a planet without any non-human animals?
Added Jan 18, 2016
Your answer to What are reasons terraforming Mars would not work?
Added Jan 17, 2016
Your answer to Is there any evidence contradicting the Cornice Avalanches on Mars theory?
Added Jan 16, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for us to send humans to Mars and bring them back before 2030?
Added Jan 15, 2016
Your answer to Is the FizzBuzz task an effective way to interview engineers? Does this task accurately differentiate engineering candidates?
Added Jan 15, 2016
Your answer to What are some things that those who have won lotteries have done to benefit society with their winnings?
Added Jan 14, 2016
Your answer to What is the full plan of Elon Musk to terraform Mars from the fusion of the poles to the magnetic field in creation?
Added Jan 12, 2016
Your answer to What if we exchanged the position of the Earth and Mars? Would the Earth still continue supporting the life as now?
Added Jan 12, 2016
Programming Tips For Better Code
Added Jan 10, 2016
Your answer to Which organisation will be the first to put a human on Mars?
Added Jan 10, 2016
Your answer to Was there or is there life on Mars.? . And are extraterrestrial beings such as the tall whites etc.. Visit or even occupy this earth?
Added Jan 9, 2016
Your answer to How did our ancestors know that there are 9 planets?
Added Jan 8, 2016
Your answer to Can we destroy the Earth?
Added Jan 6, 2016
Your answer to Why is a trip to mars one-way but to moon not one-way?
Added Jan 5, 2016
Your answer to What shape is a rainbow from view of the pilot?
Added Jan 4, 2016
Your answer to What would you do if the whole planet was going to be destroyed next week?
Added Jan 2, 2016
Your answer to What do we do to survive an asteroid hitting the earth?
Added Jan 1, 2016
Added Jan 1, 2016
Your answer to If you were on a different planet, could you eat organisms on the planet? Would they be made from DNA?
Added Jan 1, 2016
Your answer to Hypothetical Scenarios: An asteroid 10 miles wide is headed for earth, how soon will we be able to detect it?
Added Dec 23, 2015
Your answer to How much can the Falcon9 lower the launch cost?
Added Dec 23, 2015
Your answer to Can humans live generationally on Mars with its low gravity?
Added Dec 21, 2015
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Dec 21, 2015
Your answer to Why are people saying that a rogue Planet X (Nibiru) will hit the Earth? I'm very worried.
Added Dec 15, 2015
Your answer to If we can 'square' and 'cube' numbers, could we also 'sphere', or 'triangle', or <insert arbitrary shape> a number?
Added Dec 12, 2015
Added Dec 12, 2015
Your answer to Is motivation all that matters in morality, ethics or a mahayana path?
Added Dec 7, 2015
Added Dec 6, 2015
Your answer to Why did the Buddhist monk talk to me like I was a very special person?
Added Dec 5, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if someone violated the Outer Space Treaty?
Added Dec 3, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Dec 2, 2015
Assuming Nibiru is real, what would be the azimuth and elevation at which to watch for it?
Followed Dec 2, 2015
Your answer to Is planet Niburu real?
Added Dec 2, 2015
Added Dec 1, 2015
Your answer to Did Tolkien read, or was he influenced by, H.P. Lovecraft?
Added Nov 30, 2015
Your answer to Is there life after death?
Added Nov 30, 2015
Your answer to How do I find out if this assertium is logically valid?
Added Nov 30, 2015
Your answer to What data points lead us to believe there was life on Mars?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to Would a NASA Scientist be able to find Earth if they were to travel from the Andromeda galaxy?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to see Jupiter's moons with the naked eye from Earth?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to What cultures have used microtonality in their music?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to Which types of Tibetan Buddhist monks would seek to avoid sitting next to women? What are their reasons?
Added Nov 28, 2015
Your answer to Could the Mars rover have contaminated Mars with earth based life forms?
Added Nov 28, 2015
Added Nov 27, 2015
Your answer to How common is it for buddhist monks to regret their decision?
Added Nov 27, 2015
Your answer to If the ISS had powerful lighting, could it be seen at night? (Not in twilight)
Added Nov 27, 2015
Your answer to Why does Tibetan Buddhism have been conducting so many human sacrifices?
Added Nov 26, 2015
Your answer to Why is the Dalai Lama allowed entrance into the United States?
Added Nov 26, 2015
Your answer to Why do so many people want to believe in an afterlife?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to What is Planet X?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to Is Planet X gonna crash into earth?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to When will Peter Capaldi be replaced as Doctor Who?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to be buddhist but have different views of the afterlife?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to If we detected a planet-killing asteroid, is there anything we could do about it at the present time?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to If life is found on Mars, which religions would be the most compatible with this finding?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to Is the question of prior or current Martian life more important the potential of terraforming Mars?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Added Nov 24, 2015
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to How do unknown authors achieve success with their first books?
Added Nov 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the largest item humans ever discarded into outer space?
Added Nov 22, 2015
Your answer to Flying: Why have I not seen another plane in the sky while traveling on an airliner?
Added Nov 21, 2015
Your answer to How hard would it be to stow away on an unmanned SLS launch?
Added Nov 21, 2015
Added Nov 20, 2015
Your answer to Could we feasibly make many large space colonies that orbit the Earth?
Added Nov 20, 2015
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Nov 19, 2015
Your answer to What are some ideas to protect the earth against a potentially human-destroying meteorite impact?
Added Nov 19, 2015
Your answer to Why are we so interested in Pluto but no one talks about Neptune or Uranus?
Added Nov 18, 2015
Added Nov 18, 2015
Your answer to Why are most science fictions movies about aliens invading Earth rather than humans invading alien-inhabited places?
Added Nov 18, 2015
Added Nov 18, 2015
Your answer to How much of a concern were meteors during the Apollo missions?
Added Nov 18, 2015
Your answer to If somehow we found a way to ignite fusion on Jupiter and turn it into a small star, would any of its moons be habitable?
Added Nov 17, 2015
Your answer to What happens to a particle when its entangled partner falls into a black hole?
Added Nov 17, 2015
Your answer to When was the last time Mars was struck by an asteroid? Or is it always happening?
Added Nov 16, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to make an artificial black-hole?
Added Nov 16, 2015
Your answer to What are some tasks that took months to complete 100 years ago that today a computer can do in a few seconds?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Why do you only hear of meteorites hitting the Earth but not asteroids or comets?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Now that Curiosity has landed on Mars and made some discoveries, what's the next mission likely to be? What's the next step?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to If there was living creatures in Mars, in which year we would be able to "detect" them?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Outer Space: Is interstellar space full of "Oort objects"?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to If we are truly the only intelligent life form in the universe, does this mean the universe is ours for the taking?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Have all the chemical elements in the universe been discovered? How can we ever know for sure?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Could there be life in any form inside the Sun or other stars?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Why didn't Apollo 11 mission stay longer on the surface of the moon?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to If all earth's landmass was distributed homogenous how high would the oceanlevel be?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Is sun gazing safe?
Added Nov 14, 2015
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Your answer to Why do we remove spacecraft from orbit at the end of missions?
Added Nov 13, 2015
Your answer to Why is the Cassini mission ending in 2017?
Added Nov 13, 2015
Your answer to If something went wrong with the ISS and it became inoperable, what would we do with it?
Added Nov 12, 2015
Your answer to Why is there significantly more water in planet Earth than in other planets of the solar system?
Added Nov 12, 2015
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Your answer to If there is not a Self to find anywhere in Buddhism, what if anything continues after death?
Added Nov 11, 2015
Your answer to Do we know if complex life existed on earth before the moon impacted it?
Added Nov 11, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that some administration (NASA or other) has already sent astronauts to Mars and haven't told us?
Added Nov 10, 2015
Your answer to Why wasnt the asteroid explosion over Russia in 2013 predicted? Why did no space agency see it coming?
Added Nov 10, 2015
Your answer to What is the greatest misconception most people have about a specific event in The Lord of the Rings?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that humans, if they live long enough on Mars, can adapt to live without life support systems?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to How do we know there isn't another planet beyond Pluto's orbit?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Did NASA have a rescue plan for Apollo 11 if they failed to leave the Moon?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Hypothetical Scenarios: If aliens teraformed Mars, and left it alone, how long would it remain capable of supporting earth life?
Added Nov 9, 2015
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Your answer to NASA claims that Mars atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds. Why hasn't the same fate occurred to earth?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Considering all of Mars’s flaws, is it really worth the hassle of colonizing it?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to My dad loves weird science-like things and space/astronomy. What are good Christmas gift suggestions?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to Why do we think of colonizing mars while we are ruining the mother earth?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to What are some mind blowing facts about the solar system?
Added Nov 7, 2015
Your answer to How do perchlorate on Mars impact human exploration of Mars?
Added Nov 6, 2015
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Your answer to What will happen when I look at the sun with a telescope?
Added Nov 4, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible for a sun planet moon system to exist such that the moon stays in the sky of the planet for months? Read description.
Added Nov 4, 2015
Your answer to What if a private firm announced a mission to Ganymede or Europa?
Added Nov 4, 2015
Your answer to If a chunk of dry ice 10 miles in diameter struck Mars, would it instantly melt and create a dense atmosphere?
Added Nov 3, 2015
Your answer to How visible would a Texas sized asteroid be to the naked eye as it approached earth?
Added Nov 2, 2015
Your answer to Will space travel to Mars be worthwhile in our lifetimes?
Added Nov 2, 2015
Your answer to Peak Humanity: What if the population stops growing in the year 2050 and declines forever?
Added Nov 2, 2015
Your answer to If a bird is trapped in my house and banging itself constantly against the window, should I just kill it to relieve it of its misery?
Added Oct 30, 2015
Your answer to What do the Buddhists of Quora think of Steven Seagal?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to If the population of the Earth keeps on increasing indiscriminately, will there be an effect on the Earth's orbital patterns?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to As Deimos, Mars's moon, has an escape velocity of only 5.5m/s, if I jump high from Deimos' surface will I escape from it forever?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to Do we have the technology to create an automated greenhouse on Mars that could grow and store food for an upcoming manned mission?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to What Earth life forms have the potential to thrive on Mars as it is now?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to What are some movie tropes that annoy you?
Added Oct 28, 2015
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Your answer to What objects from space are going to hit earth Nov 13th, 2015?
Added Oct 27, 2015
Your answer to How can one build a spaceship that can pass right through the sun?
Added Oct 27, 2015
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Your answer to How does the dust storm in The Martian movie trailer trow stones through the air despite mars having just 1% of earths air density?
Added Oct 24, 2015
Your answer to Could Mars' thin atmosphere conceivably allow for a dust storm of the magnitude seen in The Martian?
Added Oct 24, 2015
Your answer to What are the exact steps to transform Mars atmosphere to suit for human living?
Added Oct 24, 2015
Your answer to Can you leave the space station when you want?
Added Oct 23, 2015
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Your answer to What is required to put an Earth like atmosphere over Mars?
Added Oct 20, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Oct 18, 2015
Your answer to Why aren't there fossils on mars?
Added Oct 17, 2015
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Oct 15, 2015
Your answer to Can we force trigger an evolution cycle on mars by maybe sending microbes which can resist the extreme climate on mars?
Added Oct 14, 2015
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Your answer to Do you think NASA's "Journey to Mars" report is feasible to get us to Mars?
Added Oct 12, 2015
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Added Oct 11, 2015
Your answer to If there was a lake on Mars, how would swimming in it be different?
Added Oct 11, 2015
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Your answer to How is it possible for liquid water to exist on the Martian surface and how will the recent discovery affect future missions?
Added Oct 10, 2015
Added Oct 7, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible or probable that there was a very ancient civilization on Mars that died out but whose remains will be discovered soon?
Added Oct 6, 2015
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Your answer to Could there be liquid reserves of water below the surface on Mars?
Added Oct 4, 2015
Your answer to Water on Mars: What if it is the wrong "type" of water for life?
Added Oct 4, 2015
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Your answer to When terraforming Mars, will there be protected areas?
Added Oct 2, 2015
Your answer to Water flows on Earth because of rains. If there is flowing water on Mars, does that also means it rains there?
Added Sep 29, 2015
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Your answer to What does the earth look like from the moon during a "blood moon"?
Added Sep 28, 2015
Your answer to Can humans walk on martian (Mars) soil?
Added Sep 27, 2015
Your answer to Why hasn't Envisat been brought down or destroyed or brought to a graveyard orbit?
Added Sep 24, 2015
Your answer to Why don't people populate Greenland first before trying out on Mars?
Added Sep 23, 2015
Your answer to Is John Hagee correct about the Blood Moon Prophecy?
Added Sep 23, 2015
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Your answer to Why didn't NASA send an aerial vehicle to explore Mars?
Added Sep 23, 2015
Your answer to Who is Renee M? Are her predictions about the world ending true?
Added Sep 23, 2015
Your answer to Why should I use Quora instead of just searching the Internet?
Added Sep 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the probability of asteroids which are not in the visible spectrum (invisible asteroids) to hit the Earth?
Added Sep 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the position of women in Tibetan Buddhism?
Added Sep 21, 2015
Your answer to If Space X reaches Mars first, can they claim the planet as their property?
Added Sep 21, 2015
Your answer to Are Buddhist monks leeches in society who only beg for food and meditate, or do they provide some sort of service to the people?
Added Sep 20, 2015
Your answer to Who owns the right to go to Mars and contaminate the Martian atmosphere with contaminants from Earth?
Added Sep 20, 2015
Your answer to Could we heat Mars' poles by nuking them?
Added Sep 20, 2015
Your answer to What were the primary religions in the world before Islam/Christianity/Buddhism became popular?
Added Sep 19, 2015
Your answer to Can Buddha Reincarnate?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that there is a small group of nonhuman hominids hidden somewhere on earth?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to breathe and survive on Mars with an oxygen tank, but without a space suit?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Followed Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to Another shadow or a real Alien? Is this a real Mars Crab and if yes will we still try and send a mission to Mars?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to What is the best reason for sending a manned expedition to Mars?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to What is the realistic top speed of an asteroid that might threaten the Earth and would we still be able to detect its approach?
Added Sep 17, 2015
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Your answer to Is it legal to drop a nuke on Mars?
Added Sep 16, 2015
Your answer to Do we have a positioning system for space objects and planets similar to GPS?
Added Sep 15, 2015
Your answer to What exactly is a "Super Blood Moon" and why is it so rare?
Added Sep 15, 2015
Your answer to Could humanity construct a new Earth-like planet in the solar system?
Added Sep 15, 2015
Your answer to Does NASA use Photoshop?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Wouldn't sending a manned mission to Mars violate NASA's policy of not infecting other worlds with life forms from Earth?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Have any of you encountered issues with the Wikipedia system of arbitration, and if so, how do you think it can be improved?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to What is the best way to encourage collaborative editing in an online encyclopedia - and how could wikipedia be improved in this aspect?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Quora Bugs: Why doesn't the "rephrase question" tag remove itself when I have actually rephrased the question?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Are there any advantages of exploring Mars' moon Phobos?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Why don't Mars rovers move faster?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to If the Sun disappeared completely, what would happen to the Earth and the rest of our solar system?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Could we survive without the sun?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to How do you imagine the Earth without the Sun?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to If the Sun disappeared completely, what would happen to the Earth and the rest of our solar system?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Without the sun, can oxygen be present on Earth?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to What is the expected life of earth?
Added Sep 12, 2015
Your answer to What is the common scientific opinion about Elon Musk's plan to nuke Mars' poles to accelerate the creation of an atmosphere?
Added Sep 11, 2015
Your answer to Could a planet like Mars or Venus be equipped with an artificial magnetic field similar to Earth's?
Added Sep 11, 2015
Your answer to What is the common scientific opinion about Elon Musk's plan to nuke Mars' poles to accelerate the creation of an atmosphere?
Added Sep 11, 2015
Your answer to Why the edges of Martian Polar Caps are not being searched for liquid water?
Added Sep 10, 2015
Added Sep 10, 2015
Your answer to Can bombardment by comets significantly add up to the amount of water on Mars within realistic human timescales (i.e. a few centuries)?
Added Sep 10, 2015
Your answer to Can you describe how detonating thermonuclear charges on Mars' poles can lead to the planet becoming hospitable?
Added Sep 10, 2015
Your answer to What is going to happen in September 2015?
Added Sep 10, 2015
Your answer to Can an astronaut re-enter the atmosphere with just a spacesuit and a jetpack?
Added Sep 9, 2015
Your answer to Is the comet really hitting the earth in the month of September?
Added Sep 9, 2015
Your answer to Why don't Mars rovers move faster?
Added Sep 9, 2015
Added Sep 9, 2015
Your answer to Could it have been feasible to boost Shuttle main tanks into orbit?
Added Sep 6, 2015
Your answer to What is the deep/dark web and how do you access it?
Added Sep 6, 2015
Your answer to Why can't humans spend more on exploring the remaining 95% of the oceans, rather than on space exploration?
Added Sep 5, 2015
Your answer to Between the moon and the sun which one was created first?
Added Sep 5, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to upgrade space suits so that they can survive re-entry and then parachute down like Felix Baumgartner?
Added Sep 5, 2015
Your answer to If SpaceX was responsible for destroying a huge asteroid that was headed for earth, do you think they would be successful?
Added Sep 4, 2015
MY POSTS AS KINDLE BOOKS - WHICH ONES NEXT?
Added Sep 4, 2015
Your answer to If a 1km sized rock was, for certain, to hit Earth in 6 months, what could we do about it?
Added Sep 3, 2015
Your answer to How are plants growing in the ISS? Is it different from normal? If so, in what ways?
Added Sep 3, 2015
Your answer to Can the International Space Station be brought back to Earth if it were to be dismantled?
Added Sep 3, 2015
Your answer to How will space tourism work?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to How do I go about ignoring the end of the world predictions and live my life to the fullest?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Is the world going to end in September 2015?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Who says our world will end in September and why are they wrong?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Is the world going to end in September 2015?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Is Quora just a glorified Yahoo! Answers?
Added Aug 31, 2015
Your answer to Why did God create the world if he was just going to destroy it at Armageddon?
Added Aug 31, 2015
Your answer to What are the odds of a bigtime asteroid hitting the Earth a la Armageddon and Deep Impact?
Added Aug 31, 2015
Your answer to Why can Buddhist monks in Japan get married?
Added Aug 30, 2015
Your answer to What are disadvantages of self-studying?
Added Aug 29, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible for a star to orbit a planet? Has it ever been observed?
Added Aug 29, 2015
Added Aug 29, 2015
Your answer to If life on Earth would have been observable for a million years, why has there been no contact?
Added Aug 28, 2015
Your answer to Are there any advantages in setting up a telescope (operated remotely from Earth) on other planets (such as Mars)?
Added Aug 26, 2015
Your answer to Why is it so difficult to sterilize spacecrafts?
Added Aug 25, 2015
Your answer to How are human skin thangkas being made?
Added Aug 25, 2015
Your answer to What is the estimated cost of the International Space Station (ISS)?
Added Aug 24, 2015
Your answer to Why are there rocks scattered on the sandy plains on Mars?
Added Aug 23, 2015
Added Aug 23, 2015
Why won't this "if" statement work?
Followed Aug 23, 2015
Your answer to Talking about real spacecraft, not the fictional ones seen in Star Wars and Star Trek, what is the best looking spacecraft ever made?
Added Aug 23, 2015
Added Aug 22, 2015
Added Aug 22, 2015
Your answer to Assuming that human travel to Mars is possible, what are the other hazards that prevent establishing a permanent settlement on Mars?
Added Aug 22, 2015
Your answer to Why can't the ISS split astronaut's exhaled CO2 and recycle the oxygen?
Added Aug 22, 2015
Added Aug 22, 2015
Your answer to Why does Elon Musk believe that we can't electrify transportation to space?
Added Aug 21, 2015
Your answer to What keeps trolls away from Quora?
Added Aug 20, 2015
Your answer to How can I put my "experience" as a troll to good use?
Added Aug 20, 2015
Your answer to How many trolls does it take to change a light bulb?
Added Aug 19, 2015
Your answer to Why do Christians not believe in the concept of reincarnation?
Added Aug 19, 2015
Your answer to Why has the new pentagonal tiling received so much attention in the press?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Why can't I add a comment at this time?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Are some Buddhists also Christians?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Why is it important that on the launching day of the Mars rover, the two planets should be close to each other?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Is Quora required to include attribution for reproductions of my content?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Assume a, b, c are integers. What is the proof that abc(a³–b³)(b³–c³)(c³–a³) is a multiple of 7?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Added Aug 17, 2015
Your answer to When will the probability of a life-threatening space object hitting Earth reach significant levels?
Added Aug 17, 2015
Added Aug 17, 2015
Your answer to How is New Horizons of NASA powered?
Added Aug 17, 2015
Your answer to Will Uranus and Neptune ever switch back?
Added Aug 17, 2015
Your answer to Is it illegal to download something that one has the corresponding physical version of?
Added Aug 16, 2015
Your answer to Is it illegal to download a pdf version of a book if you own the original book?
Added Aug 16, 2015
Your answer to Are there any die-hard Lord of the Rings fans that can't stand the movie trilogy? If so, why?
Added Aug 15, 2015
Your answer to Was the journey of Voyager so calculated that it didn't crash into a meteor or was it destined to go into interstellar space?
Added Aug 15, 2015
Your answer to How far could we travel within our solar system with our current technology, if we were to send a manned spaceship ?
Added Aug 14, 2015
Your answer to Is NASA presently capable of fending off a collision if a meteor or any other celestial body were to strike the earth?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to If a meteor collided with the Sun, how big would it need to be in order to be a concern?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to How certain is the claim that the ISS is the most-expensive single item ever built, taking inflation into account?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to Buildings: How much in today's dollars is the cost of a medieval cathedral?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to Does NASA care more about finding the first alien life or setting up human colonies on other worlds?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to Should there be a limit on the size of answers on Quora?
Added Aug 12, 2015
Added Aug 11, 2015
Your answer to How practical is it to put a satellite to orbit ISS?
Added Aug 11, 2015
Added Aug 11, 2015
Added Aug 11, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if someone proves P=NP or P!=NP?
Added Aug 10, 2015
Your answer to Is there water on the moon?
Added Aug 9, 2015
Your answer to What are your current all time stats on Quora?
Added Aug 7, 2015
Added Aug 7, 2015
Added Aug 6, 2015
Added Aug 6, 2015
Your answer to If the Sun disappeared completely, what would happen to the Earth and the rest of our solar system?
Added Aug 5, 2015
Your answer to If someone made an exact duplicate of you with everything in the same place, would the duplicate have your same memories?
Added Aug 5, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if the Pacific Ocean was suddenly teleported to the surface of Mars?
Added Aug 5, 2015
Your answer to Was this pile of code written by a single team of software engineers?
Added Aug 4, 2015
Added Aug 3, 2015
What Quora stats or lists (e.g., most active users, best recent answers) would users like to see?
Followed Aug 2, 2015
Your answer to How fast is Quora growing on a weekly basis? What are the growth metrics?
Added Aug 2, 2015
Your answer to Is a cheaper computer as good as the more expensive computers?
Added Aug 2, 2015
Your answer to What should be humanity's approach to exploring space and discovering alien races once we're able to travel to other planets?
Added Aug 1, 2015
Your answer to Are we technologically close to a feasible "von Neumann probe" for exploration?
Added Jul 31, 2015
Added Jul 31, 2015
Added Jul 31, 2015
Your answer to I just came up with an amazing theory. Where would I post that?
Added Jul 31, 2015
Added Jul 31, 2015
Your answer to Which line of work or profession has had the most impact on the course of human history? Why?
Added Jul 30, 2015
Added Jul 29, 2015
Your answer to Death and Dying: What could kill us so quickly that we wouldn't even notice?
Added Jul 29, 2015
Your answer to Why don't ISS photos show any of the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth? Is it a matter of being in different orbits?
Added Jul 29, 2015
Your answer to Can Earth create self-assembling or self-replicating nanoparticles and nanorobots or assembly linear nanostructures naturally?
Added Jul 29, 2015
Added Jul 29, 2015
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to Do the best programmers use the fewest lines of code, as is consistent with my experience?
Added Jul 28, 2015
Added Jul 28, 2015
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to Does the Moon always rise in the East?
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to If we could harness 100% of the sunlight that earth receives in a day, is it enough to replace the fossil fuels consumed in a day?
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to Does anyone actually like or enjoy mathematics?
Added Jul 27, 2015
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to How do I convert Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to How can Pluto be called a "dwarf planet" if it's not a planet?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to Is it safe to pick up a meteorite with my bare hands?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to If NASA sent the most developed spaceship to Pluto right now, how long would it take them to reach Pluto?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to What are the chances that a solar system with four rocky planets would go haywire and destroy itself?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to Why do companies like Facebook and Uber need so many developers?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to Why has NASA so far not found alien artifacts on the worlds of the solar system?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Added Jul 25, 2015
Your answer to Why doesn't the New Horizons mission put the spacecraft into orbit around Pluto?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Added Jul 25, 2015
Your answer to Space Travel: Who is going to Mars next year, 2016? Or was it just media hype?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Your answer to Now that NASA has discovered Kepler-452b, is there any possibility to reach this planet considering that it's 1400 light years away?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to How similar is Kepler 452b to our Earth?
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to How can NASA be assured of potentially favourable living conditions just by looking at Kepler 452B?
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to How much can we learn about the new Kepler planet?
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to Is there a way to detect if there is intelligent life on Kepler-452b?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to How realistic is the book "The Martian"?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Our own moon will eventually escape Earth. Are any of the moons of other planets losing altitude, on course to collide?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that Pluto is heated by meteorite impacts?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Is there anything of worth on the planets in our solar system like gold or something like helium 3?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Is the sunlight on Pluto bright enough to read by?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to In how many years will we be able to construct viable Stanford toruses?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to In The Lord of the Rings (creative franchise), were Frodo and Sam gay?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to terraform just a portion of Mars by enclosing it in a dome?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to If a pen were able to draw in three dimensions, would there be any notable traceable patterns, e.g. Platonic solids?
Added Jul 15, 2015
Your answer to When did science determine that the Moon, Mars, and Venus were uninhabited?
Added Jul 4, 2015
Your answer to How does one read poetry aloud?
Added Jul 3, 2015
Your answer to Could our human eyes see normally on other planets or their moons?
Added Jul 2, 2015
Your answer to Is it true that NASA is building a city in Mars?
Added Jul 1, 2015
Your answer to Does Tom Bombadil even know who or what he is or has it been so long he forgot?
Added Jun 30, 2015
Your answer to How could/would the ISS be weaponized?
Added Jun 30, 2015
Your answer to Why are wyverns so much more popular than dragons in modern fantasy shows like Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and Lord of The Rings?
Added Jun 30, 2015
Your answer to How do lottery winners pick their numbers?
Added Jun 29, 2015
Your answer to What are some cultural faux pas when working as a member of the Fellowship of the Ring?
Added Jun 29, 2015
Added Jun 29, 2015
Added Jun 29, 2015
Your answer to Were any humans aboard the SpaceX CRS-7 rocket that exploded during ascent on June 28, 2015?
Added Jun 28, 2015
Your answer to How could we barely feel a 160 km/h wind on Mars because of its thin atmosphere?
Added Jun 28, 2015
Your answer to Could a Lake Vostok exist on Mars today?
Added Jun 28, 2015
Your answer to What would Mars be like if it was heated up enough to melt all its water ice and dry ice?
Added Jun 27, 2015
Your answer to Why did Tom Bombadil permit evil to exist in the Old Forest and Barrow-downs?
Added Jun 27, 2015
Your answer to Could the Rosetta Satellite, which is currently orbiting comet 67P, have a significant effect on that comet's orbit? Why or why not?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to What are the weirdest orbits or trajectories ever observed among celestial bodies?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if an asteroid hit earth while you were in a plane?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to How realistic is the book "The Martian"?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to How realistic is the book "The Martian"?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to What is the largest known solid object in the universe that isn't spherical or almost spherical?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to Politically, how will the Moon and Mars be colonized by humans?
Added Jun 25, 2015
Added Jun 25, 2015
Your answer to When astronauts go to Mars, will we be able to watch them on TV like we did with the moon landing?
Added Jun 25, 2015
Your answer to What are the odds that alien food from an Earth-type planet would kill us?
Added Jun 25, 2015
Your answer to How common is homelessness among Buddhists?
Added Jun 24, 2015
Your answer to Could the ring in 'Lord of the Rings' be destroyed on purpose?
Added Jun 23, 2015
Your answer to When is the next anticipated supernova that will be visible to the naked eye in daylight?
Added Jun 23, 2015
Your answer to Are there any pictures taken by Curiosity of Deimos and Phobos showing up in the sky at the same time? In case there is not, why?
Added Jun 23, 2015
Your answer to Why hasn't anyone made an "analog" computer, where 0.5 could equal both on/off like a quantum computer?
Added Jun 22, 2015
Added Jun 21, 2015
Your answer to What do religions say about life on other planets?
Added Jun 20, 2015
Your answer to How and why are planets spherical? What makes them round?
Added Jun 18, 2015
Your answer to How long ago did the moon begin to form?
Added Jun 18, 2015
Your answer to Will the asteroid mining by private companies be regulated by "Outer Space Treaty" (or any other international agreement)?
Added Jun 17, 2015
Your answer to If there is an icy part of Mars, then why do scientists seem to have a problem with producing water on the Red Planet?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Your answer to Why is it so hard to create a human-like AI?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Your answer to How big would a meteorite have to be in order to be a "planet killer"?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Added Jun 14, 2015
Your answer to What will Philae do now? Will it explore the surface like a rover, or remain stationary indefinitely?
Added Jun 14, 2015
Added Jun 14, 2015
Your answer to What in layman's terms is Russell's Paradox?
Added Jun 13, 2015
Your answer to How reliable or practical would it be to use liquid mirror telescope in zero gravity?
Added Jun 11, 2015
Your answer to Might there be life on other planets but we just can't see it?
Added Jun 10, 2015
Your answer to How hard would it be for a rogue nation to start a Kessler syndrome event?
Added Jun 10, 2015
Your answer to What is LightSail's apparent magnitude?
Added Jun 9, 2015
Your answer to What are some innovative uses for the Molniya orbit?
Added Jun 8, 2015
Your answer to Does the fact that we can see (with naked eye) only a few thousand stars have any significance for Olbers' paradox?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to If the planet earth stopped producing oxygen, for how long could life exist?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Could a probe be put in orbit around a Martian moon by amateurs using a few cubesat launches?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to turn the moon into a spaceship and have all the humans live on it?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Can you de-orbit a tennis ball (or baseball) by hand from the ISS during EVA?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Should we visit Europa?
Added Jun 3, 2015
Your answer to Is Morgellons a real disease?
Added May 30, 2015
Your answer to Could an asteroid strike change the rotation of the Earth to spin in the opposite direction?
Added May 29, 2015
Your answer to Other than navigational, solar flare, ozone layer, and power grid dangers, what will happen when the magnetic poles shift?
Added May 29, 2015
Your answer to Is there any strong scientific evidence on this prediction about the 9.5 earthquake to hit California on May 28th, 2015?
Added May 28, 2015
Your answer to How and why are planets spherical? What makes them round?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Can a planet have an orbit shaped like a figure 8?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Would it be arrogant to refer to one of my findings as a theorem in my paper?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to have life within the Earth's core?
Added May 25, 2015
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to If I have a regular mediation practice, does that make me a Buddhist?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Is the hype surrounding the upcoming "Four Blood Moons" limited to Christians, or is it of secular interest as well?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to How often do solar storms occur? Can they hit earth or cause harm to use?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Why didn't the universe collapse into a black hole just seconds after the Big Bang? I imagine it was very dense at that moment.
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to What are the chances of Asteroid 2012 TT5 hitting the Earth on September 24, 2015?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to When looking at a planet like Mars, is there 0% life or are there microorganisms like Earth's germs?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to Can tardigrades survive on Mars?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to What is the concept of retrograde planets? Does it mean the planet becomes stronger or does the planet impact opposite to its nature?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to Meteorites: Should we urgently take measures to make it easy to spot a meteor about to impact Earth?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to Are there gliders that can be flown at night?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to How was all the perchlorate on Mars formed?
Added May 23, 2015
Added May 22, 2015
Your answer to Would a Rover mission to Venus be possible with current technology?
Added May 22, 2015
Your answer to Is it easier to colonize the surface of Mars or the cloud tops of Venus?
Added May 22, 2015
Your answer to If and when we colonize Mars, how will we prevent contaminating the planet with our own bacteria and microbial life?
Added May 21, 2015
Added May 20, 2015
Your answer to As the universe had an origin and a finite size, how can it now be infinite?
Added May 20, 2015
Added May 19, 2015
Added May 19, 2015
Your answer to Why are goto, break and continue statements bad in computer science?
Added May 18, 2015
Your answer to If we were sitting on Pluto looking towards Earth, would we be able to see our planet with an unaided eye?
Added May 17, 2015
Your answer to Are we inside a black hole?
Added May 17, 2015
Your answer to If you stand on the moon, can you see its surface curving?
Added May 17, 2015
Your answer to At what altitude is there no orbital decay?
Added May 16, 2015
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to Can a planet have a diamond as its center?
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to When will we have high resolution photos of Pluto from the New Horizons Mission?
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to What is a black hole made of?
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to Would a car accelerating to the escape velocity of the earth fly off?
Added May 14, 2015
Your answer to Does the Dalai Lama speak for all Buddhists?
Added May 14, 2015
Your answer to If earth were spinning faster than its escape velocity what would happen?
Added May 13, 2015
Your answer to How and why are planets spherical? What makes them round?
Added May 13, 2015
Your answer to Why does the moon appear in random places?
Added May 13, 2015
Your answer to Is it physically possible for a moon (not ours) to orbit a double-planet system?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to Could an Earth-like planet have a sizeable moon in a geosynchronous orbit?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to Is this website to be trusted about an asteroid striking earth on May 14th of this year?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to Where do Buddhists get their robes?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if we fired all nuclear missiles on earth at the sun?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to What is the most likely death of the Earth? Is it the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies colliding, or is it the sun dying and expanding?
Added May 11, 2015
Added May 10, 2015
Your answer to What are the odds that a viable population of humankind will escape to another planet before the earth becomes uninhabitable?
Added May 10, 2015
Your answer to Does Mars have a blue sky?
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to How deep would you have to bury a Mars or lunar colony in order to protect it from solar radiation?
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to Is there wind on Mars?
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to How do developers retain so much knowledge?
Added May 9, 2015
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to Why doesn't our moon have Trojan satellites, much like the Trojan asteroids leading and following Jupiter?
Added May 8, 2015
Your answer to Why is the moon often visible during the day?
Added May 8, 2015
Added May 7, 2015
Your answer to What will happen if Russia denies the US use of the Soyuz, which is currently required to access the International Space Station?
Added May 6, 2015
Your answer to Roughly, how many lifetimes would it take to be a mathematical universalist?
Added May 6, 2015
Your answer to Are you slow when it takes more than 10 seconds to respond to someone's question?
Added May 5, 2015
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to How can I produce sounds of musical instruments using Fourier series?
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to In this scenario, what would happen to the moon (and the astronaut)?
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to Why do Tibetan Buddhists visualize deities?
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to When will Mercury collide with the Sun?
Added May 5, 2015
Added May 4, 2015
Your answer to Are there any stars that will come close to our solar system in the future?
Added May 3, 2015
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to What kinds of technologies are currently used to deflect asteroids?
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to Why is unmanned exploration prefered to manned exploration?
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to If there is life in the universe, how do we explain the so far failure of SETI to find it?
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to What is an EmDrive?
Added May 2, 2015
Your answer to How were martian canyons formed?
Added May 2, 2015
Your answer to What are the chances of Asteroid 2012 TT5 hitting the Earth on September 24, 2015?
Added May 2, 2015
Added Apr 29, 2015
Added Apr 28, 2015
Your answer to Would mankind attempt to recover a Voyager type spacecraft from another world if it entered our solar system?
Added Apr 28, 2015
Your answer to Why are Quorans so stingy about giving upvotes? Doesn’t more participation make us a better community? Why not upvote?
Added Apr 27, 2015
Added Apr 27, 2015
Your answer to How long will it take us to be able to send robots to planets like Kepler 438b,"earth's twin", which is 470 light years away?
Added Apr 27, 2015
Your answer to Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001 movie): How do goblins climb along the walls and ceilings of Moria?
Added Apr 27, 2015
Your answer to Is there any video of Mars? If not, why?
Added Apr 26, 2015
Added Apr 26, 2015
Your answer to If NASA said that in a decade that they will prove that life exists on other planets, then what do they really know now?
Added Apr 24, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if someone took off his space suit in the Martian atmosphere?
Added Apr 21, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to see lightning from the ISS?
Added Apr 21, 2015
Your answer to How if Saturn became our moon?
Added Apr 19, 2015
Your answer to Do moons have moons?
Added Apr 17, 2015
Your answer to What are some teachings for me?
Added Apr 17, 2015
Your answer to How is the picture of our Milky Way galaxy taken from the outside if we are inside the galaxy?
Added Apr 16, 2015
Your answer to How is the picture of our Milky Way galaxy taken from the outside if we are inside the galaxy?
Added Apr 16, 2015
Added Apr 15, 2015
The mathematics of sloth canon number sequences and Per Nørgård's infinity series
Added Apr 13, 2015
Added Apr 12, 2015
Your answer to Would the US be lawfully allowed to claim Mars?
Added Apr 12, 2015
Your answer to What is the procedure for dealing with astronauts that die in space?
Added Apr 10, 2015
Your answer to Why are some spacecraft required to launch vertically while others can launch horizontally?
Added Apr 9, 2015
Your answer to What building materials would we use to build buildings on Ceres?
Added Apr 6, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible for human beings to adapt to new planets like Mars? If so, how long will it take?
Added Apr 5, 2015
Your answer to How difficult is it to colonize the entire Galaxy and still have full governance over it when FTL technology is non-existent?
Added Apr 5, 2015
Your answer to In your school of Buddhism, is time beginningless?
Added Apr 4, 2015
Your answer to Dependent origination: since everything is a result of dependent origination, there is nothing which appears accidentally, right?
Added Apr 2, 2015
Your answer to How much does it cost per minute to keep an astronaut alive in space?
Added Apr 2, 2015
Added Apr 1, 2015
Your answer to What is the other habitable planet for humanity in case we blow up the earth?
Added Mar 31, 2015
Your answer to Why is there a greater emphasis to colonize Mars instead of the Moon?
Added Mar 31, 2015
Your answer to Why were Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson all opposed to SpaceX?
Added Mar 31, 2015
Your answer to Space Colonization: Would it be possible to build machines that replicate themselves with just the materials around them?
Added Mar 29, 2015
Added Mar 29, 2015
Your answer to How do Mars rovers stay upright on their wheels in severe storms? Has there ever been any incident where something toppled the rovers?
Added Mar 28, 2015
Added Mar 28, 2015
Life of the Buddha according to the sutras
Added Mar 27, 2015
Your answer to Did Gandalf actually believe that Frodo had been captured when the Mouth of Sauron showed him the mithril shirt and Sam's blade?
Added Mar 26, 2015
Your answer to Is the ISS finished? What are future plans for it? Could it ever double as a spaceship? Why wasn't it build this way from the start?
Added Mar 26, 2015
Added Mar 26, 2015
Your answer to Do enlightened people get hungry?
Added Mar 25, 2015
Your answer to Are the Curiosity and Opportunity mars rovers scheduled to meet each other?
Added Mar 23, 2015
Your answer to Some Buddhists believe in rebirth. If there is "no self" or "no soul", then for these Buddhists what is being reborn?
Added Mar 23, 2015
Added Mar 22, 2015
Your answer to It is possible to create a circle using cellular automata?
Added Mar 21, 2015
Your answer to Are there any Buddhists who believe in Atman or True Self?
Added Mar 21, 2015
Added Mar 21, 2015
Your answer to Could the Mars rover have contaminated Mars with earth based life forms?
Added Mar 20, 2015
Your answer to Is there evidence that Siddhartha Gautama is a real historical person?
Added Mar 19, 2015
Your answer to Aurora Borealis: Why is Antarctic Auroral Oval always off center over the South Pole?
Added Mar 19, 2015
Your answer to If we colonize other planets, will we eventually reach a point where wars of independence will become common again?
Added Mar 18, 2015
Your answer to Do we have to give up fighting for what is right if we follow the Buddhist precept of letting go of attachment and desire?
Added Mar 18, 2015
Added Mar 18, 2015
Your answer to Can the modern adult truly be a Buddhist?
Added Mar 17, 2015
Your answer to What if something like a small meteorite or debris penetrated the ISS?
Added Mar 17, 2015
Added Mar 17, 2015
Your answer to Was Steve Jobs a Buddhist? Did he meditate every day?
Added Mar 17, 2015
Your answer to How hard would it be to grow food on Mars?
Added Mar 16, 2015
Your answer to How many habitable planets can you fit in a solar system?
Added Mar 16, 2015
Your answer to If scientists were to send an orbiter to Mars, how would the features and technology on board be different, in comparison to the ISS?
Added Mar 16, 2015
Your answer to Why don't we send a rover back to the moon?
Added Mar 15, 2015
Your answer to What are some theories on why we haven't been visited by aliens yet?
Added Mar 13, 2015
Your answer to Is terraforming bioethically irresponsible?
Added Mar 13, 2015
Added Mar 13, 2015
Added Mar 12, 2015
Your answer to Would it be harder to dig underground tunnels on the Moon or on Mars?
Added Mar 11, 2015
Your answer to Can a Buddhist be aggressive or assertive when it is appropriate?
Added Mar 10, 2015
Your answer to How can a Buddhist have a relationship if that creates attachment?
Added Mar 8, 2015
Your answer to What is the historical proof that Buddha actually taught the Middle Way?
Added Mar 8, 2015
Your answer to Would the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 hold up today?
Added Mar 8, 2015
Magic at the Heart of the Buddha's Teachings - Two Kinds of Truth
Added Mar 7, 2015
Your answer to Could I make a profit by going to the moon with Golden Spike and bringing back a barrel of Helium 3?
Added Mar 6, 2015
Your answer to Buddhist philosophy states that all suffering is caused by attachment. However, is it possible to live a life without any attachment?
Added Mar 5, 2015
Your answer to Does Tibetan Buddhism involve animal sacrifice?
Added Mar 4, 2015
Your answer to A great part of the Bible and the Buddhist scriptures are fabricated by later people, so how can we believe them?
Added Mar 3, 2015
Your answer to Is Buddhism the only religion that believes in life outside of the earth?
Added Mar 2, 2015
Your answer to What way into Mordor would have been better (safer) than Minas Ithil and the pass of Cirith Ungol?
Added Mar 1, 2015
Your answer to Would people born and raised on Mars be able to withstand Earth's gravity?
Added Feb 28, 2015
Your answer to Can a Japanese monk get married?
Added Feb 28, 2015
Your answer to Besides Buddhism, what other atheistic religions exist?
Added Feb 27, 2015
Your answer to What provisions did the Apollo astronauts have if the lunar rover irretrievably broke down while they were out driving it?
Added Feb 27, 2015
Your answer to Why are the Rosetta maneuvers so extreme?
Added Feb 24, 2015
Your answer to Why doesn't NASA build a Mars spaceship in orbit, the same way they built the space station?
Added Feb 24, 2015
Added Feb 23, 2015
Added Feb 21, 2015
Your answer to Whom would you send on Mars One?
Added Feb 21, 2015
Added Feb 21, 2015
Your answer to What do you guys think of the finalists who are ready to die on Mars?
Added Feb 19, 2015
Your answer to Why has NASA not changed the spacesuits?
Added Feb 19, 2015
Your answer to Do Buddhists have a higher external locus of control or a higher internal locus of control?
Added Feb 19, 2015
Your answer to Why do people choose Buddhism? What does Buddhism provide? Where do the other religions fall short?
Added Feb 18, 2015
Your answer to Is Tibetan Buddhism different from other types of Buddhism? If so, how?
Added Feb 18, 2015
Why Forests are not the "Lungs of the planet"
Added Feb 18, 2015
Your answer to What is the teaching of Buddhism about images and relationship with images?
Added Feb 13, 2015
Your answer to What is the Buddhist answer to the state of mind which is related to 'feeling lonely'?
Added Feb 13, 2015
Your answer to If either SpaceX or Mars One were to overcome technological challenges to colonizing Mars, what political challenges would stop them?
Added Feb 10, 2015
Your answer to Could computers do astronauts' jobs at the ISS?
Added Feb 1, 2015
Your answer to What made the Dalai Lama capable of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?
Added Jan 31, 2015
Your answer to Who owns the planets of our Solar System? Are the planets anyone's property?
Added Jan 30, 2015
Your answer to Should a Buddhist be proud of being a Buddhist? If not, what?
Added Jan 27, 2015
Your answer to What are the bad things about Great Britain?
Added Jan 26, 2015
Your answer to Why do space explorations go horizontally along the plane of the ecliptic and not vertically, perpendicular to the ecliptic?
Added Jan 26, 2015
Origins of the Buddhist Sutras - were they the Teachings of the Buddha?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to Can the Beagle 2 be remotely repaired if one of the future Mars rovers manages to travel to its location?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to How would an asteroid collision affect Mars?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to Will the fear of exterminating any potential life native to Mars prevent us from ever colonizing the planet?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to How much does it cost to ferry an astronaut to the International Space Station?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to What are the genuine flaws in Buddhism, if any?
Added Jan 24, 2015
Your answer to Why is Elon Musk so obsessed with Mars? Who would want to go there?
Added Jan 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the most pernicious and persistent myth about The Lord of the Rings that is believed by people who have seen Peter Jackson's movies but haven't read the books?
Added Jan 20, 2015
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Jan 15, 2015
Your answer to What do Buddhists think of consuming meat and drinking alcohol?
Added Jan 15, 2015
Your answer to Excluding The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, why is Tolkien's work so dull?
Added Jan 13, 2015
Your answer to Do Tibetans want to be a part of China?
Added Jan 9, 2015
Your answer to Does Buddhism involve individualism as much as Western practitioners assume it does?
Added Jan 9, 2015
Your answer to Is "Buddhistic temple" acceptable English?
Added Jan 9, 2015
Your answer to How can I save myself from being reincarnated in the Tibetan Buddhist hell realms?
Added Jan 7, 2015
Added Jan 6, 2015
Your answer to Are the Tibetan people better off under Chinese communism compared to the past?
Added Jan 6, 2015
Your answer to What will happen after the current Dalai Lama dies?
Added Jan 6, 2015
Added Jan 5, 2015
Your answer to Are there any ideas or speculations as to where the water went on Mars?
Added Jan 4, 2015
Your answer to Does Mars have water?
Added Jan 3, 2015
Your answer to Should the Chinese Government control the succession of the Dalai Lama?
Added Jan 3, 2015
Your answer to Do Gödel's theorems imply that there are limits to the laws of physics?
Added Jan 3, 2015
Your answer to Would Tibetan Buddhism lose some of its credibility if the Dalai Lama abandons the tradition of reincarnation?
Added Jan 2, 2015
Your answer to Is Mars' Curiosity rover designed to study anything biological or living?
Added Dec 26, 2014
Six Urban Legends - the Western Doom and Gloom idea of Karma
Added Dec 22, 2014
Six Urban Legends - the Western Doom and Gloom idea of Karma
Added Dec 19, 2014
Your answer to What will be next step by NASA if we discover water and methane on Mars?
Added Dec 18, 2014
Added Dec 17, 2014
Your answer to What are the biggest technical problems with nuclear thermal propulsion systems?
Added Dec 17, 2014
Your answer to Does Jupiter's moon Europa have encouraging signs of life?
Added Dec 13, 2014
Your answer to How can I calculate the ratio of Si to O atoms in SiO2, or the empirical formula of it, based on its structure?
Added Dec 12, 2014
Your answer to I've seen a picture in which Dalai Lama converses with Carl Sagan about the universe, any details?
Added Dec 12, 2014
Your answer to What would be the most profitable activity on Mars that would justify its colonization?
Added Dec 10, 2014
Which is more likely to first be colonized by settlements of millions of humans, Antarctica or Mars?
Followed Dec 8, 2014
Your answer to Which is more likely to first be colonized by settlements of millions of humans, Antarctica or Mars?
Added Dec 8, 2014
Your answer to Are there intervals in Eastern music using the eleventh harmonic, such as the neutral third 11/9?
Added Dec 7, 2014
Where is the fallacy in the following argument?
Followed Dec 6, 2014
Your answer to Where is the fallacy in the following argument?
Added Dec 6, 2014
Are there intervals in Eastern music using the eleventh harmonic, such as the neutral third 11/9?
Asked Dec 5, 2014
What is the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism?
Followed Dec 5, 2014
Your answer to What is the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism?
Added Dec 5, 2014
Followed Dec 4, 2014
Your answer to How close to us would an Earth-like planet have to be for its settlement to be economically viable, using current technology?
Added Dec 4, 2014
How much of the detectable information coming to earth from space is SETI detecting and recording?
Followed Dec 3, 2014
Your answer to How much of the detectable information coming to earth from space is SETI detecting and recording?
Added Dec 3, 2014
What is the British way of typing numbers?
Followed Dec 3, 2014
Your answer to What is the British way of typing numbers?
Added Dec 3, 2014
Followed Dec 2, 2014
Your answer to Why do we find the number 10 (and its multiples) such a satisfactory benchmark number and its arithmetic application so simple?
Added Dec 2, 2014
Followed Dec 2, 2014
Added Dec 2, 2014
Followed Dec 1, 2014
Your answer to Are airships useful on Mars?
Added Dec 1, 2014
Are there serious doubts from scientists about the descent of man on the moon?
Followed Nov 30, 2014
Your answer to Are there serious doubts from scientists about the descent of man on the moon?
Added Nov 30, 2014
Is moon Europa all ice and water, or is there any rocky surface there too?
Followed Nov 30, 2014
Your answer to Is moon Europa all ice and water, or is there any rocky surface there too?
Added Nov 30, 2014
What is the cheapest, legitimate, and realistic manned mission to Mars proposal on record?
Followed Nov 29, 2014
Your answer to What is the cheapest, legitimate, and realistic manned mission to Mars proposal on record?
Added Nov 29, 2014
Wrong View - that Intention = Karma in Buddhism
Added Nov 28, 2014
Followed Nov 27, 2014
Added Nov 27, 2014
Why you often can't do anything in a wikipedia content dispute
Added Nov 26, 2014
Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, on issues arising from introduction of Buddhism into the West
Added Nov 26, 2014
Recently Destroyed Wikipedia Articles on Karma in Buddhism and the Four Noble Truths by Dorje108
Added Nov 26, 2014
Is there a viable business model for a permanent Mars colony?
Followed Nov 24, 2014
Your answer to Is there a viable business model for a permanent Mars colony?
Added Nov 24, 2014
Followed Nov 24, 2014
Added Nov 24, 2014
Followed Nov 23, 2014
Your answer to In what succession of concrete steps should we colonize and ultimately terraform Mars, according to current science?
Added Nov 23, 2014
When will there be a mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter, to check for life?
Followed Nov 23, 2014
Your answer to When will there be a mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter, to check for life?
Added Nov 23, 2014
Which is more important to the private space race, colonization or commercialization of space?
Followed Nov 22, 2014
Your answer to Which is more important to the private space race, colonization or commercialization of space?
Added Nov 22, 2014
Followed Nov 20, 2014
Your answer to What other space exploration surprises await us that are 10+ years in the making, similar to Rosetta?
Added Nov 20, 2014
What should I do when I get stuck on a mathematical problem?
Followed Nov 16, 2014
Your answer to What should I do when I get stuck on a mathematical problem?
Added Nov 16, 2014
What makes Mars more interesting than the Moon?
Followed Nov 16, 2014
Your answer to What makes Mars more interesting than the Moon?
Added Nov 16, 2014
Why do people want to settle on Mars?
Followed Nov 13, 2014
Your answer to Why do people want to settle on Mars?
Added Nov 13, 2014
How exactly does Rosetta communicate with the earth?
Followed Nov 12, 2014
Your answer to How exactly does Rosetta communicate with the earth?
Added Nov 12, 2014
What are the green lasers I see in simulated footage showing the Rosetta mission?
Followed Nov 12, 2014
Your answer to What are the green lasers I see in simulated footage showing the Rosetta mission?
Added Nov 12, 2014
Will there be a mission like Apollo 10 before actually landing on Mars?
Followed Nov 10, 2014
Your answer to Will there be a mission like Apollo 10 before actually landing on Mars?
Added Nov 10, 2014
Your answer to Is it fair to compare Tibet under Dalai Lama to the Confederacy?
Added Nov 9, 2014
Followed Nov 8, 2014
Your answer to What is the likelihood humans will ever achieve interstellar space travel? Given we don't kill ourselves off first.
Added Nov 8, 2014
What is the best way to deal with combative or condescending editors on Wikipedia?
Followed Nov 8, 2014
Your answer to What is the best way to deal with combative or condescending editors on Wikipedia?
Added Nov 8, 2014
Added Nov 6, 2014
Tolkein, Lord of the Rings etc
Added Nov 6, 2014
Buddhism, Meditation, Tibet, the Dalai Lama
Added Nov 6, 2014
Added Nov 6, 2014
Added Nov 6, 2014
Computers, Artificial Intelligence, and Programming
Added Nov 6, 2014
Added Nov 6, 2014
Added Nov 6, 2014
★
If one meditates all one's waking hours as (some) Buddhist monks do, isn't one throwing away one's life?
Added Nov 6, 2014
Followed Nov 3, 2014
Added Nov 3, 2014
Followed Nov 3, 2014
Added Nov 3, 2014
What are the real primary colours?
Followed Nov 3, 2014
Your answer to What are the real primary colours?
Added Nov 3, 2014
Mars (planet): Why isn't the light red in this picture?
Followed Nov 2, 2014
Your answer to Mars (planet): Why isn't the light red in this picture?
Added Nov 2, 2014
Followed Oct 31, 2014
Your answer to What reasons do beginners have to be cautious of trying new meditation techniques without guided training?
Added Oct 31, 2014
How many years down the line would living on Mars become possible?
Followed Oct 30, 2014
Your answer to How many years down the line would living on Mars become possible?
Added Oct 30, 2014
How much would it cost for humans to build a habitable space craft comparable to Earth?
Followed Oct 30, 2014
Your answer to How much would it cost for humans to build a habitable space craft comparable to Earth?
Added Oct 30, 2014
Could a cockroach survive on Mars?
Followed Oct 29, 2014
Your answer to Could a cockroach survive on Mars?
Added Oct 29, 2014
In Lord of the Rings, who is the "Lord"?
Followed Oct 28, 2014
Your answer to In Lord of the Rings, who is the "Lord"?
Added Oct 28, 2014
Added Oct 28, 2014
Has NASA purposefully sent any life forms to other planets?
Followed Oct 28, 2014
Your answer to Has NASA purposefully sent any life forms to other planets?
Added Oct 28, 2014
Followed Oct 27, 2014
Added Oct 27, 2014
If the Dalai Lama is peaceful, why is he ignoring Rohingya prosecution?
Followed Oct 26, 2014
Your answer to If the Dalai Lama is peaceful, why is he ignoring Rohingya prosecution?
Added Oct 26, 2014
What is the religion of China? If it's Buddhism, then why is China against the Dalai Lama?
Followed Oct 25, 2014
Your answer to What is the religion of China? If it's Buddhism, then why is China against the Dalai Lama?
Added Oct 25, 2014
Why do we never see any videos from NASA missions, but only pictures or animations?
Followed Oct 23, 2014
Your answer to Why do we never see any videos from NASA missions, but only pictures or animations?
Added Oct 23, 2014
Followed Oct 23, 2014
Added Oct 23, 2014
How did the Mars orbiters maneuver their orbits to hide behind Mars when the comet was approaching?
Followed Oct 20, 2014
Your answer to How did the Mars orbiters maneuver their orbits to hide behind Mars when the comet was approaching?
Added Oct 20, 2014
Will space travel to Mars be affordable in our lifetimes?
Followed Oct 20, 2014
Your answer to Will space travel to Mars be affordable in our lifetimes?
Added Oct 20, 2014
Your answer to If NASA really went to the moon, why don't they prove it to people who disbelieve them?
Added Oct 20, 2014
Why does Elon Musk want to send us to Mars?
Followed Oct 19, 2014
Your answer to Why does Elon Musk want to send us to Mars?
Added Oct 19, 2014
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Oct 19, 2014
Why are tides caused by the Moon rather than the Sun?"
Followed Oct 19, 2014
Your answer to Why are tides caused by the Moon rather than the Sun?"
Added Oct 19, 2014
Who wants to go to mars in 2020?
Followed Oct 18, 2014
Your answer to Who wants to go to mars in 2020?
Added Oct 18, 2014
What were the most pointless/useless space missions in history?
Followed Oct 18, 2014
Your answer to What were the most pointless/useless space missions in history?
Added Oct 18, 2014
Why do Tibetan Monks stare indirectly at the Sun, and what does it mean to them?
Followed Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to Why do Tibetan Monks stare indirectly at the Sun, and what does it mean to them?
Added Oct 17, 2014
Followed Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to What are some current issues with planetary rovers such as the Curiosity that NASA and others would like to improve upon?
Added Oct 17, 2014
Is it possible to be spiritually enlightened and stupid?
Followed Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to Is it possible to be spiritually enlightened and stupid?
Added Oct 17, 2014
Followed Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to If one meditates all one's waking hours as (some) Buddhist monks do, isn't one throwing away one's life?
Added Oct 17, 2014
When will the Earth become like Mars?
Followed Oct 16, 2014
Your answer to When will the Earth become like Mars?
Added Oct 16, 2014
Is life possible on a planet which isn't orbiting a star?
Followed Oct 15, 2014
Your answer to Is life possible on a planet which isn't orbiting a star?
Added Oct 15, 2014
Followed Oct 15, 2014
Your answer to Is it time to send a Voyager 3 space probe with a mission mandate of better exploration of interstellar space?
Added Oct 15, 2014
What is the most likely planet to be colonized after Mars and the Moon?
Followed Oct 14, 2014
Your answer to What is the most likely planet to be colonized after Mars and the Moon?
Added Oct 14, 2014
Followed Oct 13, 2014
Your answer to After we're done terraforming Mars, what crops should we choose that would have the best nutrient yield and fastest growth rates?
Added Oct 13, 2014
Followed Oct 12, 2014
Your answer to Who owns Mars?
Added Oct 12, 2014
Your answer to Elon Musk wants to send one million people to Mars. Can he do it?
Added Oct 12, 2014
Followed Oct 12, 2014
Added Oct 12, 2014
Is there any other planet or moon besides Mars where humans can actually land?
Followed Oct 10, 2014
Your answer to Is there any other planet or moon besides Mars where humans can actually land?
Added Oct 10, 2014
What could be the pros and cons about proposed travel to, and settling down/living on, Mars?
Followed Oct 10, 2014
Your answer to What could be the pros and cons about proposed travel to, and settling down/living on, Mars?
Added Oct 10, 2014
Followed Oct 9, 2014
Added Oct 9, 2014
Are there any plans for terraforming Mars in the foreseeable future?
Followed Oct 9, 2014
Your answer to Are there any plans for terraforming Mars in the foreseeable future?
Added Oct 9, 2014
Are all modern computers built using Boole’s theorems? Why?
Followed Oct 9, 2014
Your answer to Are all modern computers built using Boole’s theorems? Why?
Added Oct 9, 2014
How long ago did the water on Mars disappear?
Followed Oct 7, 2014
Your answer to How long ago did the water on Mars disappear?
Added Oct 7, 2014
Followed Oct 7, 2014
Added Oct 7, 2014
What are the scientific ways to test to see if a person is enlightened?
Added Oct 6, 2014
What will travel to Mars be like?
Followed Oct 6, 2014
Your answer to What will travel to Mars be like?
Added Oct 6, 2014
Meditators in Interplanetary and Interstellar Spaceships
Added Oct 5, 2014
Lord of the Rings as online Google book - useful for searching for quotes
Added Oct 5, 2014
Followed Oct 5, 2014
Added Oct 5, 2014
Followed Oct 4, 2014
Added Oct 4, 2014
The Curious Case - Is This A Spirit or a Buddha?
Added Oct 3, 2014
Followed Oct 2, 2014
Added Oct 2, 2014
Suppressing Thoughts and the Mandala principle
Added Oct 1, 2014
Cave in the Snow: A Western Woman's Quest for Enlightenment
Added Oct 1, 2014
Yidams or "Tutelary deities" in Tibetan Buddhism - as "Medicine"
Added Sep 30, 2014
The Heart and Essence of the Buddhist Teachings
Added Sep 30, 2014
What gives Planetary Resources the right to mine asteroids in outer space?
Followed Sep 29, 2014
Your answer to What gives Planetary Resources the right to mine asteroids in outer space?
Added Sep 29, 2014
Why the Dalai Lama is not a Pope or Dictator
Added Sep 28, 2014
Followed Sep 27, 2014
Added Sep 27, 2014
Your answer to In The Lord of the Rings, why didn't Frodo just fly/ride some beast (e.g. the Eagles) to Mount Doom, or at least some of the way there?
Added Sep 27, 2014
Are there any plans for reducing the lag time when it comes to communicating with rovers on Mars?
Followed Sep 26, 2014
Your answer to Are there any plans for reducing the lag time when it comes to communicating with rovers on Mars?
Added Sep 26, 2014
So far as I've seen there are no caves on the Moon or Mars, what's with that?
Followed Sep 24, 2014
Your answer to So far as I've seen there are no caves on the Moon or Mars, what's with that?
Added Sep 24, 2014
If an event has a probability of happening does that mean it could happen?
Followed Sep 23, 2014
Your answer to If an event has a probability of happening does that mean it could happen?
Added Sep 23, 2014
What does it mean when people say "free Tibet"?
Followed Sep 22, 2014
Your answer to What does it mean when people say "free Tibet"?
Added Sep 22, 2014
Followed Sep 21, 2014
Added Sep 21, 2014
The much misunderstood idea of a "Guru" in Buddhism
Added Sep 18, 2014
Your answer to What is the best thing you can do at age 30 to benefit your life at age 50 and beyond?
Added Sep 18, 2014
How do you compose music? What is the process? And what do you wish you'd figured out long ago?
Followed Sep 18, 2014
Your answer to How do you compose music? What is the process? And what do you wish you'd figured out long ago?
Added Sep 18, 2014
Are there any current or planned attempts to try to contact intelligent extraterrestrial life?
Followed Sep 16, 2014
Your answer to Are there any current or planned attempts to try to contact intelligent extraterrestrial life?
Added Sep 16, 2014
Followed Sep 16, 2014
Your answer to When we say there is no life on Mars, doesn't it only mean that life do not exist there as we understand it?
Added Sep 16, 2014
Is it better for Quora that I answer any question I can or only the ones I really know?
Followed Sep 15, 2014
Your answer to Is it better for Quora that I answer any question I can or only the ones I really know?
Added Sep 15, 2014
Followed Sep 15, 2014
Added Sep 15, 2014
Followed Sep 15, 2014
Added Sep 15, 2014
Will various countries establishing permanent bases on the Moon lead to war?
Followed Sep 15, 2014
Your answer to Will various countries establishing permanent bases on the Moon lead to war?
Added Sep 15, 2014
Karma in the Buddha's teachings - how is Free Will possible in Buddhism?
Added Sep 14, 2014
Followed Sep 13, 2014
Added Sep 13, 2014
Followed Sep 12, 2014
Your answer to If NASA really wanted to could they have done a successful mars landing mission right after the apollo program?
Added Sep 12, 2014
Can we engineer an oxygen producing bacteria capable of surviving on Mars?
Followed Sep 11, 2014
Your answer to Can we engineer an oxygen producing bacteria capable of surviving on Mars?
Added Sep 11, 2014
Followed Sep 8, 2014
Added Sep 8, 2014
Can an astronaut jump to Mars or Jupiter?
Followed Sep 8, 2014
Your answer to Can an astronaut jump to Mars or Jupiter?
Added Sep 8, 2014
Followed Sep 8, 2014
Your answer to What would be the biggest challenges to building a hose that extends from the Earth to a space station to supply air, water, fuel, etc?
Added Sep 8, 2014
Followed Sep 7, 2014
Added Sep 7, 2014
Added Sep 7, 2014
Followed Sep 6, 2014
Added Sep 6, 2014
When did people start for the first time to prepare for space exploration?
Followed Sep 6, 2014
Your answer to When did people start for the first time to prepare for space exploration?
Added Sep 6, 2014
Is there any good reason to colonize space in the near-term future (i.e. next 100, 500 years)?
Followed Sep 5, 2014
Your answer to Is there any good reason to colonize space in the near-term future (i.e. next 100, 500 years)?
Added Sep 5, 2014
What space missions are currently in the works?
Followed Sep 5, 2014
Your answer to What space missions are currently in the works?
Added Sep 5, 2014
Followed Sep 5, 2014
Your answer to Hypothetically, could the ISS inject itself into lunar orbit with its current engines and fuel capacity?
Added Sep 5, 2014
Where will the first places outside Earth to be settled by humans be?
Followed Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Where will the first places outside Earth to be settled by humans be?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Does Peter Jackson's change of The Hobbit in the Desolation of Smaug anger Tolkien fans?
Followed Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Does Peter Jackson's change of The Hobbit in the Desolation of Smaug anger Tolkien fans?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Followed Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Is there Oxygen in Mars?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Added Sep 4, 2014
Why are “The Hobbit” movies considerably different from the book?
Followed Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Why are “The Hobbit” movies considerably different from the book?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Followed Sep 3, 2014
Your answer to Will self-driving cars be able to drive above the speed limit, or will speed limits be raised or abolished due to them?
Added Sep 3, 2014
Followed Sep 3, 2014
Your answer to Is it pity that pi is an irrational number? Does it mean there is something wrong about our understanding of mathematics?
Added Sep 3, 2014
Followed Sep 3, 2014
Your answer to Will Russia's actions in the Ukraine result in the US unilaterally stopping all cooperation with Soyuz flights and ISS operations?
Added Sep 3, 2014
Followed Sep 3, 2014
Added Sep 3, 2014
Followed Sep 3, 2014
Added Sep 3, 2014
Could any of our current winged aircrafts fly in Mars' thin atmosphere?
Followed Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to Could any of our current winged aircrafts fly in Mars' thin atmosphere?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Followed Sep 2, 2014
How does Voyager 1 and 2 still have enough fuel to continuously fly since the 70's?
Followed Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to How does Voyager 1 and 2 still have enough fuel to continuously fly since the 70's?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Why are Gödel's incompleteness theorems so misunderstood and abused?
Followed Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to Why are Gödel's incompleteness theorems so misunderstood and abused?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Followed Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to What are some proposed solution recommendations when building a lunar lander in pursuit of the Google XPRIZE?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Followed Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to Is mankind currently capable of sending a manned mission to orbit the moon (similar to Apollo 10's mission)?
Added Sep 1, 2014
Prove that Fn∣Fm⟺n∣m,∀n,m∈N,n≥3, where Fi is a Fibonacci number ∀i∈N0
Followed Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to Prove that Fn∣Fm⟺n∣m,∀n,m∈N,n≥3, where Fi is a Fibonacci number ∀i∈N0
Added Sep 1, 2014
Followed Sep 1, 2014
Added Sep 1, 2014
Followed Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to What is the longest time an astronaut can spend in space before it is too hard to re-acclimatize to Earth?
Added Sep 1, 2014
Followed Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to Are there more, fewer or the same number of numbers between zero and one as there are larger than one?
Added Sep 1, 2014
How might the mathematics of extra-terrestrials differ from our own?
Followed Aug 30, 2014
Your answer to How might the mathematics of extra-terrestrials differ from our own?
Added Aug 30, 2014
Followed Aug 29, 2014
Added Aug 29, 2014
Followed Aug 29, 2014
Your answer to If mathematics is, at its core, inconsistent, does that mean that the Universe itself is, at its core, inconsistent?
Added Aug 29, 2014
Can I get a metronome that guesses the tempo when I'm playing?
Followed Aug 28, 2014
Your answer to Can I get a metronome that guesses the tempo when I'm playing?
Added Aug 28, 2014
Followed Aug 27, 2014
Added Aug 27, 2014
Let's say someone proves the twin prime conjecture. What should he/she do with it?
Followed Aug 27, 2014
Your answer to Let's say someone proves the twin prime conjecture. What should he/she do with it?
Added Aug 27, 2014
What are concepts in other languages for which there is no English word/phrase?
Followed Aug 26, 2014
Your answer to What are concepts in other languages for which there is no English word/phrase?
Added Aug 26, 2014
Followed Aug 25, 2014
Added Aug 25, 2014
Why do so many people think they are smarter than Elon Musk?
Followed Aug 25, 2014
Your answer to Why do so many people think they are smarter than Elon Musk?
Added Aug 25, 2014
Followed Aug 25, 2014
Your answer to Should every programmer or coder be able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide two-digit numbers on the fly?
Added Aug 25, 2014
When will we be able to confirm or deny if Jupiter's moon Europa has life?
Followed Aug 24, 2014
Your answer to When will we be able to confirm or deny if Jupiter's moon Europa has life?
Added Aug 24, 2014
Can satellites orbit the Earth over a fixed geographical location?
Followed Aug 24, 2014
Your answer to Can satellites orbit the Earth over a fixed geographical location?
Added Aug 24, 2014
India's mission on Mars: Will a budget of INR 450 crore suffice to take a man on Mars?
Followed Aug 24, 2014
Your answer to India's mission on Mars: Will a budget of INR 450 crore suffice to take a man on Mars?
Added Aug 24, 2014
Followed Aug 24, 2014
Your answer to If we are able to send earth life and extremophiles to other planets or moons so they can reproduce, should we?
Added Aug 24, 2014
Followed Aug 23, 2014
Added Aug 23, 2014
Can anybody with the right equipment mine an asteroid?
Followed Aug 23, 2014
Your answer to Can anybody with the right equipment mine an asteroid?
Added Aug 23, 2014
Did man really land on the moon?
Followed Aug 23, 2014
Your answer to Did man really land on the moon?
Added Aug 23, 2014
Are there any organisms on Earth which could live and propagate on another body in our solar system?
Followed Aug 22, 2014
Your answer to Are there any organisms on Earth which could live and propagate on another body in our solar system?
Added Aug 22, 2014
Why wasn't the ISS designed as a rotating wheel space station?
Followed Aug 20, 2014
Your answer to Why wasn't the ISS designed as a rotating wheel space station?
Added Aug 20, 2014
Followed Aug 20, 2014
Added Aug 20, 2014
Followed Aug 19, 2014
Your answer to Why didn't man go to Mars?
Added Aug 19, 2014
Followed Aug 19, 2014
Your answer to Would a space elevator significantly change the Earth's center of gravity or rate of spin? Would the length of days change?
Added Aug 19, 2014
Why don't we use a system similar to a railgun to accelerate space ships to escape velocity?
Followed Aug 19, 2014
Your answer to Why don't we use a system similar to a railgun to accelerate space ships to escape velocity?
Added Aug 19, 2014
Followed Aug 19, 2014
Added Aug 19, 2014
Is there a number that cannot be expressed in any way due to limitations of our universe?
Followed Aug 18, 2014
Your answer to Is there a number that cannot be expressed in any way due to limitations of our universe?
Added Aug 18, 2014
Followed Aug 18, 2014
Added Aug 18, 2014
Is there a Russian equivalent to NASA's Voyager space probes?
Followed Aug 17, 2014
Your answer to Is there a Russian equivalent to NASA's Voyager space probes?
Added Aug 17, 2014
Followed Aug 17, 2014
Your answer to It is possible to adapt the atmosphere of Mars for the existence of life similar to Earth over a period of 100 years?
Added Aug 17, 2014
Your answer to If the earth is rotating at a high speed and we jump up, why doesn't the earth move below us at high speed?
Added Aug 17, 2014
Followed Aug 17, 2014
Added Aug 17, 2014
What is the significance of prime numbers?
Followed Aug 16, 2014
Your answer to What is the significance of prime numbers?
Added Aug 16, 2014
Followed Aug 16, 2014
Added Aug 16, 2014
Followed Aug 16, 2014
Added Aug 16, 2014
Followed Aug 16, 2014
Your answer to If the earth is rotating at a high speed and we jump up, why doesn't the earth move below us at high speed?
Added Aug 16, 2014
Followed Aug 14, 2014
Added Aug 14, 2014
Could diamonds potentially be found on Mars?
Followed Aug 14, 2014
Your answer to Could diamonds potentially be found on Mars?
Added Aug 14, 2014
Followed Aug 14, 2014
Your answer to Does Mars have any moons?
Added Aug 14, 2014
Why do we make an effort not to contaminate other planets with Earth life?
Followed Aug 13, 2014
Your answer to Why do we make an effort not to contaminate other planets with Earth life?
Added Aug 13, 2014
What is the oldest mathematical conjecture?
Followed Aug 12, 2014
Your answer to What is the oldest mathematical conjecture?
Added Aug 12, 2014
Followed Aug 12, 2014
Your answer to If humans were to setup a civilization on Mars, would flying cars be realistic considering the gravity there is 38% that of Earth?
Added Aug 12, 2014
What has Great Britain (UK) achieved with regards to space exploration?
Followed Aug 12, 2014
Your answer to What has Great Britain (UK) achieved with regards to space exploration?
Added Aug 12, 2014
How long will it be until humans have space ships like in Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar, etc?
Followed Aug 11, 2014
Your answer to How long will it be until humans have space ships like in Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar, etc?
Added Aug 11, 2014
Followed Aug 11, 2014
Added Aug 11, 2014
Followed Aug 11, 2014
Added Aug 11, 2014
What are the best arguments for debunking Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories?
Followed Aug 11, 2014
Your answer to What are the best arguments for debunking Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories?
Added Aug 11, 2014
Why have humans never been back to the Moon after 1972?
Followed Aug 10, 2014
Your answer to Why have humans never been back to the Moon after 1972?
Added Aug 10, 2014
In what ways is writing for Quora more fun than writing for Wikipedia, or vice-versa?
Followed Aug 10, 2014
Your answer to In what ways is writing for Quora more fun than writing for Wikipedia, or vice-versa?
Added Aug 10, 2014
Has it been conjectured that ppn+1n+pn+pn+1 is prime?
Followed Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to Has it been conjectured that ppn+1n+pn+pn+1 is prime?
Added Aug 9, 2014
Followed Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to What should we do to ensure the peaceful exploration of other planets, in particular Mars? Is it even possible?
Added Aug 9, 2014
In terms of colonizing other planets, is it more a matter of "Is it possible?" or "How do we do it?"
Followed Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to In terms of colonizing other planets, is it more a matter of "Is it possible?" or "How do we do it?"
Added Aug 9, 2014
Followed Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to How difficult would it be to colonize mars? How soon could such an endeavor happen? Is there any utility in doing so?
Added Aug 9, 2014
Followed Aug 9, 2014
Added Aug 9, 2014
What would it take to move Venus closer to Earth, making Earth/Venus a twin planet?
Followed Aug 8, 2014
Your answer to What would it take to move Venus closer to Earth, making Earth/Venus a twin planet?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Followed Aug 8, 2014
Your answer to Can the entire world's energy demands be met with 100% renewable energy and 0% coal, petroleum, nuclear?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Is it relevant to race for Mars settlement when our own planet is in risk?
Followed Aug 8, 2014
Your answer to Is it relevant to race for Mars settlement when our own planet is in risk?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Does "survival of the fittest" imply or require a will to survive?
Followed Aug 8, 2014
Your answer to Does "survival of the fittest" imply or require a will to survive?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Added Aug 7, 2014
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Added Aug 7, 2014
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to What do you say to the people who turn down space exploration & research in favor of fixing things on Earth first instead?
Added Aug 7, 2014
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to I want to try the Riemann hypothesis. What required area of mathematics and other supportive areas do I have to study?
Added Aug 7, 2014
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Added Aug 7, 2014
How expensive is the colonisation of space?
Followed Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to How expensive is the colonisation of space?
Added Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to What are the best arguments for debunking Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Is it possible to create artificial intelligence? Why or how?
Followed Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to Is it possible to create artificial intelligence? Why or how?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to What are the best arguments for debunking Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Followed Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to Can we make Mars habitable?
Added Aug 5, 2014
If money was not a constraint, what could be done to avoid an AI apocalypse?
Followed Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to If money was not a constraint, what could be done to avoid an AI apocalypse?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to Where should manned exploration programs focus first, the Moon or Mars?
Added Aug 4, 2014
How do you show mathematical symbols on a webpage?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to How do you show mathematical symbols on a webpage?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Is there a human corpse in orbit or deep space?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Is there a human corpse in orbit or deep space?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Are astronauts allowed to make autonomous decisions?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Are astronauts allowed to make autonomous decisions?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Why does it matter if there was ever life on Mars?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Why does it matter if there was ever life on Mars?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Added Aug 4, 2014
Did Earth life begin on Mars? If so, could we find evidence and or prove it?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Did Earth life begin on Mars? If so, could we find evidence and or prove it?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Could a direct hit by comet Siding Spring make Mars more hospitable for life?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Could a direct hit by comet Siding Spring make Mars more hospitable for life?
Added Aug 4, 2014
What are the possible origins of the "spidery black things" on Mars?
Followed Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to What are the possible origins of the "spidery black things" on Mars?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Followed Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to Is Mars One a scam?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Followed Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to What do you think about the decision taken by the United Arab Emirates to establish their own space program?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Followed Aug 3, 2014
Added Aug 3, 2014
Do you think that humans are just an invasive species on earth? If so, who does the earth belong to?
Followed Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to Do you think that humans are just an invasive species on earth? If so, who does the earth belong to?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Could one survive on Mars with only a pressure demand regulator and warm cloths?
Followed Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to Could one survive on Mars with only a pressure demand regulator and warm cloths?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Should we steer comets into Mars to give it oceans?
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to Should we steer comets into Mars to give it oceans?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to If we had the ability to terraform a planet to support human life, but in the process changed it irrevocably, should we?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Is Mars a little too close to the Asteroid Belt for serious consideration for terraforming?
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to Is Mars a little too close to the Asteroid Belt for serious consideration for terraforming?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to If it was possible to collect half of the atmosphere of Venus, and deposit it on Mars, would this make both planets more habitable?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to What country/company will be the second to land a person on the Moon and which will be the first to do so on Mars?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to What are some technologies or approaches being developed to make prolonged trips in space more tenable as regards human biology?
Added Aug 2, 2014
What is the minimum size for a ring-shaped, rotating space station?
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to What is the minimum size for a ring-shaped, rotating space station?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Added Aug 2, 2014
Followed Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to If a private company had the money and the resources, is there any law that would prevent them from building a moon colony?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Added Aug 1, 2014
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Can Mars be terraformed?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Can any of the planets of the solar system be terraformed for human habitation?
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Can any of the planets of the solar system be terraformed for human habitation?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Why hasn't NASA put onboard microscopes on their rovers to look for Martian microfossils?
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Why hasn't NASA put onboard microscopes on their rovers to look for Martian microfossils?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to What was the perfect reason for the Kalpana Chawla's Space shuttle failure while returning from space? How did she feel at that moment?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Would cave systems on the Moon or Mars be anywhere near as varied and intricately formed as ones on Earth?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Followed Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to If you are in a spaceship that is traveling very close to the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Added Jul 31, 2014
Is life possible on a planet without liquid water? Why wouldn't life develop on a different fluid?
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to Is life possible on a planet without liquid water? Why wouldn't life develop on a different fluid?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Added Jul 31, 2014
Is it true that if life had existed on Mars evidence of it would likely be quite obvious?
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to Is it true that if life had existed on Mars evidence of it would likely be quite obvious?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Why are there no pictures of the abandoned NASA lunar modules, rovers, etc.?
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to Why are there no pictures of the abandoned NASA lunar modules, rovers, etc.?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to The Moon: What was the argument to not accept project Horizon in 1959? What were the main issues with the project?
Added Jul 31, 2014
What are the reasons for man to not go to Mars?
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to What are the reasons for man to not go to Mars?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Followed Jul 31, 2014
Added Jul 31, 2014
Can a computer be made analog and has it been done?
Followed Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to Can a computer be made analog and has it been done?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Can deserts be made habitable?
Followed Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to Can deserts be made habitable?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Followed Jul 30, 2014
Can we create a spaceship with centrifugal artificial gravity with today's technology?
Followed Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to Can we create a spaceship with centrifugal artificial gravity with today's technology?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to What is a true personal story that people have a hard time believing?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Is it true that there are more lifeforms on your skin than there are people on the planet?
Followed Jul 29, 2014
Your answer to Is it true that there are more lifeforms on your skin than there are people on the planet?
Added Jul 29, 2014
Your answer to Grammar: Which is grammatically correct: "I hope we can keep this between you and me," or "I hope we can keep this between you and I"?
Added Jul 29, 2014
How can Spotify be written in C++ when it works on the web?
Followed Jul 29, 2014
Your answer to How can Spotify be written in C++ when it works on the web?
Added Jul 29, 2014
Do all living organisms on Earth share a common ancestor, or did life begin more than once?
Followed Jul 28, 2014
Your answer to Do all living organisms on Earth share a common ancestor, or did life begin more than once?
Added Jul 28, 2014
Followed Jul 28, 2014
Your answer to What would be the most effective way to fight overpopulation: to colonize a new planet or to efficiently manage terrestrial resources?
Added Jul 28, 2014
Followed Jul 28, 2014
Added Jul 28, 2014
Music Theory: What is the circle of fifths?
Followed Jul 25, 2014
Your answer to Music Theory: What is the circle of fifths?
Added Jul 25, 2014
Why are pitches classified the way they are in music?
Followed Jul 25, 2014
Your answer to Why are pitches classified the way they are in music?
Added Jul 25, 2014
What can be the best telescope under $500?
Followed Jul 25, 2014
Your answer to What can be the best telescope under $500?
Added Jul 25, 2014
How do different musical keys sound different from each other?
Followed Jul 24, 2014
Your answer to How do different musical keys sound different from each other?
Added Jul 24, 2014
Followed Jul 24, 2014
Your answer to If evolution has no inherent goal how did such complex forms of life arise when bacteria goes about reproducing just fine?
Added Jul 24, 2014
Followed Jul 24, 2014
Added Jul 24, 2014
Is the development of sentient AI highly probable within this century?
Followed Jul 24, 2014
Your answer to Is the development of sentient AI highly probable within this century?
Added Jul 24, 2014
Would a child be able to grow and develop safely if raised in a microgravity environment?
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to Would a child be able to grow and develop safely if raised in a microgravity environment?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Added Jul 23, 2014
Do you think Homo sapiens will spread across the cosmos?
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to Do you think Homo sapiens will spread across the cosmos?
Added Jul 23, 2014
To what degree is evolution determined by self-selection rather than natural selection?
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to To what degree is evolution determined by self-selection rather than natural selection?
Added Jul 23, 2014
What planets/moons do scientists expect to find life in our solar system? I only know of Europa?
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to What planets/moons do scientists expect to find life in our solar system? I only know of Europa?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to How long has our galaxy harbored Class F, G, and K stars with potentially life-sustaining terrestrial planets?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Is human colonization of Ceres feasible?
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to Is human colonization of Ceres feasible?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Followed Jul 23, 2014
Added Jul 23, 2014
James Lovelock's 1970s argument for no life on Mars - what does it mean for us today?
Added Jul 22, 2014
What is your preferred answer to the Fermi paradox?
Followed Jul 22, 2014
Your answer to What is your preferred answer to the Fermi paradox?
Added Jul 22, 2014
Is there any possibility that a species more intelligent than human exists on earth?
Followed Jul 22, 2014
Your answer to Is there any possibility that a species more intelligent than human exists on earth?
Added Jul 22, 2014
What is the probability of a significant asteroid impact event by 2100?
Followed Jul 21, 2014
Your answer to What is the probability of a significant asteroid impact event by 2100?
Added Jul 21, 2014
Your answer to What are good ways to avoid bugs while programming?
Added Jul 21, 2014
Are there programmers who write virtually bug-free code?
Followed Jul 21, 2014
Your answer to Are there programmers who write virtually bug-free code?
Added Jul 21, 2014
Followed Jul 20, 2014
Added Jul 20, 2014
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Jul 20, 2014
Followed Jul 20, 2014
Added Jul 20, 2014
Followed Jul 20, 2014
Added Jul 20, 2014
What resources on Mars could benefit humanity?
Followed Jul 19, 2014
Your answer to What resources on Mars could benefit humanity?
Added Jul 19, 2014
Followed Jul 19, 2014
Your answer to Is there ever likely going to be a time when humans colonize another celestial body in our solar system?
Added Jul 19, 2014
What cool things can we do with a permanent base on the Moon?
Followed Jul 19, 2014
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Added Jul 19, 2014
Are the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, also suitable for off-world colonization?
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Added Jul 19, 2014
Is it ethical or wise for parents of young children to volunteer for the one-way mission to Mars?
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Is it a special feature of Peano axioms that Godel can prove incompleteness from them?
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What kind of people will be the first to colonize mars?
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What is the most probable next step in space exploration?
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Can we be 100% sure space is infinite?
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Where should Earth's 1st off-planet colony start?
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Mathematical Fallacies: Can we prove that 1=2 or 2=3 or 3=4 and so on?
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If we could travel faster than the speed of light, would time travel backwards?
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They found a possible lake in a crater on Mars. What types of fish were in the lake?
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Is something still morally wrong if the victim is unaffected by it?
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Is it really likely future space colonies would try to gain "independence?"
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What are some reasons that many intelligent species don't colonize space and other planets?
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What are some microbes which could be 'seeded' into Venus' atmosphere, to consume the CO2?
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How dangerous is it to live in a space station?
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How would I own a piece of land on Mars?
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Is your mind part of your body?
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How many people would we need to send to a distant planet to colonise it?
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When we colonize the Moon, what will the colonists do to fight the low G effects?
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How many people are required for a self-sustaining Mars colony?
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When will humans colonize Mars?
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Is His Holiness the Dalai Lama a liar?
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Do dragons and gnomes really live in my source code?
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Impossibility of counting most mathematical objects
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What have been the top findings on Mars so far?
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Should we travel to Mars for $55 billion?
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If NASA chose you to help colonize Mars, would you do it?
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Your answer to With the Moon and Mars colonisation plans underway (Mars One, SpaceX, Chinese space program) what laws will govern the colony?
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What economic incentives are there to colonize Mars or any other planet?
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What goods could Mars colonists export to Earth?
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Is it practical to send humans to distance of Mars orbit (say) using technology of the ISS
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What will drive people to colonize Mars and when can that theoretically happen?
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Is Mars worth mining for Earth purposes?
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How successful will Mars One turn out to be?
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Why not send cockroaches to Mars?
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Why Mars Microbes Matter - Like Tigers - And More So? - Microbial ETs
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Will humans ever colonize Mars, our solar system, or the entire universe? Or will they go extinct?
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If humans were to inhabit Mars would they carry religion and countries there too?
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Why haven't we introduced life on Mars yet?
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How do I view and understand source code?
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Will humans eventually live on Mars? Why?
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Your answer to 5 manned missions to Mars, including SpaceX, have been announced so far. Will any of the 5 likely make it?
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If we live on Mars in future should these people have the right to keep and bear weapons? Why?
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What would it be like to live on Mars?
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Has the first person to live to 200 years old been born yet?
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If I were to build a permanent colony on either Mars or the Moon, which would be the better choice?
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Why does everyone plan to settle on Mars when we are not even done with the Moon?
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Your answer to What little habits made you a better software engineer?
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Space Show webinar - Partial and Artificial Gravity for Human Spaceflight
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How much of Mars' surface is unexplored?
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What is the most cost effective way for us to terraform Mars?
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How do the Mars One applicants imagine their life on Mars?
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How long would it take to terraform Mars?
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Your answer to Do you think people who have been defamed on the internet can ever live normal and healthy lives again?
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Did the Buddha ever personally visit Hell to lecture the dharma to the hell-beings?
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Added May 24, 2014
Why won't NASA consider a one-way mission to Mars?
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Your answer to What are some good resources for web developers who want to make their products more accessible for people with disabilities?
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Do we really need to send people to Mars?
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Your answer to How will the land on the moon be distributed among all of the countries?
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How will the land on the moon be distributed among all of the countries?
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Should I buy an electronic metronome or an analog one?
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Added May 18, 2014
Is colonizing Mars biologically possible?
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What are some ways to become more rhythmically precise when playing a musical instrument?
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How do top programmers work, e.g., Fabrice Bellard?
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What would happen if we released a helium balloon from the Moon's surface?
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If a colony of water bears were released on the surface of Mars, what would happen?
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Is there any promising research into achieving artificial gravity?
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Could we get a space probe to Alpha Centauri by 2121 if it got top priority?
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Is it feasible to move an iron rich asteroid into a geosynchronous or geostationary low earth orbit and build a steel works on or in the asteroid to manufacture a steel cable that could be lowered to earth?
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What are the scientific ways to test to see if a person is enlightened?
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How feasible is Elon Musk's idea to establish a colony on Mars in the 2020s?
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Your answer to Why have untruths about China's treatment of Tibet continued and why do we continue to believe Tibetans when facts support other views?
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How many scales are there in music?
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Your answer to How does President Obama meeting with Dalai Lama "interfere" in China's internal affairs?
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What happens if you travel faster than the speed of light?
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Finding the Dalai Lama reincarnation: Could it be in ethnically non-tibetians and/or women as well?
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Your Content
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(Note Feel free to link to this answer, or copy the content wherever you like or edit it for your own use. No need for attribution)
This approach backs up all your content as separate posts with a page indexing into them.
See also How to backup all your quora content to a single page on your computer - as either a web page or a pdf which is also a simpler approach.
I’ll explain how to automatically download all your answers from quora in one go with just a few minutes of work on your part, even if you have many thousands of answers..
It may take anything from a few minutes to hours to do the actual download, depending on your connection speed, if you have thousands of answers but it is automatic and you can leave your computer doing the job for you in the background.
My instructions here are for Windows but it should work similarly on other operating systems and the program HTTrack which I use is also multi-platform too.
You get HTTrack here Download HTTrack Website Copier 3.49-2 so you might as well go ahead and download it while you read the rest of this. It’s available for most operating systems. I’m using it on Windows.
Video explaining how to do it here, with apologies for the sound quality:
Note though, I’ve now found out how to do an HTTrack backup with the images downloaded as well. That just leaves the video links. I haven’t found a way to make the embedded videos save, or to include a link to the video on the page either - it just downloads a thumbnail instead, don’t know why.
SUMMARY OF MAIN POINTS
You get messages like this:
If you have done this before, you get this message:

Answer OK
When this message pops up

select “Mirror the whole domain”. At least that’s what I used and it worked. I haven’t tried the other options. If you choose “Skip All” it won’t download the rest of the site.
IN DETAIL - PART 1 MAKE A WEB PAGE WITH LINKS TO ALL YOUR ANSWERS
Forst you need to create a page with links to all your answers. My one is here
List of my answers to date for downloading with HTTrack
This is on quora - and what I’m going to do is to make a backup copy of this page and all its linked to pages on my local hard disk using HTTrack.
SHOW A LIST OF ALL YOUR ANSWERS ON QUORA
So how do you show the list of all your answers? Go to your answers page. It’s the same url for everyone but if you click through you will see a list of your answers not mine.
https://www.quora.com/content?co...
Or for all your content:
This is a dynamic page and so you can’t download it in its entirety with HTTrack. If you try, you will only get your first few answers.
So, you have to convert it to a static page.
So first, you need to show all the answers on that page. To do that, scroll to the end and keep doing that until you can scroll no more.
The easiest way to do that is to use Ctr;+ End. Keep pressing Ctrl + End until you have reached the end of your list of answers. It may take a while, you may need to press it many times if you have thousands of answers.
Or, a bit more techy, but automates the process - use the console to auto expand. Instructions for chrome:
Right click on any blank area of the page and choose inspect. Now choose the Console tab. Paste in this code:
- var interval = setInterval(function() {
- window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);
- }, 100);
Press the return key. The page should start scrolling automatically. Now you can just go away and leave it doing its thing. You only need to do this once.
When it is done
- clearInterval(interval);
(Until you do that, it keeps trying to scroll to the end so you won’t be able to scroll back up the page)
I got that code from Mehul Mohan‘s answer to Can you download all Quora answers from one person? - he explains a way to show all the answers in one page including the content of all your answers - and tested it and it works - but if you have thousands of answers, I don’t think that’s going to be practical because the browser page would be vast - but this much of it is.
Now you have a page with links to all your answers, or all your comments, but it is no use yet. If you refresh the page, you will lose all that work scrolling the page and it will show only the first few answers again.
So how can we get HTTrack to download it? There’s only one way I know of. You have to copy it to a static page.
COPY IT TO A STATIC PAGE
So to do that, highlight all your answers. The easy way is to use Ctrl + A on Windows.

Now you need to copy all that text. On Windows you can just use Ctrl + C
Now you need to create an online page to paste your list of answers into, and best done on quora. I have a blog called drafts. If you don’t have a suitable place to put it, then just create a new quora blog and then make a new post in that blog.
Go to it and paste your list of answers into it. On Windows you can just use Ctrl + V to do that. Then save it.
You should now have something like this

You need to do a bit of editing to delete all that stuff at the top of the list (it’s the stuff that originally was above and to the left on your answers page),
After you do that, leaving only your own answers, it looks like this:

This is the page you are going to download with HTTrack along with all the linked to pages.
This will also be your index page into all your answers for offline browsing.
It’s got a lot of unnecessary text. If you did this for offline browsing you may want to edit it away at this stage, leaving just the links to your answers.
But if the aim is just to make sure you have a backup of your answers there is no need to do it.
All we need to download all the answers are the links. Anything else on the page doesn’t matter.
So now save the post. This is it, a shorter version of my list which I’ve made just for this tutorial: List of answers to download with HTTrack by Robert Walker on Drafts
To download your answers we need its url. So get that from the top of the page. In my case it is:
[code]List of answers to download with HTTrack by Robert Walker on Drafts
[/code]
This is the url you are going to need for HTTrack.
We are now finished with all the preparation on Quora.
DOWNLOAD WITH HTTRACK
Now install HTTrack (if you haven’t already), install it and and start it up.

Click Next
Choose anything for name and project category. The category doesn’t seem to be used anywhere that I can see. The project name is the name HTTrack will use for your site in its list of local sites.

Click Next.
Under Action: choose Download web site + questions.
I’m not sure why this is necessary and there may be a better way of doing it, but it works. Also enter your Quora link as the “Web Addresses (URL)”
You only need to enter the one address.

SET A MAXIMUM MIRRORING DEPTH OF 2
This is very important or HTTrack will try to download the whole of quora!
Go to Set Options and then to Limits and set the Maximum Mirroring Depth to 2

It is set to a maximum of 10 connections per second, by default, probably no need to change that. You don’t want to set that to 0 - that would let you download all the content very quickly, but you are likely to overload the site and get your ip address blocked by quora. You don’t want to do that!
It’s probably also an idea to set the number of connections to 1 just to be safe, again in case quora blocks you for doing many multiple simultaneous connections to download the content. I don’t know if they would.

This is another tab where you might want to change things:

I’ve switched on “Get HTML files first!” also Get non-HTML files related to a link, e.g. external .ZIP or pictures.
Click OK - you can keep everything else at its defaults..
Then click Next. You see this. You don’t need to change anything here:

Now click Finish.
MESSAGES
Because we chose website with questions you get asked a few questions.
If you have done this before, you get this message:

Answer OK
It flickers “loading cache” for a while. That’s normal.
When this message pops up

select “Mirror the whole domain”. At least that’s what I used and it worked. I haven’t tried the other options.
It seems natural to just answer “Skip All”, but that doesn’t work. If you do that, it doesn’t download anything except the original page, for some reason. That may be why you have to choose “Website + questions” to download your answers from Quora using HTTrack.
You get that same message three or four times. Just keep answering in the same way every time you get it.
I don’t know why this is necessary - but when I tried the website without questions it just wouldn’t download the linked to pages even though I set the Maximum Mirroring Depth to 2.
I’m just sharing what worked for me. If anyone knows why this is necessary or a simpler way just say.
WHEN IT IS FINISHED
When it is finished you get this.

Click “Browse Mirrored Website to see the downloaded page.
Now you are done.
When browsing your downloaded copies you get a message “internet connection problems” just click dismiss.
You need to do that for every page you visit, a minor nuisance. You don’t see it if you upload a copy of the downloaded website online, e.g. to your website.

You then get a message about cookies, but you can’t get rid of that without editing the web pages. The X to hide the message doesn’t work in the offline copy. Just ignore it.
But those are minor nuisances. You now have all your answers backed up on your computer. Not just the text. The images too are saved offline.
If you click on any other Quora links on the answer pages, e.g. to your profile, say, it will take you back to the Quora website, but if you click on the links from our original index page to your answers you stay on your computer.
It works like this because HTTrack has cleverly rewritten the code for the page so that it works like that, because of what you told it to do, setting that 2 steps limit.
BACKING UP A BLOG
You can back up all the entries for a blog in the same way. Keep using Ctrl + End until you get to the end of the blog.
There’s a lot more content when you do that, because of the preview of the start of each blog entry, the links, comments etc. Edit those away and you get something like this
Random Things for HTTrack by Robert Walker on Drafts
When you download it, choose a different project name or it will overwrite the last one. You can use the same category as before, or a new one.
Then continue as before.
Double check that it still has a maximum mirroring depth of 2 in “Set Options” and that the Action is set to “Download web site + questions”
BROWSING YOUR DOWNLOADED SITES
You can browse your downloaded sites using File >> Browse Sites in HTTrack.
UPDATING
You’d think you could update to include new answers by just editing the page and adding the links to the new answers at the top of the page, and then choose the option in HTTrack under Action: “Update Existing Download” but that doesn’t seem to work. It downloads the new page but doesn’t download the new content that it links to. It just takes you to Quora for any newly added links on the page, while the old links take you to the backed up content on your hard disk. Strange. Because someone must have put a fair bit of thought and care into making it do that. But why, what was the idea of it?
Anyway I found a workaround, if this happens to you.
Under Action: choose Download web site + questions
as before.
Then go to “Set Options” and under Build, choose “Do not purge old files”

Then continue with your download as before, messages and everything. It only downloads new files - so it should finish quickly.
This is what I’d expect the update option to do, but for some reason it doesn’t, and not sure what it is for, at least when testing here.
Hope this is clear. Any questions do say.
PLEASE CORRECT ANYTHING HERE
Also do say if there are any mistakes here or you have any corrections however minor.
And if anyone knows why I get those messages with HTTrack and why I have to choose “Website + questions” to download all the answers from quora - or if you know of any workaround to avoid those messages, or a better way of doing this, do say.
List of some of my quora answers on Buddhism
Why I see Science as part of the Buddhist path
Errors in the Wikipedia Four Noble Truths article
Buddhist sources on the Four Noble Truths
Life of the Buddha according to the sutras
Magic at the Heart of the Buddha's Teachings - Two Kinds of Truth
Origins of the Buddhist Sutras - were they the Teachings of the Buddha?
Six Urban Legends - the Western Doom and Gloom idea of Karma
Six Urban Legends - the Western Doom and Gloom idea of Karma
Wrong View - that Intention = Karma in Buddhism
Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, on issues arising from introduction of Buddhism into the West
Recently Destroyed Wikipedia Articles on Karma in Buddhism and the Four Noble Truths by Dorje108
What are the scientific ways to test to see if a person is enlightened?
Meditators in Interplanetary and Interstellar Spaceships
The Curious Case - Is This A Spirit or a Buddha?
Suppressing Thoughts and the Mandala principle
Cave in the Snow: A Western Woman's Quest for Enlightenment
Yidams or "Tutelary deities" in Tibetan Buddhism - as "Medicine"
The Heart and Essence of the Buddhist Teachings
Why the Dalai Lama is not a Pope or Dictator
The much misunderstood idea of a "Guru" in Buddhism
Karma in the Buddha's teachings - how is Free Will possible in Buddhism?
How to back up all your quora answers to your computer
Are the Trappist planets “orbit clearing”?
Could a spaceship enter the Earth’s atmosphere slowly - shortened answer
Why is the Youtube interface so bewildering?
What you can do about the Alice through the Looking Glass world of Wikipedia Editing - Right Now
Ideas for wikipedia reform for the long term
Why Climate Change is No Longer a Political Debate Outside the US
How to edit wikipedia without getting into trouble
Should Humans Fill the Galaxy?
Programming Tips For Better Code
Why Forests are not the "Lungs of the planet"
Why you often can't do anything in a wikipedia content dispute
Lord of the Rings as online Google book - useful for searching for quotes
Testing update by adding an extra link:
If you want the instructions, go to
This page covers the motivation and I show you my own backup so you can see how it works.
MOTIVATION
This is something you might find useful for browsing your answers off line or for peace of mind.
Surely Quora has multiple backups of everything but it’s no harm to have your own too.
Especially so since Quora answers are excluded from the internet archive. They explain in their robots.txt file
“We opt out of the wayback machine because inclusion would allow people to discover the identity of authors who had written sensitive answers publicly and # later had made them anonymous, and because it would prevent authors from being able to remove their content from the internet if they change their mind about publishing it. As far as we can tell, there is no way for sites to selectively # programmatically remove content from the archive and so this is the only way for us to protect writers. If they open up an API where we can remove content from the archive when authors remove it from Quora, but leave the rest of the # content archived, we would be happy to opt back in.”
They go on to say how to find earlier versions of any of your answers here on quora.
WHY IT NEEDS TO BE AUTOMATED
It’s not so hard if you have only a few answers, but what if you have over a thousand answers (as I do) or even over 10,000 or more as some top writers do? It would take hours to save them all individually.
Well here is a way to do it in a short time.
WHAT YOUR ARCHIVE WILL LOOK LIKE
Here is the result so you can see first that it works and what we are going to achieve. It looks like a quora page (apart from the cookies message) but is on my website robertinventor.com
List of my answers to date for downloading with...

I’ve put it on my website so you can see it - but it’s an uploaded copy of my offsite backup on my computer.
The links on that page all work, but they go to my website instead of quora now.
Click on the first link and you get this

Notice that it still says robertinventor.com at the top of the page - so this is still my backup and not on quora. Here on my own computer it says it’s on drive C

It’s the same for all those answers in the first page.
For how to do it: How to back up all your Quora answers to your computer - short version
Your Content
Your answer to How vulnerable are we to a catastrophic asteroid impact? Are there people whose job is to watch for them?
Added 11h ago
Your answer to Will the world end on September 23rd, 2017? I'm worried.
Added Mon
Added Mon
Your answer to Is answering a question with a question an answer?
Added Mon
Your answer to Which Tank will Fill up First (Look closely at details)? (see question source for image)
Added Mon
Your answer to Why were question details removed from Quora on August 3, 2017?
Added Sun
Your answer to How am I supposed to ask complex questions without question details?
Added Sun
Your answer to Are Buddhist attached to being unattached?
Added Sun
Your answer to Why can't you post pictures into your Quora questions anymore?
Added Sun
This is an answer I did to another question, about workarounds for question details recovery: Robert Walker's answer to Why were question details removed from Quora on August 3, 2017?
For old questions, the details get moved to a comment automatically. It seems to take a while for that to happen, so you may see no comments, and a day later the old details appear as a question comment.
Some questions make no sense without the details. E.g. questions such as: “What is this animal?” with a photograph uploaded by the questioner.
There is no way to fix that by editing the question, no matter what the limit as you can’t put a photograph into a question.
SOLUTION 1: QUESTION DETAILS AS COMMENT, LINK TO COMMENT AS QUESTION SOURCE
The best solution I’ve seen so far is to put the question details in as a comment on the question. Then link to that comment in the source.
You can find the link to the comment by right clicking on the date or time shown below the name of the author of the comment.
You can see how it works with this question - which had a couple of images. Author wanted to know if the animal was a possum.
What is this animal? Is it a possum?

It obviously needed that photo (and their other one) just to make sense of the question.
I rewrote the title to say (see question source) and updated the question source to link to a comment into which I inserted the two photographs which I found from the log (by appending /log to the url)
This is how you find the link to the comment:

This was the result:
What is this animal? Is it a possum? (see question source for photos)
It’s a specially good very simple example of a situation where the question is a natural one that someone will want to ask: “What is this” with some photographs they took of it. All such questions will make no sense without the details. Well this is a way to fix past questions like that and to ask new ones.
Sadly it doesn’t embed the photographs into the question itself, but it’s better than nothing.
For an example involving text, which I have just fixed in the same way, see Are the tenses and punctuation in this English paragraph correct? (See question source)
There are many budding authors and the answers to such questions are important, and you learn by seeing how it is done in specific examples like that.
A general question of the type “how do you punctuate paragraphs” would be too vague to answer.
This ingenious solution goes back to a suggestion by Joachim Pense - in a comment -
SOLUTION 2 (NOT RECOMMENDED): ADDING THE DETAILS IN AN ANSWER AND LINKING TO THE ANSWER AS THE QUESTION SOURCE
Of course its awkward to have the photograph on a separate page. I expect those who answer questions like this will start putting copies of the photograph at the head of their answers, resulting in lots of answers with duplicate photos in them.
I did a new question of this type myself, it’s another type of question that just makes no sense at all without an image. You simply can’t ask the question without the image and the image is best put on Quora rather than some external site.
“Which Tank will Will Fill up First? (example with 12 tanks, A to L, see question source for image)
As you’ll see I duplicated the tank image in my answer to the question.
To help deal with that issue, you could add the image in an answer instead of a comment and link to the answer - it’s slightly abusing the question format. But you could phrase it as an answer as in “This is the photograph from the question. My answer is that it might be a possum, what do you think?”
I think though that they might complain if you have an answer as a question source, I don’t know, but that’s why I’ve said “not recommended”.
Alternatively, just do an answer to your own question with the image or details, to get it started. Even if you don’t know the answer, you can include the image and say you don’t know and that’s why you are asking the question. It will help get it off to a good start.
There are many other questions like that such as “How do I punctuate this paragraph” or “Where am I going wrong in this complex maths reasoning” or “should I buy this product - I’ve been told by friends that it has these flaws (bulleted list) - are they right?”
Indeed many scientific, technical and mathematical questions, questions on medicine, art, poetry, literature, architecture, music etc etc.
I think they should encourage question details of the right sort myself. To find a way to encourage details that are necessary to questions and discourage unnecessary details, though I’m not sure how that’s best achieved.
SOLUTION 3 QUORA BLOG POST
Another solution is to write a blog post. Everyone on quora can start new blogs. Have a question details blog post and put your details there and link to it as the question source. Then it can be as long as you like. It’s like an answer with formatting tools ready to hand (not easily accessible for comments except using copy and paste) but there’s no risk of quora having an issue with it by linking to an answer as a question source - though I don’t know if they will have problems with that as I haven’t tried.
You can combine that with a tentative answer that includes the image, but not linked to as the question source, for questions where that is appropriate.
SOLUTION 4 (NOT RECOMMENDED!) MISUSE OF THE ANSWER WIKI
I’ve also seen some questions where they misuse the answer wiki to embed an image or text so you can see it on the question page. Put the question details at the head of the answer wiki.
It seems likely to me that Quora won’t permit this once they get around to reviewing such questions. It’s a neat solution otherwise as it basically replicates the question details as they were before. Thought I should mention it for completeness.
WHATEVER WORK AROUND YOU DO, BEST DONE ON QUORA AS A COMMENT, (ANSWER?)OR BLOG POST
I think this solution of using a comment on the question as a question source is far far better than trying to create a copy of the question details off site and then linking to that.
RECOMMENDATION - MAKE USE OF EXTENDED 250 CHARACTER LIMIT FOR QUESTIONS
For instance for the possum question:
(rephrasing of the question suggested by Tim Bushell)
THIS NEW CHANGE MAKES QUORA VULNERABLE TO LINK ROT AND SPAMMING
I don’t understand the reason for implementing it in quite the way they did. It’s encouraging people who ask questions which need details to create the details off quora on some other platform, e.g. their private blog, or facebook or whatever and link to that as the question source.
The great thing about quora is the way it copies images into answers and questions if you link to an image off site. There’s such a problem of link rot on the web, why encourage people to post links to off wiki sites instead of just putting the image or text into the question details themselves?
It also seems likely to be abused too as you don’t normally have to click through to a link to a site off of quora. It’s very rare that I’ve had to do that to answer a question, even if it’s a youtube video then it is embedded in quora. You could end up on a site that asks you to pay to see the content, or spams you, or a site with pornography, or it could just be that it’s on a social site like facebook and you find you have to join to see the photograph.
After this change, any question that has details, even if it is just a photograph or a paragraph of text or a youtube video will require you to click on a link. The link could go anywhere (unless you look at it carefully to check it is a quora url or a youtube link) just to see what the details are.
It also could take the reader to another Q/A site that permits you to enter the details, like Yahoo Answers or stackexchange etc, so you end up on a different Q/A site and end up reading the answer there instead of on Quora so it could lead to Quora losing customers if that becomes prevalent - and how can they complain if someone does that?
IT’S DETRIMENTAL TO INTERESTING CAREFULLY THOUGHT OUT QUESTIONS
Also as someone who has written many answers - often the most interesting questions to answer are the ones that have details - the author of the question cared enough about their question to go into some more detail about what the question was - or it’s an interesting and complex question that needs details.
For instance a detailed question about some topic in science that is more in depth and doesn’t just ask the obvious newbie questions on the subject. Not just a question you could answer by typing your question into google, but a detailed question that you have to ask an expert in person.
This change favours the sort of question where a decent answer will often be “just search in google”, with less of the detailed questions that can only be asked on places like quora.
So - at any rate this fix to do the details as a comment, and then set the question source as a link to that comment does keep the details on quora and avoids issues of link rot. Why didn’t they do it like this automatically? Could they still, or is it too late?
It’s also a way to ask questions like this in future on Quora.
Your answer to How vulnerable are we to a catastrophic asteroid impact? Are there people whose job is to watch for them?
Added 3h ago
Your answer to Will the world end on September 23rd, 2017? I'm worried.
Added 18h ago
Added 21h ago
Your answer to Is answering a question with a question an answer?
Added Mon
Your answer to Which Tank will Fill up First (Look closely at details)? (see question source for image)
Added Mon
Your answer to Why were question details removed from Quora on August 3, 2017?
Added Sun
Your answer to How am I supposed to ask complex questions without question details?
Added Sun
Your answer to Are Buddhist attached to being unattached?
Added Sun
Your answer to Why can't you post pictures into your Quora questions anymore?
Added Sun
Your answer to Should Quora bring back question details? Why or why not?
Added Sat
Your answer to Do you think Quora removing the question details feature was a good idea?
Added Sat
Your answer to If a super volcano erupts in Yellowstone national park, where is the safest place to be?
Added Fri
Your answer to How would you explain all this talk about Nibiru, David Meade, the solar eclipse? The world is ending everywhere, now.
Added Fri
Added Jul 23
Your answer to Why is Russian news talking about Nibiru?
Added Jul 22
Your answer to Is 22/7 the nearest rational number approximation to π?
Added Jul 21
Your answer to What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don't seem like they would have?
Added Jul 18
Your answer to If you had to fall 2000 feet into a liquid what would you pick?
Added Jul 18
Your answer to Once the sun dies and the solar system goes dark, would Europa (if it had life) continue to provide a liquid ocean and a biosphere?
Added Jul 17
Added Jul 16
Your answer to Is Nibiru a real place that will hit Earth? I’m very scared, is the BBC lying?
Added Jul 16
Your answer to Can an 800 meter asteroid destroy life on earth?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to How can we make 2+2=5?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to How do mathematicians approach proving a theorem?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to If Buddhists don't, and never have, "evangelized" or "proselytized", how did/does Buddhism spread?
Added Jul 15
Your answer to Theoretically, what's the largest object by mass that could be orbiting the sun currently that hasn't been discovered?
Added Jul 14
Your answer to What would mathematicians do if someone proved that it is not possible to create a consistent system of axioms?
Added Jul 14
Your answer to Tibetan Buddhism: What's the difference between crazy wisdom and just plain crazy?
Added Jul 11
Your answer to Why has not His Holiness Dalai Lama become fluent in English yet?
Added Jul 9
Your answer to A meteorite will crash to earth in a year destroying the Western world. Do you think this information should be made public?
Added Jul 9
Your answer to Should I believe the Nibiru YouTubers?They seem pretty legit.
Added Jul 8
Your answer to How dark would a human see the moon?
Added Jul 7
Your answer to Would there be any wind inside an underground colony on the moon?
Added Jul 6
Added Jul 6
Your answer to I believe Nibiru is coming and no one else believes me. Does anybody agree?
Added Jul 6
Your answer to Will Nibiru end the world in October 2017?
Added Jul 4
Your answer to How do I tell my kids that Nibiru is going to kill us all in the next few months?
Added Jul 1
Your answer to Is Nibiru going to hit the Earth in 2017?
Added Jun 28
Your answer to Is Nibiru going to hit the Earth in 2017?
Added Jun 28
Your answer to When is planet X or Nibiru expected to pass by Earth?
Added Jun 28
Your answer to Will the heat shield of the Webb telescope reflect enough sunlight so that it appears as a star to earth based telescopes?
Added Jun 26
Your answer to How did the search for the reincarnated Dalai Lama from humble origins become instituted historically?
Added Jun 26
Your answer to How credible is the Daily Mail?
Added Jun 26
Your answer to Why can't one jump from everest with a parachute instead of walking down?
Added Jun 21
Your answer to How did a person jump without parachute from thousands of feet, landing on a trampoline without breaking his neck?
Added Jun 21
Your answer to What are the least amount of changes that would have to happen for Mars to be habitable like Earth?
Added Jun 21
Your answer to Why did Londoners elect a Muslim as their mayor? Was it to prove that they're not racist?
Added Jun 20
Your answer to Why do protons have a mass exactly 1837 times that of an electron?
Added Jun 20
Your answer to What happened to Gautama Buddha after he died?
Added Jun 19
Your answer to Which tree gives the most oxygen?
Added Jun 17
Your answer to How much oxygen does a tree produce?
Added Jun 17
Your answer to Do trees consume oxygen?
Added Jun 17
Your answer to Is it possible to build a mid-air city?
Added Jun 16
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Jun 16
Your answer to Is the Waterseer a scam ?
Added Jun 15
Your answer to Why are there so few enlightened people in the world? Is the success rate of Buddhism really that low?
Added Jun 13
Your answer to Why do dust storms happen on Mars?
Added Jun 13
Your answer to Since no one can "own" Outer Space because of the "Outer Space Treaty", what do we do about countries that don't acknowledge this?
Added Jun 12
Your answer to Why do the British accept to pay the high expenses of their monarchy?
Added Jun 11
Your answer to In what realistic scenario(s) would a Mars colony significantly increase the likelihood of the survival of the human species?
Added Jun 11
Your answer to What would have happened if the Fellowship went with Frodo to Mt. Doom?
Added Jun 10
Your answer to For a=b, does that mean b-a=a-b?
Added Jun 10
Your answer to What are the most notable software bugs in the software aboard the Mars Curiosity Rover?
Added Jun 9
Your answer to Why is no government helping with or is interested in the Skylon spaceplane? Is it overrated?
Added Jun 7
Your answer to If the purpose of a Buddhist is to stop reincarnating by achieving Nirvana, why does the Dalai Lama reincarnate?
Added Jun 7
Your answer to Are the rich building bunkers for Nibiru's arrival?
Added Jun 6
Added Jun 6
Your answer to Would someone please explain to me in plain terms what the Dalai Lama is?
Added Jun 5
Your answer to If all the ice in Antarctica melts, which countries in the world will be entirely covered in water?
Added Jun 4
Your answer to What do you think of Trump pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement?
Added Jun 3
Your answer to If we had scientists on Mars, how long would it take before we knew whether Mars ever had life?
Added Jun 3
Your answer to Is Mars habitable?
Added Jun 1
Your answer to What would a Buddhist say about the self being an emergent phenomenon?
Added Jun 1
Your answer to Why is the Earth’s moon not considered a planet?
Added May 29
Your answer to Why it is said that two perpendicular lines meet at infinity? How so?
Added May 29
Your answer to How do I know if I am a Buddha?
Added May 29
Your answer to If I wanted to live and practice as a Buddhist monk, as a westerner (more specifically Australia) how would I go about this?
Added May 28
Your answer to Why do buddhists talk N lifetimes for enlightenment when the only time anyone will get enlightenment is in this lifetime right now?
Added May 28
Your answer to How does one become a bodhisattva?
Added May 25
Your answer to Is it possible to survive if you lie along the rail tracks and a train passes over you?
Added May 23
Your answer to Why do some Buddhist teachers appear to lack compassion?
Added May 23
Your answer to Is there something that could ruin your karma (Buddhism, etc.) for life?
Added May 15
Your answer to How does the concept of rebirth (samsara, karma, etc.) differ between Buddhism and Hinduism?
Added May 15
Your answer to What is the difference between Buddhist and Christian compassion?
Added May 13
Your answer to Is Quora converting Wikipedians (Wikipedia Editors) to Quorans?
Added May 12
Your answer to How much bigger can the ISS get?
Added May 10
Your answer to Am I the only frustrated former Wikipedia editor? (The English Wikipedia is not as bad as the German one, though)
Added May 9
Your answer to For Buddhists, how does the concept of "attachment" apply to the closest people in your life?
Added May 9
Your answer to How many nukes would it take to completely and permanently irradiate a planet the size of Earth?
Added May 8
Your answer to Are pictures on Windows desktop background authentic?
Added May 8
Your answer to Is it true that some Buddhist monks can die while sitting in meditation? How do they know they are about to die?
Added May 7
Your answer to Why does it take 2 days for a spacecraft to dock the International Space Station?
Added May 7
Added May 5
Your answer to What and where did this dark energy come from?
Added May 5
Your answer to Did Buddha teach how to be Happy?
Added May 4
Your answer to How does one get born in other planes in Buddhism?
Added Apr 19
Your answer to How much vegetation do you need to provide oxygen for six astronauts on the ISS?
Added Apr 17
Your answer to What would the radius of a centrifugal space station need to be to avoid getting sick or going crazy from the endless spinning?
Added Apr 16
Added Apr 16
Your answer to Why not simply create a ship with artificial gravity for the journey to Mars?
Added Apr 16
Added Apr 12
Your answer to Can Mars support human life?
Added Apr 10
Your answer to What does the UK have that does not exist in the US?
Added Apr 8
Your answer to In which of the 6 realms do Buddhist deities such as Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri & Vajrapani reside?
Added Apr 8
Your answer to What are your thoughts on Planet Nibiru/X sightings?
Added Apr 5
Your answer to Was Buddha literate?
Added Apr 4
Your answer to How is the Buddhist idea of dependent origination related to cause and effect?
Added Apr 3
Your answer to Is Nibiru going to hit the Earth in 2017?
Added Apr 1
Your answer to Is there anything of economic value on Mars that would allow trade to finance a colony on Mars?
Added Apr 1
Your answer to If one million people prepaid the $200,000 Elon Musk estimates it will cost to go to Mars, could we do it within a decade?
Added Apr 1
Your answer to What will the next ISS be like?
Added Mar 31
Your answer to Are Russian space crafts death traps?
Added Mar 29
Your answer to Do we know anything more about the "word of command" that Gandalf refers to in Moria?
Added Mar 28
Your answer to Is it true that when we colonize Mars, our chances of going extinct drop to nearly 0%?
Added Mar 27
Your answer to Was there any procedure set up for the Apollo mission astronauts in case they found alien life on the moon? And if so, what was it?
Added Mar 26
Your answer to What is the Buddhism afterlife like?
Added Mar 24
Your answer to Can a Buddhist change and become a Christian?
Added Mar 24
Added Mar 23
Your answer to Can Magnetar Starquakes really end the world by stripping it's atmosphere?
Added Mar 20
Your answer to Did Obama warn about the coming of Nibiru?
Added Mar 19
Your answer to What was the mission for Laika the space dog?
Added Mar 18
Your answer to Does the government and the worlds elite believe in Nibiru's existence and have they built fallout shelters?
Added Mar 17
Your answer to Will Nibiru end the world in October 2017?
Added Mar 17
Your answer to Do you follow the Buddha's prohibition on alcohol?
Added Mar 17
Your answer to Why did it take NASA decades to land on Mars after landing on the Moon?
Added Mar 16
Your answer to If distance was not an issue, would it be easier to build a colony on Mars or on the moon and why?
Added Mar 16
Your answer to In your opinion, do you think Pluto is still a planet?
Added Mar 16
Your answer to Why do people still think Islam is peaceful?
Added Mar 13
Your answer to Why decommission the ISS in 2024 when it could have so much more potential usage (just like the space shuttles)?
Added Mar 12
Your answer to What are Dalai Lama’s views about Islam?
Added Mar 12
Your answer to Should we inseminate our solar system with life?
Added Mar 11
Your answer to Why does listening to a metronome drive me crazy?
Added Mar 10
Your answer to Is the author David Meade correct about the arrival of Nibiru in October 2017?
Added Mar 7
Your answer to What kind of formal education does the Dalai Lama have?
Added Mar 7
Your answer to If a distant star is red, does it mean it's really far away?
Added Mar 7
Added Mar 5
Your answer to Was life discovered in a meterorite from Mars?
Added Mar 5
Your answer to Does SpaceX have the capability to send people around the moon?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Did Quora deactivate realtime notifications for comments due to scaling challenges?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to What's the status of the missing comment notifications bug?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Why am I no longer getting topic or comment notifications?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Why does Quora not show comments in my notifications?
Added Mar 4
Your answer to Who will lead the Tibetan Buddhists when His Holiness the Dalai Lama dies?
Added Mar 3
Your answer to It's impossible to percept or imagine that nothing happens after death, are you sure that's what happens?
Added Mar 2
Your answer to Who is the Dalai Lama?
Added Mar 1
Your answer to What are your opinions on the SpaceX ‘tourist flight around-the-Moon’ in 2018?
Added Feb 28
Your answer to Are there any slight differences between the G-flat major and the F-sharp major?
Added Feb 28
Your answer to Is there an area in our solar system that we haven't yet seen or can't see?
Added Feb 24
Added Jan 31
Your answer to Is NASA covering up Nibiru's existence?
Added Jan 29
Your answer to What are the chances that an asteroid less then ten kilometers can hit earth in this century?
Added Jan 29
Your answer to If a super big magnetic meteorite fly near earth, will it be possible to attract the earth away from its original route around the sun?
Added Jan 28
Your answer to Do Buddhists believe that we come back as grass and trees as well as animals and insects?
Added Jan 27
Your answer to Are there any scientifically inaccurate parts in the Martian?
Added Jan 23
Your answer to If there is no ‘self' in Buddhism, how is there a belief in reincarnation?
Added Jan 21
Your answer to Would it be possible to put a colony on the moon, or would the gravity be too weak?
Added Jan 21
Your answer to Is there a limit to mountain height on earth?
Added Jan 21
Your answer to Why do people believe Nibiru (Planet X) exists?
Added Jan 20
Added Jan 20
Your answer to What is the possibility of Earth being affected by a Gamma Ray Burst?
Added Jan 19
Your answer to Is 2017 the return of the ancient ones from Nibiru?
Added Jan 19
Your answer to How do we know Nibiru isn't real?
Added Jan 19
Your answer to Why didn't Apollo land on earth like the moon?
Added Jan 17
Your answer to Is it safe to touch Mars? Just imagine that a sample of Mars’ soil has been taken back to Earth. Would it be safe to touch it?
Added Jan 17
Added Jan 15
Your answer to Can Mars be claimed by a person or group?
Added Jan 15
Your answer to Are there solar systems without a Galaxy?
Added Jan 14
Your answer to Are there any organizing units between a solar system and a Galaxy?
Added Jan 14
Your answer to Why are Buddhists certain that other people suffer, even if they are not feeling like it?
Added Jan 12
Your answer to If a pure water planet could develop would its core be solid?
Added Jan 11
Your answer to Does ice evaporate in a vacuum?
Added Jan 11
Your answer to What are the chances of an asteroid or comet hitting the U.S. in the next 50 years?
Added Jan 11
Added Jan 11
Your answer to What would happen if galaxies were bright enough to be seen in our earthly sky?
Added Jan 10
Your answer to Is there a Tibetan Buddhist practice that doesn't involve deity visualization?
Added Jan 10
Your answer to Are there any videos or simulations of how orbits in our solar system actually work?
Added Jan 8
Your answer to In Buddhism, why would an enlightened person defend themself, if their "self" doesn't really exist?
Added Jan 7
Added Jan 6
Your answer to How do Top Writers on Quora write such detailed answers to several questions in the span of an hour?
Added Jan 4
Your answer to What are the Nostradamus Predictions for the 2017?
Added Jan 4
Your answer to Can I be both Christian and Buddhist?
Added Jan 1
Your answer to Is Buddhism true?
Added Jan 1
Your answer to Are there any specific organisms that could conceivably survive on Mars in its current state?
Added Dec 29, 2016
Your answer to Is the Dalai Lama a god king?
Added Dec 29, 2016
Your answer to A company wants to buy my site for $1.6 million dollars. I'm currently making $8k to $11k per month with it. Should I take the deal?
Added Dec 28, 2016
Your answer to When will the next ice age happen?
Added Dec 25, 2016
Added Dec 23, 2016
Your answer to Would it be prudent to migrate away from west coast in advance of Nibiru?
Added Dec 18, 2016
Your answer to Will a Magnetar Shockwave hit earth in 9-10 days?
Added Dec 18, 2016
Your answer to What is the fastest moving known celestial body?
Added Dec 15, 2016
Your answer to If we started to harvest all helium-3 from the moon for all energy requirements of the earth, how long it would last?
Added Dec 14, 2016
Added Dec 14, 2016
Added Dec 13, 2016
Your answer to Is Nibiru and planet 9 the same thing?
Added Dec 13, 2016
Your answer to I can't see any comments on youtube videos, what can I do to see them again?
Added Dec 13, 2016
Your answer to What is a parallel universe?
Added Dec 10, 2016
Your answer to Could Donald Trump be the Antichrist?
Added Dec 10, 2016
Your answer to Is there any evidence, as Donald Trump suggests, that "windmills are devastating to the bird population"?
Added Dec 9, 2016
Your answer to What is dark matter?
Added Dec 8, 2016
Your answer to What if the super-large exoplanet is 0.01 ly form our planet?
Added Dec 8, 2016
Your answer to Where can I download the Silmarillion?
Added Dec 7, 2016
Your answer to Where is Nibiru right now?
Added Dec 5, 2016
Your answer to Is Nibiru a YouTube phenomenon or is it real? How could they keep it secret with all those astronomers out there?
Added Dec 5, 2016
Your answer to How are major content disputes adjudicated and resolved in Wikipedia?
Added Dec 5, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible to develop harmonic progressions in a 17-note scale?
Added Dec 4, 2016
Your answer to Why does NASA avoid contamination of other worlds?
Added Dec 4, 2016
Your answer to How can I abandon atheism?
Added Dec 3, 2016
Your answer to What will happen during the Galactic Alignment?
Added Dec 3, 2016
Your answer to How far away is Nibiru/Planet X now?
Added Dec 2, 2016
Your answer to Is there a space treaty to buy and own other planets?
Added Nov 29, 2016
Your answer to How would we communicate with a probe that we send to Alpha Centauri?
Added Nov 27, 2016
Your answer to What is the maximum range for which we can maintain contact with a space probe?
Added Nov 27, 2016
Your answer to How frequent does the Mars' surface gets bombarded by asteroids, comets or meteoroids? How severe are these impacts?
Added Nov 27, 2016
Your answer to Could a pandemic wipe out humanity?
Added Nov 24, 2016
Your answer to Is there any plausible reason for aliens to wipe out or enslave humanity?
Added Nov 24, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for Earth to have 2 binary moons orbiting each other?
Added Nov 23, 2016
Your answer to Would it be a very big failure for USA if Russia managed to make a manned mission to Mars and colonize mars?
Added Nov 21, 2016
Your answer to Why is it dangerous to contaminate other planets with human bacteria?
Added Nov 21, 2016
Your answer to Should Quora remove links to fake news websites in questions?
Added Nov 20, 2016
Your answer to Who would you like to see play The Doctor in 2018? And maybe companions too?
Added Nov 20, 2016
Your answer to I agree we should colonize Mars. But what are the reasons to not colonize Mars other than the costs?
Added Nov 20, 2016
Your answer to What is the theoretical furthest outer orbit a planet could have around the sun? Does the answer depends on its size and mass?
Added Nov 15, 2016
Your answer to Will it be necessary for safety reasons (such as deadly martian viruses) to ban the return to Earth of persons who travelled to Mars?
Added Nov 14, 2016
Your answer to In what phase was the moon during the Apollo landing?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Your answer to Since there is no mechanism in the USA to stop President Trump from launching a nuke, what is the chance of it happening?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Your answer to If an astronaut accidentally became untethered from the ISS during a spacewalk, could the ISS be maneuvered to rescue him/her?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Your answer to How does reincarnation happen with a growing population?
Added Nov 13, 2016
Added Nov 12, 2016
Your answer to Do Chinese people consider Dalai Lama a traitor?
Added Nov 12, 2016
Your answer to What are the most frustrating aspects of being a Wikipedia editor?
Added Nov 12, 2016
Your answer to How certain are we about the existence of Planet Nine?
Added Nov 11, 2016
Your answer to What do Buddhists think of the afterlife?
Added Nov 11, 2016
Added Nov 9, 2016
Your answer to Does the International Space Station ever get dirty on the outside?
Added Nov 8, 2016
Added Nov 7, 2016
Your answer to What are the Four Noble Truths?
Added Nov 6, 2016
Your answer to What research is being done on the potential pandemic of Morgellons?
Added Nov 4, 2016
Your answer to Is Wikipedia biased?
Added Nov 4, 2016
Your answer to Are Morgellons and chemtrails connected?
Added Nov 3, 2016
Your answer to How do I get infected with Morgellons disease?
Added Nov 3, 2016
Your answer to Can a sheep live without a shepherd?
Added Nov 3, 2016
Your answer to Do water planets exist?
Added Oct 31, 2016
Your answer to Could the Interplanetary Transportation System proposed by Musk be potentially weaponised by governments and/or competing companies?
Added Oct 31, 2016
Your answer to If and when humanity colonizes the solar system which planets and moons will be viable targets?
Added Oct 30, 2016
Your answer to What are some challenges associated with interplanetary travel?
Added Oct 30, 2016
Your answer to An AI that has been correct at predicting the last 3 elections has predicted Trump to win. Thoughts?
Added Oct 29, 2016
Your answer to Is humanity’s venture to Mars the modern version of people moving to the new world?
Added Oct 28, 2016
Added Oct 28, 2016
Your answer to What photos look Photoshopped but are actually real?
Added Oct 27, 2016
Your answer to What area on Mars is the most interesting for us?
Added Oct 26, 2016
Your answer to What is the largest size meteorite that could hit the earth without us detecting it before impact? How much damage would it do?
Added Oct 26, 2016
Your answer to Is the world gonna end on October 31 2016?
Added Oct 25, 2016
Your answer to Did the landing sequence of the Mars lander Schiaparelli really have to be so complex?
Added Oct 24, 2016
Your answer to Does the President of the United States have the authority to launch a nuclear attack without proper justification?
Added Oct 24, 2016
Your answer to Can Halley's comet strike a planet in the solar system?
Added Oct 21, 2016
Added Oct 21, 2016
Your answer to Why couldn't the Mars landers be equipped with a video camera, so that people could see moving images of the planet's surface?
Added Oct 20, 2016
Your answer to Does the new batch of WikiLeaks really show evidence for Nibiru?
Added Oct 20, 2016
Your answer to When will Nibiru hit Earth?
Added Oct 20, 2016
Added Oct 20, 2016
Added Oct 19, 2016
Your answer to Why do people want to colonize planets when space colonies would be the better choice for an expanding, technological civilization?
Added Oct 19, 2016
Your answer to Is asteroid 2009ES approaching to Earth?
Added Oct 18, 2016
Your answer to Why do some people still believe in Nibiru?
Added Oct 17, 2016
Your answer to Could I pay my way into outer space?
Added Oct 17, 2016
Your answer to Why don't the British have a space programme?
Added Oct 16, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that they found liquid water on Mars? And what does this mean for us?
Added Oct 15, 2016
Added Oct 15, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for another planet to collide with another?
Added Oct 15, 2016
Your answer to What is the real image of Earth seen from space including space junk?
Added Oct 14, 2016
Your answer to Are the YouTube results personalized, when a keyword is searched for?
Added Oct 14, 2016
Your answer to Will it be viable one day to mine the Moon and extract the resources there for something useful?
Added Oct 13, 2016
Your answer to Why don't we send humans to the moon instead of to Mars?
Added Oct 12, 2016
Your answer to What will happen after we die? What about our thoughts?
Added Oct 11, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if a large asteroid ten times the size of the earth missed it by a few kilometers?
Added Oct 8, 2016
Your answer to Will Mars colony always need a special suit or did Elon plan to inject oxygen in the air?
Added Oct 7, 2016
Your answer to Is there a future opportunity to become rich from the colonization of Mars?
Added Oct 2, 2016
Your answer to What would be the ethical implications of letting a private company colonize Mars?
Added Oct 1, 2016
Your answer to How can Mars be "warmed up" as Elon Musk implied during his September 2016 presentation?
Added Oct 1, 2016
Your answer to Shouldn't Musk try colonizing Venus instead of Mars?
Added Oct 1, 2016
Your answer to Shouldn't we focus on colonizing Antarctica and the Sahara before colonizing Mars?
Added Sep 30, 2016
Your answer to Is there any form of Earth life that could currently live on Mars?
Added Sep 30, 2016
Your answer to What are your views about interplanetary travel plans of Elon Musk?
Added Sep 28, 2016
Your answer to Are the Dry Valleys of Antarctica similar to surface of Mars?
Added Sep 25, 2016
Your answer to Is Corbyn right about the Bomb?
Added Sep 24, 2016
Your answer to What surprising activity has NASA found in Jupiter's moon Europa?
Added Sep 23, 2016
Added Sep 22, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that Mars experienced retrograde motion? How does it happen, and what are the changes that happened in the planet?
Added Sep 18, 2016
Your answer to Why do we not deploy airships to explore other planets?
Added Sep 17, 2016
Your answer to Could colonizing Mars be a lucrative or potentially profitable venture?
Added Sep 17, 2016
Added Sep 15, 2016
Your answer to How did meteorites from Mars escape its orbit and reach the Earth, for instance, ALH84001, in Antarctica?
Added Sep 15, 2016
Your answer to Would a tidally-locked planet be merely a planet of two extremes or would there be temperate zones where life might be sustained?
Added Sep 12, 2016
Your answer to Why haven't we found any broken planets?
Added Sep 12, 2016
Your answer to What's the hardest bug you've debugged?
Added Sep 11, 2016
Your answer to Is there a minor inconsistency in the 11th chapter of The Hobbit?
Added Sep 11, 2016
Your answer to Could Hubble take a picture of voyager 1?
Added Sep 11, 2016
Added Sep 11, 2016
Your answer to Were there two Buddhas?
Added Sep 10, 2016
Your answer to Which Buddhist sutras are what the Buddha said?
Added Sep 10, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible that a planet is entirely made of liquid much like Saturn and Jupiter are made entirely of gas?
Added Sep 10, 2016
Added Sep 9, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if a 15 km diameter comet hit the outback of Australia?
Added Sep 8, 2016
Added Sep 8, 2016
Your answer to I've heard many people claim the moon landing was a hoax, what are the odds they are true?
Added Sep 8, 2016
Added Sep 8, 2016
Your answer to What procedures were in place, if the Apollo 11 astronauts had beencontaminated with a living organism from their stay on the moon?
Added Sep 8, 2016
Your answer to What kind of computers were used in Apollo 11 Mission (of 1969) that resulted in the moon-landing?
Added Sep 7, 2016
Added Sep 7, 2016
Your answer to Is it a good idea to introduce Chroococcidiopsis to Mars?
Added Sep 7, 2016
Added Sep 6, 2016
Your answer to If a 9km asteroid were approaching earth right now, at what point will it be visible during daytime? How many days away from impact?
Added Aug 31, 2016
Your answer to What are some interesting facts about Usain Bolt?
Added Aug 30, 2016
Your answer to How close are we to launching supplies to ISS with a rail gun?
Added Aug 30, 2016
Your answer to A new planet orbiting Proxima Centauri could be habitable. Should we be going there instead of Mars?
Added Aug 29, 2016
Added Aug 28, 2016
Added Aug 27, 2016
Your answer to Will the use of nuclear weapons at the poles of mars make it inhabitable? Aren't there any risks to the earth if we do so?
Added Aug 26, 2016
Your answer to Has humanity reached the Moon and Mars thanks to the bombing of London by the Nazi Germany?
Added Aug 11, 2016
Your answer to What are some things non-programmers say that frustrate programmers?
Added Aug 10, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible to use an ICBM missile to send man to the moon?
Added Aug 7, 2016
Your answer to How expensive would it be to convert all of the US's ICBMs into Space Rocket Transportation to places like the Moon or even Mars?
Added Aug 7, 2016
Your answer to When does curiosity come back from mars and how will this help us?
Added Aug 6, 2016
Your answer to What will really happen when the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts?
Added Aug 6, 2016
Your answer to Who is scarier to be elected as president, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?
Added Aug 3, 2016
Your answer to Why is "Nibiru" still being forced on some of us?
Added Aug 3, 2016
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to Is Nibiru a face-palm to astronomy?
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to Planet X will hit 2015?
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to Will a 490 metre wide asteroid end all life on Earth if it hits?
Added Aug 2, 2016
Your answer to How can Curiosity survive the strong Martian wind storms and how doesn't it get damaged as Martian dust is very erosive?
Added Aug 1, 2016
Your answer to Why didn't Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings pick up the Ring after Bilbo dropped it in the Shire?
Added Aug 1, 2016
Your answer to Does Tom Bombadil predate the Istari?
Added Jul 31, 2016
Your answer to Thermodynamics: For a given pressure and temperature, how fast does water-based ice sublimate?
Added Jul 31, 2016
Your answer to Are continuous earthquakes a sign of the world's end?
Added Jul 30, 2016
Your answer to Will the world really end on July 29, 2016?
Added Jul 29, 2016
Added Jul 27, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if earth poles shifted drastically?
Added Jul 25, 2016
Your answer to What if planet X and Nemesis are the same thing?
Added Jul 25, 2016
Your answer to What would it take to effectively alter a meteor's path using electromagnetism?
Added Jul 24, 2016
Your answer to Would we be in a stable orbit if Nibiru were just behind the Sun?
Added Jul 24, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if a very small moon or mars colony declares independence?
Added Jul 22, 2016
Your answer to How much does a spacesuit cost?
Added Jul 22, 2016
Your answer to What do you think about Melania Trump's speech at the RNC and the plagiarism accusations?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if there were no police?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to Will global warming prevent the next Ice Age?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to When can we expect the next ice age?
Added Jul 21, 2016
Your answer to How does the average lobster die? What is the average lobster? What are its characteristics?
Added Jul 20, 2016
Your answer to Do moons have moons?
Added Jul 20, 2016
Your answer to Why do composers use double sharps or double flats?
Added Jul 17, 2016
Your answer to Which people have been most influential in developing longitude and latitude theories?
Added Jul 17, 2016
Added Jul 16, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that scientists have found a new dwarf planet?
Added Jul 15, 2016
Your answer to To be totally unconventional, should a piano with keys of E# and B# be produced? Would it be more versatile and more interesting?
Added Jul 15, 2016
Added Jul 14, 2016
Your answer to Where did the pan come from for Sam Gamgee to cook the rabbit in LOTR "The Two Towers"?
Added Jul 13, 2016
Your answer to How many amateur astronomers are there in the world?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to How many G's would Juno experience while passing so closely near Jupiter?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to What is this bright object next to the sun?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to Is planet 9 real?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to What usually happens to some Buddhist children who don't fully realize the implications of the life they have committed to?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to Are humans destined to colonize the universe?
Added Jul 12, 2016
Your answer to How are astronauts protected from radiation during space walks?
Added Jul 10, 2016
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Jul 9, 2016
Your answer to What are some of the most widely circulated fake pictures?
Added Jul 9, 2016
Your answer to Will humans become extinct before we can colonize other planets?
Added Jul 8, 2016
Your answer to Since the moon has no atmosphere, and thus drag would not be present, could something orbit the moon indefinitely?
Added Jul 8, 2016
Your answer to Would it be possible to create a seamless stop-motion video of the Curiosity's journey on Mars with all the available photos?
Added Jul 8, 2016
Your answer to Why doesn't NASA send a rover to Europa?
Added Jul 7, 2016
Added Jul 7, 2016
Your answer to What would the cost be to build a Stanford torus in earth orbit?
Added Jul 6, 2016
Your answer to What is the Muslim - Arab influence on Science and Western civilization?
Added Jul 6, 2016
Your answer to If China and Russia build bases on the Moon, will the U.S. do the same?
Added Jul 6, 2016
Your answer to If a manned moon landing was attempted today, how would it differ from previous missions?
Added Jul 5, 2016
Your answer to How does the Junocam on JUNO work?
Added Jul 5, 2016
Your answer to What are the LOTR books about?
Added Jul 4, 2016
Your answer to How can scientists be sure that asteroid 2016 HO3 won't ever hit the Earth?
Added Jul 4, 2016
Your answer to What are some of the obstacles we will face when we colonize the moon?
Added Jul 4, 2016
Your answer to Imagine that SpaceX has established a small habitable base on Mars. What are some ways to make the base profitable?
Added Jul 3, 2016
Your answer to I've heard that early Venus could have supported life. Is it possible that a civilization could have arose there billions of years ago?
Added Jul 3, 2016
Your answer to Would Lava Tubes be a feasible location for a future moon base?
Added Jul 2, 2016
Your answer to Can anyone give more details about the discovery of new moon that is revolving the earth?
Added Jul 2, 2016
Your answer to When will humans build base stations and moon bases?
Added Jul 1, 2016
Your answer to If we terraformed Mars via polar asteroid collision, how would the climate be affected by the new ocean and nitrogen?
Added Jun 30, 2016
Your answer to Do we have the moral right to Terra-Form Mars if we find life existing there already, even single-celled?
Added Jun 29, 2016
Added Jun 29, 2016
Your answer to What are you banned from? Why?
Added Jun 28, 2016
Your answer to Are we headed towards a new ice-age?
Added Jun 27, 2016
Your answer to Is Brexit not a right decision? How can everyone claim it’s bad if Britain's democracy voted for it?
Added Jun 27, 2016
Your answer to What building or structure would remain after a thousand years? What should an architect design to be sure it will last a millennium?
Added Jun 25, 2016
Your answer to Why is the Dalai Lama seen as evil in China?
Added Jun 24, 2016
Your answer to What will happen if the Earth's magnetic poles reverse? Will we have a catastrophe on our hands?
Added Jun 22, 2016
Your answer to Have the people of Tibet been generally successful in choosing their Dalai Lama?
Added Jun 21, 2016
Your answer to What are the best Mars analogue sites on Earth?
Added Jun 21, 2016
Your answer to Why are we attempting to colonize Mars before the moon?
Added Jun 21, 2016
Your answer to If there is a possibility of life on Europa, then why did NASA land a craft on Titan and not Europa?
Added Jun 20, 2016
Your answer to How did the universe come into existence according to Buddhism?
Added Jun 19, 2016
Your answer to Why didn't Sauron see Bilbo at his birthday party or see Samwise at Cirith Ungol?
Added Jun 19, 2016
Your answer to In your opinion, what is the best way to end the "moon landing was fake" debate?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to How does a Bhikkhu (Buddhist Monk) handle house bugs?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to What are some generally unknown facts about the Apollo Moon landings?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to Did NASA fake the moon landing? If so, how can you tell using the images?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Your answer to How big would an asteroid or comet have to be to end life on Earth?
Added Jun 18, 2016
Added Jun 17, 2016
Your answer to Am I enlightened?
Added Jun 17, 2016
Your answer to When we colonize the Moon, will we be able to see our buildings from earth?
Added Jun 16, 2016
Your answer to Can I be a Zen monk or at least study it under a Master and still get to marry, have kids, have a job and not leave the urban life?
Added Jun 15, 2016
Your answer to Is the Dalai Lama justified in withholding his duty to reincarnate?
Added Jun 11, 2016
Your answer to Did Buddha intend Buddhism?
Added Jun 7, 2016
Added Jun 6, 2016
Your answer to Are there any other fractions "like" x/7?
Added Jun 4, 2016
Your answer to Can a Buddhist give me their perspective on Buddhism?
Added Jun 4, 2016
Your answer to What do we know about the subsurface ocean of Europa?
Added Jun 2, 2016
Your answer to Which is the "Bible" of Buddhism?
Added Jun 1, 2016
Your answer to What is the purpose of the guru in Tibetan Buddhism?
Added Jun 1, 2016
Your answer to Is there proof that Buddha existed? If so, what is the strongest proof about his historical existence that we have?
Added May 31, 2016
Your answer to Does my dog know he is a dog?
Added May 28, 2016
Your answer to Did astronauts in the Apollo space program observe an alien spacecraft?
Added May 28, 2016
Added May 28, 2016
Added May 26, 2016
Your answer to Wouldn`t it be better for mankind to explore the Moon, rather than go to Mars?
Added May 20, 2016
Your answer to Is ordaining as a Tibetan Buddhist monk a lifetime commitment?
Added May 17, 2016
Your answer to What is Punya, and how does it feel?
Added May 17, 2016
Your answer to What are the primary tenets of Buddhism?
Added May 14, 2016
Your answer to How heavy of a gas could form an atmosphere on the moon?
Added May 14, 2016
Your answer to Will the James Webb Space Telescope be any more useful in the hunt for Planet Nine?
Added May 13, 2016
Added May 10, 2016
Your answer to Would a Hale-Bopp collision terraform Mars?
Added May 10, 2016
Added May 9, 2016
Your answer to Are there any planets that aren't spherical?
Added May 9, 2016
Your answer to Is going to Mars the right choice?
Added May 8, 2016
Your answer to How can I rapidly reduce my bad karma?
Added May 8, 2016
Your answer to How far are we from being able to use Mars as a pit stop on our way to other planets?
Added May 7, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for a planet to be ejected from a solar system and later captured by another solar system? If so, how?
Added May 6, 2016
Your answer to What is the likelihood that SpaceX will obtain its goal for colonizing Mars being that Elon's track record is pretty solid?
Added May 5, 2016
Your answer to Have there been any materials or phenomena encountered in space that were not already discovered or known about on or from Earth?
Added May 4, 2016
Added May 3, 2016
Your answer to Why does Buddhism automatically assume that life is full of suffering for "everyone"?
Added May 2, 2016
Your answer to Why does Buddhism posit existence of other realms and supernatural beings if there is no obvious evidence of such?
Added May 2, 2016
Your answer to Besides Mars, where else in the Solar System should rovers be sent? Where else could we currently reach?
Added May 1, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible that a government could be hiding evidence of extraterrestrial beings/activities?
Added Apr 29, 2016
Your answer to Why did both Gautama Buddha and Vardhamana Mahavira aim to escape from the cycle of birth and rebirth?
Added Apr 29, 2016
Your answer to Why do Buddhists perceive the cycle of rebirth to be a cycle of suffering and why do they wish to liberate themselves from this cycle?
Added Apr 18, 2016
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Is possible to modify the International Space Station (ISS) and use it as a vehicle to travel to the moon?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to How likely is it that ExoMars will discover life on Mars?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to What is it like to practice Vajrayana Buddhism?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Could we have established a colony on the moon by now if NASA had continued its lunar program?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Are there Buddhists who don't believe in reincarnation?
Added Apr 15, 2016
Your answer to Are partly or completely autonomous Mars rovers possible? How advanced could rovers become?
Added Apr 14, 2016
Your answer to Is Mars's gravity healthy for humans?
Added Apr 14, 2016
Your answer to Was Dalai Lama enlightened? Why or why not?
Added Apr 13, 2016
Your answer to If buddhists don't believe in the idea of a "soul", why do they say the Dalai Lama is reincarnated from a specific person?
Added Apr 13, 2016
Your answer to What is the subject matter of mathematics from Buddhist point of view?
Added Apr 11, 2016
Your answer to Should we land on the Moon or go straight to Mars?
Added Apr 9, 2016
Your answer to Do you ever feel guilty for hanging up on a telemarketer?
Added Apr 8, 2016
Your answer to Does human body contain radioactive elements? How do they affect our body?
Added Apr 7, 2016
Your answer to If we get to colonize Mars, as planned by Elon Musk, would the sunlight available on Mars be adequate like it is on Earth?
Added Apr 7, 2016
Your answer to What are the problems behind Terraforming Mars?
Added Apr 4, 2016
Added Apr 3, 2016
Your answer to What are the chances the earth will be hit by another asteroid that will wipe out all life on earth in the next 1000 years?
Added Apr 3, 2016
Your answer to How far is NASA from sending a robot to explore the ocean of Europa?
Added Apr 3, 2016
Your answer to What is the last 4 digit of 333^444+444^333?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to Why is using a metronome while studying an instrument helpful?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to How long till we have a fully self supporting colony on Mars?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to Would you rather be in space or earth now, if you get to choose?
Added Apr 2, 2016
Your answer to Do the four noble truths of Buddhism constitute an empirical method that is falsifiable?
Added Apr 1, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible that civilizations existed in planets before the birth of our sun itself?
Added Apr 1, 2016
Your answer to Could a domed city be built on the Moon or Mars?
Added Mar 31, 2016
Added Mar 31, 2016
Your answer to Could a large nuclear weapon detonated on Mars melt enough CO2 to cause a global warming cycle?
Added Mar 31, 2016
Your answer to How does Mars have more solar radiation than Earth when Earth is closer to the sun?
Added Mar 29, 2016
Your answer to If human civilization is wiped out sometime before 2025, what would the most likely cause be?
Added Mar 27, 2016
Your answer to How much computing power does Google's Alpha Go use?
Added Mar 26, 2016
Your answer to Of the things humans can currently do better than computers, which seem most likely to still be this way in 20 years?
Added Mar 25, 2016
Added Mar 23, 2016
Your answer to If ants or roaches lived on Mars could we detect them with the equipment we have one the planet?
Added Mar 20, 2016
Your answer to Have humans reached the technological point where they can start a colony on Mars?
Added Mar 19, 2016
Your answer to If there were another planet exactly like Earth but with no life and we were to add bacteria to the surface, what would happen?
Added Mar 19, 2016
Your answer to What is better: ALAP (as late as possible) or ASAP approach to send astronauts to the Moon or Mars?
Added Mar 5, 2016
Your answer to How do seasons on Mars compare and contrast with seasons on Earth?
Added Mar 3, 2016
Your answer to So an asteroid is aiming toward Earth, it has a 15000km to 1000000km margin for error?
Added Mar 3, 2016
Your answer to Has NASA ever recorded sound on the surface of Mars?
Added Mar 2, 2016
Your answer to How does "memory transfer" happen in rebirth according to Buddhism?
Added Mar 2, 2016
Your answer to Buckminster Fuller (architect): Why hasn't anybody built a cloud nine (tensegrity sphere)?
Added Mar 1, 2016
Your answer to How can humans survive the Van Allen radiation belts?
Added Mar 1, 2016
Added Feb 29, 2016
Your answer to What are reasons (not including his appearance or wealth) why people think Donald Trump would be a bad president?
Added Feb 29, 2016
Your answer to What should I do if the pilot passes out and I (with no flight training) have to land the plane?
Added Feb 29, 2016
Added Feb 29, 2016
Added Feb 28, 2016
Your answer to What can NASA realistically do to stop an asteroid from hitting the Earth?
Added Feb 28, 2016
Your answer to If Bernie Sanders is 74, why would anyone realistically vote for him?
Added Feb 27, 2016
Your answer to What do AI researchers think about the Wait But Why article on AI?
Added Feb 27, 2016
Your answer to Why didn't Tolkien give the One Ring more offensive powers?
Added Feb 26, 2016
Your answer to What does the Dalai Lama mean when he says that man never really lives because he pursues money?
Added Feb 25, 2016
Your answer to Why do so many people from Europe want Bernie Sanders to be the president of the United States?
Added Feb 25, 2016
Your answer to Why shouldn't we colonize other planets?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Does Buddhism allow fun?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to What is considered unethical about taking earth based life to other planets?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Why haven't we sent a robotic rock/soil sample return mission to Mars yet?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible, in the near future, that NASA will be able to send missions to Alpha Centauri?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Why doesn't Quora oblige or encourage users to provide sources/references for their answers?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Can two people repopulate Earth? Is it possible?
Added Feb 23, 2016
Your answer to Why do we send astronauts if we can control droids with VR?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to What constraints to AI and machine learning algorithms are needed to prevent AI from becoming a dystopian threat to humanity?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to What are the launch windows for different planets?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to What planets/moons can you see humans setting foot on by 2100?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that a neutron star will hit the Earth in 75 years from now?
Added Feb 22, 2016
Your answer to Can you suggest a second Earth aside from Mars, considering climate, resources, and distance from Earth?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to Would Elon Musk have the right to sell property on Mars if he is the first to establish a permanent colony?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to I saw a Buddhist nun window shopping in a mall. Is it deplorable of me to judge her for it?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to Would SpaceX need permission to send people to Mars?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Added Feb 21, 2016
Your answer to If Mars was warmed up, would it release enough CO2 to allow people to walk around with only an oxygen mask?
Added Feb 21, 2016
Added Feb 20, 2016
Your answer to With our current technology, how long could we make a space probe like Voyager last before it would shut down/lose contact with us?
Added Feb 19, 2016
Your answer to How does hell work in dominant religions, such as Islam, Buddhism, Christian etc?
Added Feb 19, 2016
Your answer to Is NASA's asteroid redirect mission a little bit too dangerous?
Added Feb 19, 2016
Your answer to What could we learn from a manned mission to mars that we wouldn't know from an unmanned mission?
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that the core of the Sun is Plutonium?
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Is it true that the chinese robots didn't find anything on the moon?
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Should we focus on colonization of space to save the future of our species? Assuming we cannot sustain life on earth indefinitely.
Added Feb 18, 2016
Your answer to Is Mars full of rust?
Added Feb 17, 2016
Your answer to Are airbags a good solution for 'soft lunar landing'?
Added Feb 17, 2016
Your answer to Is Pluto a planet?
Added Feb 17, 2016
Your answer to Let's say I don't believe the world is round. How can one prove the world is round to me?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to Will Earth ever be as inhospitable to humans as Mars is now?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to Compared to Chinese or Japanese Buddhism, is Tibetan Buddhism more focused on gaining control over imagination and thoughts?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to What should be the first words from Mars? What topics could be involved?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to What would happen if humanity learned that our planet is part of a huge territory claimed by extraterrestrials?
Added Feb 16, 2016
Your answer to If the Starship Enterprise were in a "standard orbit" around Earth, how bright would it appear to the naked eye?
Added Feb 14, 2016
Your answer to Could the Mars rover have contaminated Mars with earth based life forms?
Added Feb 14, 2016
Your answer to Which side of the Moon did the Americans land on: the "dark side" or the "other side"?
Added Feb 14, 2016
Your answer to Is there any possible way to make a black hole orbit the Earth?
Added Feb 13, 2016
Your answer to What do I need to be able to see the ISS?
Added Feb 13, 2016
Your answer to What would happen to the Solar System, if we created an artificial planet?
Added Feb 10, 2016
Added Feb 8, 2016
Your answer to Is Planet 9 responsible for mass asteroid impact made here on Earth?
Added Feb 7, 2016
Your answer to How big should a planet be (radius,mass) and how far away from it's star to have (for example) four natural satellites?
Added Feb 7, 2016
Added Feb 7, 2016
Your answer to Why are there no Mars photos of the daytime sun?
Added Feb 7, 2016
Added Feb 2, 2016
Your answer to Is it really true that before 2050 we would be living on moon in dome shaped houses?
Added Feb 1, 2016
Your answer to Could Planet X explain why the Oort Cloud releases comets that enter our solar system?
Added Jan 31, 2016
Your answer to How could you move 'Planet 9' into a circular orbit within the solar system's habitable zone?
Added Jan 29, 2016
Your answer to How could you slow 'planet 9' down enough for it to achieve a stable orbit around the sun like the 'inner' planets?
Added Jan 28, 2016
Your answer to What is the purpose of the Asteroid Belt and is it a former planet?
Added Jan 28, 2016
Your answer to Is it clear whether the putative "ninth planet" has cleared its neighbourhood?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to What does the rest of the world think about the controversy over the TMT (thirty meter telescope) in Hawaii?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to Would it be possible to significantly impact the orbit of the Earth if I kept performing sling-shot maneuvers across the solar system?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to Should we (human race) explore more of space and start colonizing it?
Added Jan 27, 2016
Your answer to What is it known about this hypothesized ninth planet in the solar system?
Added Jan 26, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for a planet to have an oxygen-rich atmosphere without having life on it?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to Is Mars capable of supporting life?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to Quoran Astronomers: How close will planet 9 get to the Sun and to the Earth in its perihelion and perigee?
Added Jan 25, 2016
Your answer to What type of scientists will be the first to be selected to go to Mars?
Added Jan 24, 2016
Your answer to What is the probability of human race being immigrants to Earth a long time ago?
Added Jan 24, 2016
Added Jan 23, 2016
Your answer to What is the maximum distance a planet could be from the sun and still consistently orbit it?
Added Jan 22, 2016
Your answer to If Planet Nine exists, could it be the first of many additional planets we find in our solar system?
Added Jan 22, 2016
Your answer to Should I be worried about the possible 9th planet?
Added Jan 21, 2016
Your answer to How important would be the finding of another planet in our solar system?
Added Jan 21, 2016
Your answer to Why is this flower's blooming in outer space special?
Added Jan 19, 2016
Added Jan 18, 2016
Added Jan 18, 2016
Your answer to Can it be possible to colonize a planet without any non-human animals?
Added Jan 18, 2016
Your answer to What are reasons terraforming Mars would not work?
Added Jan 17, 2016
Your answer to Is there any evidence contradicting the Cornice Avalanches on Mars theory?
Added Jan 16, 2016
Your answer to Is it possible for us to send humans to Mars and bring them back before 2030?
Added Jan 15, 2016
Your answer to Is the FizzBuzz task an effective way to interview engineers? Does this task accurately differentiate engineering candidates?
Added Jan 15, 2016
Your answer to What are some things that those who have won lotteries have done to benefit society with their winnings?
Added Jan 14, 2016
Your answer to What is the full plan of Elon Musk to terraform Mars from the fusion of the poles to the magnetic field in creation?
Added Jan 12, 2016
Your answer to What if we exchanged the position of the Earth and Mars? Would the Earth still continue supporting the life as now?
Added Jan 12, 2016
Your answer to Which organisation will be the first to put a human on Mars?
Added Jan 10, 2016
Your answer to Was there or is there life on Mars.? . And are extraterrestrial beings such as the tall whites etc.. Visit or even occupy this earth?
Added Jan 9, 2016
Your answer to How did our ancestors know that there are 9 planets?
Added Jan 8, 2016
Your answer to Can we destroy the Earth?
Added Jan 6, 2016
Your answer to Why is a trip to mars one-way but to moon not one-way?
Added Jan 5, 2016
Your answer to What shape is a rainbow from view of the pilot?
Added Jan 4, 2016
Your answer to What would you do if the whole planet was going to be destroyed next week?
Added Jan 2, 2016
Your answer to What do we do to survive an asteroid hitting the earth?
Added Jan 1, 2016
Added Jan 1, 2016
Your answer to If you were on a different planet, could you eat organisms on the planet? Would they be made from DNA?
Added Jan 1, 2016
Your answer to Hypothetical Scenarios: An asteroid 10 miles wide is headed for earth, how soon will we be able to detect it?
Added Dec 23, 2015
Your answer to How much can the Falcon9 lower the launch cost?
Added Dec 23, 2015
Your answer to Can humans live generationally on Mars with its low gravity?
Added Dec 21, 2015
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Dec 21, 2015
Your answer to Why are people saying that a rogue Planet X (Nibiru) will hit the Earth? I'm very worried.
Added Dec 15, 2015
Your answer to If we can 'square' and 'cube' numbers, could we also 'sphere', or 'triangle', or <insert arbitrary shape> a number?
Added Dec 12, 2015
Added Dec 12, 2015
Your answer to Is motivation all that matters in morality, ethics or a mahayana path?
Added Dec 7, 2015
Added Dec 6, 2015
Your answer to Why did the Buddhist monk talk to me like I was a very special person?
Added Dec 5, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if someone violated the Outer Space Treaty?
Added Dec 3, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Dec 2, 2015
Your answer to Is planet Niburu real?
Added Dec 2, 2015
Added Dec 1, 2015
Your answer to Did Tolkien read, or was he influenced by, H.P. Lovecraft?
Added Nov 30, 2015
Your answer to Is there life after death?
Added Nov 30, 2015
Your answer to How do I find out if this assertium is logically valid?
Added Nov 30, 2015
Your answer to What data points lead us to believe there was life on Mars?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to Would a NASA Scientist be able to find Earth if they were to travel from the Andromeda galaxy?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to see Jupiter's moons with the naked eye from Earth?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to What cultures have used microtonality in their music?
Added Nov 29, 2015
Your answer to Which types of Tibetan Buddhist monks would seek to avoid sitting next to women? What are their reasons?
Added Nov 28, 2015
Your answer to Could the Mars rover have contaminated Mars with earth based life forms?
Added Nov 28, 2015
Added Nov 27, 2015
Your answer to How common is it for buddhist monks to regret their decision?
Added Nov 27, 2015
Your answer to If the ISS had powerful lighting, could it be seen at night? (Not in twilight)
Added Nov 27, 2015
Your answer to Why does Tibetan Buddhism have been conducting so many human sacrifices?
Added Nov 26, 2015
Your answer to Why is the Dalai Lama allowed entrance into the United States?
Added Nov 26, 2015
Your answer to Why do so many people want to believe in an afterlife?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to What is Planet X?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to Is Planet X gonna crash into earth?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to When will Peter Capaldi be replaced as Doctor Who?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to be buddhist but have different views of the afterlife?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to If we detected a planet-killing asteroid, is there anything we could do about it at the present time?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to If life is found on Mars, which religions would be the most compatible with this finding?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to Is the question of prior or current Martian life more important the potential of terraforming Mars?
Added Nov 24, 2015
Added Nov 24, 2015
Added Nov 24, 2015
Your answer to How do unknown authors achieve success with their first books?
Added Nov 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the largest item humans ever discarded into outer space?
Added Nov 22, 2015
Your answer to Flying: Why have I not seen another plane in the sky while traveling on an airliner?
Added Nov 21, 2015
Your answer to How hard would it be to stow away on an unmanned SLS launch?
Added Nov 21, 2015
Added Nov 20, 2015
Your answer to Could we feasibly make many large space colonies that orbit the Earth?
Added Nov 20, 2015
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Nov 19, 2015
Your answer to What are some ideas to protect the earth against a potentially human-destroying meteorite impact?
Added Nov 19, 2015
Your answer to Why are we so interested in Pluto but no one talks about Neptune or Uranus?
Added Nov 18, 2015
Added Nov 18, 2015
Your answer to Why are most science fictions movies about aliens invading Earth rather than humans invading alien-inhabited places?
Added Nov 18, 2015
Added Nov 18, 2015
Your answer to How much of a concern were meteors during the Apollo missions?
Added Nov 18, 2015
Your answer to If somehow we found a way to ignite fusion on Jupiter and turn it into a small star, would any of its moons be habitable?
Added Nov 17, 2015
Your answer to What happens to a particle when its entangled partner falls into a black hole?
Added Nov 17, 2015
Your answer to When was the last time Mars was struck by an asteroid? Or is it always happening?
Added Nov 16, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to make an artificial black-hole?
Added Nov 16, 2015
Your answer to What are some tasks that took months to complete 100 years ago that today a computer can do in a few seconds?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Why do you only hear of meteorites hitting the Earth but not asteroids or comets?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Now that Curiosity has landed on Mars and made some discoveries, what's the next mission likely to be? What's the next step?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to If there was living creatures in Mars, in which year we would be able to "detect" them?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to Outer Space: Is interstellar space full of "Oort objects"?
Added Nov 15, 2015
Your answer to If we are truly the only intelligent life form in the universe, does this mean the universe is ours for the taking?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Have all the chemical elements in the universe been discovered? How can we ever know for sure?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Could there be life in any form inside the Sun or other stars?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Why didn't Apollo 11 mission stay longer on the surface of the moon?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to If all earth's landmass was distributed homogenous how high would the oceanlevel be?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Your answer to Is sun gazing safe?
Added Nov 14, 2015
Added Nov 13, 2015
Your answer to Why do we remove spacecraft from orbit at the end of missions?
Added Nov 13, 2015
Your answer to Why is the Cassini mission ending in 2017?
Added Nov 13, 2015
Your answer to If something went wrong with the ISS and it became inoperable, what would we do with it?
Added Nov 12, 2015
Your answer to Why is there significantly more water in planet Earth than in other planets of the solar system?
Added Nov 12, 2015
Added Nov 12, 2015
Your answer to If there is not a Self to find anywhere in Buddhism, what if anything continues after death?
Added Nov 11, 2015
Your answer to Do we know if complex life existed on earth before the moon impacted it?
Added Nov 11, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that some administration (NASA or other) has already sent astronauts to Mars and haven't told us?
Added Nov 10, 2015
Your answer to Why wasnt the asteroid explosion over Russia in 2013 predicted? Why did no space agency see it coming?
Added Nov 10, 2015
Your answer to What is the greatest misconception most people have about a specific event in The Lord of the Rings?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that humans, if they live long enough on Mars, can adapt to live without life support systems?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to How do we know there isn't another planet beyond Pluto's orbit?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Did NASA have a rescue plan for Apollo 11 if they failed to leave the Moon?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Hypothetical Scenarios: If aliens teraformed Mars, and left it alone, how long would it remain capable of supporting earth life?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to NASA claims that Mars atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds. Why hasn't the same fate occurred to earth?
Added Nov 9, 2015
Your answer to Considering all of Mars’s flaws, is it really worth the hassle of colonizing it?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to My dad loves weird science-like things and space/astronomy. What are good Christmas gift suggestions?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to Why do we think of colonizing mars while we are ruining the mother earth?
Added Nov 8, 2015
Your answer to What are some mind blowing facts about the solar system?
Added Nov 7, 2015
Your answer to How do perchlorate on Mars impact human exploration of Mars?
Added Nov 6, 2015
Added Nov 6, 2015
Your answer to What will happen when I look at the sun with a telescope?
Added Nov 4, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible for a sun planet moon system to exist such that the moon stays in the sky of the planet for months? Read description.
Added Nov 4, 2015
Your answer to What if a private firm announced a mission to Ganymede or Europa?
Added Nov 4, 2015
Your answer to If a chunk of dry ice 10 miles in diameter struck Mars, would it instantly melt and create a dense atmosphere?
Added Nov 3, 2015
Your answer to How visible would a Texas sized asteroid be to the naked eye as it approached earth?
Added Nov 2, 2015
Your answer to Will space travel to Mars be worthwhile in our lifetimes?
Added Nov 2, 2015
Your answer to Peak Humanity: What if the population stops growing in the year 2050 and declines forever?
Added Nov 2, 2015
Your answer to If a bird is trapped in my house and banging itself constantly against the window, should I just kill it to relieve it of its misery?
Added Oct 30, 2015
Your answer to What do the Buddhists of Quora think of Steven Seagal?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to If the population of the Earth keeps on increasing indiscriminately, will there be an effect on the Earth's orbital patterns?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to As Deimos, Mars's moon, has an escape velocity of only 5.5m/s, if I jump high from Deimos' surface will I escape from it forever?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to Do we have the technology to create an automated greenhouse on Mars that could grow and store food for an upcoming manned mission?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to What Earth life forms have the potential to thrive on Mars as it is now?
Added Oct 29, 2015
Your answer to What are some movie tropes that annoy you?
Added Oct 28, 2015
Added Oct 27, 2015
Your answer to What objects from space are going to hit earth Nov 13th, 2015?
Added Oct 27, 2015
Your answer to How can one build a spaceship that can pass right through the sun?
Added Oct 27, 2015
Added Oct 26, 2015
Your answer to How does the dust storm in The Martian movie trailer trow stones through the air despite mars having just 1% of earths air density?
Added Oct 24, 2015
Your answer to Could Mars' thin atmosphere conceivably allow for a dust storm of the magnitude seen in The Martian?
Added Oct 24, 2015
Your answer to What are the exact steps to transform Mars atmosphere to suit for human living?
Added Oct 24, 2015
Your answer to Can you leave the space station when you want?
Added Oct 23, 2015
Added Oct 20, 2015
Your answer to What is required to put an Earth like atmosphere over Mars?
Added Oct 20, 2015
Your answer to Is there a 10th planet called Nibiru?
Added Oct 18, 2015
Your answer to Why aren't there fossils on mars?
Added Oct 17, 2015
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Oct 15, 2015
Your answer to Can we force trigger an evolution cycle on mars by maybe sending microbes which can resist the extreme climate on mars?
Added Oct 14, 2015
Added Oct 13, 2015
Your answer to Do you think NASA's "Journey to Mars" report is feasible to get us to Mars?
Added Oct 12, 2015
Added Oct 12, 2015
Added Oct 12, 2015
Added Oct 11, 2015
Your answer to If there was a lake on Mars, how would swimming in it be different?
Added Oct 11, 2015
Added Oct 11, 2015
Your answer to How is it possible for liquid water to exist on the Martian surface and how will the recent discovery affect future missions?
Added Oct 10, 2015
Added Oct 7, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible or probable that there was a very ancient civilization on Mars that died out but whose remains will be discovered soon?
Added Oct 6, 2015
Added Oct 5, 2015
Your answer to Could there be liquid reserves of water below the surface on Mars?
Added Oct 4, 2015
Your answer to Water on Mars: What if it is the wrong "type" of water for life?
Added Oct 4, 2015
Added Oct 4, 2015
Your answer to When terraforming Mars, will there be protected areas?
Added Oct 2, 2015
Your answer to Water flows on Earth because of rains. If there is flowing water on Mars, does that also means it rains there?
Added Sep 29, 2015
Added Sep 29, 2015
Your answer to What does the earth look like from the moon during a "blood moon"?
Added Sep 28, 2015
Your answer to Can humans walk on martian (Mars) soil?
Added Sep 27, 2015
Your answer to Why hasn't Envisat been brought down or destroyed or brought to a graveyard orbit?
Added Sep 24, 2015
Your answer to Why don't people populate Greenland first before trying out on Mars?
Added Sep 23, 2015
Your answer to Is John Hagee correct about the Blood Moon Prophecy?
Added Sep 23, 2015
Added Sep 23, 2015
Your answer to Why didn't NASA send an aerial vehicle to explore Mars?
Added Sep 23, 2015
Your answer to Who is Renee M? Are her predictions about the world ending true?
Added Sep 23, 2015
Your answer to Why should I use Quora instead of just searching the Internet?
Added Sep 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the probability of asteroids which are not in the visible spectrum (invisible asteroids) to hit the Earth?
Added Sep 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the position of women in Tibetan Buddhism?
Added Sep 21, 2015
Your answer to If Space X reaches Mars first, can they claim the planet as their property?
Added Sep 21, 2015
Your answer to Are Buddhist monks leeches in society who only beg for food and meditate, or do they provide some sort of service to the people?
Added Sep 20, 2015
Your answer to Who owns the right to go to Mars and contaminate the Martian atmosphere with contaminants from Earth?
Added Sep 20, 2015
Your answer to Could we heat Mars' poles by nuking them?
Added Sep 20, 2015
Your answer to What were the primary religions in the world before Islam/Christianity/Buddhism became popular?
Added Sep 19, 2015
Your answer to Can Buddha Reincarnate?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that there is a small group of nonhuman hominids hidden somewhere on earth?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to breathe and survive on Mars with an oxygen tank, but without a space suit?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to Another shadow or a real Alien? Is this a real Mars Crab and if yes will we still try and send a mission to Mars?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to What is the best reason for sending a manned expedition to Mars?
Added Sep 18, 2015
Your answer to What is the realistic top speed of an asteroid that might threaten the Earth and would we still be able to detect its approach?
Added Sep 17, 2015
Added Sep 17, 2015
Added Sep 16, 2015
Your answer to Is it legal to drop a nuke on Mars?
Added Sep 16, 2015
Your answer to Do we have a positioning system for space objects and planets similar to GPS?
Added Sep 15, 2015
Your answer to What exactly is a "Super Blood Moon" and why is it so rare?
Added Sep 15, 2015
Your answer to Could humanity construct a new Earth-like planet in the solar system?
Added Sep 15, 2015
Your answer to Does NASA use Photoshop?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Wouldn't sending a manned mission to Mars violate NASA's policy of not infecting other worlds with life forms from Earth?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Have any of you encountered issues with the Wikipedia system of arbitration, and if so, how do you think it can be improved?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to What is the best way to encourage collaborative editing in an online encyclopedia - and how could wikipedia be improved in this aspect?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Quora Bugs: Why doesn't the "rephrase question" tag remove itself when I have actually rephrased the question?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Are there any advantages of exploring Mars' moon Phobos?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Why don't Mars rovers move faster?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to If the Sun disappeared completely, what would happen to the Earth and the rest of our solar system?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Could we survive without the sun?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to How do you imagine the Earth without the Sun?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to If the Sun disappeared completely, what would happen to the Earth and the rest of our solar system?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to Without the sun, can oxygen be present on Earth?
Added Sep 14, 2015
Your answer to What is the expected life of earth?
Added Sep 12, 2015
Your answer to What is the common scientific opinion about Elon Musk's plan to nuke Mars' poles to accelerate the creation of an atmosphere?
Added Sep 11, 2015
Your answer to Could a planet like Mars or Venus be equipped with an artificial magnetic field similar to Earth's?
Added Sep 11, 2015
Your answer to What is the common scientific opinion about Elon Musk's plan to nuke Mars' poles to accelerate the creation of an atmosphere?
Added Sep 11, 2015
Your answer to Why the edges of Martian Polar Caps are not being searched for liquid water?
Added Sep 10, 2015
Added Sep 10, 2015
Your answer to Can bombardment by comets significantly add up to the amount of water on Mars within realistic human timescales (i.e. a few centuries)?
Added Sep 10, 2015
Your answer to Can you describe how detonating thermonuclear charges on Mars' poles can lead to the planet becoming hospitable?
Added Sep 10, 2015
Your answer to What is going to happen in September 2015?
Added Sep 10, 2015
Your answer to Can an astronaut re-enter the atmosphere with just a spacesuit and a jetpack?
Added Sep 9, 2015
Your answer to Is the comet really hitting the earth in the month of September?
Added Sep 9, 2015
Your answer to Why don't Mars rovers move faster?
Added Sep 9, 2015
Added Sep 9, 2015
Your answer to Could it have been feasible to boost Shuttle main tanks into orbit?
Added Sep 6, 2015
Your answer to What is the deep/dark web and how do you access it?
Added Sep 6, 2015
Your answer to Why can't humans spend more on exploring the remaining 95% of the oceans, rather than on space exploration?
Added Sep 5, 2015
Your answer to Between the moon and the sun which one was created first?
Added Sep 5, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to upgrade space suits so that they can survive re-entry and then parachute down like Felix Baumgartner?
Added Sep 5, 2015
Your answer to If SpaceX was responsible for destroying a huge asteroid that was headed for earth, do you think they would be successful?
Added Sep 4, 2015
Your answer to If a 1km sized rock was, for certain, to hit Earth in 6 months, what could we do about it?
Added Sep 3, 2015
Your answer to How are plants growing in the ISS? Is it different from normal? If so, in what ways?
Added Sep 3, 2015
Your answer to Can the International Space Station be brought back to Earth if it were to be dismantled?
Added Sep 3, 2015
Your answer to How will space tourism work?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to How do I go about ignoring the end of the world predictions and live my life to the fullest?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Is the world going to end in September 2015?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Who says our world will end in September and why are they wrong?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Is the world going to end in September 2015?
Added Sep 1, 2015
Your answer to Is Quora just a glorified Yahoo! Answers?
Added Aug 31, 2015
Your answer to Why did God create the world if he was just going to destroy it at Armageddon?
Added Aug 31, 2015
Your answer to What are the odds of a bigtime asteroid hitting the Earth a la Armageddon and Deep Impact?
Added Aug 31, 2015
Your answer to Why can Buddhist monks in Japan get married?
Added Aug 30, 2015
Your answer to What are disadvantages of self-studying?
Added Aug 29, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible for a star to orbit a planet? Has it ever been observed?
Added Aug 29, 2015
Added Aug 29, 2015
Your answer to If life on Earth would have been observable for a million years, why has there been no contact?
Added Aug 28, 2015
Your answer to Are there any advantages in setting up a telescope (operated remotely from Earth) on other planets (such as Mars)?
Added Aug 26, 2015
Your answer to Why is it so difficult to sterilize spacecrafts?
Added Aug 25, 2015
Your answer to How are human skin thangkas being made?
Added Aug 25, 2015
Your answer to What is the estimated cost of the International Space Station (ISS)?
Added Aug 24, 2015
Your answer to Why are there rocks scattered on the sandy plains on Mars?
Added Aug 23, 2015
Added Aug 23, 2015
Your answer to Talking about real spacecraft, not the fictional ones seen in Star Wars and Star Trek, what is the best looking spacecraft ever made?
Added Aug 23, 2015
Added Aug 22, 2015
Added Aug 22, 2015
Your answer to Assuming that human travel to Mars is possible, what are the other hazards that prevent establishing a permanent settlement on Mars?
Added Aug 22, 2015
Your answer to Why can't the ISS split astronaut's exhaled CO2 and recycle the oxygen?
Added Aug 22, 2015
Added Aug 22, 2015
Your answer to Why does Elon Musk believe that we can't electrify transportation to space?
Added Aug 21, 2015
Your answer to What keeps trolls away from Quora?
Added Aug 20, 2015
Your answer to How can I put my "experience" as a troll to good use?
Added Aug 20, 2015
Your answer to How many trolls does it take to change a light bulb?
Added Aug 19, 2015
Your answer to Why do Christians not believe in the concept of reincarnation?
Added Aug 19, 2015
Your answer to Why has the new pentagonal tiling received so much attention in the press?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Why can't I add a comment at this time?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Are some Buddhists also Christians?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Why is it important that on the launching day of the Mars rover, the two planets should be close to each other?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Is Quora required to include attribution for reproductions of my content?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Your answer to Assume a, b, c are integers. What is the proof that abc(a³–b³)(b³–c³)(c³–a³) is a multiple of 7?
Added Aug 18, 2015
Added Aug 17, 2015
Your answer to When will the probability of a life-threatening space object hitting Earth reach significant levels?
Added Aug 17, 2015
Added Aug 17, 2015
Your answer to How is New Horizons of NASA powered?
Added Aug 17, 2015
Your answer to Will Uranus and Neptune ever switch back?
Added Aug 17, 2015
Your answer to Is it illegal to download something that one has the corresponding physical version of?
Added Aug 16, 2015
Your answer to Is it illegal to download a pdf version of a book if you own the original book?
Added Aug 16, 2015
Your answer to Are there any die-hard Lord of the Rings fans that can't stand the movie trilogy? If so, why?
Added Aug 15, 2015
Your answer to Was the journey of Voyager so calculated that it didn't crash into a meteor or was it destined to go into interstellar space?
Added Aug 15, 2015
Your answer to How far could we travel within our solar system with our current technology, if we were to send a manned spaceship ?
Added Aug 14, 2015
Your answer to Is NASA presently capable of fending off a collision if a meteor or any other celestial body were to strike the earth?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to If a meteor collided with the Sun, how big would it need to be in order to be a concern?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to How certain is the claim that the ISS is the most-expensive single item ever built, taking inflation into account?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to Buildings: How much in today's dollars is the cost of a medieval cathedral?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to Does NASA care more about finding the first alien life or setting up human colonies on other worlds?
Added Aug 13, 2015
Your answer to Should there be a limit on the size of answers on Quora?
Added Aug 12, 2015
Added Aug 11, 2015
Your answer to How practical is it to put a satellite to orbit ISS?
Added Aug 11, 2015
Added Aug 11, 2015
Added Aug 11, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if someone proves P=NP or P!=NP?
Added Aug 10, 2015
Your answer to Is there water on the moon?
Added Aug 9, 2015
Your answer to What are your current all time stats on Quora?
Added Aug 7, 2015
Added Aug 7, 2015
Added Aug 6, 2015
Added Aug 6, 2015
Your answer to If the Sun disappeared completely, what would happen to the Earth and the rest of our solar system?
Added Aug 5, 2015
Your answer to If someone made an exact duplicate of you with everything in the same place, would the duplicate have your same memories?
Added Aug 5, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if the Pacific Ocean was suddenly teleported to the surface of Mars?
Added Aug 5, 2015
Your answer to Was this pile of code written by a single team of software engineers?
Added Aug 4, 2015
Added Aug 3, 2015
Your answer to How fast is Quora growing on a weekly basis? What are the growth metrics?
Added Aug 2, 2015
Your answer to Is a cheaper computer as good as the more expensive computers?
Added Aug 2, 2015
Your answer to What should be humanity's approach to exploring space and discovering alien races once we're able to travel to other planets?
Added Aug 1, 2015
Your answer to Are we technologically close to a feasible "von Neumann probe" for exploration?
Added Jul 31, 2015
Added Jul 31, 2015
Added Jul 31, 2015
Your answer to I just came up with an amazing theory. Where would I post that?
Added Jul 31, 2015
Added Jul 31, 2015
Your answer to Which line of work or profession has had the most impact on the course of human history? Why?
Added Jul 30, 2015
Added Jul 29, 2015
Your answer to Death and Dying: What could kill us so quickly that we wouldn't even notice?
Added Jul 29, 2015
Your answer to Why don't ISS photos show any of the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth? Is it a matter of being in different orbits?
Added Jul 29, 2015
Your answer to Can Earth create self-assembling or self-replicating nanoparticles and nanorobots or assembly linear nanostructures naturally?
Added Jul 29, 2015
Added Jul 29, 2015
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to Do the best programmers use the fewest lines of code, as is consistent with my experience?
Added Jul 28, 2015
Added Jul 28, 2015
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to Does the Moon always rise in the East?
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to If we could harness 100% of the sunlight that earth receives in a day, is it enough to replace the fossil fuels consumed in a day?
Added Jul 28, 2015
Your answer to Does anyone actually like or enjoy mathematics?
Added Jul 27, 2015
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to How do I convert Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to How can Pluto be called a "dwarf planet" if it's not a planet?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to Is it safe to pick up a meteorite with my bare hands?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to If NASA sent the most developed spaceship to Pluto right now, how long would it take them to reach Pluto?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to What are the chances that a solar system with four rocky planets would go haywire and destroy itself?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to Why do companies like Facebook and Uber need so many developers?
Added Jul 26, 2015
Your answer to Why has NASA so far not found alien artifacts on the worlds of the solar system?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Added Jul 25, 2015
Your answer to Why doesn't the New Horizons mission put the spacecraft into orbit around Pluto?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Added Jul 25, 2015
Your answer to Space Travel: Who is going to Mars next year, 2016? Or was it just media hype?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Your answer to Now that NASA has discovered Kepler-452b, is there any possibility to reach this planet considering that it's 1400 light years away?
Added Jul 25, 2015
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to How similar is Kepler 452b to our Earth?
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to How can NASA be assured of potentially favourable living conditions just by looking at Kepler 452B?
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to How much can we learn about the new Kepler planet?
Added Jul 24, 2015
Your answer to Is there a way to detect if there is intelligent life on Kepler-452b?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to How realistic is the book "The Martian"?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Our own moon will eventually escape Earth. Are any of the moons of other planets losing altitude, on course to collide?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible that Pluto is heated by meteorite impacts?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Is there anything of worth on the planets in our solar system like gold or something like helium 3?
Added Jul 23, 2015
Your answer to Is the sunlight on Pluto bright enough to read by?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to In how many years will we be able to construct viable Stanford toruses?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to In The Lord of the Rings (creative franchise), were Frodo and Sam gay?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to terraform just a portion of Mars by enclosing it in a dome?
Added Jul 22, 2015
Your answer to If a pen were able to draw in three dimensions, would there be any notable traceable patterns, e.g. Platonic solids?
Added Jul 15, 2015
Your answer to When did science determine that the Moon, Mars, and Venus were uninhabited?
Added Jul 4, 2015
Your answer to How does one read poetry aloud?
Added Jul 3, 2015
Your answer to Could our human eyes see normally on other planets or their moons?
Added Jul 2, 2015
Your answer to Is it true that NASA is building a city in Mars?
Added Jul 1, 2015
Your answer to Does Tom Bombadil even know who or what he is or has it been so long he forgot?
Added Jun 30, 2015
Your answer to How could/would the ISS be weaponized?
Added Jun 30, 2015
Your answer to Why are wyverns so much more popular than dragons in modern fantasy shows like Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and Lord of The Rings?
Added Jun 30, 2015
Your answer to How do lottery winners pick their numbers?
Added Jun 29, 2015
Your answer to What are some cultural faux pas when working as a member of the Fellowship of the Ring?
Added Jun 29, 2015
Added Jun 29, 2015
Added Jun 29, 2015
Your answer to Were any humans aboard the SpaceX CRS-7 rocket that exploded during ascent on June 28, 2015?
Added Jun 28, 2015
Your answer to How could we barely feel a 160 km/h wind on Mars because of its thin atmosphere?
Added Jun 28, 2015
Your answer to Could a Lake Vostok exist on Mars today?
Added Jun 28, 2015
Your answer to What would Mars be like if it was heated up enough to melt all its water ice and dry ice?
Added Jun 27, 2015
Your answer to Why did Tom Bombadil permit evil to exist in the Old Forest and Barrow-downs?
Added Jun 27, 2015
Your answer to Could the Rosetta Satellite, which is currently orbiting comet 67P, have a significant effect on that comet's orbit? Why or why not?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to What are the weirdest orbits or trajectories ever observed among celestial bodies?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if an asteroid hit earth while you were in a plane?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to How realistic is the book "The Martian"?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to How realistic is the book "The Martian"?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to What is the largest known solid object in the universe that isn't spherical or almost spherical?
Added Jun 26, 2015
Added Jun 26, 2015
Your answer to Politically, how will the Moon and Mars be colonized by humans?
Added Jun 25, 2015
Added Jun 25, 2015
Your answer to When astronauts go to Mars, will we be able to watch them on TV like we did with the moon landing?
Added Jun 25, 2015
Your answer to What are the odds that alien food from an Earth-type planet would kill us?
Added Jun 25, 2015
Your answer to How common is homelessness among Buddhists?
Added Jun 24, 2015
Your answer to Could the ring in 'Lord of the Rings' be destroyed on purpose?
Added Jun 23, 2015
Your answer to When is the next anticipated supernova that will be visible to the naked eye in daylight?
Added Jun 23, 2015
Your answer to Are there any pictures taken by Curiosity of Deimos and Phobos showing up in the sky at the same time? In case there is not, why?
Added Jun 23, 2015
Your answer to Why hasn't anyone made an "analog" computer, where 0.5 could equal both on/off like a quantum computer?
Added Jun 22, 2015
Added Jun 21, 2015
Your answer to What do religions say about life on other planets?
Added Jun 20, 2015
Your answer to How and why are planets spherical? What makes them round?
Added Jun 18, 2015
Your answer to How long ago did the moon begin to form?
Added Jun 18, 2015
Your answer to Will the asteroid mining by private companies be regulated by "Outer Space Treaty" (or any other international agreement)?
Added Jun 17, 2015
Your answer to If there is an icy part of Mars, then why do scientists seem to have a problem with producing water on the Red Planet?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Your answer to Why is it so hard to create a human-like AI?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Your answer to How big would a meteorite have to be in order to be a "planet killer"?
Added Jun 15, 2015
Added Jun 14, 2015
Your answer to What will Philae do now? Will it explore the surface like a rover, or remain stationary indefinitely?
Added Jun 14, 2015
Added Jun 14, 2015
Your answer to What in layman's terms is Russell's Paradox?
Added Jun 13, 2015
Your answer to How reliable or practical would it be to use liquid mirror telescope in zero gravity?
Added Jun 11, 2015
Your answer to Might there be life on other planets but we just can't see it?
Added Jun 10, 2015
Your answer to How hard would it be for a rogue nation to start a Kessler syndrome event?
Added Jun 10, 2015
Your answer to What is LightSail's apparent magnitude?
Added Jun 9, 2015
Your answer to What are some innovative uses for the Molniya orbit?
Added Jun 8, 2015
Your answer to Does the fact that we can see (with naked eye) only a few thousand stars have any significance for Olbers' paradox?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to If the planet earth stopped producing oxygen, for how long could life exist?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Could a probe be put in orbit around a Martian moon by amateurs using a few cubesat launches?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to turn the moon into a spaceship and have all the humans live on it?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Can you de-orbit a tennis ball (or baseball) by hand from the ISS during EVA?
Added Jun 6, 2015
Your answer to Should we visit Europa?
Added Jun 3, 2015
Your answer to Is Morgellons a real disease?
Added May 30, 2015
Your answer to Could an asteroid strike change the rotation of the Earth to spin in the opposite direction?
Added May 29, 2015
Your answer to Other than navigational, solar flare, ozone layer, and power grid dangers, what will happen when the magnetic poles shift?
Added May 29, 2015
Your answer to Is there any strong scientific evidence on this prediction about the 9.5 earthquake to hit California on May 28th, 2015?
Added May 28, 2015
Your answer to How and why are planets spherical? What makes them round?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Can a planet have an orbit shaped like a figure 8?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Would it be arrogant to refer to one of my findings as a theorem in my paper?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to have life within the Earth's core?
Added May 25, 2015
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to If I have a regular mediation practice, does that make me a Buddhist?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Is the hype surrounding the upcoming "Four Blood Moons" limited to Christians, or is it of secular interest as well?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to How often do solar storms occur? Can they hit earth or cause harm to use?
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to Why didn't the universe collapse into a black hole just seconds after the Big Bang? I imagine it was very dense at that moment.
Added May 25, 2015
Your answer to What are the chances of Asteroid 2012 TT5 hitting the Earth on September 24, 2015?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to When looking at a planet like Mars, is there 0% life or are there microorganisms like Earth's germs?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to Can tardigrades survive on Mars?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to What is the concept of retrograde planets? Does it mean the planet becomes stronger or does the planet impact opposite to its nature?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to Meteorites: Should we urgently take measures to make it easy to spot a meteor about to impact Earth?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to Are there gliders that can be flown at night?
Added May 24, 2015
Your answer to How was all the perchlorate on Mars formed?
Added May 23, 2015
Added May 22, 2015
Your answer to Would a Rover mission to Venus be possible with current technology?
Added May 22, 2015
Your answer to Is it easier to colonize the surface of Mars or the cloud tops of Venus?
Added May 22, 2015
Your answer to If and when we colonize Mars, how will we prevent contaminating the planet with our own bacteria and microbial life?
Added May 21, 2015
Added May 20, 2015
Your answer to As the universe had an origin and a finite size, how can it now be infinite?
Added May 20, 2015
Added May 19, 2015
Your answer to Why are goto, break and continue statements bad in computer science?
Added May 18, 2015
Your answer to If we were sitting on Pluto looking towards Earth, would we be able to see our planet with an unaided eye?
Added May 17, 2015
Your answer to Are we inside a black hole?
Added May 17, 2015
Your answer to If you stand on the moon, can you see its surface curving?
Added May 17, 2015
Your answer to At what altitude is there no orbital decay?
Added May 16, 2015
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to Can a planet have a diamond as its center?
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to When will we have high resolution photos of Pluto from the New Horizons Mission?
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to What is a black hole made of?
Added May 15, 2015
Your answer to Would a car accelerating to the escape velocity of the earth fly off?
Added May 14, 2015
Your answer to Does the Dalai Lama speak for all Buddhists?
Added May 14, 2015
Your answer to If earth were spinning faster than its escape velocity what would happen?
Added May 13, 2015
Your answer to How and why are planets spherical? What makes them round?
Added May 13, 2015
Your answer to Why does the moon appear in random places?
Added May 13, 2015
Your answer to Is it physically possible for a moon (not ours) to orbit a double-planet system?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to Could an Earth-like planet have a sizeable moon in a geosynchronous orbit?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to Is this website to be trusted about an asteroid striking earth on May 14th of this year?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to Where do Buddhists get their robes?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if we fired all nuclear missiles on earth at the sun?
Added May 12, 2015
Your answer to What is the most likely death of the Earth? Is it the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies colliding, or is it the sun dying and expanding?
Added May 11, 2015
Added May 10, 2015
Your answer to What are the odds that a viable population of humankind will escape to another planet before the earth becomes uninhabitable?
Added May 10, 2015
Your answer to Does Mars have a blue sky?
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to How deep would you have to bury a Mars or lunar colony in order to protect it from solar radiation?
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to Is there wind on Mars?
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to How do developers retain so much knowledge?
Added May 9, 2015
Added May 9, 2015
Your answer to Why doesn't our moon have Trojan satellites, much like the Trojan asteroids leading and following Jupiter?
Added May 8, 2015
Your answer to Why is the moon often visible during the day?
Added May 8, 2015
Added May 7, 2015
Your answer to What will happen if Russia denies the US use of the Soyuz, which is currently required to access the International Space Station?
Added May 6, 2015
Your answer to Roughly, how many lifetimes would it take to be a mathematical universalist?
Added May 6, 2015
Your answer to Are you slow when it takes more than 10 seconds to respond to someone's question?
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to How can I produce sounds of musical instruments using Fourier series?
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to In this scenario, what would happen to the moon (and the astronaut)?
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to Why do Tibetan Buddhists visualize deities?
Added May 5, 2015
Your answer to When will Mercury collide with the Sun?
Added May 5, 2015
Added May 4, 2015
Your answer to Are there any stars that will come close to our solar system in the future?
Added May 3, 2015
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to What kinds of technologies are currently used to deflect asteroids?
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to Why is unmanned exploration prefered to manned exploration?
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to If there is life in the universe, how do we explain the so far failure of SETI to find it?
Added May 3, 2015
Your answer to What is an EmDrive?
Added May 2, 2015
Your answer to How were martian canyons formed?
Added May 2, 2015
Your answer to What are the chances of Asteroid 2012 TT5 hitting the Earth on September 24, 2015?
Added May 2, 2015
Added Apr 29, 2015
Added Apr 28, 2015
Your answer to Would mankind attempt to recover a Voyager type spacecraft from another world if it entered our solar system?
Added Apr 28, 2015
Your answer to Why are Quorans so stingy about giving upvotes? Doesn’t more participation make us a better community? Why not upvote?
Added Apr 27, 2015
Added Apr 27, 2015
Your answer to How long will it take us to be able to send robots to planets like Kepler 438b,"earth's twin", which is 470 light years away?
Added Apr 27, 2015
Your answer to Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001 movie): How do goblins climb along the walls and ceilings of Moria?
Added Apr 27, 2015
Your answer to Is there any video of Mars? If not, why?
Added Apr 26, 2015
Added Apr 26, 2015
Your answer to If NASA said that in a decade that they will prove that life exists on other planets, then what do they really know now?
Added Apr 24, 2015
Your answer to What would happen if someone took off his space suit in the Martian atmosphere?
Added Apr 21, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible to see lightning from the ISS?
Added Apr 21, 2015
Your answer to How if Saturn became our moon?
Added Apr 19, 2015
Your answer to Do moons have moons?
Added Apr 17, 2015
Your answer to What are some teachings for me?
Added Apr 17, 2015
Your answer to How is the picture of our Milky Way galaxy taken from the outside if we are inside the galaxy?
Added Apr 16, 2015
Your answer to How is the picture of our Milky Way galaxy taken from the outside if we are inside the galaxy?
Added Apr 16, 2015
Added Apr 15, 2015
Added Apr 12, 2015
Your answer to Would the US be lawfully allowed to claim Mars?
Added Apr 12, 2015
Your answer to What is the procedure for dealing with astronauts that die in space?
Added Apr 10, 2015
Your answer to Why are some spacecraft required to launch vertically while others can launch horizontally?
Added Apr 9, 2015
Your answer to What building materials would we use to build buildings on Ceres?
Added Apr 6, 2015
Your answer to Is it possible for human beings to adapt to new planets like Mars? If so, how long will it take?
Added Apr 5, 2015
Your answer to How difficult is it to colonize the entire Galaxy and still have full governance over it when FTL technology is non-existent?
Added Apr 5, 2015
Your answer to In your school of Buddhism, is time beginningless?
Added Apr 4, 2015
Your answer to Dependent origination: since everything is a result of dependent origination, there is nothing which appears accidentally, right?
Added Apr 2, 2015
Your answer to How much does it cost per minute to keep an astronaut alive in space?
Added Apr 2, 2015
Added Apr 1, 2015
Your answer to What is the other habitable planet for humanity in case we blow up the earth?
Added Mar 31, 2015
Your answer to Why is there a greater emphasis to colonize Mars instead of the Moon?
Added Mar 31, 2015
Your answer to Why were Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson all opposed to SpaceX?
Added Mar 31, 2015
Your answer to Space Colonization: Would it be possible to build machines that replicate themselves with just the materials around them?
Added Mar 29, 2015
Added Mar 29, 2015
Your answer to How do Mars rovers stay upright on their wheels in severe storms? Has there ever been any incident where something toppled the rovers?
Added Mar 28, 2015
Added Mar 28, 2015
Your answer to Did Gandalf actually believe that Frodo had been captured when the Mouth of Sauron showed him the mithril shirt and Sam's blade?
Added Mar 26, 2015
Your answer to Is the ISS finished? What are future plans for it? Could it ever double as a spaceship? Why wasn't it build this way from the start?
Added Mar 26, 2015
Your answer to Do enlightened people get hungry?
Added Mar 25, 2015
Your answer to Are the Curiosity and Opportunity mars rovers scheduled to meet each other?
Added Mar 23, 2015
Your answer to Some Buddhists believe in rebirth. If there is "no self" or "no soul", then for these Buddhists what is being reborn?
Added Mar 23, 2015
Added Mar 22, 2015
Your answer to It is possible to create a circle using cellular automata?
Added Mar 21, 2015
Your answer to Are there any Buddhists who believe in Atman or True Self?
Added Mar 21, 2015
Added Mar 21, 2015
Your answer to Could the Mars rover have contaminated Mars with earth based life forms?
Added Mar 20, 2015
Your answer to Is there evidence that Siddhartha Gautama is a real historical person?
Added Mar 19, 2015
Your answer to Aurora Borealis: Why is Antarctic Auroral Oval always off center over the South Pole?
Added Mar 19, 2015
Your answer to If we colonize other planets, will we eventually reach a point where wars of independence will become common again?
Added Mar 18, 2015
Your answer to Do we have to give up fighting for what is right if we follow the Buddhist precept of letting go of attachment and desire?
Added Mar 18, 2015
Added Mar 18, 2015
Your answer to Can the modern adult truly be a Buddhist?
Added Mar 17, 2015
Your answer to What if something like a small meteorite or debris penetrated the ISS?
Added Mar 17, 2015
Added Mar 17, 2015
Your answer to Was Steve Jobs a Buddhist? Did he meditate every day?
Added Mar 17, 2015
Your answer to How hard would it be to grow food on Mars?
Added Mar 16, 2015
Your answer to How many habitable planets can you fit in a solar system?
Added Mar 16, 2015
Your answer to If scientists were to send an orbiter to Mars, how would the features and technology on board be different, in comparison to the ISS?
Added Mar 16, 2015
Your answer to Why don't we send a rover back to the moon?
Added Mar 15, 2015
Your answer to What are some theories on why we haven't been visited by aliens yet?
Added Mar 13, 2015
Your answer to Is terraforming bioethically irresponsible?
Added Mar 13, 2015
Added Mar 13, 2015
Added Mar 12, 2015
Your answer to Would it be harder to dig underground tunnels on the Moon or on Mars?
Added Mar 11, 2015
Your answer to Can a Buddhist be aggressive or assertive when it is appropriate?
Added Mar 10, 2015
Your answer to How can a Buddhist have a relationship if that creates attachment?
Added Mar 8, 2015
Your answer to What is the historical proof that Buddha actually taught the Middle Way?
Added Mar 8, 2015
Your answer to Would the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 hold up today?
Added Mar 8, 2015
Your answer to Could I make a profit by going to the moon with Golden Spike and bringing back a barrel of Helium 3?
Added Mar 6, 2015
Your answer to Buddhist philosophy states that all suffering is caused by attachment. However, is it possible to live a life without any attachment?
Added Mar 5, 2015
Your answer to Does Tibetan Buddhism involve animal sacrifice?
Added Mar 4, 2015
Your answer to A great part of the Bible and the Buddhist scriptures are fabricated by later people, so how can we believe them?
Added Mar 3, 2015
Your answer to Is Buddhism the only religion that believes in life outside of the earth?
Added Mar 2, 2015
Your answer to What way into Mordor would have been better (safer) than Minas Ithil and the pass of Cirith Ungol?
Added Mar 1, 2015
Your answer to Would people born and raised on Mars be able to withstand Earth's gravity?
Added Feb 28, 2015
Your answer to Can a Japanese monk get married?
Added Feb 28, 2015
Your answer to Besides Buddhism, what other atheistic religions exist?
Added Feb 27, 2015
Your answer to What provisions did the Apollo astronauts have if the lunar rover irretrievably broke down while they were out driving it?
Added Feb 27, 2015
Your answer to Why are the Rosetta maneuvers so extreme?
Added Feb 24, 2015
Your answer to Why doesn't NASA build a Mars spaceship in orbit, the same way they built the space station?
Added Feb 24, 2015
Added Feb 23, 2015
Added Feb 21, 2015
Your answer to Whom would you send on Mars One?
Added Feb 21, 2015
Added Feb 21, 2015
Your answer to What do you guys think of the finalists who are ready to die on Mars?
Added Feb 19, 2015
Your answer to Why has NASA not changed the spacesuits?
Added Feb 19, 2015
Your answer to Do Buddhists have a higher external locus of control or a higher internal locus of control?
Added Feb 19, 2015
Your answer to Why do people choose Buddhism? What does Buddhism provide? Where do the other religions fall short?
Added Feb 18, 2015
Your answer to Is Tibetan Buddhism different from other types of Buddhism? If so, how?
Added Feb 18, 2015
Your answer to What is the teaching of Buddhism about images and relationship with images?
Added Feb 13, 2015
Your answer to What is the Buddhist answer to the state of mind which is related to 'feeling lonely'?
Added Feb 13, 2015
Your answer to If either SpaceX or Mars One were to overcome technological challenges to colonizing Mars, what political challenges would stop them?
Added Feb 10, 2015
Your answer to Could computers do astronauts' jobs at the ISS?
Added Feb 1, 2015
Your answer to What made the Dalai Lama capable of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?
Added Jan 31, 2015
Your answer to Who owns the planets of our Solar System? Are the planets anyone's property?
Added Jan 30, 2015
Your answer to Should a Buddhist be proud of being a Buddhist? If not, what?
Added Jan 27, 2015
Your answer to What are the bad things about Great Britain?
Added Jan 26, 2015
Your answer to Why do space explorations go horizontally along the plane of the ecliptic and not vertically, perpendicular to the ecliptic?
Added Jan 26, 2015
Your answer to Can the Beagle 2 be remotely repaired if one of the future Mars rovers manages to travel to its location?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to How would an asteroid collision affect Mars?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to Will the fear of exterminating any potential life native to Mars prevent us from ever colonizing the planet?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to How much does it cost to ferry an astronaut to the International Space Station?
Added Jan 25, 2015
Your answer to What are the genuine flaws in Buddhism, if any?
Added Jan 24, 2015
Your answer to Why is Elon Musk so obsessed with Mars? Who would want to go there?
Added Jan 22, 2015
Your answer to What is the most pernicious and persistent myth about The Lord of the Rings that is believed by people who have seen Peter Jackson's movies but haven't read the books?
Added Jan 20, 2015
Your answer to How soon can humans move to and live on Mars?
Added Jan 15, 2015
Your answer to What do Buddhists think of consuming meat and drinking alcohol?
Added Jan 15, 2015
Your answer to Excluding The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, why is Tolkien's work so dull?
Added Jan 13, 2015
Your answer to Do Tibetans want to be a part of China?
Added Jan 9, 2015
Your answer to Does Buddhism involve individualism as much as Western practitioners assume it does?
Added Jan 9, 2015
Your answer to Is "Buddhistic temple" acceptable English?
Added Jan 9, 2015
Your answer to How can I save myself from being reincarnated in the Tibetan Buddhist hell realms?
Added Jan 7, 2015
Added Jan 6, 2015
Your answer to Are the Tibetan people better off under Chinese communism compared to the past?
Added Jan 6, 2015
Your answer to What will happen after the current Dalai Lama dies?
Added Jan 6, 2015
Added Jan 5, 2015
Your answer to Are there any ideas or speculations as to where the water went on Mars?
Added Jan 4, 2015
Your answer to Does Mars have water?
Added Jan 3, 2015
Your answer to Should the Chinese Government control the succession of the Dalai Lama?
Added Jan 3, 2015
Your answer to Do Gödel's theorems imply that there are limits to the laws of physics?
Added Jan 3, 2015
Your answer to Would Tibetan Buddhism lose some of its credibility if the Dalai Lama abandons the tradition of reincarnation?
Added Jan 2, 2015
Your answer to Is Mars' Curiosity rover designed to study anything biological or living?
Added Dec 26, 2014
Your answer to What will be next step by NASA if we discover water and methane on Mars?
Added Dec 18, 2014
Added Dec 17, 2014
Your answer to What are the biggest technical problems with nuclear thermal propulsion systems?
Added Dec 17, 2014
Your answer to Does Jupiter's moon Europa have encouraging signs of life?
Added Dec 13, 2014
Your answer to How can I calculate the ratio of Si to O atoms in SiO2, or the empirical formula of it, based on its structure?
Added Dec 12, 2014
Your answer to I've seen a picture in which Dalai Lama converses with Carl Sagan about the universe, any details?
Added Dec 12, 2014
Your answer to What would be the most profitable activity on Mars that would justify its colonization?
Added Dec 10, 2014
Your answer to Which is more likely to first be colonized by settlements of millions of humans, Antarctica or Mars?
Added Dec 8, 2014
Your answer to Are there intervals in Eastern music using the eleventh harmonic, such as the neutral third 11/9?
Added Dec 7, 2014
Your answer to Where is the fallacy in the following argument?
Added Dec 6, 2014
Your answer to What is the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism?
Added Dec 5, 2014
Your answer to How close to us would an Earth-like planet have to be for its settlement to be economically viable, using current technology?
Added Dec 4, 2014
Your answer to How much of the detectable information coming to earth from space is SETI detecting and recording?
Added Dec 3, 2014
Your answer to What is the British way of typing numbers?
Added Dec 3, 2014
Your answer to Why do we find the number 10 (and its multiples) such a satisfactory benchmark number and its arithmetic application so simple?
Added Dec 2, 2014
Added Dec 2, 2014
Your answer to Are airships useful on Mars?
Added Dec 1, 2014
Your answer to Are there serious doubts from scientists about the descent of man on the moon?
Added Nov 30, 2014
Your answer to Is moon Europa all ice and water, or is there any rocky surface there too?
Added Nov 30, 2014
Your answer to What is the cheapest, legitimate, and realistic manned mission to Mars proposal on record?
Added Nov 29, 2014
Added Nov 27, 2014
Your answer to Is there a viable business model for a permanent Mars colony?
Added Nov 24, 2014
Added Nov 24, 2014
Your answer to In what succession of concrete steps should we colonize and ultimately terraform Mars, according to current science?
Added Nov 23, 2014
Your answer to When will there be a mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter, to check for life?
Added Nov 23, 2014
Your answer to Which is more important to the private space race, colonization or commercialization of space?
Added Nov 22, 2014
Your answer to What other space exploration surprises await us that are 10+ years in the making, similar to Rosetta?
Added Nov 20, 2014
Your answer to What should I do when I get stuck on a mathematical problem?
Added Nov 16, 2014
Your answer to What makes Mars more interesting than the Moon?
Added Nov 16, 2014
Your answer to Why do people want to settle on Mars?
Added Nov 13, 2014
Your answer to How exactly does Rosetta communicate with the earth?
Added Nov 12, 2014
Your answer to What are the green lasers I see in simulated footage showing the Rosetta mission?
Added Nov 12, 2014
Your answer to Will there be a mission like Apollo 10 before actually landing on Mars?
Added Nov 10, 2014
Your answer to Is it fair to compare Tibet under Dalai Lama to the Confederacy?
Added Nov 9, 2014
Your answer to What is the likelihood humans will ever achieve interstellar space travel? Given we don't kill ourselves off first.
Added Nov 8, 2014
Your answer to What is the best way to deal with combative or condescending editors on Wikipedia?
Added Nov 8, 2014
Added Nov 3, 2014
Added Nov 3, 2014
Your answer to What are the real primary colours?
Added Nov 3, 2014
Your answer to Mars (planet): Why isn't the light red in this picture?
Added Nov 2, 2014
Your answer to What reasons do beginners have to be cautious of trying new meditation techniques without guided training?
Added Oct 31, 2014
Your answer to How many years down the line would living on Mars become possible?
Added Oct 30, 2014
Your answer to How much would it cost for humans to build a habitable space craft comparable to Earth?
Added Oct 30, 2014
Your answer to Could a cockroach survive on Mars?
Added Oct 29, 2014
Your answer to In Lord of the Rings, who is the "Lord"?
Added Oct 28, 2014
Your answer to Has NASA purposefully sent any life forms to other planets?
Added Oct 28, 2014
Added Oct 27, 2014
Your answer to If the Dalai Lama is peaceful, why is he ignoring Rohingya prosecution?
Added Oct 26, 2014
Your answer to What is the religion of China? If it's Buddhism, then why is China against the Dalai Lama?
Added Oct 25, 2014
Your answer to Why do we never see any videos from NASA missions, but only pictures or animations?
Added Oct 23, 2014
Added Oct 23, 2014
Your answer to How did the Mars orbiters maneuver their orbits to hide behind Mars when the comet was approaching?
Added Oct 20, 2014
Your answer to Will space travel to Mars be affordable in our lifetimes?
Added Oct 20, 2014
Your answer to If NASA really went to the moon, why don't they prove it to people who disbelieve them?
Added Oct 20, 2014
Your answer to Why does Elon Musk want to send us to Mars?
Added Oct 19, 2014
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Oct 19, 2014
Your answer to Why are tides caused by the Moon rather than the Sun?"
Added Oct 19, 2014
Your answer to Who wants to go to mars in 2020?
Added Oct 18, 2014
Your answer to What were the most pointless/useless space missions in history?
Added Oct 18, 2014
Your answer to Why do Tibetan Monks stare indirectly at the Sun, and what does it mean to them?
Added Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to What are some current issues with planetary rovers such as the Curiosity that NASA and others would like to improve upon?
Added Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to Is it possible to be spiritually enlightened and stupid?
Added Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to If one meditates all one's waking hours as (some) Buddhist monks do, isn't one throwing away one's life?
Added Oct 17, 2014
Your answer to When will the Earth become like Mars?
Added Oct 16, 2014
Your answer to Is life possible on a planet which isn't orbiting a star?
Added Oct 15, 2014
Your answer to Is it time to send a Voyager 3 space probe with a mission mandate of better exploration of interstellar space?
Added Oct 15, 2014
Your answer to What is the most likely planet to be colonized after Mars and the Moon?
Added Oct 14, 2014
Your answer to After we're done terraforming Mars, what crops should we choose that would have the best nutrient yield and fastest growth rates?
Added Oct 13, 2014
Your answer to Who owns Mars?
Added Oct 12, 2014
Your answer to Elon Musk wants to send one million people to Mars. Can he do it?
Added Oct 12, 2014
Added Oct 12, 2014
Your answer to Is there any other planet or moon besides Mars where humans can actually land?
Added Oct 10, 2014
Your answer to What could be the pros and cons about proposed travel to, and settling down/living on, Mars?
Added Oct 10, 2014
Added Oct 9, 2014
Your answer to Are there any plans for terraforming Mars in the foreseeable future?
Added Oct 9, 2014
Your answer to Are all modern computers built using Boole’s theorems? Why?
Added Oct 9, 2014
Your answer to How long ago did the water on Mars disappear?
Added Oct 7, 2014
Added Oct 7, 2014
Your answer to What will travel to Mars be like?
Added Oct 6, 2014
Added Oct 5, 2014
Added Oct 4, 2014
Added Oct 2, 2014
Your answer to What gives Planetary Resources the right to mine asteroids in outer space?
Added Sep 29, 2014
Added Sep 27, 2014
Your answer to In The Lord of the Rings, why didn't Frodo just fly/ride some beast (e.g. the Eagles) to Mount Doom, or at least some of the way there?
Added Sep 27, 2014
Your answer to Are there any plans for reducing the lag time when it comes to communicating with rovers on Mars?
Added Sep 26, 2014
Your answer to So far as I've seen there are no caves on the Moon or Mars, what's with that?
Added Sep 24, 2014
Your answer to If an event has a probability of happening does that mean it could happen?
Added Sep 23, 2014
Your answer to What does it mean when people say "free Tibet"?
Added Sep 22, 2014
Added Sep 21, 2014
Your answer to What is the best thing you can do at age 30 to benefit your life at age 50 and beyond?
Added Sep 18, 2014
Your answer to How do you compose music? What is the process? And what do you wish you'd figured out long ago?
Added Sep 18, 2014
Your answer to Are there any current or planned attempts to try to contact intelligent extraterrestrial life?
Added Sep 16, 2014
Your answer to When we say there is no life on Mars, doesn't it only mean that life do not exist there as we understand it?
Added Sep 16, 2014
Your answer to Is it better for Quora that I answer any question I can or only the ones I really know?
Added Sep 15, 2014
Added Sep 15, 2014
Added Sep 15, 2014
Your answer to Will various countries establishing permanent bases on the Moon lead to war?
Added Sep 15, 2014
Added Sep 13, 2014
Your answer to If NASA really wanted to could they have done a successful mars landing mission right after the apollo program?
Added Sep 12, 2014
Your answer to Can we engineer an oxygen producing bacteria capable of surviving on Mars?
Added Sep 11, 2014
Added Sep 8, 2014
Your answer to Can an astronaut jump to Mars or Jupiter?
Added Sep 8, 2014
Your answer to What would be the biggest challenges to building a hose that extends from the Earth to a space station to supply air, water, fuel, etc?
Added Sep 8, 2014
Added Sep 7, 2014
Added Sep 7, 2014
Added Sep 6, 2014
Your answer to When did people start for the first time to prepare for space exploration?
Added Sep 6, 2014
Your answer to Is there any good reason to colonize space in the near-term future (i.e. next 100, 500 years)?
Added Sep 5, 2014
Your answer to What space missions are currently in the works?
Added Sep 5, 2014
Your answer to Hypothetically, could the ISS inject itself into lunar orbit with its current engines and fuel capacity?
Added Sep 5, 2014
Your answer to Where will the first places outside Earth to be settled by humans be?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Does Peter Jackson's change of The Hobbit in the Desolation of Smaug anger Tolkien fans?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Is there Oxygen in Mars?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Added Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Why are “The Hobbit” movies considerably different from the book?
Added Sep 4, 2014
Your answer to Will self-driving cars be able to drive above the speed limit, or will speed limits be raised or abolished due to them?
Added Sep 3, 2014
Your answer to Is it pity that pi is an irrational number? Does it mean there is something wrong about our understanding of mathematics?
Added Sep 3, 2014
Your answer to Will Russia's actions in the Ukraine result in the US unilaterally stopping all cooperation with Soyuz flights and ISS operations?
Added Sep 3, 2014
Added Sep 3, 2014
Added Sep 3, 2014
Your answer to Could any of our current winged aircrafts fly in Mars' thin atmosphere?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to How does Voyager 1 and 2 still have enough fuel to continuously fly since the 70's?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to Why are Gödel's incompleteness theorems so misunderstood and abused?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to What are some proposed solution recommendations when building a lunar lander in pursuit of the Google XPRIZE?
Added Sep 2, 2014
Your answer to Is mankind currently capable of sending a manned mission to orbit the moon (similar to Apollo 10's mission)?
Added Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to Prove that Fn∣Fm⟺n∣m,∀n,m∈N,n≥3, where Fi is a Fibonacci number ∀i∈N0
Added Sep 1, 2014
Added Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to What is the longest time an astronaut can spend in space before it is too hard to re-acclimatize to Earth?
Added Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to Are there more, fewer or the same number of numbers between zero and one as there are larger than one?
Added Sep 1, 2014
Your answer to How might the mathematics of extra-terrestrials differ from our own?
Added Aug 30, 2014
Added Aug 29, 2014
Your answer to If mathematics is, at its core, inconsistent, does that mean that the Universe itself is, at its core, inconsistent?
Added Aug 29, 2014
Your answer to Can I get a metronome that guesses the tempo when I'm playing?
Added Aug 28, 2014
Added Aug 27, 2014
Your answer to Let's say someone proves the twin prime conjecture. What should he/she do with it?
Added Aug 27, 2014
Your answer to What are concepts in other languages for which there is no English word/phrase?
Added Aug 26, 2014
Added Aug 25, 2014
Your answer to Why do so many people think they are smarter than Elon Musk?
Added Aug 25, 2014
Your answer to Should every programmer or coder be able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide two-digit numbers on the fly?
Added Aug 25, 2014
Your answer to When will we be able to confirm or deny if Jupiter's moon Europa has life?
Added Aug 24, 2014
Your answer to Can satellites orbit the Earth over a fixed geographical location?
Added Aug 24, 2014
Your answer to India's mission on Mars: Will a budget of INR 450 crore suffice to take a man on Mars?
Added Aug 24, 2014
Your answer to If we are able to send earth life and extremophiles to other planets or moons so they can reproduce, should we?
Added Aug 24, 2014
Added Aug 23, 2014
Your answer to Can anybody with the right equipment mine an asteroid?
Added Aug 23, 2014
Your answer to Did man really land on the moon?
Added Aug 23, 2014
Your answer to Are there any organisms on Earth which could live and propagate on another body in our solar system?
Added Aug 22, 2014
Your answer to Why wasn't the ISS designed as a rotating wheel space station?
Added Aug 20, 2014
Added Aug 20, 2014
Your answer to Why didn't man go to Mars?
Added Aug 19, 2014
Your answer to Would a space elevator significantly change the Earth's center of gravity or rate of spin? Would the length of days change?
Added Aug 19, 2014
Your answer to Why don't we use a system similar to a railgun to accelerate space ships to escape velocity?
Added Aug 19, 2014
Added Aug 19, 2014
Your answer to Is there a number that cannot be expressed in any way due to limitations of our universe?
Added Aug 18, 2014
Added Aug 18, 2014
Your answer to Is there a Russian equivalent to NASA's Voyager space probes?
Added Aug 17, 2014
Your answer to It is possible to adapt the atmosphere of Mars for the existence of life similar to Earth over a period of 100 years?
Added Aug 17, 2014
Your answer to If the earth is rotating at a high speed and we jump up, why doesn't the earth move below us at high speed?
Added Aug 17, 2014
Added Aug 17, 2014
Your answer to What is the significance of prime numbers?
Added Aug 16, 2014
Added Aug 16, 2014
Added Aug 16, 2014
Your answer to If the earth is rotating at a high speed and we jump up, why doesn't the earth move below us at high speed?
Added Aug 16, 2014
Added Aug 14, 2014
Your answer to Could diamonds potentially be found on Mars?
Added Aug 14, 2014
Your answer to Does Mars have any moons?
Added Aug 14, 2014
Your answer to Why do we make an effort not to contaminate other planets with Earth life?
Added Aug 13, 2014
Your answer to What is the oldest mathematical conjecture?
Added Aug 12, 2014
Your answer to If humans were to setup a civilization on Mars, would flying cars be realistic considering the gravity there is 38% that of Earth?
Added Aug 12, 2014
Your answer to What has Great Britain (UK) achieved with regards to space exploration?
Added Aug 12, 2014
Your answer to How long will it be until humans have space ships like in Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar, etc?
Added Aug 11, 2014
Added Aug 11, 2014
Added Aug 11, 2014
Your answer to What are the best arguments for debunking Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories?
Added Aug 11, 2014
Your answer to Why have humans never been back to the Moon after 1972?
Added Aug 10, 2014
Your answer to In what ways is writing for Quora more fun than writing for Wikipedia, or vice-versa?
Added Aug 10, 2014
Your answer to Has it been conjectured that ppn+1n+pn+pn+1 is prime?
Added Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to What should we do to ensure the peaceful exploration of other planets, in particular Mars? Is it even possible?
Added Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to In terms of colonizing other planets, is it more a matter of "Is it possible?" or "How do we do it?"
Added Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to How difficult would it be to colonize mars? How soon could such an endeavor happen? Is there any utility in doing so?
Added Aug 9, 2014
Added Aug 9, 2014
Your answer to What would it take to move Venus closer to Earth, making Earth/Venus a twin planet?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Your answer to Can the entire world's energy demands be met with 100% renewable energy and 0% coal, petroleum, nuclear?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Your answer to Is it relevant to race for Mars settlement when our own planet is in risk?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Your answer to Does "survival of the fittest" imply or require a will to survive?
Added Aug 8, 2014
Added Aug 7, 2014
Added Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to What do you say to the people who turn down space exploration & research in favor of fixing things on Earth first instead?
Added Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to I want to try the Riemann hypothesis. What required area of mathematics and other supportive areas do I have to study?
Added Aug 7, 2014
Added Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to How expensive is the colonisation of space?
Added Aug 7, 2014
Your answer to What are the best arguments for debunking Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to Is it possible to create artificial intelligence? Why or how?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to What are the best arguments for debunking Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to Can we make Mars habitable?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to If money was not a constraint, what could be done to avoid an AI apocalypse?
Added Aug 5, 2014
Your answer to Where should manned exploration programs focus first, the Moon or Mars?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to How do you show mathematical symbols on a webpage?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Is there a human corpse in orbit or deep space?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Are astronauts allowed to make autonomous decisions?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Why does it matter if there was ever life on Mars?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Added Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Did Earth life begin on Mars? If so, could we find evidence and or prove it?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Could a direct hit by comet Siding Spring make Mars more hospitable for life?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to What are the possible origins of the "spidery black things" on Mars?
Added Aug 4, 2014
Your answer to Is Mars One a scam?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to What do you think about the decision taken by the United Arab Emirates to establish their own space program?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Added Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to Do you think that humans are just an invasive species on earth? If so, who does the earth belong to?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to Could one survive on Mars with only a pressure demand regulator and warm cloths?
Added Aug 3, 2014
Your answer to Should we steer comets into Mars to give it oceans?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to If we had the ability to terraform a planet to support human life, but in the process changed it irrevocably, should we?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to Is Mars a little too close to the Asteroid Belt for serious consideration for terraforming?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to If it was possible to collect half of the atmosphere of Venus, and deposit it on Mars, would this make both planets more habitable?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to What country/company will be the second to land a person on the Moon and which will be the first to do so on Mars?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Added Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to What are some technologies or approaches being developed to make prolonged trips in space more tenable as regards human biology?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to What is the minimum size for a ring-shaped, rotating space station?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Added Aug 2, 2014
Your answer to If a private company had the money and the resources, is there any law that would prevent them from building a moon colony?
Added Aug 2, 2014
Added Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Can Mars be terraformed?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Can any of the planets of the solar system be terraformed for human habitation?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Why hasn't NASA put onboard microscopes on their rovers to look for Martian microfossils?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to What was the perfect reason for the Kalpana Chawla's Space shuttle failure while returning from space? How did she feel at that moment?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to Would cave systems on the Moon or Mars be anywhere near as varied and intricately formed as ones on Earth?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Your answer to If you are in a spaceship that is traveling very close to the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?
Added Aug 1, 2014
Added Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to Is life possible on a planet without liquid water? Why wouldn't life develop on a different fluid?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Added Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to Is it true that if life had existed on Mars evidence of it would likely be quite obvious?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to Why are there no pictures of the abandoned NASA lunar modules, rovers, etc.?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to The Moon: What was the argument to not accept project Horizon in 1959? What were the main issues with the project?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to What are the reasons for man to not go to Mars?
Added Jul 31, 2014
Added Jul 31, 2014
Your answer to Can a computer be made analog and has it been done?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to Can deserts be made habitable?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to Can we create a spaceship with centrifugal artificial gravity with today's technology?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to What is a true personal story that people have a hard time believing?
Added Jul 30, 2014
Your answer to Is it true that there are more lifeforms on your skin than there are people on the planet?
Added Jul 29, 2014
Your answer to Grammar: Which is grammatically correct: "I hope we can keep this between you and me," or "I hope we can keep this between you and I"?
Added Jul 29, 2014
Your answer to How can Spotify be written in C++ when it works on the web?
Added Jul 29, 2014
Your answer to Do all living organisms on Earth share a common ancestor, or did life begin more than once?
Added Jul 28, 2014
Your answer to What would be the most effective way to fight overpopulation: to colonize a new planet or to efficiently manage terrestrial resources?
Added Jul 28, 2014
Added Jul 28, 2014
Your answer to Music Theory: What is the circle of fifths?
Added Jul 25, 2014
Your answer to Why are pitches classified the way they are in music?
Added Jul 25, 2014
Your answer to What can be the best telescope under $500?
Added Jul 25, 2014
Your answer to How do different musical keys sound different from each other?
Added Jul 24, 2014
Your answer to If evolution has no inherent goal how did such complex forms of life arise when bacteria goes about reproducing just fine?
Added Jul 24, 2014
Added Jul 24, 2014
Your answer to Is the development of sentient AI highly probable within this century?
Added Jul 24, 2014
Your answer to Would a child be able to grow and develop safely if raised in a microgravity environment?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Added Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to Do you think Homo sapiens will spread across the cosmos?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to To what degree is evolution determined by self-selection rather than natural selection?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to What planets/moons do scientists expect to find life in our solar system? I only know of Europa?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to How long has our galaxy harbored Class F, G, and K stars with potentially life-sustaining terrestrial planets?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to Is human colonization of Ceres feasible?
Added Jul 23, 2014
Added Jul 23, 2014
Your answer to What is your preferred answer to the Fermi paradox?
Added Jul 22, 2014
Your answer to Is there any possibility that a species more intelligent than human exists on earth?
Added Jul 22, 2014
Your answer to What is the probability of a significant asteroid impact event by 2100?
Added Jul 21, 2014
Your answer to What are good ways to avoid bugs while programming?
Added Jul 21, 2014
Your answer to Are there programmers who write virtually bug-free code?
Added Jul 21, 2014
Added Jul 20, 2014
Your answer to Is there life on Mars?
Added Jul 20, 2014
Added Jul 20, 2014
Added Jul 20, 2014
Your answer to What resources on Mars could benefit humanity?
Added Jul 19, 2014
Your answer to Is there ever likely going to be a time when humans colonize another celestial body in our solar system?
Added Jul 19, 2014
Your answer to What cool things can we do with a permanent base on the Moon?
Added Jul 19, 2014
Your answer to Are the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, also suitable for off-world colonization?
Added Jul 19, 2014
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I’ve been getting messages from people who are scared of the eclipse this August. It’s totally normal. We get an eclipse of the sun every year or two. Many of them are total. It is very common for the eclipse to span midday at some point along its track too. ~An eclipse of the sun is just the small shadow of our Moon moving over the surface of Earth. Sometimes the shadow cone doesn’t quite touch Earth and we get an annular eclipse. And sometimes it does touch it and we get a total eclipse. But it will only go dark for at most a minute or two, and you have to be inside the shadow when it passes by to see the total eclipse.
It’s a small shadow 70 miles across and travels across the US at supersonic speeds, over Mach 3 at times. It is just a shadow and can’t harm you, but is a spectacular natural event. “Eclipse chasers” will travel hundreds of miles to see one.
Meanwhile half the Earth is plunged into shadow for half a day on average, once a day, we call it night. It causes us no harm at all, so I hope you can understand that you can’t be harmed by experiencing two minutes and 40 seconds of darkness in the middle of the day.
If you watch the eclipse - be sure to get eclipse glasses. Only cost of the order of dollars. You may also be able to get them on the cover of astronomy magazines. You don’t sense any pain even when the back of your eye is burning - or more likely - getting bleached by UV light. You can lose your eyesight in the center of your vision temporarily, and in rare cases, permanently, by staring at the sun without protection.
The only time it’s safe to stare at the sun without eye protection is when the sun is completely blocked by the Moon and you see the corona (see below).
Though they are common, because the shadow is small, then it’s rare to see an eclipse anywhere particularly. You have to be standing within the blue eclipse track shown on the map here: this shows the eclipses from 2001 to 2020 including the US one.

The last total eclipses in the US were back in the 1960s and 1970s so young people will not have seen one. Even older people won’t have seen it unless you traveled to the eclipse track. Here is the map for those US eclipses. All the blue lines here are total eclipses. The red ones are annular, meaning that the sun is not totally blocked out.

This is NASA’s eclipse page, with lots of maps like that in the map section. Solar Eclipse Page
Because they always happen at new moon, you won’t see the moon until it starts to take a bite out of the sun. It’s lit up from behind. In the same way if you stand in the shadow of anything, you will see the darker side of it, not the sunlit side. There’s no scattered light in space, apart from a bit of light from the Earth, so the shaded side of the Moon is pitch black. It is, quite literally, behind the blue sky, so you don’t see anything of it until it passes between you and the sun.
Some people worry because there will be a total eclipse around midday - because of some Bible passage about darkness at noon. Well eclipses that span midday are very common.
First example: Solar eclipse of August 11, 1999
This eclipse was maximum at 11 am in Romania but was still total over India around midday. This was the last total eclipse in the UK

That photograph shows the corona - white rays radiating out from the Sun which you only see at times of total eclipse. If you are lucky enough to have a clear sky, you may see this awesome sight. The sky goes dark and you will even see the brightest stars in good viewing conditions.
It's rather spectacular if you get to see a total eclipse - "eclipse chasers" travel around the world to see eclipses. There are several stages to it, first partial eclipse. Then as the moon covers the sun, you get "Bailey's beads" when light shines between gaps in the mountains around the Moon often ending with a single "diamond ring" when just a tiny patch of sun is left. Then it goes dark and the sun's corona shows and you may see the brightest stars.
And yes, if you stand in just the right place, it turns dark in the middle of the day but only for a minute or so and you have to be exactly on the eclipse track to see this too.
Second example: Solar eclipse of June 21, 2001
This one had greatest eclipse at 12:04:46 so as close to noon as makes no difference - that’s when the eclipse lasted the longest for this one.
Wikipedia has lists of eclipses, so you can follow through to find any other eclipses that you are interested in: Lists of solar eclipses
This is what an eclipse looks like from space - the dark patch here includes some of the area of partial eclipse - it’s only seen as total from the very center and darkest part of the shadow.
You have to be on the narrow path of the Moon's shadow - the Moon is small and the Sun is huge, and the Moon's shadow is shaped like a cone and only just touches the Earth which is why it is so tiny. You have to be positioned within that tiny shadow to see an eclipse.
This example Solar eclipse of August 21, 2017
The maximum possible eclipse is 2 minutes 40 seconds for this one.
It’s tricky to find a place that experiences the eclipse at midday. Grand Island, Nebraska, USA Nebraska has an eclipse that starts at 12:58 and finishes at 13:01. Further east you get eclipses that start and end before midday.
But because of the transition from mountain daylight time to central daylight time, I don’t think there is anywhere that experiences a total eclipse at noon in their local time as they measure it.
If you count midday as the time of day when the sun is highest in the sky, irrespective of your time zone, then there will be a place that experiences the eclipse at that time of day though the clock may not say midday, or 1 pm or any exact time like that because of the large regions spanned by the time zones.
Here is an animated eclipse map. Notice how tiny the shadow is

And map of entire eclipse across the US

There the dark strip is the strip of totality. More detailed maps for states along the track here Total Solar Eclipse 2017 including an interactive map you can zoom into
Details here Total Solar Eclipse of 2017 Aug 21 - they warn: “The eclipse predictions presented here DO NOT include the effects of mountains and valleys along the edge of the Moon. Such corrections for the lunar limb profile may shift the limits of the eclipse path north or south by ~1-3 kilometers, and change the eclipse duration by ~1-3 seconds.”
So, yes, if you stand in just the right place, it turns dark in the middle of the day in this astronomical sense but only for a minute or two, and you have to be exactly on the eclipse track to see this, and your local clocks probably won’t say midday or an exact hour of the day either.
You have to travel to the eclipse track to see a total eclipse (unless you are already on it). Most people in the US will only see the sun partly covered - a partial eclipse. But if you are on the eclipse track, you will see a total eclipse.
DOES IT GET COLD?
Perhaps rather surprisingly, it can get a fair bit cooler, a bit like night falling, but only for a short while. Here is an example from Zambia, the temperature dropped by 15 F or about 8 C. Similar to the change from day to night. That’s the air temperature not the ground temperature.

HOW BIG IS THE SHADOW AND HOW FAST DOES IT MOVE?
The central shadow is about 70 miles wide (see Total Solar Eclipse 2017 ) and crosses the USA at the speed of Concorde, at varying speed.
This is one of the best interactive online calculators - you can click on your location to find extra details such as the path width where you are, and the speed the shadow is moving. USA - 2017 August 21 Total Solar Eclipse - Interactive Google Map - Xavier Jubier
So for instance, its speed is 2410 mph or Mach 3.14 in Western Oregon and 1402 mph or Mach 1.83 near Charleston SC. (from How fast is the shadow moving across the US during the eclipse? )
NASA will send some jets to observe the eclipse, because it’s a chance for scientists to study the solar corona for faint details that are otherwise hard to spot. NASA has a brilliant plan to make the total solar eclipse last nearly 3 times as long
However to see the eclipse for as long as possible you need a supersonic aircraft. In 1973 eight lucky astronomers were able to observe totality for 74 minutes in a supersonic Concorde aircraft in 1973 When Astronomers Chased a Total Eclipse in a Concorde

The French prototype Concorde 001 - which at that point was an experimental aircraft doing test flights, taking off for its 1973 eclipse mission. It flew at Mach 2.05, more than twice the speed of sound. This is Concorde 001 on its last flight on June 30th before it was retired on October 19th to the Air and Space Museum at Le Bourget Airport, Paris.
It was the first Concorde to fly (on March 2nd 1969) and did 249 supersonic flights in total and had 245 hours 49 minutes of supersonic flight hours in total. See Heritage Concorde. The British prototype was 002.
Photo: Jim Lesurf

One of the specially-designed instruments for observing the composition of the sun's corona. Photo: Pierre Léna
Pierre Léna wrote a book about the mission, Racing the Moon's Shadow with Concorde 001 (Astronomers' Universe)
The Concorde prototype they used with its modifed portholes is on display at the as a permanent exhibit at Le Bourget Air and Space Museum
Interviewed by motherboard vice, Léna says: "There's no aircraft flying today that would let us do what we did, nothing that can fly that fast for that long. There are military jets that can fly faster, but not with the endurance of Concorde—and of course they couldn't carry the instruments. Our record is safe for the foreseeable future."
Here is a video about their experience
So, yes, if you stand in just the right place, it turns dark in the middle of the day in this astronomical sense but only for a minute or two, and you have to be exactly on the eclipse track to see this, and your local clocks probably won’t say midday or an exact hour of the day either.
You have to travel to the eclipse track to see a total eclipse (unless you are already on it). Most people in the US will only see the sun partly covered - a partial eclipse. But if you are on the eclipse track, you will see a total eclipse.
GOING TO SEE THE ECLIPSE
It's well worth going to see if it is reasonably close to you, many people say it is a sight of a lifetime. Unless it is clouded over. In that case it just gets dark for a minute or two and you don't see anything much else.
If you do see it, then the sun gets blocked out by the moon and then you see white rays emanating from the shadow. That's the solar corona. So not totally black, you see the corona and you may see the brightest stars. If you are lucky enough to have a clear sky that is.
This can help you find the best place to see it. You need to be inside the shadow. You also need to have clear skies. So best if you can go to a place that has clear skies more often.
See also List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
The idea is still circulating that we are due a mass extinction in the very near future because of a distant companion star called Nemesis at a distance of 1.5 light years. This is nonsense.
Short summary: The theory never predicted a mass extinction in the near future. And anyway, it is pretty disproved now. Most stars like our sun are single, as we now know. The WISE infrared search ruled out any companion expect a very low chance of an extremely cold, unusually cold brown dwarf - it would have spotted a normal brown dwarf at a distance of ten light years. The periodicity was very approximate. If true, the next mass extinction would be 15 million years into our future, but give or take many millions of years. At any rate it’s not due in the near future as at the moment there are very few comets passing close to Earth (only 1 in 155 of objects that pass close to us is a comet).
More details
Here is an example video that might scare you. It’s a clip from a longer BBC documentary - not a news program.
I’ve added a comment to the youtube video clip here
Here are the most recent extinction events - including very minor ones:
Extinction event - List of extinction events - Wikipedia
Holocene extinction: 12,000 years ago through to the present— Ongoing- caused by Humans
Quaternary extinction event 640,000, 74,000, and 13,000 years ago -Unknown; may include climate changes and human overhunting
Pliocene–Pleistocene boundary extinction - 2 Million years ago - Supernova? or Eltanin impact?
Middle Miocene disruption - 14.5 Million years ago - climate change due to change of ocean circulation patterns and perhaps related to the Milankovitch cycles?
Eocene–Oligocene extinction event - 33.9 Million years ago - Popigai impactor?
Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event - 66 million years ago, Chicxulub impactor or Deccan Traps?
So if you look at the really big extinctions 66 million years ago, and 33.9 million years go (which is quite a big one though not one of the “big five”) - you’d expect the last two to have happened 66, 39 and 12 million years ago and the next one to happen 15 million years into the future.
I suppose you could include the Middle Miocene disruption to try to explain why there is nothing in the record 12 million years ago though it’s not thought to be due to an impactor. The one 2 million years ago is a very minor event, and it would be a bit of a stretch to say that it is the 12 million years ago event delayed by 10 million years.
Perhaps you could say that the one 12 million years ago got skipped for some reason - if the theory is valid, it’s obviously a very irregular pattern, no surprise - if the theory was true you’d expect the numbers of comets disturbed to vary, and the number that get into the inner solar system to vary too, and probably sometimes very few get anywhere near Earth.
At any rate we are not “due” another one for many millions of years.
In a bit more detail:
This is shows the most recent mass extinctions in terms of extinction of marine species

From wikipedia, labelled version of Extinction intensity with the Eocene–Oligocene extinction event labelled in black
This shows the effect on biodiversity generally of the extinctions

If the theory was true it would be very approximately periodic. If you suppose an exact cycle with the huge spike at 66 million years ago as a starting point, there would be two events, 39 million years ago and 12 million years ago with the next one due 15 million years into the future. Either way, you wouldn't expect the next one for at least many millions of years.
They have gone back 250 million years and found what seems to be a statistically significant correlation with a period of 27 million years, but obviously not an exact periodicity. It's always been a controversial theory. However, their theory of the influence of a second star is pretty much ruled out now by the WISE infrared survey. It would have spotted a red dwarf easily and most brown dwarfs too unless very very cold (which is unusual). It would have spotted most brown dwarfs 10 light years away. The Nemesis hypothesis is a star orbiting 1.5 light years away. That’s a bit closer though it is still much of the way to our nearest star Proxima Centauri, a faint red dwarf about 4.25 light years away.
With it orbiting so far away I suppose it's not surprising if the correlation is approximate, but it seems to be ruled out now.
If there was a comet mass extinction on its way you'd expect to see an increase in comets passing close to Earth - but at the moment only 1 in 147 of the objects that do close flybys of Earth are comets so we are certainly not yet in much danger of comets, whatever the future may bring millions of years into the future.
As of writing this, there are 16396 known Near Earth Objects of which 16290 are asteroids and 106 are comets. The comets are rare - the last time one was discovered was in June 2016, and that number is increasing very slowly as they discover more objects of all types including very faint comets. See Discovery Statistics
That makes it 1 in 155 of the currently known NEOs that are comets. So we certainly aren’t in the middle of a big influx of comets right now.
WISE SURVEY FOR A COMPANION STAR, BROWN DWARF OR DISTANT LARGE PLANETS
In any case the WISE infrared survey has pretty much ruled out the Nemesis and the Tyche theories. It does leave open the possibility of very distant large planets, but any ones as close to the Sun as several times the distance to Neptune would be spotted easy.

Artist's impression of the NASA Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. Researchers proved that Nemesis and Tyche can't exist in results published in 2014, using data that it collected in 2010 to 2011.
It was an all sky survey and has ruled out the possibility of a Saturn sized object out to 10,000 times the Earth - Sun distance (33 times distance to Neptune), and a Jupiter size or larger object out to 26,000 times that distance. (I.e. 26,000 AU, 867 times distance to Neptune)
There could easily be Mars or Neptune sized objects closer than that but they would still need to be several times the distance to Neptune or we’d spot them easily.
Planets get rapidly harder to spot if they are further away. If they only shine by reflected light from the sun, then a planet at ten times the distance of Neptune would be 10,000 times fainter (sunlight hitting it is 100 times fainter, but as seen from Earth it seems 100 times smaller too in terms of the area of the patch it occupies in the sky, so combining those effects, it would be 100,000 times fainter in our telescopes). If 100 times further way, it would be 100 million times fainter. So you can see how, though it’s easy to miss distant planets, we can’t possibly miss nearby planets, even if they only shine by reflected light.
If they are warm, like brown dwarfs or stars, they are much easier to spot because then if 100 times further away they are only 100 times fainter.
Warming something up of course doesn’t make it invisible, so anything that’s warm like a brown dwarf is as easy to spot visually as a planet, but in addition is rather easier to spot in infrared than a planet, especially if it is a very long way away from the nearest star and so doesn’t shine much by reflected light. This is something that the Nibiru conspiracy theorists often get wrong - they assume for some reason that brown dwarfs are invisible. They aren’t. They can of course be dark in colour, like our Moon - its rocks are dark in colour like worn asphalt (approximately same brightness as the lunar rocks) but its bright in our night sky because it is close to the sun and close to us. The darkest brown dwarf, at the distance of Jupiter would be as bright as Betelgeuse, the bright star which forms one of the shoulders of Orion.
See also
See also List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
Short summary. Schummann resonances are real. They are not sound. They are radio waves, so you need something like a radio antenna to detect them - but these are radio waves that are far too big for a normal radio antenna to detect them as they are larger than our entire planet. They are also ultra low energy with very feeble photons. There is no way anything like that could affect us or be generated by us or protect us from anything. The HAARP experiment managed to generate a very feeble glow a bit like the Northern lights, but far too faint to be seen with the naked eye. It's using tiny amounts of energy and creates miniscule effects compared to the natural phenomena they are studying.
Example story:
First Schuman Resonances are real. They are radio waves with wavelengths at multiples of the circumference of the Earth, resonating inside the Earth's magnetosphere.. So they are 40,000 kilometers in wavelength upwards. The lowest frequency wavelengths in normal use, the "long wave" radio waves are multiple kilometers in scale. (Radio waves are much much longer than sound waves at the same frequency because light travels much faster than sound).
They have radio frequencies of 7.83 Hz upwards, this means that they resonate around the world around 8 times a second. It's not sound though, it's radio waves. I don't know what that could possibly be protecting us from, - and I can't think of any way that humans could generate radio waves with a wavelength of 40,000 km by our mental activity or anything like that. You could generate ultra low frequency sound waves perhaps - elephants do. But radio waves? At higher frequencies yes, but you'd need to be similar in size to a planet to create radio waves as low frequency as this. That's because you generally need an antenna getting on for the size of the wavelength to generate it efficiently - long wave radio transmitters can be less than a quarter of the wavelength and so are more inefficient. But to generate a wavelength of 40,000 km you would need to have wavelengths of thousands of kilometers.
So that's where HAARP comes in. We have plenty of radio transmitters but they can't create radio waves this big.
HAARP used ultra high frequency radio waves at 2.8 to 10 MHz so around a million times the frequency to perturb the ionosphere which then indirectly generates the ultra low frequency radio waves. So that's the connection.
We use the ionosphere every time we send radio waves around the world as they get to their target by bouncing around inside the ionosphere much like the Schuman resonances. So it's natural to want to study the ionosphere, and there's nothing sinister about that. Also this is the only way to generate such long wavelength radio waves. We generate radio waves in all the other areas of the radio spectrum, so the idea is to generate and study radio waves of very low frequencies.
Low frequency means also that the individual photons that make up the wave are very low energy. And the total power used by HAARP with one of its transmissions is far less than that of a lightning flash, and the world experiences 50 to 100 lightning flashes per second.
It has nothing to do with the weather. It might have some connection with the aurora - Northern and Southern lights. They say that it creates a glow they can study but it is so faint you can't see it with the naked eye. So it's nowhere near as powerful as the natural events that perturb the ionosphere and cause glows in it, or the natural Schumann waves.
Schumann resonances - Wikipedia
High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program - Wikipedia
I did this as a reply to a discussion here in the facebook group V.O.R.T.E.X.
See also
SUMMARY
This is a discovery of a clumping of one of the meteor showers we get every year. We are in no more danger of being hit by space rocks than we were before this discovery, but the new discovery gives astronomers a place to look to search for asteroids that could potentially hit Earth. These asteroids are fragments of a comet so they are made of ice and the more common smaller chunks in this stream will burn up in the upper atmosphere harmlessly.
IN DETAIL
This is an example of one of the stories that have worried people:
And this is an example of a story that gets it right - an article in the reputable online astronomy magazine “EarthSky”
So what is the truth behind this story?
Every year Earth passes through the debris of comet 2P/Encke in November. It’s one of the many times of the year when we get more shooting stars than usual in what’s called a “meteor shower”. The Taurids shower is one of the showers that is noted for its fireballs - larger meteorites that can become as bright as the Moon or brighter. Here is an example, a Taurids fireball videoed from Thailand in November 2015:
The overall risk hasn't changed - Earth passes through this extra branch of the Taurids every few years. So - the distribution of asteroids is not uniform but is a bit clumpy, and this is one of the clumps, so if you look in this clump maybe you have a better chance of spotting the smaller asteroids.
It’s a regular meteor shower that comes every year, but they say there’s an extra “branch” that’s clumpy with a slightly different orbit. They say that the main clumps in that orbit encounter Earth only every few years. The say the objects are weak, like comets, easily broken up, but can be large with one confirmed fireball of 1 meter and another probable one of 2–3 meters in diameter.
The astronomers used a network of observation stations in Czechoslovakia to study the fireballs in 2015. Many of them were very bright, some brighter than a full Moon and one that was widely photographed, they estimated to have weighed a metric ton and been about one meter in diameter. They got more reports of that one than any before, and all 15 of their fireball observation stations photographed it. See page 7 of their paper. They had one other fireball of similar brightness. This is an earlier paper they did about those two fireballs published in May 2016.
They think that a 10 meter diameter fireball seen the same day over the Pacific Ocean may belong to the same branch. See discussion on page 16
Their network of 15 observation stations let them work out the orbits of the Taurids more precisely than ever before.
The Taurid stream is already divided into two branches, the Northern and the Southern branch. Based on their data, they propose a new sub-branch of the southern branch.
So, they then did a search in the database for asteroids that could match the properties of their new sub branch of the southern branch of the Taurids. They found two of them, 2015 TX24 and 2005 UR. These are hundreds of meters in diameter.
They think there probably are many asteroids still to be discovered in this branch that are tens of meters in diameter. They would be fragile, easily broken up in the atmosphere, but the largest ones could be large enough to cause “significant regional and even continental damage”.
So the very largest ones would be a threat to the ground like Tunguska or even more than that.
Earth encounters this new stream every few years, and when that happens then the risk of being hit by larger asteroids is increased.
The paper in full is here
SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
It doesn’t mean an increased risk of asteroids overall. It’s just that they think that there might be more chance of them on those particular years - so less on other years. Something to focus attention on.
The Taurids stream follow the orbit of Encke, a comet. It’s debris from a comet so rather fragile, and so most of it would just break up in the upper atmosphere.
If they are right, it’s nothing new. If they are right, this has been happening every few years for centuries. The overall risk is not changed, it’s just that they are saying we need to pay attention to a particular group of asteroids as worth looking at closely, and the risk may be higher in those years, but if so, it is lower in other years.
Our asteroid searches are complete for objects like this for 10 km upwards, and nearly everything of 1 km or larger has been found as well, but we are missing many of around 100 meters or so and smaller ones. So we could be surprised by one of those, but for those also we’d expect to see them do close flybys of Earth many times before they hit, if there are any due to hit us any time soon.
We could be hit by one of them unexpectedly but the chance is very low, as it is for all 100 meter diameter meteorites. Perhaps this paper will help them to direct observations in a way to find them more quickly or help motivate new telescopes and more observations to find them?
A 100 meter asteroid could devastate a small country, and if it hit London it would cause gale force winds and smash windows as far as Edinburgh. It might be able to create a tsunami if it crashed into shallow water, but in deep water the waves behave in a way that doesn’t seem to lead to tsunami in the latest modeling. For global effects you need a 1 km asteroid and we’ve found 90% of those and you’d have a fair bit of warning for those. 10 km or larger basically can’t happen.
But large asteroids impacts are very rare, after all there have been none that killed large numbers of people in recorded history - and many large earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunami.
If anything the risk from asteroids is much lower in this century than any other previous one, because we’ve found most of the ones down to 1 km and many smaller ones too. So we know that none of those can hit us (which we didn’t know before).
Also, we now have the ability to predict and evacuate the impact zone in any of the larger ones which we couldn’t do before so the risk of loss of life is much lower now than it was in the past.
So, as far as asteroids are concerned, right now is the safest humans have ever been in recorded history. They’ve found all the 10 km asteroids and we know none of them are headed to Earth in the next few centuries - even in the twentieth century astronomers didn’t know that. They’ve found 90% of the 1 km asteroids and none of those are headed our way either.
As for the smaller ones, they remain a risk, but so also are earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions etc. But with asteroids it’s a risk we can do something about. By the 2030s we should have found just about all of the asteroids even the smaller ones. The aim is to find 99% of the asteroids down to 130 meters by the end of the 2020s, I’m not sure if they will succeed by then, but surely by the 2030s.
Once we know them that well then we can deflect any that are headed our way, or evacuate the impact zone. But they are very rare - through all of recorded history there’s no example of an asteroid like that hitting a populated area. Most of Earth is unpopulated still, desert or ocean. So if we do get such an asteroid it’s likely to land in a remote desert place. And we would expect at least a few weeks of warning for something as large as 100 meters, enough time to evacuate the impact zone.
So we are far safer now than we were even last century, and as time goes on we will know these things in more and more detail and with knowledge comes the ability to do something about it. And there is nothing that’s increasing our risk.
That Taurids result, if it is confirmed, is actually helping to reduce the risk by telling astronomers that a particular direction in space is a good place to look to try to find the asteroids we haven’t found yet.
See also List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
This is a particularly bizarre one as 3BC2017 is not even an asteroid name - asteroids start with the year, then two letters, then a number. They got it back to front, and put the year last. So it's totally made up. The story was published in the Express, and it's all based off some amateur video an anonymous uploader uplaoded to youtube. It's quoted to "An unnamed video narrator" and they explain throughout that it is actually a hoax, if you read it in detail.

This is the image the Express uploaded, captioned “the hoax video warns that it is not a hoax.”. We can’t be hit by an asteroid that big - that’s an artist’s impression of one of the planetesimals that hit Early Earth not long after the formation of the Moon. They are all gone from the inner solar system now, or in stable orbits like Ceres or Vesta.x
'This is NOT a hoax' Asteroid strike will kill millions in JUNE, shocking video claims
The article ends:
“The asteroid the video names as 3BC2017 is not a name used by NASA in any of its official asteroid databases, so does not exist.”
“Many hoax apocalypse prediction videos are placed on YouTube just to raise advertising revenue due to the large number of views they attract.”
“NASA says videos like this are just hoaxes, and scaremongering, and that it knows of no asteroid that could hot the earth for at least 100 years.”
So - one wonders why they published it. And if they did - perhaps to allay fears of peole scared by it - why not put the word “hoax” prominently in the title?
There is nothing at all to worry about here.
IN YET MORE DETAIL - ASTRONOMICALLY IMPOSSIBLE - NO ASTEROIDS THAT LARGE COULD HIT US
What he describes is astronomically impossible and reads like a bad B movie plot script. It is possible for an asteroid to hit Earth with very little warning, but it would have to be very small to do that. We’ve already found all the ones of 10 km or larger and 90% of the ones of 1 km diameter and a comet would be spotted years in advance and is very very unlikely since only 1 in 147 of the flybys of Earth are by comets.
A tiny 20 - 40 meter diameter asteroid could hit Earth with very little warning, and though our advance warning system is improved since Chelyabinsk, still, if one of those came from close to the direction of the sun then we might not spot it until it hit. They now think we get hit by one of those every 80 years, but most of Earth is ocean and what isn’t ocean is mainly desert or ice caps, and the inhabited area is mainly lightly populated agricultural land outside cities. These are far more common than the larger meteorites so the next impact is most likely to be one of those. It could be predicted in advance - we’ve already had two impacts that were predicted in advance, of tiny asteroids too small to be of any danger to anyone, hitting one in a desert, one in the sea. If you were directly hit by a small meteorite you could be injured, even killed, and there are some examples of people killed by small meteorites in the literature. But this is very rare indeed, only a few per century reported world wide - many people are reported as killed by lightning every year so you can see the difference there.
So from an astronomical point of view, small asteroid impacts could happen at any time, including that date of course, so it would be foolish in the extreme to say we can’t be hit by a small asteroid on that date.
But a large asteroid large enough to have global effects - well we’d know about that by now. An asteroid large enough to stop the world rotating for three days - that doesn’t even make sense.
ASTEROID LARGE ENOUGH TO STOP EARTH ROTATING - IMPOSSIBLE IN PRESENT DAY SOLAR SYSTEM
If you had a really huge asteroid, as large as the Moon perhaps, which hit Earth in just the right place, maybe it could stop it rotating. But that would be the least of our worries as the entire surface would be molten after an impact like that, seas and atmosphere gone. And the only way to start it rotating again would be a second impact just as large in the opposite direction. It makes no sense astronomically.
If there were large Moon sized objects in our solar system on random orbits that took them past Earth frequently, that would be a major risk. And there were objects like that in the early solar system, when an even large object the size of Mars hit early Earth and the Moon formed from the debris - at least that’s the current leading theory for the formation of the Moon.
So back then 4.6 billion years ago, soon after the formation of the Moon, this scenario was possible though incredibly unlikely. But the solar system has settled down - those orbits were unstable, and eventually all those “planetary embryos” as they were called hit other planets or were ejected from the solar system or hit the Sun. So they are all gone now, and what’s left is orbiting in stable orbits in the asteroid belt or in orbits in the outer solar system in resonances with Neptune and further out.
There isn’t any stable orbit for an object like that in the inner solar system. So if there ever were objects like that, they are long gone.
And from time to time they may come into the inner solar system from beyond Neptune, but Jupiter is the big target and protects us from them, in simulations. We can see that from the cratering record. All the really big craters on the Moon, Mars, Mercury and what we have of the surface history of Earth come from well over three billion years ago (Venus had a global resurfacing by volcanism a few hundred million years ago so doesn’t give us evidence of this early time but it has no new huge impacts either).. Since then, we only have craters from only smaller asteroids of 10 km and a bit more than that but less than 100 km. So his scenario is impossible at present.
So that’s the astronomy. And this is someone just saying it, with no cites, no evidence, no explanation, the papers don’t know his name, he’s just like an anonymous stranger buttonholing you in the street.
They have already found all the asteroids of 10 km in diameter or larger that do flybys of Earth (and so potentially could hit it). That’s the size of New York. Compared to Earth, it’s tiny. And none of them are going to hit Earth in the next several centuries. There is no way we are going to be hit by an asteroid the size of the Moon. There are comets that big way out in the outermost reaches of the solar system around the orbit of Neptune - but they are in reasonably stable orbits too, all the ones known, for at least thousands of years into the future - and we have Jupiter in between to protect us from them if there was any object headed our way. But we’d spot something like that decades before it got here. That’s totally impossible that something that big could hit us. And it’s never happened in the last 3 billion years because Jupiter protects us.
RED TOP TABLOID HOAXES
The red top tabloids publish hoaxes. You know that they know no more about this person who uploaded the video than the readers. Anyone can upload a video to youtube and there is no check on what they upload by anyone and they can say anything in the video. Why pay any attention to it?
The name is just made up. There is nothing in the video to suggest that the author knows anything about astronomy. The one thing he does say about the Earth’s rotation stopping for 3 days then restarting shows a complete ignorance of the most basic ideas in astronomy.
It’s just a waste of ink. Why also do people buy these stories? I mean - they write these stories because there are people who like to buy them for some reason. They wouldn’t write these articles if they didn’t sell.
Do check out my petition:
It seems to be legal to write these fake doomsday stories. But maybe we can somehow put pressure on them. I had the idea to try to get an op ed published on this, if I could get it into one of the main newspapers it might help perhaps but I think that would be hard to do. I don’t think they understand really how worried these stories make some people.
LATER VIDEO WITH ASTEROID NAME RE-ARRANGED TO 2017 3BC
In a later video, the rearranged the letters and numbers in the asteroid name to “2017 3BC” but it’s still not a bona fide asteroid name; It should be 2017 BC3. But there is no 2017 BC3. The list jumps from 2017 AB to 2017 BQ13
List of minor planets: 495001–496000 - Wikipedia
This is how the provisional asteroid names are worked out
New- And Old-Style Minor Planet Designations
Also the only predicted flyby around that date is on 24th June at a distance of 7.9 times the distance of the Moon, see for the details 2010NY65:
So obviously NASA hasn’t predicted it, what’s more of course any asteroid with a path predicted to hit Earth that would be added to the sentry tables as a red entry. See near future predicted flybys - published on the website of the ESA - European Space Agency
And it still says the same impossible thing that it would stop the Earth rotating. It is just BS. The latest video is just impressionistic music with children floating in the sky fading in and out with an image of a sunset or sunrise behind it and of a plane. I have no idea what it has to do with the subject matter. Probably an illegally copied promotional video for a song..
See also List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
This is actually true, even though it’s published in the Sun, but it’s nothing to be alarmed about today. Shows that they do sometimes do reasonably accurate science articles on asteroid impacts. This one is genuine science but not something we need to worry about at present. If accurate it helps fill in the missing link in a "cold case" 252 million years old.
The article in the Sun is here: Mysterious 'anomaly' linked to ancient apocalyse mass extinction discovered in The Falklands
The press release is here
This is one of the images of the anomaly, showing variations in the magnetic field

Falkland islands in yellow overlaying image of the strength of Earth’s magnetism in red, courtesy of the National Centers for Environmental Information.
The basin is also visible in seismic reflection profiles and gravity surveys as well as magnetic ones. It “has traits that are consistent with impact craters”.
If this is confirmed, then it might explain the Permian-Triassic mass extinction which happened 252 million years ago as they estimate its age as 250 to 270 million years ago.
The crater is around 150 miles in diameter, or around 250 km in diameter. At that size, the impactor would probably be larger than 10 km in diameter or around the size of New York city.
It’s not a concern for the present though, as we know all the asteroids of 10 km or larger that cross Earth's orbit regularly and none can hit us in the next few centuries. We know nearly all the 1 km asteroids too.
That only leaves comets. We'd spot such a large comet many years in advance, but comets are very rare at least at present, only 1 in 147 of the objects that do close flybys of us are comets. That makes it a 1 in 147 million the chance of a large comet hitting Earth this century, which is so unlikely that it's not something to be concerned about. We might get quite a large comet come past Earth, as has happened in the past, and happened recently with Mars with Siding Spring - a half kilometer diameter comet that had a tiny chance of hitting Mars but in the end missed by quite a distance - planets are a tiny target so if we do spot a largish comet heading towards Earth it's almost bound to miss.
See also List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
Here the paper it’s all based on is genuine science. The paper suggests that all stars are born as part of very wide binary systems. But it’s been seriously misreported in the tabloids and some popular science articles as support for the theory of Nemesis. The original paper has no mention of the hypothesis, which was disproved conclusively by WISE a few years back.
The press release does mention “Nemesis” in a remark by one of the authors. One of the authors Steven Stahler, is quoted by Berkeley university in their press release as saying
“We are saying, yes, there probably was a Nemesis, a long time ago,”
But by “a long time ago”, it’s clear from the paper that they mean in the first few million years after the Sun formed. That would be long long before the dinosaurs, before the formation of the Moon even, over 4.5 billion years ago.
The popular science articles and news stories go on to add as journalistic elaboration that this supports the Nemesis theory. That’s the theory of a distant star that sends comets towards the inner solar system every 26 million years. But that theory was disproved by the Wise results some years back.
Example stories which get it wrong:
Example that gets it right
IN DETAIL
The original techy article is here: [1705.00049] Embedded Binaries and Their Dense Cores
It puts forward the thesis that most stars are born in very wide binary systems with the stars around 500 au apart. So far, that’s the same as what the papers are saying.

Image from press release of a very young binary star system in the Perseus molecular cloud, less than 1 million years old. The dense core is outlined in oval, and the image is from the SCUBA-2 survey image by Sarah Sadavoy, CfA.
However after that it differs.
It suggests that the stars then normally split up, though they are not sure how that happens. See their conclusions on page 13, particularly:
“(5) Our model further predicts that most wide binaries break apart, although some shrink to become tighter systems. We have considered two modes of binary breakup - core splitting and stellar ejection. Under either mode, we obtain equally good fits to the observed populations of embedded stars. Deeper and higher-resolution studies of more evolved stars may help decide which picture is correct.”
So they have two hypotheses to explain how the binaries split up:
This makes no difference at all to the question of whether our Sun has a companion star. We now know it doesn’t from the WISE results. It does however suggest that somewhere in our galaxy there is another star that was originally born not just in the same nebula as us, but also in the same dust / gas core as us. But it’s probably thousands or tens of thousands of light years away now.

Artist's impression of the NASA Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. Researchers proved that Nemesis and Tyche can't exist in results published in 2014, using data that it collected in 2010 to 2011.
It was an all sky survey and has ruled out the possibility of a Saturn sized object out to 10,000 times the Earth - Sun distance, and a Jupiter size or larger object out to 26,000 times that distance. (I.e. 26,000 AU.)
It ruled out a red dwarf star completely and it ruled out even brown dwarfs, unless very unusually cold. It discovered normal brown dwarfs at a distance of 10 light years.
See also Debunked: Nemesis or Tyche is Nibiru by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
See also List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
SPOILER ALERT This review contains spoilers. I gave this a 1 point on IMDb for awful, for the science. I'd give it an 8 perhaps for the science fiction, special effects and story line as I did thoroughly enjoy watching it, though those who find such things scary probably wouldn't. But I'm judging it for its science as it is presented as a docudrama to present science.
So let's look at the other scenarios (apart from the disease outbreak) in more detail
My IMDb review is here.
MEGATSUNAMI
The BBC site itself has a page about this: Mega-tsunami: Wave of Destruction
The main inaccuracies are that
A more detailed study in 2013 shows that the deposits in the sea bed next to the Canary islands though they did deposit many cubic kilometers of rock, didn't do so all in one go. Instead they did them as a series of smaller subunits. So they would not have caused a tsunami.
Here is a quote from Dave Petley who researches landslides:
New Acquaintance: "So what do you do?"
Me: "I research natural hazards, and in particular landslides"
NA: "Oh – is it true that one of the Canary Islands volcanoes is going to collapse in a giant landslide? I was told that it'll cause a tsunami that'll devastate the coasts of Europe and America"
Me: "Excuse me – I'm just going to bang my head on the table…" [thump!]
That’s by Dave Petley, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation) at the University of Sheffield and researcher into landslides. Quote from The Canary Islands landslide-induced tsunami scare
ASTEROID IMPACT
This is the only scenario that was reasonably accurate. Except that such space rocks are very rare.
It's true that a 100 meter rock could hit us with not much warning. They have found all the rocks larger than 10 km, more than 90% of the ones above 1 km, but the ones above 100 meters are far more numerous. It's very unlikely though that it would hit a city - most of the Earth is ocean and desert.
Also we’d have more warning than they suggest in the docudrama. We missed the Chelyabinsk meteorite but if it had been just 40 meters in diameter instead of 20 meters we’d have spotted it months before. So it’s very likely we’ll spot a 100 meter diameter asteroid many months before and we’d surely spot it weeks before impact.
Also, most of Earth is desert or ocean. According to this 2014 study 0.6% of the Earth’s surface is artificial surfaces - and that includes roads and quarries as well as cities. So if we did get a 100 meter asteroid hit Earth, bearing in mind also that 80% of the Earth is ocean, then the chance of it hitting a city, is surely under 0.12%. It would have large scale effects - storms and broken windows for hundreds of kilometers, but with warning we’d be prepared, evacuate the impact zone, and those far from it would be told to keep away from windows etc.
Asteroids are the one natural disaster we can predict exactly, to the minute, with enough advance warning to track them. Back in 2003 when this film was published, we’d not have much warning at all and that part of this section was reasonably accurate. But now we’d have much more warning.
We could still get one of those with only weeks or months of warning, but by the end of the 2020s the risk of this should be reduced to a tiny level, or certainly by the 2030s.

BLACK HOLES / STRANGELETS
In this section they mention the RHIC study, but only the list of scenarios they looked into, not their conclusions.
It uses the cosmic rays evidence for the mini black holes and vacuum decay - that there are much more energetic collisions happen all the time in the upper atmosphere, a million times a year. It uses a slightly different argument for the strangelets:
STRANGELETS
For the slow ions strangelet collisions it uses collisions of ions with the Moon. For the idea that perhaps strangelets are only created in collisions of gold ions - they say that there'd be many such ions hitting each other in free space and if they created strangelets, they would fall into stars like our Sun and should turn them into strange matter which is not observed. The paper is here here
There was a similar review for the LHC by an independent group of scientists in 2003 which is here: [0806.3414] Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions Conclusions summarized here: The safety of the LHC
LHC REVIEW
The LHC review doesn't bother to go into details for the RHIC arguments against strangelets as, the RHIC of course has validated those argumentsalready by being run without creating strangelets.
"It is difficult for strange matter to stick together in the high temperatures produced by such colliders, rather as ice does not form in hot water. In addition, quarks will be more dilute at the LHC than at RHIC, making it more difficult to assemble strange matter. Strangelet production at the LHC is therefore less likely than at RHIC, and experience there has already validated the arguments that strangelets cannot be produced."
VACUUM BUBBLE
It’s the same for both, and the LHC summary is:
On the vacuum bubble, they say
"There have been speculations that the Universe is not in its most stable configuration, and that perturbations caused by the LHC could tip it into a more stable state, called a vacuum bubble, in which we could not exist. If the LHC could do this, then so could cosmic-ray collisions. Since such vacuum bubbles have not been produced anywhere in the visible Universe, they will not be made by the LHC."
Though they don’t go into any details there, there are other reasons for thinking that a vacuum bubble is scientifically implausible. The universe experienced far higher energies and densities than can ever be produced now in the first tiny fraction of a second of the Big Bang, before inflation, which is when it is supposed to have fallen into a false vacuum. How could it get through that without going into a true vacuum state? Surely that’s evidence that we are in a true vacuum state? And if it were true, it’s so vastly unlikely that there’s no real chance of a vacuum bubble forming until a number of years in the future so vast you need 1 followed by 100 zeroes to express it.
For more about this see Debunking: Stephen Hawking Says Universe is on the brink of instability and could collapse - metastable, in a false vacuum state.
MINI BLACK HOLES
Again, it’s the same for both, and the LHC summary is:
For black holes:
"Whilst collisions at the LHC differ from cosmic-ray collisions with astronomical bodies like the Earth in that new particles produced in LHC collisions tend to move more slowly than those produced by cosmic rays, one can still demonstrate their safety. The specific reasons for this depend whether the black holes are electrically charged, or neutral. Many stable black holes would be expected to be electrically charged, since they are created by charged particles. In this case they would interact with ordinary matter and be stopped while traversing the Earth or Sun, whether produced by cosmic rays or the LHC. The fact that the Earth and Sun are still here rules out the possibility that cosmic rays or the LHC could produce dangerous charged microscopic black holes. If stable microscopic black holes had no electric charge, their interactions with the Earth would be very weak. Those produced by cosmic rays would pass harmlessly through the Earth into space, whereas those produced by the LHC could remain on Earth. However, there are much larger and denser astronomical bodies than the Earth in the Universe. Black holes produced in cosmic-ray collisions with bodies such as neutron stars and white dwarf stars would be brought to rest.
The continued existence of such dense bodies, as well as the Earth, rules out the possibility of the LHC producing any dangerous black holes."
So all those scenarios are ruled out - and remember that in the case of the LHC review, this is a review by independent scientists.
NEED PARTICLE ACCELERATOR AS LARGE AS THE SOLAR SYSTEM
To produce collisions with similar energy to the ones with cosmic radiation particles, we'd need to build particle accelerators as large as a solar system, so it's not something we are going to do any time soon.
Though they don’t cover these, it's the same for other astronomical "doomsday scenarios". Astronomy has moved on hugely in the last decade or so and we know our stellar neighbourhood very well now. There are no stars able to go supernova close enough to harm Earth. The only gamma ray burst candidate we know of close enough to harm us is now known to be angled away from us.
DOCUDRAMA SELECTION OF MATERIAL TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE STORY LINE ONLY
Although the BBC does produce many good documentaries, they often will take a particular story line, and anything not contributing to the story they want to tell is left out. That can work very well. I've just watched an excellent documentary on Horizon about volcanism in the solar system. But sometimes it is seriously flawed, especially if it presents a minority view and only presents the reasons for that view as in this case.
For instance, in this docudrama, they only present clips from scientists that support their story line. Nothing from anyone explaining why the particle accelerator was safe for instance. Just saying that it is without explanation. Hopefully from this review you can see that they had good reason for saying that it was safe.
I think it is fair to say, it’s a docudrama designed by script writers who know how to present a compelling story line rather than scientists.
As a drama, it’s kind of interesting, like Ground Hog Day, it could be a basis for an episode of Doctor Who or Star Trek etc. But as science, it’s absolutely awful, and as it is presented as science I give it the lowest score available for a review of 1.
You can't say that a science documentary, because it is on the BBC, is okay. Many of them are great but you get a few rotten tomatoes like this one. It's basically written by a good script writer with scant regard to anything scientific that doesn't support and advance their story line.
For more about this see also
List of articles here: List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
Summary - that is indeed what he says. The details are sketchy and it’s about a program series to be aired on the BBC in the future. However if you look at the list of things mentioned in the program description, none of them would make us extinct in the next century.
First the story itself is true - but about a future program series that will air on the BBC called “Expedition New Earth”. Details here
All we know about what he will say is this short paragraph:
“Professor Stephen Hawking thinks the human species will have to populate a new planet within 100 years if it is to survive. With climate change, overdue asteroid strikes, epidemics and population growth, our own planet is increasingly precarious.”
“In this landmark series, Expedition New Earth, he enlists engineering expert Prof Danielle George and his own former student, Christophe Galfard, to find out if and how humans can reach for the stars and move to different planets.”
So he lists
POPULATION GROWTH
The last two I think we can rule out as making us extinct right away. How can population growth make us extinct? It could lead to a boom / bust where the population drops to much lower numbers, but populations don’t go extinct as a result of growth. A famous example is the boom / bust of lemmings. After a boom you get some years with very few lemmings, but they don’t go extinct.
Also our population is actually leveling off at ten to eleven billion by 2100 with the middle of the road projections. And we aren’t running out of the capability to feed ourselves.
We have already reached peak child, and most areas of the world now have fertility levels at or below replacement, and feature a slowly growing, steady or declining population. Our world population continues to grow only because with better health world wide, people on average live longer each year.
The middle of the range projections have the Earth's population trending towards 11 billion by 2100 while lower projections have it level off at ten billion or even start to decline towards the end of the century.

So whatever happens, we aren't headed for Malthusian type exponential growth because we have reached peak child already. In the graph above, the red dotted lines show the upper and lower limits for the 95% prediction interval. The blue lines are for +- 0.5 children per couple average. You can look up the data here, the graphs page for the UN population division.
Though we may not reach peak population this century, most parts of the world have a good chance of stabilizing before then, especially the more developed countries. The least developed countries are the ones that would get most population growth. The most rapid growth is in Africa in the projections. You can see a break down for each region of the world here,

Older figures from 2014. Most of the population growth is in Africa by the end of the century by these figures, with everywhere else leveling off by then, the least developed countries are the ones that grow most rapidly, so that's a reflection of the situation in Africa
So, things are actually looking brighter than one might think. Which isn't to say it will be easy, but there is no reason why we have to ruin ecosystems on Earth.
EPIDEMICS
An epidemic doesn’t normally make a population extinct unless it is reduced to a small population already. We have a huge and genetically diverse population.
OVERDUE ASTEROID STRIKES
When it says “overdue asteroid strikes” - the chance of being hit by a big asteroid gets no greater after a long period without asteroid impacts. It’s only overdue if the asteroids come at regular intervals. But they don’t.
If buses go past a bus stop every hour in the daytime, and it’s been over an hour since the last one, you can say that it is overdue. If swallows arrive in your region every spring, and they haven’t arrived yet at their usual time, again you can say they are overdue.
But if you get rain on average every other day and you have a sunny spell of a week, you can’t say that rain is “overdue”. Even before weather forecasts, then if you had no other basis for your prediction, you’d still say the chance is 1 in 2 of a rainy day.
Now that we have good weather forecasts. It depends on the weather forecast. Perhaps you get another week of sunshine. You may even be just about certain you will have another week of sunshine as our weather forecasts are getting to be very good over short time periods like that. So it’s not a case of “overdue rain” but of “rain is likely if the forecast says rain”.
And we do have a “giant asteroid weather forecast” for the next several centuries. Our current forecast is “no giant asteroid impacts”.
They can say that because of a major program to search for asteroids that could hit Earth. They have completed their survey of all the asteroids larger than 10 km in diameter, that do regular flybys of Earth. None can hit us for several centuries. This only leaves comets. But - though these numbers can vary - at present only 1 in 147 of the objects that do close flybys of Earth are comets. So a large comet impact is extraordinarily unlikely. They usually say that the chance of an asteroid impact of 10 km or above is 1 in a million per century - though it is 0 of course for the next few centuries. For comets then, it would be 1 in 147 million that we are hit by a 10 km or larger comet this century. That figure is so low that you can forget about it.
Smaller asteroids are possible. They have found 90% of the 1 km ones - but these would not make us extinct. The large ones wouldn’t either. See my
But we don’t need to worry about those anyway because there are no 10 km or larger asteroids headed our way for the next several centuries. If we find one that large, and find that it is headed our way, then they are easy to deflect if you have decades of warning. The longer the time before the impact, the smaller the nudge. You need a tenth of the nudge to deflect with a decade warning than with a one year warning. But not only that. If you have decades of warning, the asteroid will do close flybys before it hits and has to pass through a tiny “keyhole” region to hit Earth next time around. In that case a tiny fraction of the usual nudge is enough to deflect it away in that case.
So if we continue to have space technology, there’s no reason why we can’t prevent Earth from being hit by these large asteroids indefinitely into the future.
Also sometimes you get the impression we could be hit by truly huge asteroids, hundreds of kilometers across. That’s not possible. See my Debunked: Earth could be struck by a huge asteroid hundreds of kilometers across
CLIMATE CHANGE
Our planet is actually cooler than it was in the distant past. For most of Earth’s history our planet is so warm that it has no ice at all except at the top of high mountains. Geologically speaking we are in an “ice age” in an interglacial of an ice age, for as long as there is ice at the poles. And Antarctica particularly will have ice for thousands of years into the future even on the warmest of the projections.
Some areas of our planet in the tropical regions could get too hot for humans to live easily. They could become as hot as Death Valley. But the planet as a whole will not do that in any of the climate change predictions. It will continue even to have large ice sheets for the foreseeable future. So - a planet with ice at the poles pretty obviously won’t be too hot for humans to live in.
OTHER THINGS NOT MENTIONED THERE
Other possibilities which he might mention, has mentioned in the past, not listed there, are from a previous quote from him:
"A billion years will give us four more orbits of the Milky Way galaxy, any one of which could bring us into collision with another star, or a supernova shockwave, or the incinerating beam of a gamma ray burst. We could swing into the path of a rogue planet, one of the billions that roam our galaxy darkly, like cosmic wrecking balls. Planet Earth could be edging up to the end of an unusually fortunate run."
So if we look at those:
So I don’t see any basis for his prediction at all if this is what it is based on.
SPACE COLONIZATION ENTHUSIASTS “WE NEED TO BACKUP EARTH”
We will have to see if he has anything more to say when the program airs. But it is part of a general narrative by some space enthusiasts. They desperately want us to send humans into space to try to colonize Mars, most of all. And they have taken this idea that we need to “backup Earth” as their reason for doing it. But I don’t think the idea stands muster at all.
There is no way you could make Earth anything like as uninhabitable as Mars. It will have an atmosphere, oceans, some kind of animals and fish, and plants, even with the worst possible disaster. Most of all it will have air to breathe. It will have a comfortable range of temperatures for humans to live in, except for the coldest and hottest places. We will be able to live almost anywhere on Earth with only minimal technology. As omnivores then it’s just not possible to mess up our planet so much that there is nothing for us to eat.
Meanwhile Mars has
Here is the US comedian Bill Maher poking fun at the idea of Mars as a "backup planet" and talking about the importance of looking after Earth.
EARTH BEST FOR A BACKUP
In my Case for Moon First, I argue that the only kind of a "backup" that could be worth doing in space is a backup of knowledge and seeds etc in a repository on the Moon - that Earth for better or worse is the place we call home and have to look after.
See
I do see a possibility of large O'Neil type colonies and habitats in lunar caves becoming eventually as easy to maintain as houses on Earth if there is a reason to set them up in the first place and depending how easy the maintenance is. But I don't see setting up a backup in space as a good motivation for these. Indeed if not done carefully, if done too quickly, then it could lead to the likes of N. Korea in space, millions of people with strange ideologies (to us) and with all the technology of space travel.
EARTH HAS THE EQUIVALENT OF FOUR “OCEAN WORLD” PLANETS HERE ALREADY
Earth has four times it’s land area as oceans. That’s the equivalent of four “ocean worlds” each of which could sustain our entire population using Mars colonization technology, easily.
Using those methods, we could provide all the food for four times the population of Earth, from only 0.5% of the Pacific ocean. I’m talking here about minimal impact sea steading, in tethered floating sea cities that feed themselves by growing crops in floating farms, and only use the sea water as a source of water for the crops and for salt etc and the sunlight as a source of power.
That may seem far fetched but it is far far easier than trying to survive on Mars or anywhere else, which is Stephen Hawking’s plan, if he hopes to feed those 11 billion people from crops grown on Mars. I go into it in detail with calculations here:
For more about this see also
List of articles here: List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
Darkfrog24 is, or rather was, a wikignome. You may not have heard of them as they are hard to spot though not rare particularly. She is someone who delights in going over wiki pages fixing typos and generally copy editing.
The project needs wikignomes or its pages would be a mess, but they are "unsung heroes" who rarely get into the limelight for their work.

The elusive wiki gnome - if you look at the edit history of wkipedia pages then often most of the edits are by wikignomes, but they rarely venture onto the talk pages to discuss things, and they are content to work in the background fixing wikipedia when big blundering oafs like me position a comma or a quotation mark in the wrong place or mistype a word or use the spelling "colour" in a US article or "color" in a UK article, etc.
She did this for several years, getting a lot of personal satisfaction from helping to keep wikipedia articles free of typos, until she discovered that the way she was positioning quotation marks on American articles went against the requirements for Matters of Style in wikipedia.
This took away some of her zest for wikignoming as she felt that American articles should have the quotation marks positioned according to the style used in America and British articles should have them positioned according to the British style. It just felt wrong to use the British style in American articles.
So she ended up joining the debates on Matters of Style pages. Like any publication of any size, Wikipedia has a style guide to help wikignomes to edit it in a consistent way. The guide is based on the idea of ENGVAR's which is wikipedia’s term for “varieties of English”.
For instance if an article is about a US topic then it will use the spelling "color" because that's how it is done in the US. If it is about a UK topic it will use the spelling "colour". And if it is not closely connected to any country, it uses the style of the first major contributor to the article.
So, first, if you look anywhere except these rather arcane discussions on the MoS talk pages on wikipedia you will learn that American and Britain have different styles for quotation. I'll let Darkfrog24 explain the difference herself with a few examples.
In British English, the period or comma is placed inside or outside the quotation marks depending on whether it applies to the quoted material or not and American English places them inside all the time. Basically, British English does with commas and periods what all of English does with question marks:
Both: Did he say "I am alive"?
Both: No, he asked "are you alive?"
American: Bruce Springsteen, nicknamed "the Boss," performed "American Skin."
British: Eric Clapton, nicknamed "God", performed "Layla".
Both: The fan said, "I love guitarists."
Here are the pages on them on Wikipedia’s sister project Wiktionary
However what slightly complicates it is that there are two other significant styles,
These roughly correspond to American and British style, but with some subtle differences.
The editors who uphold the current version of the MoS claim there is no difference between British and American styles, and will not permit those words to be used anywhere in the wikipedia style guide. They then say that of logical and typesetter's style, the encyclopedia has to use logical style.
Once a year or so then a wikignome like Darkfrog24 will go to the MoS talk pages and say "Shouldn't we use American quotation style on American articles?" And when they did that, the editors who see themselves as the "guardians of MoS" on wikipedia will patiently explain that there isn't any American style and that there is only logical and typesetter's style and that wikipedia has to use logical style.
In those debates Darkfrog24 would chip in and say "Actually there is such a thing as American style, and here is this long list of citations from publications like the Oxford dictionary, US newspaper style guides etc to prove it".
Then, the "Guardians of Sanity" in MoS as the editors who support MoS seem to think of themselves as got totally fed up with her constantly saying that.
So, what do wikipedia editors do on wikipedia when they get totally fed up with someone? Well, as often as not, they find a way to get them banned from wikipedia so that they don’t have to be bothered with arguing with them again.
They often trump up the most absurd claims. And they take these to the admins, and a lot of these attempts to get someone banned get thrown out, or they may “boomerang” when the admins will apply sanctions on the person who tried to take out the ban instead of the person they were trying to get sanctioned.
But rather often they succeed. So that’s what happened to Darkfrog24.
So another thing you need to know about wikipedia. Whenever you do anything there, however minor, there is a permanent record of it. Say “Hi” to someone on Wikipedia and fifty years later someone can go and look up your record and say “Look, you said “Hi” to me fifty years ago”. This record is never erased, except in very unusual circumstances.
Also, you can go to any contributor on wikipedia, and bring up a list of all their edits of the encyclopedia. Here for instance is the record of Jimmy Wales’s edits.
User contributions for Jimbo Wales
In these situations then the editor who is trying to get someone else banned will gather together all the “dirt” they can find on them. They often do this by trailing back through their list of contributions looking at everything they ever said to anyone else and then looking for anything they said that puts them in a bad light. It’s a real hall of mirrors.
Summary: This is fake news.
Detail: This is a new Doomsday story on the Express website, a UK red top tabloid. Despite the article title it’s a blatant hoax. The newspaper itself says this at the end, so I don’t know why they run this BS which they themselves know is nonsense. 3BC2017 is not even a genuine asteroid identifier, so there is no point in trying to look it up. Their only source for the story is a youtube video by some anonymous uploader on a youtube video channel “End of The World Apocalypes News & Updates”
This channel is not running ads so they aren’t doing it for money which shows you get some people who do these videos for other reasons - just for clicks or to get in the papers? YouTube Stats, Channel Statistics
Genuine asteroid identifiers start with the date first, then two letters then numbers. See Astronomical naming conventions
The video is here
You can check here to see if there are any risks
Sentry: Earth Impact Monitoring
So long as the top entry is white, blue, green, or yellow, there is nothing to worry about.
Yellow means there’s a small possibility of it hitting Earth at some point, but that means that almost certainly it’s going to change to green then white as they calculate its orbit more precisely. Orange means there is a high enough probability of impact to be a matter needing public attention and red means certainty. So far it has never got into orange.
Right now the top entry is white. This means there is nothing currently known with any significant chance of an impact in the next century. They have completed the survey for 10 km asteroids, so apart from comets which are very rare at present (and also detectable years in advance), only 1 in 147 flybys is a comet - then there are no 10 km asteroids that can hit us in the next 100 years. They have nearly finished the survey for 1 km asteroids too. They expect to reach 99% coverage of those some time in the 2020s.
The article is here: This is NOT a hoax' Asteroid strike will kill millions in JUNE, shocking video claims
They use this image:

I can’t find the author of this image, which they use for their article, but it’s the size of asteroid that hit Earth in the early solar system around the time of formation of the Moon.
We don’t get asteroids this big hitting Earth any more. The asteroid that made the dinosaurs extinct was around the size of New York - too small to see at this resolution - and we also know all the asteroids of that size that do regular flybys of Earth and none will hit us in the next several centuries. We know nearly all the asteroids of 1 km size also.
While a comet even of 1 km size would be easy to spot for several years before it comes past Earth, would be far more likely to do a close flyby than to hit, because Earth is such a tiny target - and only 1 in 147 of the asteroids that come close to Earth are comets.
So basically a 10 km diameter comet can’t happen just now, in any practical sense, is so unlikely, only a 1 in 147 million chance over the next century. We could get a large comet fly past but the chance of that is so tiny, and the chance of a hit is so small again that it’s just about impossible.
It may have been possible in the past at times with more comets than we have today.
So in short, it’s just fake news.
See also: List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
Summary: yet another doomsday prophecy that hit the news, and is getting some people very anxious. There is nothing to worry about here. So, yes, it is true that Horacio Villegas did predict Trump’s presidency in a book published in November 2015. And he did predict nuclear war - though not in May, rather in October 2017. However there are many people prophesying. Several of those hit the tabloid news every year, and there are many more that don’t. We don’t notice all the ones that made false predictions while the few that get something “right” get all the publicity and attention. And - there is no evidence at all that humans can predict wars and disasters.

IN DETAIL
This has recently hit all the red top tabloid news. Titles like: Mystic who foretold Trump presidency predicts exact date of WW3 - and it's SOON
It is true that he did foretell that something would happen at this time in 2015. And claimed "Trump is being set up to win" at the end of 2015. So quite early on I suppose. And predicts a nuclear war with Russia. That's all true.
His book is here and you just need to read the introduction and chapter titles: Prophecy In The Making III: Amazon.co.uk: Horacio Avila Villegas: 9781519165930: Books
His blog itself is here, though it is hard to navigate: Prophecy In The Making.
Remember however, there are dozens of people prophesying things, having visions, writing books. So from time to time they are going to prophecy something that has a resemblance to real events.
The idea that we might have a nuclear war with Russia is a natural thing for someone to predict, and trouble in Syria also, they are the most obvious things for anyone to think of back then as now. So that's hardly convincingly prophetic.
So it really amounts to the Trump prophecy as the main unlikely thing he predicted that actually happened. So I'm not sure I can say more than that. It probably seems striking to him but for every person like this who predicts something unusual that actually happens there are probably a dozen or a hundred or more who predict unlikely things that don't happen.
When something striking happens you get plenty of people predicting it, but where were all the people predicting Trump to win in 2015? Well they did exist, after all he had predicted it - but there were many people predicting all sorts of other futures that didn't happen. Also predicting him to win is the sort of idea that would tend to occur to someone drawn towards ideas that we might have an unpredictable president.
So there are many false predictions and - some turn out to be true, but we can’t decide in advance which of those many predictions is correct, so they aren’t really helpful in predicting the future. And previous success in prediction doesn’t seem to correlate to continuing success.
And - bottom line is there's no evidence that the future can be prophecied in such a way.
When debunking things like this, there is no astronomy or science to debunk. It is all about people's tendency to believe there is something in prophecy for some reason despite the lack of any evidence at all in its favour and many people prophesying and getting it wrong.
Yet for some reason people continue to think "Yes they got it wrong every century and indeed several times a year for the last two thousand years, but this time, this prophet has got it right". It's hard to debunk that as it isn't based on science or astronomy or indeed even ordinary reasoning but some kind of blind belief that prophesy of this type works despite all the evidence to the contrary.
I can look at particular prophesies in this case the Fatama sisters and show that first you have to be a deeply devout Catholic because otherwise why believe there is anything in it? And that they didn't prophesy the things attributed to them anyway. That's about all I can do.
WHAT ABOUT THE THREE SISTERS OF FATIMA?
These sisters saw visions and made visionary statements that could be interpreted in many ways. Some think they refer to things that have already happened by now - that is if they are prophetic. The Catholic church has a belief in modern saints, miracles and prophecies, and even has the Pope recognizing miracles, but other Christian churches don't think like that.
There is no real evidence at all that anyone can successfully make such kinds of predictions. But Catholics, even if you are a devout catholic and believe in holy miracles and believe they still happen to this day, and believe that the visions of the three sisters of Fatima were an example of a prophetic holy miracle - still - there is nothing to link them to a particular date or a particular event like a nuclear war.
The third vision, revealed in 2000 which is his basis of a prediction of WWIII this year was this:
‘At the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword; it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice:
“Penance, Penance, Penance!” ‘(In the second scene a terrible catastrophe befalls the world.)‘And we saw in an immense light that is God… a Bishop dressed in white. We had the impression it was the Holy Father. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big cross; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins, and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks.’
(The third scene depicts the return of humanity to God.)
‘Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels, each with a crystal aspersorium in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.’
As you can see, it is very enigmatic. No date mentioned. There are many specific interpretations which put the predicted events in our past, if you read how the catholic church has interpreted it What were the 3 secrets of Fatima? Are they against Catholicism?
So even if you are a devout Catholic, believe in holy miracles, believe in prophetic visions, still, there is absolutely no reason at all to take it as a prediction of WWIII.
See Debunked: Have these three sisters predicted the Apocalypse by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
Three Secrets of Fátima - Wikipedia
And of course I have debunked the idea that a nuclear war, even an all out nuclear war, would have the effects described. See
Also see
See also: List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
This obviously is not my specialty but I feel I need to say something to help those who are scared about it. It is quite a serious situation. It's similar to the situation at the height of the Cold War in Europe, though with the focus on Asia rather than Europe. Trump surely won't want to start a nuclear war., that much I’m sure of. Even if you are totally cynical about him, obviously his hotels and golf courses and businesses matter a lot to him and a nuclear war would be a disaster for them :). And it would of course be an utter disaster for North Korea. So neither of them want a nuclear war to start. So the main thing is, could it start “by accident”? It’s much the same as the situation for the Cold war but for different reasons.
So first, thare a few things to bear in mind.
When reading statements by the Chinese, like this one by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi :
"Lately, tensions have risen between on the one hand the United States and the Republic of Korea [South Korea] and on the other, the DPRK [North Korea] and one has the feeling that a conflict could break out at any moment.
"I think that all relevant parties should be highly vigilant with regards to this situation."
"We call on all parties to refrain from provoking and threatening each other, whether in words or actions, and not let the situation get to an irreversible and unmanageable stage."
Do bear in mind that first, they are making this statement because China also doesn’t want a nuclear war. Nobody wants it. It is just like the cold war in that respect.
Also, they have always been trying to stop the West from sanctioning North Korea too much because they are concerned about the effects on their border if the regime their collapses. It is a buffer state for them. China are the only ones supporting North Korea, and in a modern world, North Korea couldn’t last that long without support from outside its borders.
So, it is in their interest to make it seem even tenser than it actually is, as they are uncomfortable with too much by way of diplomatic and economic pressure on North Korea.
But it is a tense situation,
Also another remark on the statements from North Korea. When you read about the nuclear bomb and missile tests, then North Korea frequently does these, about once or twice a year and makes provocative statements. So North Korea posturing and being belligerent, launching test missiles and exploding nuclear weapons also doesn't mean they are going to carry out a nuclear attack.
I think myself that the best response in event of a nuclear attack by a nuclear power is not to respond. If North Korea was to drop a nuclear bomb on South Korea, say, then it is no solution at all to bomb North Korea and kill millions of innocent civilians - there are of course lots of civilians in North Korea, it is not just military.
Instead if nobody retaliated, then North Korea would be universally condemned and China would have no option but to stop supporting them.
But - that might not be what happens of course.
I don't think it is going to lead to a nuclear war, chance must be small at present. Nobody wants that, not even North Korea.
NORTH KOREA’S PERSPECTIVE
You don’t hear much about their own perspective on this. I watched a news section on the BBC last night which helped. So part of this is from that story plus a bit of research to confirm. They do of course have their own perspective. They don’t think “we are evil people threatening the free world”. They think what they are doing has good reasons behind it. And their main interest of courses is to preserve their own country.
The reason the North Koreans developed the nuclear bomb is to prevent their country from being overridden by others. They see the example of the US invading Iraq, many countries bombing Syria, Russia taking over the Crimea etc - and they don't want that to happen to them.
They think that if they have nuclear bombs then other countries will leave them alone.
They don't seem to have expansionist plans to take over the rest of the world as far as I know. Don’t try to draw comparisons with Hitler - they don’t want to do that.
It is rather that they look at these examples of other places in the world that have been invaded by military superpowers, and say that "but for our nuclear bombs, there we would be also".
Given that motivation then why would they actually launch a bomb? Their main asset is as a threat, to prevent anyone bombing them. They are not useful as offensive weapons, because of the political fallout, or if there is retaliation, the devastating effects on their own country.
They have a rather uneasy relationship with China because they are highly religious. They have Buddhists and Christians minorities there, amongst others, with the Christians particularly persecuted, but their main religion by far is Cheondoism which is a form of Confucianism.

This is a modern twentieth century religion founded from Confucianism, which is to do with developing a pattern on Earth of a heavenly nature, with agnosticism about an afterlife.
KOREAN HISTORY
They have a past history too. From 1952, within living memory of older people. From:
I Asked Noam Chomsky His Thoughts on the North Korea/US Situation: He Sent This
“This “object lesson in air power to all the Communist world” was an attack in the major irrigation dam – a crime that led to the death sentence at Nuremberg. It was highly successful, causing a flash flood that “scooped clear 27 miles of valley below. Along with other attacks on dams, this devastated 75% of the controlled water supply for North Korea’s rice production. It sent the commissars “scurrying to the press and radio centers to blare to the world the most severe hate-filled harangues to come from the Communist propaganda mill in the three years of warfare.” To the Communists, “the smashing of the dams meant primarily the destruction of their chief sustenance – rice. Westerners can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of this staple food commodity has for the Asians – starvation and slow death. Hence the show of rage, the flare of violent tempers, and the threats of reprisals when bombs fell on five irrigation dams.”
They also have the example of Vietnam, devastated by the war with the US. Again, they know of th effects of the defoliants of the Vietnam war on Vietnamese agriculture
And more recently
“In 1993 North Korea was about to strike a deal with Israel to end missile exports to
the Middle East in return for diplomatic recognition. The US pressured Israel to reject it, and North Korea retaliated by carrying out its first test of a medium-range
missile. A US-North Korean “framework agreement” was then signed. Neither
side observed it completely, but they mostly kept to it. When President Bush took
office, “the North Koreans had stopped testing longer-range missiles. It had one or
two bombs’ worth of plutonium and was verifiably not making more,” according
to Leon Sigal, one of the leading US specialists on the topic. Bush’s aggressive
militarism quickly led to a revival of NK’s missile and nuclear programs. By
2006, North Korea had developed 8-10 nuclear weapons, and had resumed long-
range missile tests, one of many neocon successes.“A year earlier, an agreement had been reached under which North Korea would
abandon “all nuclear weapons and existing weapons programs” and allow
international inspections, in return for international aid and a non-aggression
pledge from the U.S., along with commitments by the two sides to “respect
each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize
relations.” The Bush administration immediately undermined the accord,
disbanding the international consortium set up to provide the promised light-water
reactor, renewing the threat of force, and pressuring banks to freeze North Korea’s
hard currency accounts, including proceeds from legitimate foreign trade. North
Korea reacted predictably, in their own strange ways.”
This is something their school children will all learn at school and the older people will remember their parents talking about those 1950s events, and some very old people there will have lived through those 1950s events themselves.
RANGE AND CAPABILITIES OF NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS
They can in principle hit Alaska and part of Canada I believe with their longest range missiles, but not the US. They can hit Scandinavia, Germany, some of the Balkan states, but not the UK, France, Spain or Italy,
They have put a satellite into orbit, but that's not the same as a ballistic missile though it is the same basic technology, it doesn't mean they could make it descend again anywhere particular, except to eventually burn up in the atmosphere.
Also though they have tested nuclear weapons, there is a lot of international skepticism about whether they have mastered the much more difficult feat of miniaturizing a nuclear bomb to put it inside a ballistic missile.
They have got solid fuel rockets, which are harder to counteract as they can be launched more quickly, instead of needing lots of preparation first (similar to a conventional space launch) which the spy satellites could spot easily.
The main danger at present is for South Korea and Japan, and other places nearby. And most likely they can only launch weapons filled with conventional explosives at present.
But some experts are concerned that they may be able to target the US in the not so distant future perhaps four years from now, if they continue this line of development, and that eventually, though probably they haven’t yet, they will learn to miniaturize their nuclear weapons.
N Korean nuke could hit US west coast by 2021: former CIA officer
North Korea's nuclear programme: How advanced is it? - BBC News
North Korea's missile programme - BBC News
North Korea missile test: What's changed? - BBC News
TRUMP’S TWEET
Trump tweeted three days ago:
North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2017
This lead to a lot of speculations that he is threatening military action against North Korea. But it turns out that actually, he was threatening increased sanctions, not military action. His administration has completed an internal review and come to that conclusion. See Opinion | Trump’s North Korea policy is ‘maximum pressure’ but not ‘regime change’
Then a little later, he met the Chinese president Xi Jinping and this is what happened:
"In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr Trump said he told Mr Xi he believed Beijing could easily take care of the threat of North Korea.
"The US President said Mr Xi then explained the history of China and Korea to him.
""After listening for 10 minutes, I realised it's not so easy," Mr Trump said."
"I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it's not what you would think."
Trump was given a 10 minute history lesson by the Chinese President. This is what he was told
So, the whole thing is in the balance, but it’s about sanctions, not about military action, if I understand right. North Korea is doing its usual nuclear weapons tests. But it’s meant as a signal “don’t mess with me”, and not as “I’m out to get you”.
OTHER DEBUNKING ARTICLES HERE
See also: List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
And questions about the Dalai Lama
If you ask an astronomer if there could be a planet X orbiting beyond Neptune, they will say Yes. They don’t know if there is one, but it’s possible. If you ask them if Nibiru could exist and explain the idea to them of a planet that could fly past or hit Earth in the near future then if they answer at all, they will say “No, that’s ridiculous and impossible”.
It’s like the difference between asking if there are elephants in Africa and asking if there is an enraged elephant charging for the front door of a tenth floor apartment in New York. There are many elephants still in Africa. But unless you live in Africa, or India, or some place that has elephants, you are at no danger of being trampled by elephants :). And they can’t fit into lifts or get through our tiny doors and climb winding stairs. Even if one escaped from a zoo it could never get into a tenth floor apartment.

African Bush Elephant - an African elephant is a formidable beast, and if it runs at you in Musth, then you’d better get out of its way. You need to watch out for elephants in Africa. But if you live in London or New York they are not a hazard. In the same way an undiscovered planet could be something to watch out for if you live beyond Neptune but such a planet can’t come into the inner solar system so there is no way it ca nharm us here on Earth.
That’s why astronomers will just LOL if you say you are worried about being hit by a planet beyond Neptune - until they realize you really mean what you say.
If they take you seriously and realize you really are scared, then it’s like trying to comfort someone in an apartment in New York who is scared they are going to be killed by an African Elephant because they have read about them in a book. You aren’t for an instant scared that an elephant is about to charge through the door and kill you :). But you realize that this person is so you try to explain to them why it is impossible.
In the same way unless you live in the outer reaches of our solar system, way beyond Neptune, you are at no risk at all from any newly discovered planets out there. They can’t even get into the inner solar system because in an orbit like that they’d hit one of the other planets or be ejected from the solar system or hit the sun within a million years - if a planet ever was in such an orbit, say at the time of formation of the Moon, it is long gone, more than 4.5 billion years ago.
And the space beyond Neptune is so vast that even the other dwarf planets out there are very very unlikely to collide with Planet X. After all they have been orbiting for billions of years without colliding with it.
See also my
And list of all these posts: List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
This is a conspiracy theory that’s going the rounds on youtube. It’s nuts, there is no way to hide the sun. It would need mirrors the same diameter as the Earth. They use as evidence for their conspiracy such things as sun halos which they claim have something to do with these mirrors, and say the dark circle inside the sun halo is the planet that they are attempting to hide with the mirror. This idea is scaring some people who genuinely think there is a huge planet in the sky being hidden from view by gigantic space mirrors. The whole thing is total nuts for anyone with basic astronomy or physics.
This is an example of a sun halo, do you see how it is much darker inside the halo? They are always like that. It’s the same also for rainbows, they are always darker inside, because of the way the ice crystals (in this case) and water droplets (for rainbows) refract / reflect light from the sun:

Halo in the Himalayas, photo by Anton Yankovyi taken from Anapurna base camp on 20 April 2014
For more about this and how it works, Halo (optical phenomenon) and for more photos again all showing it dark inside see Why a halo around the sun or moon? | EarthSky.org
Here is an example video using sun halos as “evidence” that we have huge mirrors and lenses in space blocking out Nibiru and projecting a fake sun in some way to Earth.
Sun dogs are rare so it's no surprise to have days without a sun dog. Depends where you are and on your weather conditions. Where I live they are so rare I've never seen one. I'd love to see a sun dog :).
The Sun is larger than the Earth so the closer the shade is to Earth the smaller it is but the smallest it can be is the diameter of the Earth.
Also anything in orbit around the Earth in LEO orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes or so. To continuously shade the Sun it is no good even to be at GEO. Because that would be stationary relative to the Earth as it spins, but the sun doesn't stay at the same point in the sky either relative to someone standing on its surface. As the Earth spins, of course the sun rises and sets. So, to block out the Sun for everyone living on Earth you are talking about a mirror or lens the diameter of the Earth, so a mirror 12,000 kilometers in diameter at the Sun Earth L1 position, a long way away, further away than the Moon.
By comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter

Spy satellite mirrors are similar in diameter. It is possible to put mirrors into space and lenses too (if there was any point) that are meters in diameter. But thousands of kilometers in diameter - no, we don’t have that capability yet. And think what an astronomical spectacle it would be, with thousands of spaceships going up there to ferry all the materials up to make it, and the lens or mirror gradually unfolding in a space construction project millions of times more ambitious than the ISS.
It’s just an absurd idea.
Apparently the Nibiru / Planet X groups are in a frenzy after tonight’s Star Gazing live episode about “Planet 9”. So I thought I’d do another debunking post about it. The only point of resemblance is that it is in an elliptical orbit. But all planets are in elliptical orbits, even Earth is. The two ideas are about as similar as a frog is similar to a giraffe.
First though, perhaps it may help to say a bit about the discovery of Neptune. Here is a photo of it taken by Voyager 2. It’s so far away that the astronomers at the time could see no detail from Earth, and this was our first, and so far, only close up view of it:

So, Neptune was discovered in the nineteenth century by noticing perturbations in the orbit of Uranus - which had been discovered earlier by

This is how it was found - when Neptune is ahead of Uranus, it pulls it forward in its orbit slightly. When behind, it drags it back. Two mathematicians, the UK John Couch Adams and the French Urbain Le Verrier both predicted its position and they got it pretty much right:

So - that’s very much like the present situation. They didn’t for a moment expect it to be anywhere close to Earth. To have had that effect on Uranus’ orbit it had to be further away from the Sun than Uranus and they predicted where it would be and got it pretty much right too.
And indeed Neptune is not any danger to Earth at all.
So it’s like that. Now they are using the orbits,, not of Neptune but of much smaller dwarf planets that are in orbits that take them way way beyond Neptune to predict a possible even more distant planet.
So, planet 9 if it exists:
Nibiru, which is BS and can’t exist
Do you see a difference? You can check this for yourself whether these ideas are at all similar. This is the suggested orbit for Planet 9 if it exists

It’s that big red oval. Now do you see the blue circle in the middle? That’s the orbit for Pluto and Neptune. All the planets the ancients knew about, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are inside that circle and so are the more recently discovered Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
So the proposed orbit does not go anywhere near Earth, it doesn’t even go anywhere near Neptune, the most distant of the gas giants from Earth. Its closest point is around 200 au so over six times the distance to Neptune (of 30 au) and its furthest point is 1200 au or 40 times the distance to Neptune from the Sun.
The zone of search shows the part of its orbit where it could be and still remain hidden to us - if it was closer to Earth we'd have seen it already.
The scientists who hypothesized Planet 9 don’t have any proof that it exists. They are currently searching to try to find it. For more about this, see Why This New "Planet X" Is No Threat To Earth :).
To get an idea of how far away Neptune is see Bill Nye’s video here:
After watching that video, can you see that something that is many times the distance to Neptune is no threat to Earth?
So, the people saying that this is Nibiru are wrong.
Nibiru’s orbit is unstable anyway. It would have to cross the orbits of four gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
It is possible to cross one gas giant by being in a resonance with it. Pluto is in a 2:3 resonance with Neptune. Neptune‘s orbital period is around 165 years. Pluto’s orbital period is around 248 years. In just under 500 years (approx) then Pluto orbits the sun twice, and Neptune orbits it three times.
That way, Pluto keeps missing Neptune over and over. The first time it’s closest to the Sun, Neptune is more than 50° behind Pluto and the second time it is more than 50° ahead of it, and so in that way they keep missing each other, over and over, for billions of years. This is a stable configuration - gravity actually helps to keep the planets in this resonance.
However, Uranus’ orbital period is 84 years. That’s not in any simple relation with Neptune or Pluto’s orbit. So there is no way that a planet can keep missing Neptune in each orbit and also keep missing Uranus as well. Saturn’s orbit is 29.5 years And Jupiter’s orbit is 11.9 years.
There is just no way that another planet in an orbit crossing all four gas giants could keep missing them. It would hit one or other of them, or be perturbed to hit the Sun or be ejected from our solar system within a million years. Our Moon is 4.51 billion years old. Supposing there was a planet in an orbit like the one they say Nibiru is in, crossing all four gas giants, at the time the Moon formed. It would have either hit one of the other planets, hit the Sun, or been ejected from the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
That’s why astronomers never hypothesis a planet in an orbit like Nibiru. It’s just not a possible orbit for a planet to be in.
The Nibiru conspiracy theorists often say that Nemesis was Nibiru. Nemesis is a genuine astronomical hypothesis though it was pretty much disproved by the WISE infrared astronomy search.
Nemesis if it existed - which it now seems it doesn’t
Again - do you see how that is different from “Planet 9” and also different from this Nibiru idea which is just utter piffle all the way through.
If you got this far and you still don’t see any difference between these ideas and Nibiru, well, if those ideas seem so similar to you, that they all seem to be describing the same thing, then why is Jupiter any different from Nibiru? Or Neptune?
Most astronomers probably haven’t heard of “Nibiru”. Those who have just LOL at the idea until they realize, sadly, that it is making people feel suicidal. It’s such a shame for such a BS idea.
See also
In summary, Sharia law is civil, not criminal law. It is similar in purpose to the Jewish Beth Den. It is used mainly for financial and family matters. It is additional to ordinary civil or criminal law and can’t override it, and Muslims have no wish to use it in that way. The few countries such as Saudi Arabia, that have criminal systems that are inspired by Sharia law are going against the heritage of Islam, which has a clear separation between the secular and religious aspects of life and does not promote theocracy. Most Muslims would say they are wrong to do this.
I’m appalled by the amount of misinformation there is out there about Muslims and Sharia law. This is just things that I’ve said in response to facebook friends and friends of friends who have fallen for all the myths about it. I am not a Muslim, only know about this from news stories here in the UK, but I think they are more balanced than the ones you typically get in the US (though some US stories are good), and I also know how to check them against reliable sources.
So, what I’ll do here is just direct you to some reliable sources you can read on the topic to hopefully counter some of this disinformation plus summarize some of what they say.
SUMMARY
We have Sharia law in the UK. It's Sharia civil law. It is used mainly for financial matters (e.g. Muslims can't have bank accounts that earn them interest, so it's not so easy for them to work with ordinary banks) and family matters.
It does not displace ordinary laws. Muslims are completely bound by all the laws of our country like anyone else. This seems to be a common misconception that it is a replacement for the legal system. It is not at all, neither in the UK nor in the US where there are already some places with Sharia law alongside your ordinary legal system. Nor do Muslims have any wish or aim to do so.
It is not the Sharia inspired criminal law as practiced in some places like Saudi Arabia. That would not be legal in our country at all or in the US, so couldn't be applied even if they wanted to, which they don’t want to. The idea of using Sharia law to inspire criminal law actually goes against the history and background of Islam and is a break with the past which many Muslims think is wrong. More on that in a minute.
Rather, it is like the Jewish Beth den, a system of laws similar in many ways to Sharia law, which regulates Jewish religious matters in the Jewish diaspora including in the US. If the US was to ban Sharia law, properly, then they would have to ban the Beth Den as well.
So what is it, if it is not criminal law or indeed even civil law? It deals with things that the rest of the legal system does not cover, points of special interest to Muslims who want to be sure that their lives are in compliance with the guidelines in the Koran. Mainly things that would be very dull and uninteresting to non Muslims I gather.
The main concern here in the UK is about whether it might lead to some Muslim women not seeking the protection they are entitled to under UK law. Some Muslims here are opposed to recognition of Sharia law in our country for that reason. It’s not that it would deny them that protection, it can't do that. Just that they might not step forward to get it because they go to a Sharia court.
As you can see, it doesn’t impact on non Muslims at all. We would not be governed by it in any future development. It is mainly an issue with how it might impact on Muslims themselves.
Also all our legal and criminal law applies to Muslims. If a Muslim kills another Muslim in the UK it is murder and a criminal case and could not be tried in a Sharia court. It doesn't override our civilian law either. All the laws that apply to everyone else also apply to Muslims. It is an extra layer on top of that which some Muslims apply to themselves, largely about matters to do with finance and family.
British Sharia - An Introduction to Islamic Law in the UK - InBrief.co.uk
Islamic finance – the lowdown on sharia-compliant money
And this is an article about the issues of Muslim women who don't want to be subject to Sharia law in the UK. This is the main controversy we have about it AFAIK.
Sharia courts have no place in UK family law. Listen to women who know | Pragna Patel
This is also a good intro for US readers: Column: The sharia myth sweeps America - USATODAY.com
MUSLIMS OFTEN SPEAK UP AGAINST TERRORIST VIOLENCE AS UNISLAMIC
This just isn’t reported much in the media, and when it is the stories are not widely shared. But Muslims are of course as dead set against ISIS as anyone. More so, because it’s their young ,sometimes children as young as 14, that are most vulnerable to the un-Islamic ISIS propoganda. What could be worse for a parent than to find out that their fourteen year old child has disappeared from their house without explaining what they are up to and next they hear about it is a news story that they were seen entering Syria to join up with ISIS!
The Muslims in the West, ordinary Muslims, are doing everything they can to stop this awful thing. They also do a lot of outreach, trying to ensure that their young realize that ISIS is against the very core principles of their religion.
This is one video they shared that got a bit viral a while back.
IN DETAIL
First Sharia law is not “one thing”. It is not intended as State law, which is called Siyasa. The separation shows that this State law is not meant to turn Muslim states into a theocracy. And there are many intepretations of Sharia law and the Islamic scholars recognize that they are not speaking for God.
From 5 myths about Sharia law debunked by a law professor | Commentary | Dallas News
“ The human interpretation of Sharia is called "Fiqh," or Islamic rules of right action, created by individual scholars based on the Quran and hadith (stories of the prophet Muhammad's life). Fiqh literally means "understanding" -- and its many different schools of thought illustrate that scholars knew they didn't speak for God.
“Fiqh distinguishes between the spiritual value of an action (how God sees it) and the worldly value of that action (how it affects others). Fiqh rules might obligate a devout Muslim to pray, but it's not the job of a Muslim ruler to enforce that obligation. Fiqh is not designed to help governments police morality in the way, say, Saudi Arabia does today.
“According to classical Fiqh scholarship, a Muslim ruler's task was to put forth another type of law, called Siyasa, based on what best serves the public good. The most vivid example of this was the recognition of incestuous (mother-son, brother-sister) marriages practiced by some non-Muslim minorities living under Muslim rule, dating back at least to the 14th century, despite the abhorrence, generally, of such marriages to Islam. In other words, Sharia doesn't hold that everything objectionable to Islam should be outlawed.”
Different scholars will interpret the rules in different ways. Sometimes there is consensus amongst most scholars, but sometimes not. Financial institutions occasionally exploit this to their advantage (controversially). From How Sharia-compliant is Islamic banking?:
“We create the same type of products that we do for the conventional markets. We then phone up a Sharia scholar for a Fatwa [seal of approval, confirming the product is Shari'ah compliant].”
"If he doesn't give it to us, we phone up another scholar, offer him a sum of money for his services and ask him for a Fatwa. We do this until we get Sharia compliance. Then we are free to distribute the product as Islamic."
MYTH THAT SHARIA LAW WILL EXPAND TO ENCOMPASS EVERYTHING AND DISPLACE OUR LEGAL SYSTEM
We've had civil sharia law here for a long time and it has not "expanded to include everything". It couldn't anyway, not without new legislation in Parliament - and nobody is asking for that. It is only applied by Muslims to themselves, nobody else is governed by it at all, and it is additional to our laws all of which apply to Muslims as much as to anyone else.
That’s the same in the US. You have Muslim populations that have been in your country for a century and they have not tried to overturn local law. From Column: The sharia myth sweeps America - USATODAY
But if that was true — and the very allegation labels every Muslim in America a national security threat — the creeping Islamic theocracy movement is creeping very slowly. Muslims first moved to the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, for example, nearly a century ago to work in Henry Ford's factories. For most of the past 100 years, Dearborn has been home to the largest community of Arabs in the U.S. And yet after five or six generations, Dearborn's Muslims have not sought to see the city run in accordance with sharia. Bars and the occasional strip clubs dot the town's avenues, and a pork sausage factory is located next to the city's first mosque.
Maybe Dearborn's Muslims are just running a very drawn-out head fake on the country. It's hard to avoid the more likely conclusion, however, that politicians who cry "Sharia!" are engaging in one of the oldest and least-proud political traditions — xenophobic demagoguery.
You can also see this from the over a thousand years long history of Islam. It has been in India since the 7th century and is its second largest religion (see 'Trade, not invasion brought Islam to India' - Times of India). If this theory that Sharia law inevitably expands to become the law of a country, if you let any Muslims have Sharia courts in that country, then why is India not under Sharia law?
Pakistan is a Muslim country, 97% of is population are Muslims and it has the second largest Muslim population after Indonesia (Islam in Pakistan ). I'm not sure when Islam first came to Pakistan but before the Ghaznavids dynasty which starts in 977.
The Saudi Arabians are going against their own tradiations and the classical separation of Fiqh and Siyasa - Sharia law is not meant to be used for the criminal and civil law of a country. More on that in a minute.
IDEA THAT MUSLIMS BELONG IN ARABIC COUNTRIES AND SHOULD GO BACK THERE
There are many Muslims who were born in the UK, become lawyers, MPs doctors, owners of corner shops or whatever. The top four Muslim populations in the world are in Indonesia, Pakistan India, and Bangladesh, which between them constitute 43.6% of the world's Muslim population. Add in Nigeria, Algeria and Morrocco and that's 52.2% of the Muslim population. They may also be second or third generation, have lived in the UK, as did their parents and grandparents.

Jama Masjid - Jama Masjid in Delhi is India's largest mosque. India has the third largest population of Muslims in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan, and is a progressive country in which Shia and Sunni Muslims live together harmoniously
Why should they want to go to an Arabic country? They almost certainly don't speak Arabic, any more than most of my readers. The ones who came here originally most likely originate in progressive modern countries and see countries like Saudi Arabia as repressive and backward in its laws and ethics.
You might be interested in this talk by the Dalai Lama to Muslims in India where he talks about the harmonious integration of Islam into India. India has one of the oldest populations of Muslims in the world. It is not a Muslim state, Islam is a minority religion there. It’s had Muslims there for centuries.
See also my answer to What are Dalai Lama’s views about Islam?
The few Muslims that came to the UK recently from Saudi Arabia, then some of them at least probably came to the UK because they disagreed with their own country’s way of doing things.
Why should even the Muslims that emigrated here from Saudi Arabia want to migrate to Saudi Arabia.
And why would anyone else who came here, with no historical connection at all to Saudi Arabia want to migrate there any more than I do?
EXTREMIST STATES THAT RAISE SHARIA LAW TO CRIMINAL LAW
The extremist states that raise Sharia law to use it as a basis for their State and Criminal law are ignoring their religion’s own history and precedent, and understanding. From 5 myths about Sharia law debunked by a law professor again:
“When Muslim political movements, such as Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, have looked to codify Sharia in their countries, they have done so without any attention to the classical separation of Fiqh and Siyasa, instead continuing the legal centralization of the European nation-state. “
“That's why these movements look to legislate Sharia -- they want centralized laws for everything. But by using state power to force particular religious doctrines upon the public, they would essentially create Muslim theocracies, contrary to what existed for most of Muslim history. “
MYTH THAT MUSLIMS ARE REQUIRED TO LIE
This is based on Taqiya which is specifically a dispensation that Muslims (Shiites especially) are allowed to conceal there religion when asked, if faced by persecution for their faith.
It's not at all a general injunction to lie. There are lots of urban myth websites about this.
It's just like the way that Roman Catholics might conceal their faith in the UK, and especially, would lie if asked if there was a Catholic priest on the premises when they were persecuted by Protestants.

Boscobel priest-hole - Priest hole on second floor of Boscobel House, Shropshire, England
In the sixteenth century, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, after the Rising of the North, Catholics were forbidden to carry out the rites of the Catholic church in the UK, and Catholic priests were at risk of execution. As a result many would be concealed in these “Priest holes” to hide from persecution. The inhabitants of the house would lie if asked if there is a Catholic priest on the premises. There were Priest hunters who would go around hunting for priests and many of the ones found would be executed.
In those circumstances, do you think that the Catholics should have told the truth about whether there is a priest concealed in their house?
MUSLIM FINANCE
The main principle of Muslim finance is that a Muslim can’t have money in a bank account that earns them interest. Nor can they borrow from a bank that charges interest. They have other ways of doing these things, for instance though they can’t take out a mortgage, they have other ways according to which they don’t have to pay for the entire cost of a house upfront but the bank does that and they pay it back. The banks make a profit on the difference betweeen the amount they are paid back and the amount thye originally paid for the house, and this is thought of as being a reasonable recompense for the risk taken by the bank.
So, they do all the same things we do, they just do it in different ways. It is very important for many Muslims that they are compliant with this.
Again this doesn’t impact on anyone else. What they are doing is of course totally within the law, it’s just a bit unusual for those used to banks charging interest on loans and paying interest on savings, and so you have special Sharia compliant financing systems. They also aren’t permitted to invest in a wide range of activities that are considered unethical. All this does is restrict what a Muslim can do financially and has no impact on anyone else.
For more on this, see Islamic finance – the lowdown on sharia-compliant money
COMPULSORY CHARITY
This is about how for a Muslim who is financially stable you are not just expected but required by your religion to give charity to the poor and needy.
For some reason this is given as a negative in anti-Islamic sites, saying that they have to give money to support violence. That is a total urban myth.
That is not at all what it is about. The Islamic teaching is that wealth is a gift from God. Muslims should acquire wealth to spend on their own needs and on the needs of others.
The Third Pillar of Islam: Compulsory Charity
“’Like prayer, which is both an individual and communal responsibility, zakat expresses a Muslim’s worship of and thanksgiving to God by supporting those in need. In Islam, the true owner of things is not man, but God. Acquisition of wealth for its own sake, or so that it may increase a man’s worth, is condemned. Mere acquisition of wealth counts for nothing in the sight of God. It does not give man any merit in this life or in the hereafter. Islam teaches that people should acquire wealth with the intention of spending it on their own needs and the needs of others. ‘
‘"‘Man’, said the Prophet, ‘says: My wealth! My wealth!’ Have you not any wealth except that which you give as alms and thus preserve, wear and tatter, eat and use up?"’
‘The whole concept of wealth is considered in Islam as a gift from God. God, who provided it to the person, made a portion of it for the poor, so the poor have a right over one’s wealth. Zakatreminds Muslims that everything they have belongs to God. People are given their wealth as a trust from God, and zakat is intended to free Muslims from the love of money. The money paid in zakat is not something God needs or receives. He is above any type of dependency. God, in His boundless mercy, promises rewards for helping those in need with one basic condition that zakatbe paid in the name of God; one should not expect or demand any worldly gains from the beneficiaries nor aim at making one’s name as a philanthropist. The feelings of a beneficiary should not be hurt by making him feel inferior or reminding him of the assistance.’
It’s not unlike Christian charity though more formalized, with an actual religious requirement to give, which is not a requirement as such in Christianity, just encouraged. Sometimes Muslims will give to their local mosque to distribute their charity for them, but often not, and again that’s just like Christians giving to their local church or to a Christian charity like Christian Aid, here in the UK - a charity that fights global poverty world wide, amongst people of all religions or none. How could anyone say that this is an aspect of Islam that is wrong in some way?
It’s not unlike Bill Gates The Giving Pledge for people who are not multi-billionaires.
This is a dramatic story that’s recently been published about a supremassive black hole in a very distant galaxy. I’ve been told that many Nibiru people in comments, pms etc are getting scared of this. They think it endangers Earth. So, no, it does not, not remotely.
As an analogy to understand why it is so harmless to us - suppose that you are crossing a road in London. Meanwhile you are on your mobile phone to a friend in New York. They are watching a New York taxi, which is traveling East. You panic and say “Oh, I don’t want to be hit by a New York taxi and it is traveling in my general direction”.

New York yellow taxi. Being scared of a black hole in a distant galaxy, or at the center of our galaxy, or TRAPPIST-1 39.1 light years away, is like someone in London panicing whenever they hear about a New York taxi that is traveling East in case it runs them over
You stand in a panic by the side of the road in London, and refuse to cross it until your friend tells you that the bus has changed direction and is no longer traveling in the vague general direction of London.
That’s what it is like, to be scared of something that is happening around a distant galaxy. Indeed it was the same thing when they said that TRAPPIST-1 threatens Earth. This is 39.1 light years away. It’s actually far more absurd, the idea that it would threaten Earth than the idea that a New York taxi risks running you over in London.
Here is a typical story. A 3 billion solar mass black hole rockets out of a galaxy at 8 million kilometers per hour. Yes, seriously.
This galaxy is 8 billion light years away. We are seeing an event that happened eight billion years ago. We see it because light travels at the speed of light. But the black hole is traveling at 8 million kilometers per hours - not even in our direction. That may seem an impressive speed. But it’s only 0.0074 light hours per hour. It’s traveling at 0.74% of the speed of light.
That’s the case generally. When we see violent activity in distant galaxies, then whatever we see traveling, even if it is very fast - we see it by light. The light takes a long time to get here and whatever it is that we see moving is traveling at a tiny fraction of the speed of light. So, if we see something that’s millions of light years away, it just can’t harm us. Even if it traveled at 1% of the speed of light directly towards us, it would take 100 million years to get here. Anything that was any danger to us would already be in our galaxy, and what’s more to get to us within a century would have to be within a 100 light years, Probably within 1 light year assuming it travels at a hundredth of the speed of light. There’s nothing within one light year of us, no massive black hole, no core of a galaxy, nothing. Not even got any of those things within a million light years except the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy (our nearest neighbour large galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, is more than two million light years away). And our sun orbits the center of the galaxy much as our Earth orbits the Sun. We are in no danger at all of going anywhere near it, no more than we are in any danger of hitting our Sun. Because Earth is in a stable orbit around our Sun and our Sun is in a stable orbit around the very distant galactic core. It’s so far away we would take more than two hundred thousand years to get to it anyway traveling at 1% of the speed of light directly towards it. But that’s not going to happen. We just aren’t traveling in that direction, but rather, we orbit it slowly.
As for light from a distant galaxy - even though they have violent events, gamma rays, X-rays etc - well they are also far away and the energy drops off as the inverse square, very quickly. We don’t need to worry about those either.
We just have nothing at all to worry about with respect to galaxies or supermassive black holes. They can’t harm us.
Trappist 1 is a system of seven planets located 39.1 light years from us. It was not found by NASA. The first three planets were found by TRAPPIST in 2015 (hence the name). This is the name for a pair of small telescopes in Chile operated by a team in Belgium. You can tell its size from this photograph

It consists of two 60cm (0.60 m or 23.5″) reflecting robotic telescopes They are similar in size to many largish amateur telescopes. A 30″ Dobsonian will set you back about $25,000 WEBSTER TELESCOPES - SCOPE PRICES. Of course that has got none of the sophisticated robotics of this telescope - but it shows that it’s not a huge mirror. It’s quite modest, large for an amateur telescope but tiny for a professional.
So this is not a big telescope. Here is another view on it

It only tracks 60 stars. Very modest goal. But it tracks ultra cool nearby dwarf stars. Just 0.05 percent the brightness of the Sun. Kepler, which discovers most of the exoplanets doesn’t bother looking at those.
It discovers them in the same way by looking for a faint dip in light as the planet passes in front of the star. Because the parent star is very cool (for a star) then the planets are easy to spot.
It’s just a prototype - another telescope TRAPPIST-North in Morocco will survey the Northern hemisphere. And eventually they want to build a whole new observatory in Chile to search for planets eclipsing ultra cool stars called SPECULOOS. See The Little Telescope That Just Discovered Three Exoplanets and One-Upped Kepler
This shows how you can find exoplanets nowadays with even quite small telescopes if you are clever in how you do the search.
After the Belgian team found the first three, then the European Space Observatory did more observations with their Very Large Telescope as did NASA with their Spitzer Space Telescope
So if you try to make this into a conspriacy - it’s a world wide conspiracy involving the University of Liège in Belgium, NASA, ESA, and many other astronomers - to what end?
Here is one of those conspiracy theory videos about TRAPPIST-1. I’ve just debunked the first thing they say, as usual. It takes ages to debunk all the many things in a video like this. I normally go as far as the first absurd BS thing they say, debunk that, and leave it at that.
These planets are also more than 39 light years away. The only connection at all with all the ideas about Nibiru is that it has seven known planets. Previously it had three. They may well find more in the future.
The basic argument in that video is:
“TRAPPIST-1 has seven planets, we’ve said for years that Nibiru is a system of seven planets - so of course, TRAPPIST-1 is Nibiru”
That’s like saying “a Dachshundis a dog, a Great Dane is also a dog, so a Great Dane of course is a Dachshund”.
That’s the most common argument the Nibiru people use. They use it time and again. No, a Great Dane is not a Daschund and TRAPPIST-1 is not the nuts BS Nibiru.
(The video also ignores the fact that there are about as many ideas about “Nibiru” as there are people who write about it, and as for scriptures, you can probably find almost any small number less than ten somewhere in a scripture)
TRAPPIST-1 is nowhere near Earth. It cannot harm or threaten us in any way at all.
Summary: This is hard to debunk because it’s by someone who is trained as a scientist. It is “minority view science” rather than just out and out BS. But his ideas are so far fetched, making tenuous connections , that most other scientists just ignore him. They don’t try to debunk him because it’s just not worth the effort it would take to try to understand what he is talking about. It’s not something to worry about.
In detail
The "superwave theory" is minority view science. It claims that our galaxy is related to a “Seyfert galaxy”. These are genuine things, but ours is not a Seyfert galaxy. So that's an eccentric thing to claim.
I think it is fair to say that probably most astronomers have never heard of a "superwave". I've been interested in astronomy all my life and only heard the term last autumn. It's just one scientist saying this, Dr. Paul LaViolette. Nobody else is studying it as far as I can tell.
LIfe is too short to try to figure out what he is talking about, with lots of bizarre seeming ideas, tenuous connections, and with the grand aim to rewrite most of modern astronomy. I just skimmed his ideas but enough to get a flavour and a few of his main lines of thought.
His papers are long and complex, but he claims that every 5,000 to 15,000 years we get mass extinctions saying that the megafauna extinctions in the last ice age were due to this. E.g. extinction of mammoths etc. Most people would say they were due to a combination of climate changes and human hunting. See for instance Why did the wooolly mammoth die out?

Woolly mammoth - model at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria (Canada). The display is from 1979, and the fur is musk ox hair
Most people say that the large mammals that died out at the end of the last ice age died because of changes of climate exacerbated by humans hunting them. The Earth’s climate was much more variable during the ice ages than it is now and it was easy for species to go extinct. The mammoths lived on great plains of grassland which disappeared, turned into the Siberian tundra and they must have needed to eat a lot of grass to survive
It’s the abrupt warmings that caused the extinctions, at least some scientists think. Megafauna extinction: DNA evidence pins blame on climate change. That’s going back through previous extinctions not just the most recent one. During the ice ages large animals often go extinct. They can’t take the heat as the climate suddenly warms up from time to time.
The Earth’s climate is much more stable in between the ice ages in an “interglacial” as it is now.
However perhaps humans had something to do with it as well, hunting already vulnerable large animals to extinction. In one particular place, Australia, there’s good evidence that humans caused th eextinction according to this paper: Climate change not to blame for late Quaternary megafauna extinctions in Australia.
Also, clearly humans survived fine. So whatever happened back then harmed mammoths,
These are not the same as the mass extinctions which happen on average every few tens of millions of years. Many are at least partially caused by asteroid impacts, the most recent one definitely.
I haven’t tried to understand his work in detail. I just skimmed through his papers and got a rough idea, it is very "way out" stuff. Huge extrapolations, waving his hands in the air, saying that things would happen based on the flimsiest of reasons.
There are violent galaxies called Seyfert galaxies and there are stars a bit like our sun with more violent flares called T-Tauri stars. Based on nothing except the flimsiest of extrapolations and a lot of hand waving, he says that our galaxy turns into a sort of Syefert galaxy briefly every few thousand years and somehow this causes our sun to turn briefly into a T-Tauri star, then it all reverts to normal again.
At least I think that is approximately what he says. That's just looking at the abstracts and conclusions of a couple of his articles.
Honestly I wouldn't worry about it at all, it is indeed astronomy after a fashion, by someone who has studied astronomy but it is so far-fetched.
It happens from time to time in astronomy that someone gets a "bee in their bonnet" and everything they hear about seems to them to fit into a grand pattern that nobody else can see in the data. Sometimes scientists who have done good work, and then they end up diving into this conceptual rabbit warren, at least it seems so to everyone else.
For instance, Charles Hapgood's theory of the entire crust shifting was briefly a viable theory but soon fell out of favour
Chandra Wickramasinghe’s strangest idea perhaps is that flu is caused by viruses brought to Earth on comets. Hard to see how a scientist could think such a thing. He has some good ideas though so it's a mix of almost mad way out ideas with a few blips of brilliance. Fred Hoyle who collaborated with him thought the same way. They were very early pioneers of the idea of Panspermia - that life can be transferred between planets and solar systems - long before anyone else thought it was possible. But the idea that flu comes from comets is really quite strange to most scientists, how could a virus - keyed to human beings, somehow come to us from comets? I read their book in the 1970s I think it was and I couldn’t make head or tail of it, why they’d think this was possible.
Then, Robert Shawyer, inventor of the EM Drive has really bizarre ideas of how it works, publishes papers full of maths that don't make any sense at all to other mathematicians / scientists. They just seem incoherent. The drive itself might or might not work, the jury is out on that, but I don't think anyone much apart from himself thinks he is right about how it works (if it does). See my Suggestion: The EM Drive Is Getting The Appropriate Level Of Attention From The Science Community
These are all professional trained scientists with degrees, PhDs etc.
Paul Lavoilette has many other unconventional views. He doesn't think there are such things as black holes. But he thinks our galaxy periodically has large bursts of cosmic radiation. He has a theory that he thinks solves just about all the fundamental outstanding problems in modern physics. He thinks that 10 to 15 percent of the solar output comes from “photon blueshifting” whatever that is. He is a self proclaimed expert on Electrogravitics. He doesn’t think there was a Big Bang.
Basically he is saying that just about all of modern ideas about stars, galaxies and the universe are fundamentally flawed and that he has a new theory that solves it all.
Now very occasionally a scientist like that will turn out to be really onto something. Everyone cites continental drift as an example here. But to win over everyone else then they had to find out lots of more data and develop a theory that really worked. The original continental drift theory wasn’t convincing at all. But it turned out that he was onto something.
Most of the time they don’t win anyone else over to their views, or just one or two, they work away most of their life on these ideas, like Charles Hapgood, and eventually they are shown to be completely wrong. So - you shouldn’t dismiss eccentric scientists like this out of hand, but the chances of them being really onto something are low, most of the time they are wrong.
Paul LaViolette is CEO of the The Starburst Foundation which is a website which summarizes his theory. His papers include: The Cause of the Megafaunal Extinction: Supernova or Galactic Core Outburst? and Cosmic ray volleys from the galactic center and their recent impact on the Earth environment.
It's hard to find anything debunking him, basically because it is crackpot stuff. Like someone says here:
"There are any number of crackpot theories out there and it's just not possible to rebut them all. As I said, life's too short."
Many “doomsday scenarios” are easy to debunk. The difficulty with debunking something like this is that because he is a trained scientist, then he knows how to put things together, but he's threading a story in a fantastical way picking up genuine astronomy here, there and everywhere and tying it together with coincidences and very tenuous similarities and connections.
So, to debunk well you can go through all those things saying "this looks tenuous", "that does", "the next does". He is not going to say a single out and out outrageous thing such as that brown dwarfs are invisible. It's rather the way he connects all the ideas together that is far fetched in the extreme.
Critiques of Dr. Paul LaViolette's theoroes
So, it's so complex that anyone who debunks it will have their work cut out just summarizing what it is they are debunking, in any scientific detail, and then by the time they've explained why it is far fetched, they'll have lost their audience anyway. It's like a big tangle of strings with everything tied to everythign else in a jumble.
This is the video I was asked to debunk. It makes many incorrect claims. However I expect they are not quoted correctly. If they are correct then Paul LaViolette is no longer doing even minority science.
With videos like this normally I just go as far as the first incorrect claim and debunk it, because it takes so long to debunk them all.
He claims that our Sun orbits the galaxy every 26,000 years so that's completely wrong. That's the period of precession of our Earth's axis. Nothing even to do with our Sun at all. Axial precession
Our sun orbits the galaxy once every 230 million years Does the Sun move around the Milky Way?? and How long to orbit Milky Way’s center? | EarthSky.org
Simultaneously our Sun bobs up and down above the galactic plane in a cycle which it completes every 70 million years. It is currently above the plane moving upwards and will cross the plane again 30 million years from now. What causes our Sun to oscillate around its mean Galactic orbit?
There is no 26,000 year period at all. There are many other rookie mistakes in it, which, for all his eccentricity, I don’t think Paul Lavoilette would make. I suspect this video is by someone who took elements of the already minority view eccentric “Superwave” theory and mixed it up with other elements in a big incoherent hodge podge.
This is an idea for an “origami rover” the size of a smartphone which spaceships could take with them to deploy to scout out places where it’s too dangerous for the main rover to go, or get to places they can’t reach (because they are much smaller). A larger rover could also deploy several of them, to scout its neighbourhood, to see which is the most interesting place to go to next.
It can climb 45 degree slopes, crawl into overhangs, and drop into pits and craters. Because it can be folded flat, you can stack them one on top of each other a bit like a pack of cards, and they can do parallel science increasing the amount you can do in a day. Perhaps they might be useful for scientists here on Earth too.
Here is an early prototype folded up:

It has “whegs” instead of wheels - a kind of cross between a leg and a wheel that lets a rover traverse much rougher terrain than you can with a wheel.
Here it is as it unfolds:

Another four wheel version:

But eventually it evolved to a two wheel version. Here is a two wheel version in both configurations

Artist’s impression of it deployed on Mars:

This is what it is like in the tests:
As separate videos:
They can travel quite long distances too as in this sped up video of a 250 meter “hike”
It can travel about 2,050 feet (625 meters) on one battery charge on a flat dirt path like this.
It can be outfitted for snow too. Here it is tested on Mount Erebus in Antarctica

So far they have tested it in Rainbow Basin California, at a ski resort in Grand Junction Colorado, Big Bear California and on Mt Erebus in Antarctica.
It’s small body lets it get into small places



They plan to field test them in the Mojave desert in the near future.
I added “the Moon” to the title as a Moon exploration enthusiast, because they are obviously useful for the Moon as well though the publicity doesn’t specifically mention the Moon, they just say “Example terrains could include caves and lava tubes on Mars, or icy “chaos terrains” on the surface of Europa.“
PUFFER’s body inspired by origami is due to Jaakko Karras, at JPL who is also the project manager.
Its body is wrapped in Nomex, the same textile used for the air bags that cushioned the NASA Spirit and Opportunity rovers when they landed on Mars. The Nomex is integrated into the folding circuit boards and it helps protect it from high temperatures as it repels heat.
It’s able to function in the Mars temperatures of –135 to 30 ˚C without a heater.
The next stage is to find a way to integrate instruments into it. For instance to sample water for organics or add a spectrometer.
It is a “Game Changing Development” progoram managed by GCD, and is part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directive.
For more about it:
Origami-inspired Robot Can Hitch a Ride with a Rover
PUFFER Prepares for Field Testing
NASA's Adorable Pop-Up Rovers Are Designed to Explore Harsh Alien Terrains - Motherboard
Some people claim that the Sun is only a few thousand miles away, and only a few miles in diameter. See for instance this conversation The Size And Distance Of The Sun/Moon which links to many online web sites and videos claiming to prove the Sun is really small. For instance this post by Pastor Billy Reuben “proving” that the Sun is only 500 miles away
So, how is it that astronomers know the distance to the Sun?
First the Sun is clearly further away than the Moon because the Moon eclipses the Sun. The Greeks could measure the distance to the Moon by parallax - observing it from different positions on Earth and seeing which stars are next to it. The Moon is 384,400 km away as we now know, of course we now know the distance to the Moon very accurately because of the laser reflectors left there by Apollo and anyone with a powerful enough laser (has to be very powerful though) can bounce light off the Moon to check its distance.

This is an arrangement of prisms left on the Moon which reflects any laser beam you shine at it from Earth directly back to its source. It works similarly to a “cat’s eye” reflector on a road which reflects your car’s headlights back at you so you can see where the center of the road is. Using this we can measure the distance to the Moon very accurately now using lasers. See Lunar Laser Ranging experiment - Wikipedia
The ancient Greeks however could already measure its distance using parallax, and knew it was several hundred thousand kilometers away (in our units)
For the Sun, it's more tricky. The Greeks made an early attempt by checking when the Moon is at its half phase, what the angle is from the Sun in the sky. The method is geometrically sensible, but there are just too many errors involved to get a very accurate distance, but it's enough to show that the Sun has to be at least millions of kilometers away.
Measurements more recently involve finding the distance to Venus. Once we know that we know the scale of the solar system and so the distance to the Sun using the laws of motions of planets and orbits. So - its' done by radar today. In the past they did it by timing transits of Venus across the Sun, something that happens very rarely.

Astronomer with Captain Cook 1769 observed transit of Venus from Tahiti. This was used to estimate the distance to the Sun in modern times. Nowadays we use radar to measure the distance to Venus and so work out how far away the Sun is.
For more on this:
How do you measure the distance between Earth and the Sun? (Intermediate)
I think there is no evidence at all of any ancient knowledge from extra terrestrials or a past technological “Atlantis”. Though lots of ancient wisdom in philosophy and understanding of human nature and of ways to work with the natural world, an ecological type of wisdom etc. But their best scientists and astronomers and mathematicians just hadn’t got many of even the simplest of modern concepts in those subjects.
There are many images often shared as “Ancient astronauts “

But all I see there are figures with hoods or halos which may mark them out as important figures or who knows what. It’s hardly an accurate representation of a spacesuit :).

Doesn’t much resemble a spaceship to me. Out of thousands of drawings from the past, we are bound to come across one or two that accidentally resemble things that we have today.
Suppose we sent them a drawing of this, back in time somehow:

What do you think they’d read it as?
of course!
Just as we read their figures as astronauts in spacesuits, they’d read our styluses and phones as clay tablets with clay styluses.
We always interpret things in terms of our culture when there is some resemblance.
Also, there could be past civilizations that had peaceful ordered society, that were very civilized by modern standards, but I’m very skeptical about the idea of some past technological civilization of humans that has vanished, advanced enough for spaceflight or anything resembling modern technology. No matter how much they kept themselves to themselves.
Now they did have technology that was advanced for their time. The Greek Antikyras device is a striking example.
But if they had a civilization anything like ours, my main question would be - why didn't they leave us a legacy of simple maths at least?
Not complex maths, not the ability to make spaceships, I can understand that that could be forgotten, especially if they kept themselves very much to themselves and didn't share their knowledge widely. But just the ability to use:
The Babylonian system was the first positional value system. They could represent a zero within a number by leaving a gap, e.g. 101, distinct from 11. (Except of course, they worked to base 60). But they couldn't distinguish 1, 10 100, 1000 from each other - you had to infer which was which from context. Babylonian numerals - Wikipedia
The Egyptians by contrast had different symbols for each of 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 and 1,000,000 Egyptian numerals
Some of the ancient maths is just notating what they did on an abacus. The Roman numerals are like that, great for notating a position on an abacus and not much use for much else. It’s hard to do much arithmetic with Roman numerals on the paper but you can do it on an abacus and just note down what you the answer is.
Basically they had no idea that maths could be made any easier.
We don’t see these as difficult at all. We now teach all of this to young children but which took thousands of years for human civilizations to come up with those concepts and only one at a time, very slowly, centuries of work to get to that point.
They did many complex things - Stonehenge, the tables of the appearances of Venus by the Sumerians, noticed the Saros cycles and used them to predict eclipses, though nowhere near the accuracy with which we predict them.
But they did these things through incredibly laborious methods, as they seem to us now. How could they forget such simple ideas that would make things so much easier for us?
Even up to the middle ages the world’s best mathematicians, mathematicians who entered into mathematical competitions, would split an equation such as the cubic or the quadratic into several cases because they hadn't quite understood how to work with negative numbers.
And the Sumerians used the most complex calculations to work around the difficulty that they had no way to notate fractions.
Robert Walker Everything had to be positive throughout the equation.
Plus why didn't they tell us basic astronomy if they had spaceships or telescopes? That
Originated as my answer to Is 2017 the return of the ancient ones from Nibiru
See also Do you believe in UFO'S and the different species of alien life they have named?
I couldn't find much about this, just a few “Before it’s news” type posts which I won’t boost by linking to them. I think basically fake news by a conspiracy theorist. No sign of Trump doing an expedition to Antarctica :). Or Theresa May or Angela Merckel or any other world leader as far as I know. I don’t know of any world political or religious leader who has visited Antarctica.
It's a place of great scientific interest and I suppose maybe from time to time some leader goes there to show their interest in science or something? By the Antarctic treaty then they have agreed to ignore all territorial claims in Antarctica - there's a time out for that but surely it would be renewed. And only a tiny population of scientists, of the order of a few thousand in the Antarctic winter. More in summer and lots of tourists visit the Antarctic coast in summer.
There is the conspiracy theory idea of ancient technology buried in Antarctica. A big fuss a while back about supposed pyramids in Antarctica. based on this photograph


But though it’s impressive it’s clearly just a natural phenomenon. Some of the photos are somewhat blurred to make it look more artificial.
It comes from this article Tropical climate in the Antarctic: Palm trees thrived on today's icy coasts 52 million years ago
Here is another example of a similar “snow pyramid” in Antarctica

There are some impressive geological formations in Antarctica. By the same author:

And not surprisingly, lots of impressive ice formations: Stunning Photos Capture the Otherworldly Beauty of Antarctica's Icebergs
Debunking the Pyramids of Antarctica Myth
Burying the Debunk: How Fake News about "Pyramids" in Antarctica Creates False Balance
I don't know anything about "project blue beam" but this is it debunked on metabunk. Project Blue Beam
I can make a general remark though. Generally these people seem to think NASA is an all purpose spy agency / defence agency / source of all astronomical knowledge in the world / totalitarian misinformation education campaign.
It is none of those. It is just the best known of several civilian aerospace agencies. In Europe we have ESA. In Germany it's DLR. In Russia it's ROSCOSMOS. In Japan it's JAXA. India, China etc also have their own aerospace industries. And they are not all organized in one big umbrella organization under the control of NASA. Do you think ROSCOSMOS is under the control of NASA?
And none of them really do astronomy. They launch space telescopes and then the telescopes are operated by astronomers, not by the space engineers who launched them, and astronomers world wide bid for time on the telescopes typically.

Hubble Space Telescope - The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) begins its separation from Space Shuttle Discovery following its release on mission STS-82.
Hubble was launched and serviced by NASA which is a civilian aerospace industry. But the observations are not done by NASA. They are done by astronomers internationally who compete for observation slots on Hubble. That’s for 90% of the observations. Up to 10% can be reserved as a Director's Discretionary Time Submission for events of special temporary interest that they want to photograph right away - they also used this for the NASA deep field photographs.
Sometimes there's a closer connection with mission scientists who design the instruments and then get first dips on the results - that's mainly with the in situ explorers - robotic explorers of comets, planets etc. Not for telescopes though.
I don't believe in UFOs as being aliens in contact with Earth. First, the idea of them crashing - with technology likely to be millions of years ahead of us (very unlikely in a nearly 14 billion years old universe that they reach our level of technology only a few centuries or thousand years before us) - how could they crash? They would land remote robots anyway not themselves and probably undetectable nanoprobes.
If they are seen it is because they want to be seen not an accident. The problem with UFO stories is not the advanced technology, but that it is nowhere near advanced enough, it's like early sci. fi. movies and stories with spaceships using clunky cathode ray tubes and monochromatic green screens or using teleprinters.
And why would they want to collaborate with the US government? You can see what is in it for the US but not for ETs. And the US surely can't have technology a million years ahead of everyone else - if they did they could develop some commercial use of it that would wipe out their national debt overnight.
And our solar system seems totally pristine. We can photograph Mars down to resolution of a few cms from orbit. So far no alien tracks. The Moon as far as we can see has no tracks by anyone else either. Our solar system as a whole seems pristine.

New Images Offer Sharper View of Apollo Sites - we can see the tracks left by the Apollo rover clearly. No tracks left by aliens seen anywhere on the Moon or Mars

If there are ETs here, then they have to have a policy of erasing all traces of their presence and strict non interference with us. Yet they are supposedly spotted by people just looking up at the sky and seeing a UFO flying over.
Why take such care to erase all trace of their presence from the solar system, and yet buzz us with UFOs? When whatever they might want to do they could do undetectably with nanobots?
I think there may well be extra terrestrials, microbial life in our solar system, perhaps higher life too. There is a remote chance of a non technological civilization living beneath the surface of one of the icy moons in our solar system such as Europa. They would not know about us and we wouldn’t know about them either. Apart from that, yes, very likely to be intelligent species living around other stars, but our galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter and unless extraterrestrials are very common, the nearest is surely thousands of light years away
We don't see any signs of a galactic civilization or large scale modification of our galaxy so if there are any such, they have managed to explore our galaxy in such a way as to have minimal impact on it. If there are extra terrestrials throughout the galaxy even a few light years away - well they have to be way ahead of us technologically, most of them, it’s too bizarre a coincidence otherwise. And if so - well they have managed to develop remarkable harmony or they would already be here fighting over the Earth and other resources in our solar system.
And if any extraterrestrials wanted Earth for themselves - well why wait for us to evolve and develop technology? They could have done it millions of years ago. Given that it is vastly improbable that they develop the technology to get here only in the last few centuries - and given that the Earth would be easy to detect with telescopes just a bit larger than we have now, as a habitable planet, from thousands of light years away.
Our universe is nearly 14 billion years old. 140 million centuries, and has been habitable for civilizations to develop for at least fifty to a hundred million centuries.. It’s just not credible that a whole lot of ETIs, could develop to just our stage of technology and no further in the same century as us. For even one ETI to do that is a 1 in several million type probability.
The problem with the extra terrestrials in these stories is not that they have advanced technology. Rather their technology is nowhere near advanced enough, they should be at least thousands and probably millions of years ahead of us. It's not advanced enough. Their spaceships shouldn't crash and if they want to be undetectable we simply would have no idea they visited us. And they would have been aware of Earth probably before modern humans evolved and most likely before the development of complex multicellular life 500 million years ago.
I’m not sure what this refers to, but it may well have been elaborated as an urban myth so perhaps this is it: Debunked: A Solar Storm Put A Crack In Earth's Magnetic Field by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
It doesn’t. The ISS does get hit occasionally by micrometeoroids. Here is a hole in one of the solar panels

See Warning Shot: a "Bullet Hole" on the ISS - Universe Today
The main modules also get hit sometimes. This is a story about a puncture in an outer pumping unit for the Russian Zaria module: Meteorite damage found on space station
It also has to maneuver from time to time to avoid larger debris which is detected by ground radar. The International Space Station Just Avoided a Collision With Space Junk
Occasionally the crew have had to retreat into the Soyuz TMA just in case the ISS gets depressurized if they are unable to maneuver away in time. From there they could get back to Earth within hours. ISS crew shelters in Soyuz capsule over space debris
There is a finite probability that the ISS gets breached by orbital debris or a meteoroid before the end of mission. They have emergency procedures in place - the crew immediately evacuate to the Soyuz TMA ready to return to Earth within hours if necessary. Then try to repair it if possible. If not possible they would have to de-orbit it. There are contingency plans worked out for all that. Bringing down the ISS - Plans for Station’s demise updated - powerpoint slides
Yes there are high levels of radiation. But Apollo didn't go through the center of them, it bypassed most of them going through it to one side.

Also the particles are lower energy, and most blocked out by the skin of the spacecraft, and then they were only in it for a small amount of time. The amount of radiation you are exposed to depends on the intensity as well as the time. If they'd spent days in it then it would certainly be an issue ,but they spent only minutes to hours and they went through a weak part of it. It wasn't a concern. They measured their radiation dose and it was only a fraction of the total dose they received - most of it from cosmic radiation, and from the sun.
For more details
This is an answer I just made to a comment on one of my answers, thought I’d share here (and BTW I have done lots of posts answering questions on Buddhism just forgot to copy them here, will copy a few over). I was asked if I found Buddhism was in conflict with science - and - I’ve found no conflict with science at all in Buddhism or indeed as a Christian either. It’s especially easy to see in Buddhism, because Buddha taught that we need to test our beliefs. In the Kalama sutra - it’s a long sutra and people often take it wrongly too so the translator’s summary is best:
“Traditions are not to be followed simply because they are traditions. Reports (such as historical accounts or news) are not to be followed simply because the source seems reliable. One's own preferences are not to be followed simply because they seem logical or resonate with one's feelings. Instead, any view or belief must be tested by the results it yields when put into practice; and — to guard against the possibility of any bias or limitations in one's understanding of those results — they must further be checked against the experience of people who are wise.
The ability to question and test one's beliefs in an appropriate way is called appropriate attention. The ability to recognize and choose wise people as mentors is called having admirable friends. According to Iti 16-17, these are, respectively, the most important internal and external factors for attaining the goal of the practice.”
Then - one of the places where Buddhism and other religions may on the face of it seem to come most into conflict with science is if you ask “What happens when I die”. But despite Richard Dawkings - actually science doesn’t prove anything about that. It proves that our bodies decay, can study what happens to the atoms that make them up etc, but I don’t think any major religion denies this.
And every atom of your body has been exchanged many times in your lifetime. Even when you retain the “same neurons” they aren’t the same atoms as those are living cells, which also constantly exchange molecules and atoms with their environment.
So, when it comes to the question of what happens when you die, I think the clearest way to see rather quickly that science doesn’t give a final answer is to consider vivid dreams. Some people have dreams so vivid they literally can’t tell that they are asleep. Sometimes they wake up many times before they finally awake and each time they think they really have woken up. Richard Feynman, like many others, was able to do lucid dreaming where he knew he was asleep, and could investigate his dreams, which as a scientist he did scientifically and he found that his dreams could be studied just like waking life, for instance seeing diffraction spots in a girl’s hair, though because he was in control in his dreams he could arrange things to work differently from waking life, e.g. a thumb tack that he could feel but not see.
So - this is not to say that this is a dream. But - what if it has some of the qualities of a dream, that you can wake up from it, or transit to another similar state like transitioning from one dream to another? Shared with others of course, a collaborative reality as it were, not that we are making it, that it is real too but that a lot of what we perceive is due to a shared “consensus reality” in how we interpret it all. There are many ways of talking about all this in Buddhist teachings, that’s one way my teacher used to talk about it, just to give an example. He’d talk also about how subgroups of people can have their own consensus reality - which we do in matters like politics say, but perhaps this goes on in a more fundamental way.
So if this has some qualities like a dream, then our experiments have some of the qualities of dream experiments. If you do experiments in a dream, when you study your dream body, find out about dream atoms and electrons - what happens to all that, and your scientific equipment, your body etc when you wake?
Thinking like that could lead one to start to have an open mind about what happens when you die. It doesn’t prove that any particular thing happens, but it shows that we don’t know.
So that’s the starting point in Buddhism. To recognize what we don’t know. In all sorts of things. And that’s also the starting point of science. Though they didn’t historically apply it to science, not really, didn’t develop science as we do, it is basically a scientific approach to the world, but without science’s focus on material things so much. It starts from recognizing what one doesn’t know, and then investigating that. Or, a bit like Descarte’s approach, except he starts with the undoubted fact that he exists, but Buddhists go further and ask what it means to say that I exist, and what am I, and to leave that too as an open question that one doesn’t know the answer to.
But it’s not nihilism, or existentialism. Because as with science there are many things one can come to see to be true easily. Indeed all of science would count as part of this investigation, because basically the path of the Buddha is a search for truth, and science is too, so as far as you are searching for truth in science - that’s the Buddhist path really.
Of course Feynman was an atheist.
“What I mean is this: the probability that the theory of God, the ordinary theory, is right, to my mind is extremely low. That's all. That's the way I look at it.”
Buddhists are “non theists”. Not even agnostics about God. It’s just not relevant to the Buddhist path to ask that question.
But central to Buddhism as to science is the search for truth. It’s very much the curiosity about truth Feynman talks about here, but it’s main focus is different, as it starts by asking “Why do we suffer, what is the cause of suffering, is there such a thing as cessation of suffering and what’s the path to the cessation of suffering”. But suffering there is more generally not just suffering but any form of unsatisfactoriness, even things like that you may have a life full of pleasure, great, but eventually you die, or in some way your situation changes - so the happiness is great, but it’s not a final solution to the problem of dukkha / suffering because it’s going to come to an end at some point, and you know that. If we could find a true “happy ever after” in this life, for ourselves and for others, then there wouldn’t really be any need for the Buddhist path, but however we try, we can’t seem to do that. Even with all the power of science, we can’t achieve that.
And part of that path is finding out how much you don’t know, and connecting to the truth of the situation you are in, and then science is part of that. Science both helps clear away many misunderstandings and confusions and it also helps in material ways to ease suffering, to help us achieve our goals and so on, and to have a better understanding of our universe.
All that is also part of the Buddhist path too, it’s just that in all these centuries, somehow Buddhists as with everyone else never thought to look quite so intently in that particular direction as modern scientists do. Here is Feynman talking eloquently about curiosity:
And that curiosity is basically the start of the Buddhist path. To look closely at things most don’t look at. To connect to the truth and be firmly grounded in the truth as best you understand it. So not only do I see it as no conflict. I see my science / maths as part of the Buddhist path.
And when I was Christian before I became Buddhist then I saw it the same way. But as I’m now Buddhist it’s easier to explain what it’s like as a Buddhist. If you’d asked me in the 1970s I’d have answered rather similarly but as a Christian.
Margot's Π - the various measures are all are in pretty good agreement in the discrimination between planets and non planets - and that's the only one that's easy to calculate. Very easy.
I'll indent the calculations so they are easy to skip.
With the planet measured in Earth masses, for planet h, then m is <1. M is measured in solar masses, so is 0.08. a is 0.063 au. And k for those units is 833. So the formula works out as
833*1/((0.08^(5/2)*( 0.063 ^(9/8)) = 10319577.4726
Where the value needs to be greater than 1 to "clear the neighbourhood".
So they are most definitely “uber planets”.
It’s probably going to be a while before we find an exoplanet which isn’t an uber planet just because many (though not all) of our search methods are biased towards finding planets that are close to the host star, and especially so, our methods for finding the smaller planets. We need a small planet at a fair distance from its star or a large planet at an immense distance.
Let’s turn this the other way around. How far away would an Earth mass planet have to be from Trappist 1 to be an unter planet (non planet clearing)?
Then the formula is a = (833*1/(0.08^(5/2)) ^(8/9) or about 228,000 au. Or about 3.6 light years.
Let’s try a Mercury sized planet, then it’s 0.0553 Earth masses, the equation then becomes (833*0.0553/(0.08^(5/2)) ^(8/9) = 12616 au or about 0.2 light years.
So it would be possible for a very distant Mercury size planet around TRAPPIST-1 to be an unter planet.
Anyway it will help to try it for a very massive star. Let’s look at this table at wikipedia: List of exoplanets - Wikipedia
So that table is in Jupiter masses for the planet. Jupiter is 317.83 Earth masses.
the formula is
(833*m/317.83 )/((M^(5/2)*( D ^(9/8))
m= planet mass in Jupiters, M= star mass in sun masses, D= distance in AU.
Sort with the most massive host star first,
HD 13189 b (833*14/317.83 )/((4.5^(5/2)*( 1.85 ^(9/8)) = 0.4275
So that is a 14 Jupiter masses planet orbiting at a distance of 1.85 AU which if we used the IAU definition would count as a dwarf planet!
Range of masses 8 to 20 so the highest mass in that range (833*20/317.83 )/((4.5^(5/2)*( 1.85 ^(9/8)) still gives it a Margot PI of 0.61, so it would count as a dwarf planet.
This is the bank note, it’s a Swiss banknote

It shows the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with their symbols. For some reason Mars is shown without any moons, Jupiter with five (it has four large moons and numerous smaller ones), Saturn with five moons and it shows a comet like elliptical orbit as well as a mysterious white ellipose in the middle of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
This shows the complete note

So of course the big question is, what is that ellipse? Some online pages say it is Comet Elenin. But this note predates its discovery as it dates back to 1990. C/2010 X1 (Elenin) was discovered in 2010, as the name shows.
Well, I found the most detailed explanation on this site by an enthusiast collector of bank notes who has this note in their collection: 10 Franken 1990 Switzerland
The banknote was issued to commemorate the great Swiss mathematician Euler.
Anyway he explains that it is based on this diagram by Euler

Here is another image of the same page

So then the main question is, what was Euler drawing in this diagram?
This is what it says on the facing page, if any of you can read it:

This is just from a scan I found on the internet and I don’t know where it comes from, which page of which book. I’ll update this if I found out.
Leonhard Euler - Wikipedia lived from 1707 to 1783.
Halley's Comet was discovered in 1758.
So anyway, the note collector author of the site says it is comet Halley, and it seems it must be because the second comet to be given a short period orbit, Comet Encke didn’t have its orbit calculated until 1819 after Euler died.
But Euler did work out other comet orbits, at any rate he found the orbit of Messier’s “Great comet” of 1769 to have an orbital period of 449 to 519 years from three observations (page 24 of this article)
So, if it’s meant to be Halley, it’s puzzling because Halley has an orbital period of 75 years. If so, the longest line through the ellipse (which determines its orbital period) should be much longer than the diameter of Saturn’s orbit with a period of 29 years.
Reading from the diagram, It seems to be a shorter period comet with a period of between 12 and 29 years (the orbital periods of Jupiter and Saturn). Around 20 years perhaps.
Euler would have known Kepler’s laws of orbits so not sure how he could have made a mistake like that so my main guesses would be
This is Halley’s orbit:
It could easily have been a hypothetical comet orbit, or some comet other than Halley, with its orbit not well known yet perhaps, because Euler did know of several.
So if any of you can read the text above, or you know whether it is Halley’s comet or a hypothetical comet or some other particular comet that he didn’t know the orbit to for sure, or whatever it is, let me know.
Anyway let’s repeat the banknote image again:


The note is basically a rotated version of Euler’s diagram. But the engraver has made a mistake. It shows Jupiter with five moons instead of four. The original diagram shows the four moons known to Euler. Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
Saturn shows the five moons of Saturn known to Euler, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, and Iapetus
Mars is shown without any moons because its two moons are so tiny, and weren’t known in Euler’s time. The Moons of Mars were discovered by Asaph Hall in August 1877. Moons of Mars
The white mark is the asteroid 2002 Euler (there the 2002 is a number not a year) discovered in 1973 originally called “1973 QQ1” which was named after Euler for his contributions to astronomy.
So, there you have it. More details here: 10 Franken 1990 Switzerland
This is a common myth in the conspiracy sites. But it could hardly be further form the truth. NASA have almost nothing to do with asteroid tracking. The tracking itself is organized by the Minor Planet Center. They are involved with finding asteroids, mainly through funding. But the search for asteroids is a world wide effort with many telescopes and organizations involved. The whole thing is done in a totally “open source” way with no possibility of hiding anything.
IN DETAIL
NASA manage spacecraft and space missions, and most of the ones they have launched so far are not much use for day to day asteroid finding and tracking.
Hubble would be useless as its field of view is far too small.
They also operate NEOWISE, a repurposed infrared telescope that finds a fair number of asteroids though as you’ll see from the table below, it’s not a large proportion of the total.
NASA are considering possibly sending up a mission to do this called NEOcam. But this so far is just a mission proposal.

NEOcam - a proposed future mission for NASA that would help with tracking small asteroids.
The main thing NASA do is provide co-ordination of asteroid searches and funding for projects. They spend $40 million a year.

Planetary Defense Coordination Office
The US Airforce Research Laboratory funded construction of the Pan-STARRS telescope.

Pan-STARRS is one of the top observatories for finding asteroids at present. Construction was funded by the US Airforce Research Laboratory, but they don’t run it. It is run by an international consortium of astronomical bodies.
Pan-STARRS operations are funded by fourteen institutions in six countries, in the PS1 Science Consortium in exchange for right to analyse the data for astronomical purposes.
It is one of many projects to find asteroids, though one of the most prolific.
Once one of these projects finds an asteroid - that’s just the start. At that point they don’t know the orbit. The Minor Planet Center then alerts observers world wide to track it and co-ordinates their observations. Pan-STARRS does do some follow up observations too but amateurs are very much involved as well.
The main ones involved are listed here:
"Most of the NEO Discovery Surveys, including the Catalina Sky survey, Pan-STARRS and Spacewatch provide a substantial number of follow-up observations. Dr. David Tholen, at the University of Hawaii, is particularly efficient in providing the very faint follow-up observations that are often required to prevent small NEOs from being lost.
A substantial number of faint follow-up observations are also made at the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico (Bill and Eileen Ryan). Explicit mention should also be made of the prolific number of follow-up observations provided by the Astronomical Research Institute (ARI) under the direction of Robert Holmes and the amateur group at the New Millennium Observatory in Northern Italy."
(from: Follow-up Observing Programs)

This shows the new millennium observatory in Italy - run by amateur astronomers - one of the many groups of observers who are involved in the Follow-up Observing Programs to refine the orbits of NEOs. This was built by Luca Cozzi, an engineer, brother of Dr. Elia Cozzi, Italian amateur astronomer and astrophysicist whose idea it was.
That's just to give an example - there are many groups of people and many telescopes world wide involved in this - and as you see - that's an ordinary not that big suburban house in Italy with a telescope built into its roof - the telescopes don't have to be huge monster tens of meters telescopes for this job.
Robert Holmes, amateur astronomer, one of the most prolific follow up observers for the NEO program.
For an idea of some of the other amateur groups involved in the NEO follow up observations see the Planetary Society grants, which they give regularly - to amateur groups who are doing especially good work in this area. See:
Leaders in Asteroid Tracking/Observing Awarded Through Global Grant Program

Bob Holmes again, this time with one of his telescopes - a wide field of view 0.76 m (30 in) telescope with a sensitive CCD camera purchased with a 2013 grant from the Planetary Society. Bob Holmes of the Astronomical Research Institute in Illinois, USA
So, NASA are part of a big global program, and it is all interconnected.
Teams currently searching for asteroids include
Amateurs used to detect them but now, only rarely, by accident, as these professional telescopes do the job so much more quickly. Amateur astronomers mainly help with the very important follow up observations now.
So, the discovery is normally done by professional telescopes run by many international groups of astronomical organizations. The asteroid tracking is done by amateur and professional astronomers world wide. Once you find an asteroid with one of these big telescopes anyone with even a medium sized telescope within the range of enthusiastic amateurs can then get involved in tracking. And the observations are shared in an open way. There is no way to hide anything.
Summary: Professor Zhakarov predicted a “mini ice age” which was reported as far more dramatic than the original idea. It's just a theory, not established fact. And if it does happen, she predicts a global cooling of 0.1 °C for 30 years. This won't nearly offset the global warming from human introduced CO2, and indeed it wouldn't even be enough to halt warming which would just level off for part of that 30 years if he is correct, if we continue to emit CO2 and then at the end would jump up to the expected temperature it would have reached anyway after 30 years.
Another idea is from 1970s that we are headed towards a new ice age some time soon, maybe even this century. That was just based on the average time between ice ages, and assuming that our interglacial (gap between ice ages) was average in length. However the gaps between ice ages vary hugely in length and we now understand why that is. Ours is predicted to be a much longer gap than usual - and the amount of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere already probably means we won’t get our next ice age for 100,000 years, and possibly not at all for the foreseeable future
Example story to debunk: The Controversial Files: According To A Math Professor’s Solar Cycle Mode, An ICE AGE Is Near
IN DETAIL
Profressor Zharkova’s prediction is similar to the Maunder Minimum when there were no sunspots and the sun was a bit cooler than usual with the Thames freezing over in London. It’s just a prediction and hypothesis, she’s not saying that the sun has started to cool down yet. Also it’s for a much shorter time than the Maunder minimum.
If we do get a mini ice age of that type - which depends on the sun not on Earth, then the global warming that we've had would offset it. But it''s quite a small effect, they say a reduction of average temperatures by 0.1 C, small compared with the global warming of 1 C we’ve had already. Of course local effects could be more than that, that's global average. Still, don’t expect ice sheets to start advancing. With all the CO2 in the atmosphere, it’s more like a short period of 30 years when maybe the Earth doesn’t warm up quite as much as it would otherwise.
The Sun goes through a sunspot cycle every 11 years. Sometimes has lots of sunspots, sometimes few. And occasionally it goes for decades with no sunspots at all. The last time that happened was several centuries ago. This scientist is predicting it might happen again. But we don't know if she is right. It is just a theory.
When there are no sunspots, like that, it may be very slightly cooler. So that's the basis of her prediction that the world might get a cooling of 0.1 C. But the warming from global warming is already around 1 C since pre-industrial. So a cooling of 0.1 C is not going to take us back even to the nineteenth century temperatures never mind the Maunder minimum.
If it does happen it is just a brief pause in warming, not even a cooling. And then three decades later the world would heat up again to whatever temperature it would have been anyway without this brief cooling event.
You can read what Zharkova herself says about her theory and it’s relevance to climate change here: Is a Mini Ice Age Coming? 'Maunder Minimum' Spurs Controversy
See also There Probably Won't Be A “Mini Ice Age” In 15 Years
And - from the UK met office: Scientists show a decline in solar activity could not halt global warming
WAS THE MAUNDER MINIMUM AN ICE AGE
Also there’s some question about whether the Maunder minimum was a global mini ice age or caused by the Sun. It might have been local to Northern Europe. It might also have been caused by volcanoes. It started before the reduction of hot spots.
Oh, is one thing new. On the Maunder minimum, yes it was a sunspot minimum. Yes it was colder in Europe. But that doesn't mean it was a global reduction in temperature. The reduction in solar intensity was probably no more of a reduction than you get during the 11 years sunspot cycle. The cold period started before the sunspot minimum started. It was not uniformly cold, just on average. Had some very hot summers.

Temperatures in England midlands area - the longest continuous temperature series from a single spot, note these are not global temperatures. Black line is a rolling ten year average. Blue is the year mean. Red and blue lines are max and min for the period. Note that even during the mini ice age period there were occasional very warm years.
There has been a long discussion in the academic literature about whether it is volcanic in origin, or due to decreased solar output or a mixture of both. This 2012 paper suggests that it was volcanic in origin. "UNUSUAL VOLCANIC EPISODE RAPIDLY TRIGGERED LITTLE ICE AGE, RESEARCHERS FIND".
It was a time of increased volcanic activity. The correlation with the sunspot minimum is not a strong one due to the onset of colder temperatures before onset of the reduced sunspot numbers. The wikipedia article on the Little Ice Age has lots of cites and lists of various hypotheses on it which could be worth following up to find out more.
Seems there were cold events in other parts of the world at around the same time, but not necessarily closely correlated with the cold weather in northern Europe. The final effects of it had cleared away by the twentieth century, whatever the cause was.
NO ICE AGE FOR 100,000 YEARS
There is a theory from the 1970s which suggested that there could be an ice age headed our way in the next few thousand years, or sooner -, but that theory is no longer accepted. Even without global warming, the next ice age is expected to be 50,000 years into the future. An Exceptionally Long Interglacial Ahead?
The 1970s theory was simply based on looking at the duration of previous interglacials, which usually last for 10,000 years. They just assumed ours would be the same duration as the previous ones.
Their theory for ice ages back then was based on the idea of a “random walk”. What if the climate just randomly wobbles a bit warmer then a bit colder? And maybe if it shifts a bit warmer by chance, then it has more of a tendency to keep going that way? Then the entire process of moving in and out of the ice ages could be a result of random processes. This is one such paper from 1976. This is a later paper from 1990 though by then most climatologists had moved on to new ideas
So the idea was that the climate of the Earth itself was just moving randomly like that. We can predict it short term they thought, but it gets chaotic beyond a few days - and then beyond that, it is just not possible to predict the climate very exactly. Sometimes it gets a bit warmer, sometimes a bit colder, and if it keeps randomly getting colder for long enough we hit an ice age.
The last three interglacials all lasted for about ten thousand years. So, though we couldn't predict when it could happen and our weather could head towards an ice age at any time, they thought that it would happen at the same time again. Our current Holocene interglacial started 11,700 years ago. So based on that simple argument, it would seem that we are due for another ice age just about now. And that’s how they reasoned back then, see The Future of the World's Climate.
However far from it, the Earth is warming up slightly even without global warming. Back then they didn’t have any detailed theory, as the theory of Milankovitch cycles which is now accepted widely was only finally established as valid in the late 1970s through study of ice cores (though first put forward as a theory in the 1920s). The ice ages depend on interaction of many different cycles involving slight variations in the Earth’s tilt, how circular the orbit is (eccentricity) and the precession of the equinoxes. See Milankovitch Cycles and Glaciation
He found out that the ice ages end at times when we get particularly high levels of sunlight at northerly latitudes.
This is a modern diagram from the NOAA. The warmer interglacials are shown in yellow. The graph at the top in red shows how warm it is in July at 65 degrees North, the modern version of Milankovitch's curve.
There's a strong cycle there every 23,000 years due to the precession of the Earth's axis. Interglacials like the one we are in now happen when the weather is warmer in the northern hemisphere, though not every time. As you see, it has happened every five cycles for the last fifteen cycles.
The bottom line in blue shows the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere which is nowadays thought to play an important role in the warming, though Milankovitch didn't realize that. (Calculated from bubbles of atmosphere in the Dome Fuji ice core)
The middle line shows the temperature in Antarctica (calculated from hydrogen isotope ratios in the Dome Fuji ice core). The temperature in Antarctica is higher at times when the northern hemisphere gets most sunlight, even though at those times Antarctica gets least sunlight, because of global warming.
This theory was first put forward by Milankovitch. Here he is as a student with a pocket watch.
This though was not very convincing right away. It is easy to prove the craziest things using graphs and correlations.

At best a correlation like that might lead you to consider a hypothesis to investigate further.
Is it a real effect or is it just a coincidence like that? The scientists needed to find out more to check this out. And they did. Though his original explanation wasn’t quite right - carbon dioxide plays more of a role than he realized - his theory once updated with new ideas passed all their tests.
As a result, nowadays, based on a much better understanding of how it works, the scientists predict that ours would be a longer duration interglacial even without global warming, lasting about 50,000 years.
Then, there’s new research that suggests that the next ice age could be postponed from 50,000 to 100,000 years in the future due to the effects of the CO2. See: Fossil fuel burning 'postponing next ice age You can click through the link in that article to get to the nature paper itself complete under their sharing initiative.
The authors selected only the models that most accurately tracked the previous ice ages, and used that to study whether or not we are due to plunge into the next ice age. They found that if they ran the models with CO2 levels of 240 ppm, similar to the Halocene (the previous interglacial, last time the world was this warm), then the next ice age would be as soon as 1500 years into the future.
But if they used the pre-industrial levels of CO2 of 280 ppm, then the next ice ages should be 50,000 and 90,000 years from now (with a possibility of a slowly approaching ice age 20,000 years from now). Just that extra 40 ppm made all the difference. They are unsure why we had more CO2 this time around. Perhaps human activity even in pre-industrial society was enough to raise the levels by 40 ppm, which isn't very much, or at least contributed to the levels.
They found that with 500 Gt of emissions, not far off what we have already reached, we may already have enough CO2 in the atmosphere to make a difference to the ice sheets over thousands of years. If it reaches 1000 GT then the chance of an ice age in the next 100,000 years is notably reduced and with 1500 GT of emissions then it is very unlikely that we get an ice age in the next 100,000 years. And with higher levels of emissions, then we will end the pattern of ice ages altogether. You can read it in full under Nature's sharing initiative if you click on the link " published in the journal Nature" in the article in the Guardian here: Fossil fuel burning 'postponing next ice age
In that paper, they say
" Using an ensemble of simulations generated by an Earth system model of intermediate complexity constrained by palaeoclimatic data, we suggest that glacial inception was narrowly missed before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The missed inception can be accounted for by the combined effect of relatively high late-Holocene CO2 concentrations and the low orbital eccentricity of the Earth7. Additionally, our analysis suggests that even in the absence of human perturbations no substantial build-up of ice sheets would occur within the next several thousand years and that the current interglacial would probably last for another 50,000 years."
So in other words yes, we were due to go into an ice age around the start of the industrial Revolution, but it's not just the CO2 that stopped it. The various cycles are complex with many factors interacting and their analysis suggests that this time around the interglacial would have lasted 50,000 years anyway.
Their crucial graph is this one on page 203 of the paper.

The graph at the top shows the effects of different levels of CO2 now over the next 100,000 years plus in black, variations in amount of sunlight. The graph at the bottom shows the amount of ice in red, orange or blue with the colour there matched to the colour of the curve in the top half of the graph.
Notice that there's a significant difference between the predictions of the amount of ice, depending on the levels we reach in the near future, even 100,000 years from now.
With all the scenarios, there is much less CO2 of course 100,000 years in the future, but you still see differences because the amount you have then if we get to 1000 gigatons this century is still double the amount you get if we don't go above 500 gigatons. Apparently even that small amount of CO2 is enough to be significant. The reason is that the way carbon dioxide behaves in the atmosphere is very complex.
(see . CLIMATE CHANGE - the IPCC scientific assessment)
For instance after adding a pulse of CO2 to the atmosphere,
So for example, of the roughly 32 billion tons of CO2 that humans added to the atmosphere in 2010
That 15% which is left after thousands of years with a long term half life of 13,500 years is enough to prevent the next ice age and possibly, depending how much CO2 we add in total, end the cycle of ice ages altogether.
That of course is not necessarily a bad thing. The climate is much more stable between ice ages. During an ice age much of the world is covered in ice and can’t be cultivated and the climate also varies very rapidly over time periods of decades. The main problem with global warming is not that it is making Earth a bit warmer, it’s just the speed of the change. And that’s not a doomsday scenario either.
See also my Debunked: Climate change will make the world too hot for humans by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
Techy background: Order Patterned With Chaos - How Climate Is Predicted For Decades - With Exact Forecasts Only For Days
So many “Nibiru” believers seem to think that a gap in a cloud and a brightly lit cloud has to be a passing planet or star. Here is an example: Reload pass it on!!! 2 SUNS!!! - LaShelle Entsminger and here is another one

From 14 minutes into this video. I just see a gap in the clouds and a patch of sunlight from a sunset.
Maybe you live in a place with few dramatic sunsets. It's often like this where I live, though this is not one of my photos.

Dreaming by Moyan Brenn on Flickr
Just this evening before writing this, I saw the clouds lit up all across the sky around my house to the North - that’s the opposite side of the sky from the Sun. We often get these “wrap around the horizon sunsets” here. Some day I must try to get a photograph of one of these sunsets and upload it.
By comparison, these sunsets that they claim are "Nibiru" are really tame. You wouldn’t give them a second glance, just think that the sunset was rather clouded over that day.
And anyway suns don’t blink in and out, or hide in bushes like a bittern! How could a sun suddenly appear at sunset and then disappear by night time?
It doesn't make any sense if you try to think it through as an idea. If we had two suns, we'd get two sunsets, with the sun everyone knows about setting first, then the second sun staying in the sky - for hours if they were as far apart as in this video.
And you'd just need to hold your finger in front of the first sun to see the second sun. Though with them as far apart as this, you wouldn't need even to do that, as it would be plain to view to everyone that we have two suns.
Here is a video, an artist's impression, to show what the sunset would be like if we really had two suns, or three in this case.
See also my What it would be like if we really had two suns (or three in this case)
Summary: If you have got scared of “Nibiru” you may start to pay more attention to the sky than you ever did before. You may notice that the Sun and Moon sometimes rise and set in different places, and the Moon also rises at different times each day. and is often visible in the daytime sky along with the Sun. This scares some people, who think it is a sign that the world is about to end. It is totally normal. The Sun and Moon have been doing this all your life. You just didn’t notice before.
IN DETAIL - RISING OF SUN AND MOON
The Sun and Moon follow each other across the sky. Sometimes they are both higher in the sky and we have more sunlight and that's what makes it summer. Sometimes they are lower in the sky and days are a shorter, and that's what makes it winter.
So the Sun and Moon rise further and further to the North as it goes through from winter to summer (northern hemisphere summer) and then further to the south as it goes through from summer back to winter.
This video shows how it works at Calgary - it is similar where I live on West coast of Scotland.
If you live north of the arctic circle then the sun never sets in the middle of the summer and never rises in the middle of winter.
That's how we have a difference between summer and winter. People who have got scared of Nibiru start noticing the sun and moon for the first itme in their lives, notice that they rise and set at different times each day, and then get scared of this.
It is nothing to be scared of at all. The sun and moon have done this all your life.
MOON RISE AND SET TIMES - WHY THEY CHANGE EACH DAY AND WHY WE CAN SEE THE MOON IN DAYTIME
The Moon orbits Earth very slowly, once a month. At full Moon then the Moon is the other side of Earth from the Sun - has to be because it is fully lit up by the Sun. So the Moon rises as the Sun sets, is visible all night as a full Moon and sets as the Sun rises.
At New Moon then the Moon rises with the Sun. It’s lit from behind as we look towards the Sun so we don’t see it at all unless it happens to pass between us and the Sun and causes an eclipse. So at New Moon the Moon is in the sky all day and is not in the night time sky at all.
In between the Full and New Moon the Moon is in the night sky for part of the time and in the daytime sky for part of the time. It is also partly lit - in between a full and a new Moon - and so is visible too.
You can see the Moon in daylight at any time of the month except at Full Moon. It rises and sets an hour later each day. For instance the day after full Moon it will rise an hour after sun set and set an hour after sunrise, so already has some overlap into the daytime sky.
So it is normal to see the Moon in daytime.

Daytime Moon over Monument 8.3 - photo by Alana Sise
You can look up your moon rise and set times here: Moonrise, Moonset, and Moon Phase in London
Note, the time the Moon rises or sets depends on your latitude. For instance if you live far north in winter, just south of the Arctic circle, the Moon will only appear above the horizon for a short time in winter, while if you live far south, on the same day, just north of the Antarctic circle it will be above the horizon nearly all day and only dip below it for a short time.
If you live on the equator then the Sun and Moon always rise around 6 am local time and always set around 6 pm local time and you don’t really have seasons. But even at the equator there will be some variation in where the Sun and Moon rise and set in the sky because of the tilt of the Earth’s axis.
This is what it would be like if we really had two suns, or three suns as the case is for this movie. This is an artist's impression of an imagined moon orbiting a real exoplanet around a very distant star. It is no threat to us at all.
And it would be like that day after day.
If you believe the “Nibiru” photos then we have a second sun that keeps disappearing and reappearing and is sometimes due North, sometimes due South, sometimes even is in the West when the sun sets but somehow mysteriously is no longer there when night falls. Then sometimes is tiny and sometimes huge, as big as the Sun. - and most of the time is invisible. And then they are visible momentarily but only to one person who is photographing from a beach somewhere.
That is how bird watching works. That is not how astronomy works.
They’d always be there every day. Slowly moving relative to each other in the sky, not always in exactly the same patterns each day, but those changes too would be continuous and gradual.
FINGER TEST FOR NAKED EYE VIEWING
It is easy to check that we only have one sun with your naked eye.
Congratulations you have just debunked the idea that Earth has two suns.
But some planets do have two or more Suns. We just happen to be one of the planets with only one sun.
LENS FLARE TEST
Most of the photos and videos you see of a “second sun” (apart from hoaxes and jokes) are the result of lens flares and other strange things that can happen in a camera lens when it is overwhelmed with a very bright light like the Sun.
A modern lens is a complex thing with numerous layers of transparent materials of different types joined together. Normally this works fine but if you point it straight at the sun, the strong light from the sun bounces around inside the complex optics of your camera and causes all sorts of strange effects your the photos.
When people say they have “I have seen a second Sun with my own eyes” they nearly always mean “I have taken a photo or video and while looking through the digital camera pointed at the Sun I saw what looked like a second sun”.
This video helps you understand what is really going on in that situation.
Jeff Niddler explaining how you can distiguish various lens anomalies from the real thing. With good equipment and careful photography you can get that shot of the Sun “as is” without the lens flares and other effects that create those images of “extra suns” but it’s quite tricky to do that.
THINGS YOU CAN SEE IN DAYTIME
You can see the Moon in daytime of course. This depends on the phase of the Moon. At full Moon the Moon rises when the Sun sets. At all other times the Moon is in the daytime sky at least for part of the day. At new Moon it rises and sets with the Sun but is hidden from view because it is lit up from behind.
It is actually possible to see Venus in the daytime sky. It’s not the bright object you see at night, because the sky is so bright. Just a white dot against a bright blue sky which may “pop out” when you notice it looking in the right direction.
This photo is taken in excellent viewing conditions:

Moon and Venus in daylight via Martin Powell at nakedeyeplanets.com
10 surprising space objects to see in the daytime sky | EarthSky.org
You can even see Jupiter in the daytime sky - it’s much fainter than Venus and not much brighter than the sky itself. But white ,rather than blue. You need to know exactly where to look. And you need to block out the Sun - better behind a building or something quite large and distant - and if you know exactly where to look, with clear viewing.
It doesn’t look spectacular though. You just see a white point that is only a little brighter than the sky itself, but white instead of blue.
This is a list of all my Nibiru articles in Debunking Doomsday to date. Most are included in my new Doomsday Debunked - kindle book - or Read it online on my website (free).
Debunked: Nibiru fragment to strike Earth in February
Debunked: Rich people are buying bunkers to escape from Nibiru
List of newspapers that run fake or unchecked Doomsday “news”
Fake doomsday and disaster news from 2015 through to 2017
Debunked: Melissa Huffman did a video of Planet X
Debunked: The Vatican built a huge telescope, one of the largest in the world, to track Nibiru
Debunked: You should always read both sides of the argument about Nibiru - or indeed anything
Debunked: ALMA’s Gna (if it exists) is Nibiru
Why so many people post sightings of “Nibiru” - and why not “Santa” instead?
Debunked: Nemesis or Tyche is Nibiru
Bullshit Detector Plugin for Chrome for Fake News Sites
Debunked: Nibiru is Wormwood so must be real
Debunked: Astronomers get murdered by the secret agencies if they “speak out” about Nibiru
Debunked: Those who say Nibiru is real say that we should be scared and worried - are they right?
Nibiru Debunked: Yes, we deserve to know the truth about Nibiru
Debunked: This is a “Winged planet” and is Nibiru
Debunked: Paul Cox said that we have two suns
Debunked: Nibiru is at coordinates …
Debunked: The US government is building vast underground bunkers to escape from Nibiru
Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy
Debunked: Mysterious sphere spotted in NASA’s Sun Images
Debunked: Everyone who says Nibiru is not real is lying
Debunked: This tablet from the ancient Sumerians depicts 12 planets including Nibiru
Debunked: NASA has found a brown dwarf in our solar system
Debunked: Carlos Muñoz Ferrada discovered Nibiru
Nibiru is so scary because it isn’t real - what can you do to prevent something that isn’t real?
Debunked - Nibiru will hit Earth between January and March 2017 - or any range of dates like that
Why the idea of Nibiru seems non refutable - and how does astronomy really work?
Debunked: How can the videos and photos be hoaxes when so many people believe them?
Debunked: The IRAS infrared satellite found Nibiru in 1983
Where can I get support if I’m scared of Nibiru / Doomsday maybe even suicidal?
Debunked: Nibiru has been found on Google Sky
Dazzathecameraman’s amusing parody about HCT2014 (Huge Chocolate Teapot)
Debunking: Inuit elders say that the Earth’s poles have shifted position
Who else says Nibiru is nonsense?
Debunked: Nibiru is invisible because it is a brown dwarf or made of dark matter
Debunked: A planet in a 3600 year orbit can hide behind the sun for years on end
Debunking: Think how stupid you will feel if Nibiru is real
Debunked: NASA has been tracking “Planet X” for decades
Debunked: This is a photograph of two suns
I understand that Nibiru is not real but still feel scared all the time - what can I do?
Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]
Debunked: NASA is getting ready to Capture Planet X / Nibiru on Camera
Debunked: Doomsday Stories like Nibiru must be true because lots of people believe they are true
Debunk: Planet 9 is tilting our solar system

Doomsday Debunked - kindle book - or Read it online on my website (free).
Short summary: it is very unlikely that the LHC can create mini black holes. If it can then the mini black holes are expected to disintegrate immediately in a burst of Hawking radiation. Whether or not that’s true, our universe has natural particle accelerators larger than our solar system, which accelerate particles to immense energies and fire them in all directions including towards the Earth. There is no way that our tiny accelerators on Earth can match their energies.
The reason for building the LHC is not to create new kinds of collisions. Whatever happens there also happens in nature. It's because the natural collisions at this energy scale occur high in the atmosphere and typically long distances away from the experimenter, up to kilometers away. To study them properly we need to look at them close up from a distance of a few meters. So we have to replicate these natural collisions in an accelerator. That's all it is doing.
The current situation is that first, the collisions probably don’t produce black holes - as the energy levels are far too low accprding to most theories of how it happens. If they do produce black holes, they almost certainly disintegrate right away. If this doesn’t happen, they still must be harmless because if the LHC can make mini black holes, then the cosmic particles hitting Earth must make them by the million every year.
PREDICTIONS TO DEBUNK
The first time I came across this was a prediction for someone predicted that 23rd of September, 2015, the LHC will create a mini black hole and that Earth will be whisked through a portal to the "Abyss".
Other stories at the time said that a mini black hole will swallow first France, then the entire Earth in seconds, and then soon after, the entire solar system. I don't want to add to their credibility in google with a link, but they are easy to find with a google search.
It's not the first time someone has prophesied something like this. When CERN was first turned on, there was a similar worry amongst many that the Earth would get swallowed up by a mini black hole.
And the stories are still running. Here are a few from the last week
All of those actually include some debunking as well which is something.
WHAT’S THE TRUTH?
It is true indeed that the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), operated by CERN, could create mini black holes according to some theories. Those sound alarming if you don't know the background.
And, unlike some of these doomsday stories, this was a real scientific possibility. The risk was credible enough, that a detailed safety review was done before they built the LHC. After a careful review, they concluded that it is safe to build it.
THE LHC COLLISIONS HAPPEN NATURALLY
The thing is that CERN is reproducing collisions that happen naturally in the upper atmosphere - indeed at energies we can't reach on the Earth.
The LHC with its reboot can now reach 13 TeV.
The highest energy cosmic radiation protons reach energies of around a hundred million TeV. Those particles reach Earth at a rate of one per square kilometer per century. Which means that the Earth is hit by about five million of them every year. Five million particles each more than seven million times more energetic than the highest levels that LHC can produce.
They'd dearly love to find out more about the highest energy collisions. But our atmosphere is in the way and these collisions happen high up in the upper atmosphere - and one per square kilometer per century still means that you have to wait a century to have a decent chance of spotting one that is even as close as half a kilometer away from your detection. And then it’s also high up in the upper atmosphere as well.
A collision at a hundred million TeV in the upper atmosphere produces around a billion particles in the debris, and you only catch a few of them. There's not much chance of us ever getting a detailed close up view of these collisions.
So - they do continue to study the high energy ones indirectly like that. It's the only way we have to find out anything about them at all. Gradually they are finding out more but it’s a slow process.
So the idea of the LHC is to study much lower energy collisions. For those ones, they reproduce those conditions on the ground in such a way that they can arrange for the collisions to happen next to the detectors. These detectors are the size of a multi-story house and have to be very close to the collision to detect things that are short lived. A lot of the debris from the collision is so short lived that it will vanish just a short way away from the collision site so could never be observed from the ground looking up at those collisions from kilometers away or even hundreds of meters away.

One of the huge detectors in the LHC.
There's not much chance of studying cosmic radiation with detectors like this, which need to be positioned right next to the collision. That's why they create the collisions in the LHC even though far higher energy ones occur naturally in the atmosphere.
The mini black holes, if they do form at energies produced by the LHC, are also created in these natural cosmic ray collisions. So they can't be hazardous to the Earth as we are still here. Whatever they do, they do that every year anyway, and at such low energies, that means we must have billions of them forming in the Earth atmosphere every year and we don't get whisked through a portal every year. So I think nothing to worry about there either.
WHY THEY THINK THE BLACK HOLES WILL VANISH AS SOON AS THEY FORM
First, most theories say that the LHC is not energetic enough to create black holes. So chances are it won’t create any.
If it does, then our leading theories say that the black holes will immediately disintegrate into a flash of light and radiation as soon as they form. That’s because of Hawking Radiation which it's thought would mean they would evaporate immediately in a tiny fraction of a second.
However that's only theoretical, not yet observed because of difficulties of creating them in a laboratory, if they exist at all. Indeed that is one of the predictions the experiment could confirm.
So - that wouldn't be enough to prove that it is safe.
WHY THEY ARE SURE IT IS SAFE - OUR ACCELERATORS, EVEN LHC, ARE TINY COMPARED TO NATURAL ACCELERATORS LARGER THAN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM
The reason scientists are sure it is safe is rather because they are only reproducing conditions that happen naturally, indeed at far higher energies which the LHC could never achieve, nor any other accelerator we can build.
The most energetic "cosmic rays" are produced in natural "accelerators" around stars, and the most energetic ones are too energetic to be produced even with a stellar sized accelerator. Perhaps they are produced by black holes in galactic nuclei? The first of these to be discovered packed as much energy as a baseball thrown at 60 mph. That may not sound a lot, but for a tiny particle the size of a proton, that's an absolutely huge, almost unbelievable, amount of energy.

The glorious Crab Nebula in the constellation Taurus, above the head of Orion - photographed with Hubble. You can get the full size original here.
Zoom in on the Hubble detailed image of the crab nebula, shown in context in the night sky above Orion (ESA animation).
It's a natural huge "particle accelerator, producing particles with energies way beyond current human capabilities.
But even this accelerator is nowhere near powerful enough to create the most powerful cosmic rays, protons flying so quickly relative to Earth that they pack as much energy as a baseball thrown at 60 mph, or faster.
Their source is currently unknown, possibly giant black holes.
Also with our technology, the only way we can accelerate particles to such huge speeds is to build accelerators this big. We don’t know any way to “miniaturize” this. So, with our current technology, we'd need to build similarly sized accelerators, much larger than our entire solar system, to equal those energy levels. We are nowhere near to that capability yet.
We can't even bid an accelerator with the diameter of our Earth - and such an accelerator would be nowhere near large enough to equal the power of these natural accelerators. But even one as large as Earth’s orbit wouldn’t do the trick. Not even one as large as Neptune’s orbit.
And at present, we don't have any other method to create particles with such huge amounts of energy, or anything close to this.
STEPHEN HAWKING’S COMMENTS
Stephen Hawking: God particle could wipe out the universe - quotes from his preface to a new book called "Starmus" -- a collection of lectures given by famous scientists and astronomers
"The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn gigaelectronvolts (GeV)."
"A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate."
A hundred billion GeV is a hundred million TeV. So he is saying there that a particle more energetic than the most energetic cosmic ray particles that hit Earth could make it metastable.
I think the last sentence is meant as humorous understatement perhaps. The most powerful cosmic ray particle which in turn is seven million times more energetic than the LHC collisions. An accelerator the size of the Earth would be nowhere near big enough. After all there are accelerators far larger than our solar system that produce the cosmic rays naturally and they are not powerful enough. Colliding giant black holes won’t do the job either, or it would happen already.
He’s talking about the equivalent of a particle accelerator which must be about the size of a galaxy or possibly larger probably.
Stephen Hawking lost a $100 bet when the Higgs boson was discovered. He made a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that it would not be discovered. Transcript of what he said here: Hawking says he lost $100 bet over Higgs discovery
Now he is predicting it will be metastable. He could easily be wrong about that too. The whole idea of a “Big Rip” is disputed anyway and most think if it is possible it can’t happen for trillions of years. See my Debunking: Stephen Hawking Says Universe is on the brink of instability and could collapse - metastable, in a false vacuum state. by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
And he has a track record of predicting scientific doomsday things without putting a great deal of thought into them. See my Debunked - Stephen Hawking puts an expiry date on humanity by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
Just because someone is a scientist who has made breakthroughs in theoretical physics - that doesn’t stop him from also being a human being and saying somewhat daft things as well. Michio Kaku is similar ,more so, he’s an excellent physicist but says the daftest things. Just before 2012 he said that we would have an “energy wave” that would threaten the Earth on dec 21. Hard even to know what he meant except a solar storm - he was just hooking in to the general 2012 panic and adding to it for goodness knows what reason.
So Stephen Hawking isn’t as bad as that but he does seem to relish his doomsday forecasts.
WHAT ABOUT CLAIMS THAT IT WILL OPEN A “PORTAL TO ANOTHER DIMENSION”
For those who think that it’s going to open up a portal to another dimension - or any of those other claims - remember that anything it does, is done millions of times every year by natural particle accelerators firing particles at the Earth as well as everywhere else in the galaxy. It’s the same argument as for the mini black holes. If the LHC could create a portal to another dimension then there must be many millions of those portals opening every year. Tens of thousands of them opening in Earth’s atmosphere every day, opened by particles at energies millions of times higher than the LHC.
We don’t see that happening. And if it is happening and somehow we don’t notice, it’s obviously harmless. But I think that this idea is based on a misunderstanding.
I think this comes from the “parallel universes” theory for mini black holes. This is one of four main theories that predict it could form mini black holes (probably unstable) and it doesn’t say a portal to another dimension, just talks about gravity leaking from a parallel universe:
Those are all just ideas and none have been confirmed. If any of those are true, it changes nothing. It’s still something that happens millions of times a year so can’t be dangerous :). It just means we may understand it better. Physicists will be very interested if any of these theories ends up being proven. If they are all disproved then again that’s very interesting too.
So far it hasn’t detected any mini black holes. So, there’s no evidence yet that any of those theories are true, though they haven’t been disproved either.
Anyway - anything that it does - it is doing it in a much more feeble way than the natural particle accelerators and the only thing it does different is to do it in a place where we can position detectors all the way around the collision site to look closely at the collsion to see what is happening. All we are doing with the LHC is looking at something that already happens naturally.
See Detection of mini black holes at the LHC could indicate parallel universes in extra dimensions
For more on this, see The Astronomical Particle Colliders That Put Our Own to Shame, Cosmic radiation (CERN), The Safety of the LHC, and Ultra high energy cosmic radiation (wikipedia) ).
Summary: tabloids don't publish fake obituaries. It was also reported in her local newspaper the Bath Chronicle. Being Buddhist and Vegan doesn't make you OCD. OCD is not a mental illness.
He confuses two stories, one of a 16 year old UK girl called Isabel Taylor who killed herself partly out of fear of solar storms, which doomsday prophets associated with the 2012 stories.

Isabel Taylor - from “Family grieves for Neston girl found hanged” She killed herself at 3.15pm, on September 24 2011
The other one is about a sixteen year old Indian girl called Chaya who killed herself in september 2008, out of a fear that the Earth would crack open when the Large Hadron Collider switched on, afraid that everyone in her village would die.
This is the video I’m debunking, by Scott who makes a living from ad revenue on Nibiru Doomsday videos. I think that youtube should stop all ad revenue on videos like this myself - any video that promotes doomsday stories just shouldn’t get ad revenue. They have other exceptions such as videos that show extreme violence, so surely ones that make people suicidal with fake news should be exempted too.
He earns an estimated £2.7K - £43.9K for youtube ads on these videos. That’s $3.36K - $54.7 K
IN DETAIL:
He claims that the story is fake news. It is true that the Daily Mail sometimes publishes inaccurate and occasionally out and out fake news (don’t seem to have a system in place to check for fake news) - but not fake obituaries. And he has got them confused, the Daily Mail doesn’t run stories about people having alien births etc - those are the “red top tabloids” like the Sun. Even the red top tabloids don't publish fake obituaries. Any journalist who wrote a fake obituary would be out of their job pretty quick.
It's better to go to her local newspaper - she was from Bath and there's a long obituary in the Bath Chronicle here which you link to but don't mention:
Teenager who feared the world was about to end
And in the gazette and herald
Family grieves for Neston girl found hanged
This is the Daily Mail one he mentions
The main story that scared her was a fear of nuclear reaction in the sun and sun spots. Since it's associated with 2012 then I expect that that means the solar maximum (which doesn't have an exact date but reached its maximum some time in 2013) which happens every 11 years. Before 2012 then a lot of people associated the next solar maximum with the end of the world and that it's date was in 2012. and that it would somehow end the world.
It's all nonsense. The worst that can happen is a solar storm which causes satellites to reboot (can't actually physically damage them, just flip bits in their memory) and cause power surges in very long distance multiple kilometer cables. And those can happen at any time not just at solar maximum.
OCD NOT A MENTAL ILLNESS
It can have many causes but is sometimes a result of depression and when that's the case, then when the depression is treated the OCD goes away. So whatever the course you did on psychology, it doesn't sound as if it covered OCD.
"OCD is not a disease or a 'mental illness', but sometimes it is a secondary condition triggered by depression (or sometimes General Anxiety Disorder).If this is so, then treating the depression is the first priority, and the GP is the first port of call. Once the depression goes away, the OCD may well follow without much extra effort."
The most common treatment for OCD is CBT - Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Despite the word "therapy" in the title, it's not related at all to psychotherapy. You don't discuss your parents or your childhood or anything like that. Just work on how our minds get into ruts - very effective methods to get out of a rut that is causing problems. It is very effective - most people who go through CBT are able to end the worst symptoms quickly within a few weeks of starting the treatment.
STORY DOESN'T SAY SHE HAD OCD AND YOU CAN'T DIAGNOSE OCD FROM A SHORT OBITUARY
Who knows if she had OCD or not? It’s a spectrum thing and many people do to some extent, so it would be no surprise if she did. But a doctor would not diagnose someone for OCD based on a short obituary! None of the stories say she had OCD.
MIXING UP TWO DIFFERENT STORIES
His link about a girl who killed herself by ingesting pesticides is about a "16 year old girl from central India" who was scared about the Large Hadron Collider. A bit of a difference between a girl in India scared of the LHC and a girl in Bath scared of a solar storm.
The stories about Isabel Taylor say nothing about her researching into pesticides on her computer.
The girl who took the pesticides was called Chaya and her father was called Bihari Lal and she lived in the central Indian city of Indore. She killed herself because of Indian news stories about the world ending because of the Large Hadron Collider. It's a different story.
"Bihari Lal said Chaya - the eldest of his six children - had been frightened after watching local TV reports that the experiment would cause the "Earth to crack up and everybody in the village would die"."
CLINICAL PSYCHIATRIST WARNING ABOUT THE EFFECTS OF DOOMSDAY STORIES ON EMOTIONALLY WEAK PEOPLE
The article on the BBC website, which is more complete than the one he link to, ends:
"Clinical psychologist Nadia Masand said some of the television coverage had been "irresponsible".
"These people are constantly airing series on black magic, blood-sucking vampires; even sensationalising a natural phenomenon such as an eclipse by saying that it means bad omen," she told the BBC.
"Now prophesising that the Big Bang would bring doomsday! Such programmes can have a disastrous effect on an emotionally weak person." "
I don't know of an example of someone who killed themselves out of fear of Nibiru. But I often get people who contact me who say they used to be suicidal until they found the debunking articles and videos. Many say that they were anxious day and night, withdrew from society, talk about spending their time on the internet reading stories about Nibiru and getting more and more scared. These are real people not just lines of text on a computer screen. It's impossible to say if any of those who contact me who say they felt suicidal would have gone on to commit suicide.
David Morrison said that he heard of several who did. But that's "anecdotal". I would not be surprised if at least some people have committed suicide over these videos. Whether or not, many do suffer extreme anxiety. It's so sad since the whole thing is just nonsense and so easy to debunk if you know a bit of basic astronomy.
For instance, it is easy to see that we have only one sun. Go out any sunny day, block out the sun with a finger, so you don't damage your eyes by staring at it. Look to left, to right above, below. You won't see any second sun.
That debunks the whole BS idea that we have two suns. Suns aren't like bitterns. They can't hide in the rushes and emit booming sounds - there are no trees or rushes or bushes in the sky to hide behind on a clear day. The other things they say are all easy to debunk too.
Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy
I RECOMMEND YOU CROSS THIS CHANNEL OFF YOUR LIST OF PEOPLE WHO SAY SENSIBLE THINGS AND CHECK THEIR SOURCES
Just this short video is so poorly researched and inaccurate, making extravagant claims and claiming to be expert on psychiatry which he is obviously not when he confuses OCD with mental illness and attempts to diagnose OCD from an obituary and calls it “Mental Compulsive Disorder”
And confusing two stories which you can hardly imagine mixing up even on the hastiest of reading. The only two points they had in common was that they were both about young girls aged 16. One was in Bath, England, one was in India. One was in 2011, the other in 2008. One was death by hanging, other was death by taking pesticides. One was fear of solar storms, the other was fear of the LHC.
Anyone who can’t tell those two stories apart is obviously not a reliable source.
Stay well away if you find these things scary. And he is obviously financially motivated as he earns thousands of dollars a year as a result of this activity. Quite possibly thousands of dollars a month from making these videos.
For the stories that scared these two young girls and caused them to commit suicide - why they are no concern at all - see also - Debunked: the Large Hadron Collider will create mini black holes that will destroy the world
This is nonsense. Birds have always sung at night. Owls and nightingales obviously. Where I live I often hear those. But ordinary daytime birds too. Robins particularly often sing late at night and very early in the morning and they also sing all the year round, unlike most birds. And when you have street lights, they may sing at any time of the night, kept awake by the street lights.
The story is here Do You Hear Daytime Birds Chirping At Night?
We are not due the next ice age. That is a now disproven theory. Scientists used to think this in the 1970s before we understood the causes of ice ages. It was just based on assuming that this interglacial (warm period between ice ages) would last the same length of time as an average interglacial. The gap between them varies a lot. Now that we understand this better we know that this is a particularly long gap and we won’t go into an ice age for tens of thousands of years into the future.
Here is a video of a robin singing at night near a streetlight.
About robins: Song
Many birds do this.
David Morrison coined the word “cosmophobia” to describe an unreasoning fear of the cosmos. Yes that does help astronomers who aren’t affected to get an idea of what is going on. But after talking to many people who are scared of these things for the last year or two, I don’t think it is actually a true “phobia” like a fear of spiders. I haven’t come across anyone yet with a genuine “phobia”. I think it’s more of a “habitual fear”. That’s good news for those affected as habitual fear is easier to deal with.
First I’m not a doctor or psychiatrist. Just describing a distinction which I think is helpful.
EXAMPLE OF A PHOBIA
To explain the difference, nearly everyone has a phobia of some sort. In my case, as is quite common in my family, I have mild claustrophobia. It’s very specific. I get mild feelings of fear, which can sometimes be a bit debilitating, if I’m in an enclosed place with no windows surrounded by lots of people. It’s at its worst if I’m in a lift. If I’m waiting for a lift and I see that there are several people in it already, or am queuing with several people, then if I can, I’ll let it pass and wait for an empty or emptier one.
But if it is a glass lift, I couldn’t care less how many people are in it and can get in with no fear at all. I also don’t mind the London underground at all, because the carriages have windows, even though most of the time all you see out of them is a speeding tunnel wall. There is nothing rational about it. But however much I reason about it I can’t stop this very mild fear through reasoning.
There are ways of dealing with phobias I know. It’s not easy but can be done. If I needed to work with lots of people in a small space without windows I’d investigate them.
EXAMPLE OF HABITUAL FEAR
Now for an example of habitual fear. If someone throws a ball at you very hard, so it stings, and then they pretend to throw something at you, even with nothing in their hand, you will probably flinch. You know you are in no danger of being hurt at all, but an unreasoning fear of being hit kicks in, just momentarily.
If they then keep pretending to throw something at you, you probably won’t flinch any more.
So, I think that fear of Nibiru / two suns / asteroid impacts is like that. When I talk to someone who has got very scared that we have two suns, for instance, I explain how it’s easy to check that we have only one sun by blocking out the sun with a finger, look to left, to right, above, below. I also explain how the double sun images and videos on the internet are made, through lens reflections, flares, hoaxes etc and point them towards all the sun images without extra suns in Flickr.
So, they understand the reasoning there. They can see we have only one sun. But they have been so scared of a second sun for so long, that they still have the fear of a second sun, even once they realize we have only one sun.
It’s like flinching when you know someone has nothing in their hand.
HOW TO DEAL WITH IT - CROSSING THINGS OFF YOUR LIST AND RECOGNIZING TELLERS OF TALL STORIES
Suppose you had a friend, call them Boaty, after “Boaty McBoatface”, who is rather batty about Antarctica. Every week at work they tell you about their adventures in Antarctica over the weekend. You know they never went to Antarctica. You saw them in the street maybe. Yet they keep talking about it and insist they have just been to Antarctica. Talk about the things they’ve seen. Bring in photos like this

One of the numerous Ice Fume roles near the summit of Mount Erebus in Antarctica. Image credit Mount Erebus Volcano Observatory
And claim they were there and saw it for themselves.
Well you just wouldn’t believe them would you? They might be perfectly nice people. Maybe they tell the truth about everything else. But you know they have never been to Antarctica.
Now maybe one day they actually do go to Antarctica. They come back and tell you about it. But of course you won’t believe them. It’s rational not to believe them. But maybe they went with a friend of yours who you know is truthful and not given to telling tall stories. So they say that “yes we did go to Antarctica”. And then you do believe them and say “Oh my, so Boaty did go to Antarctica after all”.
So, it’s like that for the asteroid impact stories. The Metro magazine, Express, Sun, etc they keep running tall stories about asteroid impacts. So that’s like Boaty telling tall stories about Antarctica.
If you want the truth about asteroid impacts, then go to a proper astronomy site. For instance Earth Sky. Earth, Space, Human World, Tonight
That’s a good reliable site for astronomy. If we do have an asteroid predcted to hit us - they will run the story, it will be accurate and give more details also than the tabloid press.
Or subscribe to Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch) | Twitter. Here is a recent tweet from them:

To date, over 15,000 near-Earth asteroids have been discovered & catalogued. None pose a risk over next 100 yrs.
Or head over to Daily Minor Planet which you can also subscribe to, to get their daily news story about asteroids.
So, even when there is a real asteroid impact predicted, most likely a tiny one hitting the sea or a desert - well Metro, the Sun etc have blown it. Nobody will believe them if they publish this story, if the reader has any sense. That’s like Boaty saying he’s been to Antarctica.
But go to Earth Sky and read it there, or follow Asteroid Watch, or any other reliable source on this topic, and you can then believe it and will have accurate information too.
YOU DON’T NEED TO LISTEN TO BOTH SIDES OF THE ARGUMENT
This is especially for the really bonkers ideas like a second sun or Nibiru. They get you by saying that you have to listen to them because you need to listen to both sides of hte argument. But that’s rubbish.
For instance, suppose someone comes up to you and says “Do you know that you are standing on your head?”.
You say “Oh, you mean relative to Australia”, “No, you are just standing on your head”.
Do you think you need to listen to both sides of that argument?
Or if someone says “Did you know that Usain Bolt is a top ranked tennis player and he won wimbledon in 2008 and all the sprint videos are hoaxes and a lie perpetuated by the establishment”
- would you feel you have to listen to both sides of that argument?
Of course not.
CROSSING THINGS OFF YOUR LIST
So, I recommend, that you cross things off your list of things to be scared might end the world. Probably quite early on you can cross the “two suns” off your list though some people continue to be scared of that one for many months and find it hard to believe the arguments that we have only one sun, even though they understand them rationally.
So - think about it carefully, once you are sure we have only one sun - well if anyone says we have two, you don’t have to listen to their side of the argument. Just treat it as a tall story. They are not reliable in this area.
In the same way - only once you can see it for yourself - then you can treat all the stories, web sites, articles, news reports about “Nibiru” as tall stories. Nothing sensible in an astronomical sense follows after the word “Nibiru” unless it is a Nibiru debunking article.
There is no need to listen to their side of the argument there either. So you can just cross that off.
Same for pole shift, and earthquakes, and all these things.
I find that some people get scared of the Moon when they first notice it. Maybe all your life you have paid almost no attention to it. Then you start noticing the sky and you notice that the Moon rises at a different time every day and is often visible in the daytime. This may scare you. It’s just because you never noticed this before. All your life the Moon has been doing this but you never paid it any attention.
So, try going to the websites which list the moon rise and set times for your location. You can then confirm that the Moon is rising at just the time when it is predicted to rise and nothing scary is going on. You can then cross the Moon off your things to be scared about.
Same also for particular sources. The Sun, Expresss, Metro magazine, the online Telegraph, they all have run stories about the end of the world that are based on fake news, or are just nonsense. So -they are noted for telling tall stories about the end of the world. Like our friend Boaty in the fictional story then you can just cross them off your list too. Some find their stories entertaining. If they scare you - just don’t read them. There is no need to do that.
RESIDUAL PANIC
However even after all of this, you may still find you have a totally unreasoning fear that the world is about to end. It probably feels like a phobia. It’s not a fear of death. Some people even feel suicidal, they want to kill themselves to get rid of this fear of the world ending.
You’ve ruled out all the particular things that got you scared, but you still feel panicky. This I think is what David Morrison was referring to when he talked about “cosmophobia”.
But, I don’t think it is a phobia, at least not normally. The people I talk to who have this fear never used to have it. They didn’t grow up having a fear of the Moon or the Sun or the night sky or shooting stars. It started when they started to read news stories, usually about “Nibiru” or they watched videos about it.
So that doesn’t sound like a phobia but more like a habitual residual fear. Those who come to me early on, who have only just read the stories recently, they get satisfied easily. They just need a few answers, say “right, yes I see it now thx” and off they go.
But those who have been scared for some time - often it has built up to the point where every day they wake up anxious that the world is about to end and this colours their entire day.
They may retreat from the world, seldom go out at all. May sometimes have left work. Don’t have many friends. Spend a lot of time on the internet reading stories about Nibiru. It’s almost become their entire world. Some leave their job and go and live in the countryside or somewhere where they feel safer.
Often they are receiving medication from doctors to deal with anxiety. So that definitely helps. It takes the edge off the anxiety I think. Modern medicines are much better than they used to be. Often involve boosting serotonin, which gives you a sense of well being, a natural chemical we have anyway. That makes it easier to put this in perspective.
So in this situation of course it is going to take a while to come out of it and to begin functioning more normally without this constant fear of Nibiru.
So - I’ve already mentioned medication. I’m not a doctor but I do recommend you contact your doctor if you haven’t already especially if it is debilitating like this. You don’t have to do what the doctor recommends. With medicine it’s definitely sensible to ask the question “Is it habit forming, and will I have any difficulty coming off it?”. The answer for modern medicines I understand is usually no. Especially the ones that work by boosting serotonin. But do ask your doctor that question, and then make your decision based on what they say. You don’t have to do anything they say, but it can help to hear their professional suggestions and opinions.
As well as medicine they can help in other ways. I suggest looking into cognitive behaviour therapy, asking your doctor about that, if they think it may help.
COGNITIVE BEHAVIOUR THERAPY
It’s worth a try I think. It’s mainstream and your doctor might well refer you to a specialist. Despite the word “therapy” in the name, it’s not the sort of thing where you talk about your past, your parents, childhood etc. It’s very much in the present.
It’s to do with identifying ruts you get into. Often those who are scared of Nibiru tell me they have tried stopping themselves from thinking about it. They may have tried also wishing very strongly for the stories not to be true. None of that works.
Try this experiment. For the next minute try not to think about a hippopotamus?
Did you succeed? I can almost guarantee that your mind was full of hippopotamuses although you probably never thought of them at all all day up to now.
So, it’s a bit like that if you try to stop thinking about Nibiru, and to stop panicking. But it is possible to do something about it, just not in that head on direct way. That’s what cognitive behaviour therapy helps with, if I understand it right. It’s good for any kind of obsessive behaviour and is often used to help people with OCD. It has a very high success rate.
FEELING OF IMPENDING DOOM
You can have this fear without any reason for it. I don’t know if it is the same thing, but there’s an Australian fish that causes unreasoning fear of doom in patients who have been stung by it.

Small box jellyfish, possibly Carukia barnesi , one of the jellyfishes responsible for irukandji syncrome. Photo Carukia barnesi - by Forgez Wikipedia (there are many other photos of Carukia barnesi but I can’t find one right now that has a suitable sharing license to include here)
You can read the story of its discovery here: Irukandji Jellyfish. Carukia barnesi
This jellyfish is not dangerous to most people, if you get out of the water and get treatment, but for some reason people who are stung by it become convinced they are going to die, although they don't. See Apparently There’s a Jellyfish Whose Sting Causes Feelings of Impending Doom
You can get a similar feeling if you eat too many nutmegs, like huge numbers of them. See feeling of impending doom.
So - not saying it’s the same thing but that shows how you can have this feeling of impending doom, even when you know there is nothing to be scared of. And it’s not a phobia. Eventually it goes away. I think there are similarities. Obviously if it is something like that, an actual change in your body leading you to feel fear all the time, then reasoning, and things like cognitive behaviour therapy may help but can only take you so far. You might have to wait for it to wear away. But some of those I talk to have found breaks useful.
TAKING A BREAK
You can do a lot by just not searching for Nibiru. On facebook, then say you don’t want to see “stories like this” in your feed - click on the x at top right of the story and you see that option. Stop searching in Google and stop clicking through to Nibiru in search results and Google will eventually stop showing them to you.
Take a break from the internet altogether. Especially if the main thing you do on line is to search for stories about Nibiru it may help a lot to just stop going online. Take an internet break, for a few hours, a day, a week, whatever is sensible and practical for your situation. See if that helps and if it does, you have a way to deal with the situation.
Or anything else, to just notice things that help with your fear of the world ending.
And associate with people who know that it’s nonsense and can reassure you when others tell you it makes sense. If you are interested in astronomy you could try joining your local astronomy club - people who regularly observe the sky through telescopes and follow the planets and all the latest astronomy news, in the tradition of amateur astronomy, will certainly not have any truck with ideas of us having two suns or extra planets or all that BS.
And you can try our groups on facebook,
You tend to get lots of stories appear about doomsday, so if you want to avoid those stories altogether they may not be the best place at that point. But the stories get debunked and you can talk to knowledgeable astronomers and scientists who will help you get grounded in this.
I think it is something that will gradually subside over time. The people who contact me who are very scared to start with gradually get a lot less scared.
So, if you can see rationally that these aren’t things to be scared of - that’s an excellent starting point. But you may well find you can’t get rid of your fear instantly through reason. But eventually it gets less and less and in many cases it just goes away, in my experience of talking to people over the internet who are scared of these things. Might take months, might take longer sometimes. Some that I talked about this first a year ago are still scared a bit, but much less so. So if it takes a year that’s not so unusual either.
See also my I understand that Nibiru is not real but still feel scared all the time - what can I do?
This one is not even listed as a "Potentially Hazardous Object". This means that it's not a possible threat at all even for many centuries into the future. The closest it gets for the next 150 years is 2.7 million miles or nearly ten times the distance to the Moon, in April 2047.
The story is here
They all cite the Russian astronomers as saying we will need to keep an eye on it because it could be perturbed unpredictably by other planets. That’s nonsense. Perhaps they were misunderstood or misquoted.
The main cause of uncertainty is if we have too few measurements to calculate an accurate orbit. This one ,as the name implies, has been tracked since 2014 so is well understood.
This is the sequence of discovery images from 2014

Gravitational effects of the planets are well known and can’t surprise us in the next few thousands of years. Comets can also change track through venting water vapour, but not make major changes in direction and there are other minor effects on the orbit e.g. due to heating from the Sun. But these are all taken account of in the predictions.
Although it was only discovered last month, we have 300 observations spanning three years. That’s because after discovering it, they could go back through looking at images of that patch of the sky and find “pre-discovery” images where astronomers photographed it and thought it was just a very faint star and didn’t pay any attention to it at the time. So its orbit is very well understood.
It got so much media attention that JPL put up a page about it here
“Some recent press reports have suggested that an asteroid designated 2014 UR116, found on October 27, 2014, at the MASTER-II observatory in Kislovodsk, Russia, represents an impact threat to the Earth. While this approximately 400-meter sized asteroid has a three year orbital period around the sun and returns to the Earth's neighborhood periodically, it does not represent a threat because its orbital path does not pass sufficiently close to the Earth's orbit.
“Furthermore, Tim Spahr, Director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge Massachusetts, has also re-computed this object's orbit after noticing that it was the same as an object observed six years ago. Using both sets of observations, the future motion of this asteroid was carried further forward in time using the automatic computations made by the Sentry system at NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These computations rule out this object as an impact threat to Earth (or any other planet) for at least the next 150 years.
“Any statements about risk for impact of discovered asteroids and comets should be verified by scientists and the media by accessing NASA' Near Earth Object (NEO) Program web site at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/
“or the European equivalent, the NEO Dynamic Site at http://newton.dm.unipi.it/neodys... . “
See: Asteroid 2014 UR116, A 400-meter Sized Near-Earth Asteroid, Represents No Threat to the Earth
It’s debunked in many places:
Summary: It’s not something to worry about, and we are not in the middle of one anyway.
We get magnetic pole shifts every few tens of thousands of years. Last one was 41,000 years ago. But there is no evidence that we are in the middle of one now. Both magnetic poles are close to their geographical poles and though the magnetic field strength is currently decreasing that doesn’t mean much as it is above average levels - and obviously can’t stay above average levels indefinitely so was bound to come down. If it did happen it would happen slowly. Over many decades our compasses would stop pointing North / South and start pointing East / West or maybe sometimes one way and sometimes the other way. Several centuries after it started, our compass’s North would point South and Vice Versa.
Last time we had a reversal, nothing happened, humans survived just fine. There isn’t any evidence that they cause mass extinctions. The ozone layer gets thinner for a while meaning more UV light gets to ground level, but it doesn’t vanish. That would probably be the main risk for our descendants maybe many thousands of years from now who have to live through a pole shift if there is an increase. But it is easy to protect from UV light. Nothing much else will happen.
This is different from the idea of a geographical pole shift. That’s just nonsense. See Debunking: Inuit elders say that the Earth’s poles have shifted position for that one.
Magnetic pole shifts do happen - we have lots of good evidence of this from the geological record. First discovered by studying rocks that form in the sea floor, e.g. along the Atlantic, in the so called “deep sea trenches” where the rocks are pulling apart and new rock forming, very slowly. They found magnetic strips of rock pointing in opposite directions where they trapped the Earth’s magnetic field as the rock solidified.
IN DETAIL
This article from IFL Science propagates many of the myths about magnetic pole shifts. Why The Earth’s Magnetic Poles Could Be About To Swap Places – And How It Would affect Us
Short answer, nothing much for most of us:
HOW OFTEN DO WE GET A MAGNETIC REVERSAL?
First, full magnetic reversals, where the field flips and stays flipped, are rare, roughly every 200,000 years but sometimes with much longer gaps between them. The last one was Brunhes–Matuyama reversal 781,000 years ago.
But sometimes the magnetic field reverses temporarily, and then reverts to its original state again. One geologically recent example, the Laschamp event 41,000 years ago. This happened surprisingly quickly, around a century for the polarity shift, unlike a full reversal that takes thousands of years for it to reverse.
It was a complete reversal, not just a change in position of the pole. While reversed, the field strength was only 5% of our normal magnetic field, but it had North and South interchanged. It lasted for 440 years. Of that time period, the two reversals took up 250 years.
An extremely brief reversal of the geomagnetic field, climate variability and a super volcano
It’s not much different though whether it just flips for a short time or flips for a long time.
In this diagram the yellow dots track the motion of the north "virtual geomagnetic pole"

For a couple of science news stories about this research: An extremely brief reversal of the geomagnetic field, climate variability and a super volcano , Ice age polarity reversal was global event: Extremely brief reversal of geomagnetic field, climate variability, and super volcano
It remained reversed for a total of 450 years and the two polarity reversals took 250 years of that. That's very rapid on geological timescales.
For the detailed scientific paper: Dynamics of the Laschamp geomagnetic excursion from Black Sea sediments. This diagram is discussed on page 65.
So, it does seem it is something that can happen. Not just in a few years. But over a couple of centuries.
There have been other magnetic field "excursions" as these are called. Gothenburg magnetic reversal 11,500 years ago and Mono Lake magnetic reversal of 23,000 years ago .
This is a simulation of a magnetic reversal on supercomputer from 2010, just to give an idea of how it works, it's not just the magnetic poles moving, like turning around, the magnetic field would get complex in the middle of the transition. It would get pretty hard to use a compass, I'd imagine, need to rely on up to date maps of the direction of the magnetic field in whatever part of the world you were sailing in.
This is what it's like in the middle of a reversal:
We are nowhere near anything like that at present.
CURRENT SITUATION, NO SIGN OF A REVERSAL
The South dip pole lies at a latitude of 64.28 degrees South, outside Antarctica, in the open ocean, also outside the Antarctic circle.

While the North magnetic pole is far closer to the pole, almost directly at it right now:

As you see the N. magnetic pole is continuing to move closer to the geometric N. pole and the S. magnetic pole is continuing to move away from the geometric S. pole.
In these diagrams, the blue is the geomagnetic pole - treats the Earth as if it were a dipole magnet. So the geomagnetic poles are diametrically opposite each other. The red dots are the dip poles - the point on the surface where your compass needle would point directly downwards or upwards.
More about it here: Magnetic Poles
There's also evidence that the magnetic field is getting weaker. But it’s been much stronger than usual for a while and so far it is not particularly low, just declining towards rather ordinary values

What it will do next is anybody’s guess. If you extrapolate that graph, it reaches 0 so a reversal after 1500 years. But there is no reason to suppose that it’s doing that. Even if it gets very weak, often you get “excursions” where the field gets weak, but then just restores itself in the same direction as before.
So there is no reason to suppose it will reverse based on the magnetic field strength so far. The magnetic poles are continually moving anyway and at present they are close to the poles and the magnetic field strength is normal.
But it could happen. And we can get an idea of the effects, from studies of the last time it happened.
EFFECTS OF THE REVERSAL LAST TIME IT HAPPENED
There were increased levels of radiation, with increased levels of Beryllium 10 and carbon 14. See https://www.sciencedaily.com/rel...
(note, in case of confusion: the paper doesn’t say that the reversal caused the supervolcano eruption, it’s just that their research allowed them to research both events as they were close together in time)
We remain protected by the atmosphere, which is roughly equivalent in radiation shielding to ten meters thickness of water. So we don't need to be concerned we'll all die, like astronauts caught in a solar storm outside the shelter of the Earth's magnetic field. That can't happen.
Human beings have managed fine through many previous reversals. Anatomically modern humans evolved around 200,000 years ago, archaic humans 500,000 years ago, and earlier hominids have been around for millions of years, see human evolution
The weaker magnetic field during a reversal wouldn’t make much difference for the faster particles in cosmic radiation as these fast particles go straight through the Earth’s magnetic field anyway. And some particles are even accelerated by the magneticfield. The Earth’s atmosphere protects us from this, again shielding equivalent to ten meters thickness of water.
Theoretically the increased radiation levels from the slower particles could increase cloud levels (because radiation is supposed to help with cloud formation, similarly to the way they produce trails in cloud chambers) which could cool the Earth. The authors of that paper couldn't find a clear correlation of weather with the cosmic ray flux during the Laschamp event however (just summarizing what they way in their paper).
More generally, there’s no proven link between magnetic reversals and extinctions.
“During a transition the magnetic field at the surface of the Earth decreases to about 10% of its current value. If the geomagnetic field is a shield against energetic particles of solar or cosmic origin then biospheric effects can be expected. We review the early speculations on the problem and discuss in more detail its current status. We conclude that no clear picture of a geomagnetic link, a causal relation between secular magnetic field variations and the evolution of life on our planet can be drawn.”
In more detail: in the summary conclusion section on page 157 of the earlier paper:The Sun, geomagnetic polarity transitions, and possible biospheric effects: review and illustrating model (2009) they conclude that the main effect would be generation of a natural hole in the ozone layer and this would stress the populations of phytoplankton in the sea, but that so far none of the recent studies have yet been conclusive enough to decide if this has cataclysmic effects on the Earth’s ecosystem.
- “A major atmospheric effect of polarity transitions is most probably the generation of a natural ozone hole due to enhanced SPE activity. This ozone hole is associated with a strong increase of erythemal weighted surface UV-B flux. .
- “The increase of erythemal weighted surface UV-B flux represents a clear stress on aquatic ecosystems such as phytoplankton populations. Using a simplified model of enhanced UV-B stress on such a population indicates a complex, nonlinear response of the population.
… “We conclude that many further studies on details of the suggested process chain and actual analyses of geologic proxies are necessary before a possible connection following the processes discussed can be confirmed. All recent studies do not yet allow one to decide whether a polarity transition is a cataclysm to the Earth system or not. “
This is an earlier 1980 paper with the same conclusion: Relationship between biological extinctions and geomagnetic reversals
More citations in the wikipedia article here: Geomagnetic reversal
SOLAR STORMS
A really major solar storm will break through our magnetic field whatever, so that’s not particularly to do with magnetic pole reversal.
There's no risk to humans. But there is a risk to the electricity transmission network and to satellites mainly. Ordinary strong solar flares aren't really a problem, there is enough warning and the electricity companies and so on can take measures to protect themselves. Impacts of Strong Solar Flares. We get those every so often, every decade or so.
But then - there's the possibility of a really big solar flare. There was a big solar flare back in Solar storm of 1859. Known as the "Carrington event" after an English astronomer who was observing the sun, saw some huge sunspots, and spotted an intense white flash from the sunspot group. The auroras turned night to day, people could read the newspaper by the auroras. Gold minors in the Rocky Mountains woke up and ate breakfast at 1 a.m. thinking it was sunrise on a cloudy day.
Telegraphs stopped working - and in the USA, some operators disconnected the batteries and found they could send telegrams just using the induced electricity from the storm. See Severe Space Weather Events Telegraph operators also saw sparks leaping from their equipment, some big enough to cause fires. What If the Biggest Solar Storm on Record Happened Today?
So - at the time that was just a curiosity and hardly made any difference to anyone except the telegraph operators and people woken up early by the bright auroras. But if we had a storm like that now, the effects could be huge. We have never had a flare anything like that big since then.
The main effects are:
Basically the power companies need to install monster surge protectors. Solar Storms: What You Need to Ask Your Power Company
And another approach involving adding extra resistors - this amounted to a total cost of the order of $100, million, for an event that could cost trillions (between 0.6 and 2.4 trillion dollars to replace damaged transformers after sch an event according to the Lloyds report) and mean outages of electricity for between 6 days and years. An Inexpensive Fix to "Prevent Armageddon" But Congress didn't pass the bill that was proposed to spend this $100 million on this fix.
I'm not sure of the latest on this. There's a lot about this online but it can be a bit hard to sift the accurate sites from the ones that are a bit over the top and sensationalist.
Blackouts certainly can happen, this is something that actually did happen in Quebec in 1989 You are most vulnerable in the higher latitudes so the North of the US would be the ones who lose power, and the higher latitude countries in Europe. Apparently also more vulnerable if the power lines run above igneous rocks.
"Power systems in areas of igneous rock (gray) are the most vulnerable to the effects of intense geomagnetic activity because the high resistance of the igneous rock encourages geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) to flow in the power transmission lines situated above the rock. "
The Day the Sun Brought Darkness
And - is something you can do something about - ways of protecting the transformers in power grids seem the most important thing to focus on. There's a useful recent discussion here at physicsstackexchange:
Can a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) cause a blackout on Earth and why?
Where one of the answers says that the power network has various unintended protections built in, mainly that if one transformer blows out, the rest in the grid tend to trip rather than blow out too. And that in a study that he and some colleagues did, they found the power grid may be less vulnerable than previously predicted because of these reasons, but satellites that orbit at geostationary orbit, also the middle level orbit GPS satellites may be more vulnerable than previously expected, with many of them, if on the sun side of the Earth (between it's magnetic field and the sun) likely to be destroyed.
"So the most recent idea is that our satellites are very vulnerable but our power grids may not be as vulnerable as we originally thought (though, all of these issues are incredibly difficult to model and predict so take my comments with a grain of salt)."
- see the conversation here: Can a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) cause a blackout on Earth and why?
Any other links on this?
(This is a shortened version of Robert Walker's answer to How often do solar storms occur? Can they hit earth or cause harm to use?)
NO DIFFERENCE IN NUMBERS OF PARTICLES THAT GET DOWN TO GROUND LEVEL
Solar storm particles are too weak to get through the atmosphere at all. Cosmic "rays" actually particles (the name is confusing as they aren't photons or radiation and travel at less than light speed) - they can, but the atmosphere is equivalent to 10 meters thickness of water so only the most energetic can get all the way through.
The loss of magnetic field won't make any difference there as it’s our atmosphere that protects us most (though it would make a big difference to astronauts in the ISS). It increases the number of particles that hit the upper atmosphere, whch is why it can influence the ozone layer and perhaps cloud formation. It also makes magnetic field differences to the surface which is how you can get the effects on long cables such as electricity transmission cables. But it doesn't increase the number of particles that get down to ground level in the atmosphere.
AURORAS
You'd see auroras right down to the equator.

Here is a stunning video of the Aurora Borealis from the ISS in 2012.
And a compilation of various videos of it here
and Aurora Borealis: Why is Antarctic Auroral Oval always off center over the South Pole?
This is identical to my answer to What will happen if the Earth's magnetic poles reverse?
Summary: It’s fake news - anyone who runs this has no system in place to check if the story is fake. The title of this article is taken from the Sun but several others are running this story. It’s fake news.
If you trace it back, the original story about “Dr Zakharovich” talks about the “dark side of the Sun”, which is a staple of joke stories in Astronomy like the fake news that N. Korea claimed to have landed an astronaut on the Sun at night. It’s hard to be sure if it is meant to be humour, satire or real - but it is one of several stories about the “dark side of the sun” on the same website. Hopefully most of you know that the sun doesn’t have a “dark side” and that at night it is just hidden below the horizon.
The later versions of the story still mention the supposed astronomer “Dr Zakharovich” but omit the ideas of a dark side to the sun.
2016 WF9 is a real asteroid but it passes us at a distance of 132 times the distance to the Moon on February 25th and is no threat at all. It’s not even in an orbit that takes it anywhere near the Earth.
I expect the "self proclaimed astronomer"'s name is just made up. They wouldn't use a real person for a joke story about the dark side of the Sun. This particular asteroid is nowhere near Earth. On February it passes 132 times the distance to the Moon. Its closest flyby is 20 times the distance to the Moon in February 2149
But since then somehow it has lost all its joke elements and journalists who don’t bother to check their sources for fake news are running it as a serious story.
I hope most of those reading this know that the sun doesn’t have a dark side.
It’s like them all running an April Fool joke as if it was real news.
Anyone who runs this story doesn't check for fake news for asteroid impacts so cross them off your list of reliable sources for astronomy.It is a serious problem I think, the large numbers of news sites that are willing to run joke / hoax / fake doomsday stories without any system in place to check them.
Papers running this story without any mention of its origin as fake news include:
The original version appears on
The original site, Someone’s Bones, reblogged it as
The Daily Mail actually does some rather decent science and astronomy articles at times. Some are well researched and careful. But others are just bunk. Maybe they have some good science journalists and some hopeless ones and it depends who writes the article?
Snopes debunks it here, but even they didn’t pick up on the fact that it originated as a joke story involving the dark side of the sun, which is easy to find with a google search
This site though does do the check back to the original and it’s a good article debunking it
HOW I FOUND THE ORIGINAL STORY
It’s actually quite easy to find the original source of a story like this. I used the google search option to search for results before a particular date.
Enter a search for e.g. the name “Dyomin Damir Zakharovich” + “asteroid” and then set the final date to different dates. You will soon find that the name didn’t occur before January of this year anywhere on the web. Then go forward by a week, found it was first week of January, keep dividing down and soon you find there are few results and the earliest was 4th Jan.
It’s a little confusing as the google search by date is slightly flawed ,sometimes shows later stories than the final date you set, but it is easy to check those individually as it doesn’t make many mistakes.
I doubt if this is a real person. There are earlier occurrences, e.g. this story again on “Someone’s bones” under Russian Nibiru Astronomer Fears For His Life says
“Dyomin Damir Zakharovich, a Russian astronomer and graduate of Russia’s prestigious Lomonov Moscow State University “
A search for Lomonov+Zakharovich only turns up ten results, and mostly highly dubious planet X / Nibiru ones at that.
IN DETAIL
This is a rather distant asteroid / comet. This is an artist’s impression of it.

"2016 WF9 will approach Earth's orbit on Feb. 25, 2017. At a distance of nearly 32 million miles (51 million kilometers) from Earth, this pass will not bring it particularly close. The trajectory of 2016 WF9 is well understood, and the object is not a threat to Earth for the foreseeable future."
That’s over 132 times the distance to the Moon.
This is just made up in the Sun article “Nasa said it did not believe the asteroid will collide with Earth, but it will provide an incredible spectacle as it soars over our planet”
NASA didn’t say that, I’m sure, no astronomer would say that. It will be so far away that it can’t possibly be a naked eye object and would need a large telescope to see it at all. When reading these articles you need to know that journalists, especially in the red top tabloids, just make things up to make the story sound good. Rather like someone telling a tall tale in a pub.
The only reason NASA did a bulletin about it is because it seems to be a comet that has lost all of the ice and gas that makes comet tails. They think it is a comet because comets are dark (their nucleus that is) and it is darker than ordinary asteroids. Apart from its darkness it looks like an ordinary asteroid, doesn’t have a tail More about it: 2016 WF9.
That’s interesting to astronomers. But it’s not even in an orbit that takes it anywhere near Earth. It’s closest approach in the next 200 years is well over a century in the future, in February 2149. And even then, it will be more than 20 times the distance to the Moon.
This is what NASA say about it:
“It's in an orbit that takes it on a scenic tour of our solar system. At its farthest distance from the sun, it approaches Jupiter's orbit. Over the course of 4.9 Earth-years, it travels inward, passing under the main asteroid belt and the orbit of Mars until it swings just inside Earth's own orbit. After that, it heads back toward the outer solar system. Objects in these types of orbits have multiple possible origins; it might once have been a comet, or it could have strayed from a population of dark objects in the main asteroid belt.”
Note that it crosses the ecliptic just inside Earth’s orbit. This means it can never hit Earth as long as it remains in its current orbit. An object in a trajectory like that would have to cross the ecliptic exactly at Earth’s orbit to hit us.
The earliest version of the story I can find online is here, 4th Jan: Nibiru Fragment To Strike Earth in February, Says Russian Astronomer
Copied many times, later version here: Nibiru fragment to strike Earth in february, says russian astronomer, identical text. For many more examples: google search for: * Nibiru fragment to strike Earth in february, says russian astronomer"
But then it started to morph into a new story after that.
I’m not sure you can even call it fake news. More of a satire or joke story as it says
“According to Dr. Zakharovich, 2016 WF9 was one of trillions of asteroids churning around Nibiru in a cosmic whirlpool. Occasionally, the asteroids collide, bumping one another likes balls on a billiard table, sometimes ejecting one another from orbit. In this case, Dr. Zakharovich said, 2016 WF9 was jettisoned directly toward Earth. Using the “slingshot effect,” it first doubled speed circling the brown dwarf star, then doubled that speed to the third power when it spun behind the dark side of the sun, propelling it toward Earth at transversel velocities.”
I think most of us know that the Sun doesn’t have a dark side :).
It’s from a blog that takes almost every news story in the News, and runs it as a story about Nibiru: Someone’s Bones
Here is another story from the blog, about the report of a failed test from the UK Trident submarine: British Sub Tries To Nuke Nibiru, Nearly Ignites War
‘“This was a clandestine operation,” Steele said. “No one was supposed to find out. They had to spin a story to conceal the truth. Prime Minister May learned that Nibiru’s relative position to the dark side of the sun had made it vulnerable to nuclear weapons. She also learned that late last year Kim Jong-un launched nukes at Nibiru, to no affect. She thought British-American technology would be better. She ordered the operation without informing parliament.” ‘
So I think this is yet another example of journalists not checking their sources to eliminate fake news. You get what we in the UK call “Chinese whispers” for some reason. Someone publishes a fake or joke story. Another journalist spots it, thinks it is fun to run, but leaves out some of the details that make it clear it’s a joke. Or doesn’t mention that they got it from a fake news site and runs it in a slightly more reputable newspaper. Then another even more reputable journalist reads that, thinks there is lot of fuss about it, and they rush to run it before anyone else, not stopping to check where it came from originally. Then you get maybe a dozen different news sites all rushing to publish it as fast as possible - and none of them have a policy requiring their journalists to check if an asteroid impact story is fake news.
And it is so easy to check these stories too. When they say NASA says we have an asteroid headed our way, or any other astronomical authority, just go here Sentry Risk Table
Although that page is published on the JPL website, it’s a result of collaborative work by astronomers in dozens of different countries. The whole thing is done in an open way. You can find all the observations online if you search for them, and if you know enough astronomy, you can run the orbital simulations yourself to find out what the asteroids will do in the future from the observations done so far. There is no way any government or organization can hide this.
If the first entry is white, blue or green - then the story is a fake, First entry is white. So you don’t even need to research to find out where it came from. That shows that it is fake news. If journalists knew to do this, then we wouldn’t get any of these stories - well perhaps.
More about it here: Debunked: Nibiru fragment to strike Earth in February
Summary: A supernova is an exploding star. Our star can’t explode. There are many stars that can but the nearest one is 150 light years away. This is far too far away to harm us in any way at all. It would just be a very bright star in the sky for a few days.
We know the region close to the Earth very well and it’s not likely that we are missing a supernova candidate so close it could harm us. Stars do also move, so if you look far enough into the future, some stars that are now a long way away will be closer, and some of the ones that are close by will be further away.
So, it’s possible that we have nearby supernova candidates millions of years into the future but for the next few thousands up to hundreds of thousands of years, it seems we are safe from supernovae.
Also the main effect of a supernova is to increase the amount of UV light by destroying the ozone layer. Our atmosphere is a thick barrier to the ionizing radiation, similar to ten meters thickness of water as radiation protection. So Earth won’t be in any danger from the ionizing radiation. Some scientists think supernovae and gamma ray bursts caused mass extinctions in the past. If so, on the basis of the latest research, they would have to do that through increased levels of UV light. Though UV light is harmful, it’s a bit hard to see how that could cause a mass extinction. It could easiiy make some vulnerable species extinct .This is a matter of much discussion.
Supernovae are very common. We get one every century in our galaxy. The nearest one so far is 700 light years away - and most often they are thousands or tens of thousands of light years away.
So - in short, it’s something to look forward to, not something to be scared of. I’d love to see a supernova. But though we get one every century on average, about half of them get so hidden from view by dust that we won’t see them on Earth with the naked eye. It’s been several centuries since the last naked eye supernova in the seventeenth century (two of them, one in 1604 observed by Kepler, very bright, and another which was obscured by dust, observed by Flamstead in 1680 as a sixth magnitude star, so on the edge of naked eye visibility - and he just recorded it as a star and didn’t know what it was).
OTHER TYPES OF STAR - LUMINOUS RED NOVAE, MAGNETARS, AND GAMMA RAY BURSTS
There are many other types of ways stars can get very bright - in the ordinary “nova” - but they can’t harm us, even if they are very close.
The recent stories in the papers about a supernova in 2022 were actually about a Luminous red nova which is in between the brightness of a normal nova and a supernova. So it’s not actually going to be particularly bright. At it’s brightest, it may perhaps reach magnitude 2, the same brightness as the Pole Star. For more on this: Debunked: A new star that will appear in the sky in 2022 is a sign of the end of the world,
Another kind of star that’s quite dramatic is the magnetar. These also are harmless to Earth Debunked: Pastor Paul Bagley predicts that Magnetar SGR 1806-20 is going to send a gamma ray blast on 26th December which will be devastating to Earth
Then you’ll also hear that gamma ray bursts can harm us. Well it’s similar to a supernovae, though because they could harm us from thousands of light years away, it’s not so easy to make a comprehensive list of candidates. But we do know of many gamma ray burst candidates and they are just not pointing in the right direction to harm us. The star WR 104 used to be a gamma ray burst candidate, but after more measurements they found out that its axis is tilted at an angle of f 30° - 40° (possibly as much as 45°) which would mean it would miss. See WR 104 Won't Kill Us After All - Universe Today. And the way they cause harm us is by damage to the ozone layer which would be a nuisance, we’d have to use UV sun screen protection, but it would not make us extinct, and probably won’t make many species extinct. For details see my. Debunked: A gamma ray burst could make humans extinct
So in short it seems pretty clear that we are not in danger from supernovae, gamma ray bursts, or any other form of star explosion in the near future. Maybe a slight chance of a gamma ray burst because we don’t understand those very well and though very rare, they could harm us from a greater distance. But those don’t seem likely either.
And all of them, supernovae, gamma ray bursts, or anything else like that - they harm us through damaging the ozone layer and could not possibly make humans extinct. We’d just have to wear broad brimmed hats, or protective clothing or use sun cream to avoid the risk of skin cancer from the UV light. I go into this in detail in the gamma ray burst answer so take a look at that article to find out more.
If we did have a nearby supernova or gamma ray burst, maybe we’ll all be wearing Mexican hats (sombreros) and sun cream to protect ourselves from the UV light:
But it doesn’t seem that it is likely to happen any time soon like in the next few tens of thousands of years.
IN DETAIL
The most harm a supernova can do if very close is to damage the ozone layer and create a big ozone hole which increases the amount of UV light.
Our star can’t go supernova because it’s not heavy enough for that. It does have quite a turbulent future if you look billions of years ahead but it can’t go supernova.
It’s in a quiet phase of its long life at present, slowly burning hydrogen to helium in its core. By “burning” I mean nuclear fusion here.
WHAT HAPPENS TO OUR SUN
The events I’m going to describe happen billions of years into the future. We might have to move to another planet or protect our planet from the Sun i some way - or rather - probably not us but whatever evolves by then. That’s far enough into the future for a tiny microscopic creature to evolve all the way to humans many times over. For all we know some tiny creature we can only see in a microscope may be the ancestor of the beings in a future civilization on Earth hundreds of millions of years from now.
But we can see other stars that have gone through these stages.
Eventually it runs out of hydrogen and then it starts to contract as it cools down. It could burn helium at that stage, but it’s not hot enough. So it has to keep contracting, until its core turns into “Degenerate matter” so squashed together that it can’t form separate atoms any more but is a mix of atomic nuclei and electrons.
That’s when the helium burns. This happens suddenly producing a Helium flash - which is however not nearly as bright as a supernova. Only the core of the star explodes.
Sakurai's Object which is currently in the middle of a Helium flash
After that, the explosion has reduced the density of the core enough so that it can burn Helium in a more controlled fashion. It burns more hotly, than hydrogen, converting helium to carbon and oxygen (mainly). Because the core is so hot the star expands - and the outer envelope cools down so our sun will become a red giant star, rather than the current hotter white star (it’s really white not yellow, especially if you look at it from space, but even through our atmosphere it’s much more white than it is yellow).
If you heat up metal it goes a glowing red, then orange red, then white hot, and eventually a blueish white in colour. Anything at the same temperature which is just radiating heat energy goes the same colour. So stars work the same way.
Our sun is white hot. When it becomes a red giant it goes red hot. But that won’t happen for billions of years. At that stage it gets rather volatile throwing off clouds of gas and will form a “planetary nebula”.
After that when our sun uses up its helium fuel, it’s not hot enough to go any further. So it will just cool down into a small dense and very hot star known as a white dwarf. This can’t produce any more heat from inside. But it’s so hot and so heavy that it just stays white hot for billions of years. No stars in our universe are old enough yet to have cooled down from the white dwarf state to the next stage of a black dwarf. It would take more than a quadrillion years, so a thousand billion years, for our star to become a Black dwarf
For more about this: The Evolution of the Sun
To go supernova it has to go much further than helium burning, it has to burn all the way up the periodic table to iron, which then because it is inert causes it to collapse. Our sun never gets hot enough for that because it isn't heavy enough. But other stars can do this.
WHAT HAPPENS TO A STAR HEAVIER THAN OUR SUN
Betelgeuse is another red giant star 640 light years away in the constellation Orion, one of the easiest to recognize constellations in the night sky. It’s the star in Orion’s top left shoulder, shown with an arrow below:

However it’s heavier than our Sun. So when it runs out of helium, then it contracts, and will be able to burn the oxygen and carbon in its core. Eventually it runs out of that also, and burns heavier and heavier elements. It gets through each one more and more quickly. Eventually it gets to iron, which won’t burn. When that happens, suddenly the core is not supported any more, and the star collapses. The falling in material then bounces back to create a big shock wave. For a long time scientists couldn’t figure out how that would do anything much, but turns out that the star creates huge amounts of a mysterious particle called a neutrino. A neutrino can go through a light year of lead without noticing, but a collapsing star is so dense it traps lots of neutrinos which push it out just enough for it to explode.
Betelgeuse will explode some day, we know this for sure. It could be today, but much more likely to be a long time into the future. It could be a million years from now. But it is far too far away to be any problem for Earth, nor will it be a second sun. It will just be a very bright star in the sky. It will be an interesting sight for astronomers, great chance to study a supernova close up. For everyone else, just a very bright star. Briefly, the brightest star in the sky. Betelgeuse will explode someday
Eta Carinae is another star that can go supernova. It’s a “blue supergiant” - so that shows it’s not just red giants that can go supernova. This is a very young, super hot star 8,000 light years away and it may explode in the next few hundred thousand years. It’s also far to o far away to harm us.
There are two types of supernova. The first way it can happen is the type II supernova which I just described.
This is the closest supernova that we’ve actually seen exploding of Type II,

SN 1987A in the Large Magellanic cloud - a dwarf galaxy that’s close to our Milky way galaxy and in orbit around it, visible from the Southern hemisphere as a faint patch of luminosity in the sky to naked eye in very dark skies. Although this was 168,000 light years away, it became briefly so bright it was an easy naked eye star, at magnitude 3. The red in this photo shows radio waves and is given off by the dust from the explosion. Blue is X-rays and green is visible light and those colours mark out the expanding shock wave.
TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE
The other way it can happen is if a star like our sun has a companion when it becomes a white dwarf. If that happens, then after it has gone white dwarf, the companion star may go through its red giant phase and as it enlarges, it can dump gas on the white dwarf. As a result the white dwarf gets heavier and hotter and eventually collapses and then explodes in a Type Ia supernova explosion.
When it explodes, this can literally tear the white dwarf apart leaving nothing there at all, or it may collapse to form a neutron star.
But there are no nearby candidates for a type Ia supernova either. The closest is IK Pegasi which at 150 light years away is far too far away to harm us. It’s moving away from us and the scientists think it won’t go supernova for several million years, by which time it will be perhaps 500 light years away. It would need to be within 30 light years to be harmful.
Here is Phil Plait of “Bad Astronomy” talking about the two types of supernova and about how there is no nearby star that can go suprenova.
Here is a list of the nearby List of supernova candidates
See also: The closest supernova candidate? - Bad Astronomy
There are type Ib and type Ic supernovae too, These happen when a star loses its outer envelope, for instance to a companion star - and then the naked core collapses. Type Ib and Ic supernovae
We get supernovas quite often and they leave rather beautiful remnants.
LIST OF SUPERNOVAE
So here is a list of them from 1000 AD. Adapted from the List of supernova remnants - Wikipedia
Brightness in astronomy is measured using magnitudes. They work the opposite way from what you’d expect. Larger positive numbers are fainter so 6th magnitude is very faint. The smaller the brighter and negative magnitudes mean quite a bright star.
Venus at its brightest is -5 so anything as bright as that or brighter would be very noticeable. Sirius is -1.5 so anything brighter than that would be brighter than anything in the sky except for some planets, the Sun and the Moon.
Also note, these images are using enhanced and often false colour. The remnants wouldn’t be anything like as bright as this or as colourful to the naked eye.
W49B About 1000 AD

No observations recorded but it would have been seen around 1000 AD if visible. Distance 26,000 light years.
SN 1006 May 1, 1006

Magnitude −7.5, distance 7,200 light years
SN 1054 or M1 or Crab Nebula 1054

Magnitude -6, distance 6,400 light years
G350.1-0.3 About 1100

Unlikely to have been seen because of interstellar dust. Distance 15,000 light years
SN 1181 1181

Magnitude -1, distance 26,000 or more light years
RX J0852.0-4622 or Vela Junior About 1250

Distance 700 light years. Not observed. At 46 degrees south, it would have been invisible to most of Europe.
SN 1572 or Tycho's Nova, November 11, 1572

Magnitude -4, distance 7,500 light years
SN 1604 or Kepler's Nova October 8, 1604

Magnitude -2.5, distance 20,000 light years
Cassiopeia A Mid 17th Century, obscured by interstellar dust. Recorded as very faint sixth magnitude star by John Flamstead on August 16 1680, he didn’t know what it was

Magnitude 6, distance 10,000 light years
G1.9+0.3 About 1868 - obscured by the dust at the center of our galaxy, no observations

Not observed. Distance 25,000 light years
Yes, it is easy to penetrate the atmosphere quickly, and burn up like a meteor. The problem is to enter slowly. You can do that too, but it would take a HUGE amount of fuel with ordinary rockets. You can do it with aerobraking, including a surprisingly slow re-entry with an orbital airship; and there are some other ideas that may be possible in the not too distant future, such as a space elevator, or spinning “skyhooks”.
To see why it is so difficult with ordinary rockets, here is a quick refresher on orbits. If you could throw a ball from above our atmosphere, gravity still pulls it down in the same way as on Earth, If you throw it fast enough, what happens is that it gets beyond the horizon before it can hit the Earth, and Earth’s gravity continues to pull it around into a curve until it gets back to its starting point. That’s how satellites such as the ISS stay in orbit, and that’s why it is often called free-fall.
To skim the Earth’s atmosphere in orbit, your spacecraft has to travel at least as fast as 7.8 km / second, or about 17,500 mph. The Earth itself, with its atmosphere, is spinning eastward below you, at around 1,000 mph. So, you can reduce your re-entry speed by orbiting in the same direction that the Earth spins. However that only helps a bit. Your spacecraft still has to travel at 16,500 mph relative to our atmosphere to stay in orbit.
If you slow down by a tiny amount below that speed, even by just a few hundred miles per hour, as you skim the atmosphere, you will fall too far towards Earth before you complete your orbit. You will hit the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour, and will re-enter in a fiery descent. At that point you depend on your aeroshell to protect you from the heat.
Example: On December 11, 2015, the Soyuz TMA 17M mission started from a low Earth orbit at an altitude of 416.7 km, and re-entered with a change in speed of 128 meters per second or 286 miles per hour.
But couldn’t you just hover above the atmosphere much in the same way that the lunar module pilots hovered above the Moon’s surface? You may remember that the Apollo 11 landing module nearly ran out of fuel as they were landing, because the computer was taking them to the steep slopes of a crater with rocks the size of automobiles. Here is Neil Armstrong narrating his landing:
As he says there, he took over manually and “flew it like a helicopter” on out to the West to find a good site. That’s something you can do using rocket thrust in the weak lunar gravity. To do a hover like that against full Earth gravity would take a lot of fuel. So much so that when fully fueled to land, your spaceship would need to be nearly as large as those rockets you see in televised launches that take our spacecraft into orbit. Huge!
If you could use fuel with a high power density, such as antimatter, which lets you convert matter directly into energy, or perhaps fuel for nuclear fusion, it would be easy. Your spaceship just needs to thrust continually at 1 g away from Earth to maintain position as it slows down, and then it can lower itself down to the surface, as slowly or as quickly as your pilot wishes.
But we don’t have such fuels yet. So is there any other way to do it?
SPACE ELEVATOR
We could lower a spacecraft slowly through our atmosphere with a space elevator. This is basically a giant lift, with the top a long way above our atmosphere, extending beyond geostationary orbit, and usually reaching to the ground at the equator. It is held in place, and tensioned, by a counterweight above geostationary orbit. This video gives an idea of how it works - and it also gives a refresher on orbits at the beginning.
If we had that, your spaceship could dock at geostationary orbit, which is easy to do, so long as you make sure that you orbit the earth in the same direction that it spins, once every 24 hours. That way your orbit keeps you stationary above the same point on Earth all the time, and so stationary relative to the top of the elevator. So then you can just dock slowly much as they do for the ISS.
Once you’ve done that, then you would get out of your spacecraft, or attach your spacecraft to a lift, and just slowly travel down the elevator at, say, 200 mph, or whatever speed you find comfortable and safe, until you reach the Earth’s surface. You’d feel gravity gradually increase from zero g to full g as you descend.
Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction story The Fountains of Paradise is based around this idea.
The space elevator is a mega engineering project, with many issues to sort out before it can be built. However, as well as that, at the moment there is one issue that is a deal breaker for it. It requires cables able to hold up their own weight for distances of thousands of kilometers. Present day materials such as Kevlar and the somewhat stronger Zylon can only hold up a few hundred kilometers. Carbon nanotubes made in a laboratory are strong enough for a space elevator, but when they are made into larger cables in practice they are weaker than Kevlar because of flaws. It would be possible to build a space elevator on the Moon with its weaker gravity, using Kevlar or Zylon, but not on the Earth. More on this later, but meanwhile let’s look at other ideas.
TRADITIONAL ROCKET
You could use a large rocket refueled from orbit of course, to slowly lower your spacecraft through the atmosphere. This would require a lot of fuel though because of the Earth’s gravity.
It’s easy to carry enough fuel to land on the Moon, in a slow controlled de-orbit. The lunar module descent stage had a total mass of 15.2 tons, and of that, 8.355 tons was propellant (these figures varied depending on the mission). So around 45% was payload, including as the payload there, the lander itself, the ascent stage, its fuel, and the crew, as well as the lunar rover and any equipment to be left on the surface.

Apollo 11 lunar module. The fuel for the landing was only 55% of its total mass.
The ascent stage was even more efficient with less that 50% of its mass consisting of fuel.

The ascent stage for Apollo 9’s “Spider” lunar module, seen from below, showing the ascent nozzle. This was a test in LEO as you can see from the Earth behind in the photo.
The lunar module’s ascent stage had a total mass of 4.76 tons. Of that, the crew was 144 kg and the propellant was 2.375 tons. The fuel amounted to less than 50% of its total mass. Of the original 15.2 tons of the fully loaded and fueled lunar module, 2.405 tons did the round trip all the way back to orbit. That’s about 15.8%. (Some of the payload of course was left on the surface such as the lunar rover in later missions, and the experiments).
If Earth had as little gravity as the Moon it would be easy to get into orbit and back again and we wouldn’t need to use the atmosphere at all. However, though the gravity is only six times greater on Earth, we need far more than six times the amount of fuel because of the way rockets work. For every few tons of fuel at the end of the journey, you may many extra tons early on, which is just fuel to accelerate fuel.
By way of example only 4% of the Saturn V rocket used to launch the Apollo missions was payload, so 96% of the launch mass is either burnt or discarded on the way to orbit. For the Ariane 5 (European heavy lift rocket), the payload fraction is 2.5%, and it’s similar (slightly less) for the Soyuz 2 used to launch the crewed Soyuz MS.
For the Space Shuttle, only 1% was payload because most of the mass put into orbit was the shuttle itself which was returned to Earth. For more on this, see The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation and for some more example figures, this Payload fraction table
If you don’t have an atmosphere for aerobraking, it takes about the same amount of fuel and hardware to get something into orbit as to de-orbit it. So for instance, since it takes 312 tons total mass to launch the new Soyuz MS with a crew of three into orbit, you’d need that much mass in orbit already to get them back. But each launch can only carry a payload of 7.08 tons. That makes it 44 launches before you have enough mass up there to return your crew of three safely without aerobraking.
You can improve those figures by using a heavy launch vehicle but it would still take eleven launches of the Delta IV Heavy, the highest capacity launch vehicle in production, with a payload of 28.79 tons. It would take six launches of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy when it is ready, with a payload to LEO of 54.4 tons.
You could do it more easily with the Saturn V. This had a payload to orbit of 140 tons (after boosts in payload capacity for the last two missions). So three launches would be more than enough at least in terms of the total mass. It would also take three launches of the new Space Launch System when ready.
Back in the 1960s NASA studied even larger rockets, the NOVA series, with an eye to a mission to Mars. These never flew, but would have been able to send many hundreds of tons into LEO in a single flight.

Nova - studied from 1959 to 1962. Finally cancelled 1964. Figures show payload to LEO in metric tons. Image © Mark Wade
Later on they explored ideas for modifying the Saturn V for a Mars mission. The Saturn V-4X(U), designed but never built, could have sent 527.6 tons to a 486 km orbit at 28 degrees. That would be much more than enough to get the entire mass of a Soyuz 2 fully loaded with fuel + payload to LEO in a single launch.
So, that would be the situation, for someone living on a planet with Earth gravity and no atmosphere, or very little atmosphere. They could send robotic spacecraft into orbit early on. Returning their citizens safely from orbit would be tough, but not impossible, if they build something like the Saturn V or even more so, the Saturn V-4X(U). However it’s no wonder that we use our atmosphere to slow down our spaceships for re-entry.
One thing that could change all this, is if you don’t have to carry the fuel on board the spaceship. If it is beamed to the spaceship from elsewhere, say from Earth, then you don’t need to use fuel to carry more fuel, and then it becomes much more feasible to land by hovering in the atmosphere. Your spacecraft also becomes much less bulky because it doesn’t have to contain all the fuel.
FLYING TO ORBIT AND BACK ON A BEAM OF LIGHT
This is a neat idea, but so far has only been tried in small scale demos, raising models a hundred feet or so on laser beams
Who knows, it might become the standard way to get into space some time in the future, but it is a long way from achieving that potential right now. A related idea is a mixed system with laser or microwave supplying energy, to heat up propellant on the rocket itself, which requires much less fuel, as you don’t need to “burn” the propellant to supply energy to fire the rest of the propellant out of the rocket exha ust. See Laser Propulsion Could Beam Rockets into Space, and Jordin Kare's talks to the Space Show.
If you can send a spacecraft into orbit that way you can also return it from orbit the same way if you want to. However we don’t have any spacecraft yet that can do this.
USING THE UPPER ATMOSPHERE AS A BRAKE - SPACE SHUTTLE
This is the way it is done today, to use the upper atmosphere as a brake, then slowly parachute to the surface or glide down in the lower atmosphere. How easy that is to do depends on the spacecraft.
If it is a heavy one like the Space Shuttle (now retired of course) then it can only slow down deep in the upper atmosphere, where it is dense. So it gets very hot. That’s why the Space Shuttle had to have ceramic tiles able to withstand temperatures up to 3,000 °F (1,650 °C)

Space Shuttle Enterprise banking on its second approach and landing test, during early flight tests.

NASA artwork for Space Shuttle re-entry - it’s high density, so can only slow down deep in the upper atmosphere, and gets very hot during that stage of its flight
LOWER TEMPERATURE REENTRY - SKYLON
Skylon is a plane being developed by the British company Reaction Engines with funding from the UK government and ESA. It will be able to fly to orbit from a conventional runway (though reinforced to carry the extra weight of all the fuel), return back to Earth, and then take off again within a couple of days with a crew of 200 to assist.
Its design is much lower in density than the space shuttle, once it has used up its fuel to get into orbit. So it slows down in the atmosphere at higher altitudes on the way down.
What really matters is the mass per cross sectional area it presents to the atmosphere or more exactly, its ballistic coefficient. Skylon could slow down even higher in the atmosphere if it presented a large blunt face like an aeroshell, but it has to be streamlined for the other stages of its flight. However it is also able to compensate for that to some extent by steering during the early part of the flight to slow down more quickly.

Skylon (future design being developed by UK / ESA). It flies to orbit from a normal length runway, reinforced to take the weight of fuel on lift off and may fly in the 2020s. It is heavy when it takes off, but during the landing, having used up most of its fuel, it is low density and so slows down much higher in the atmosphere than the Space Shuttle
As a result, it will reach lower temperatures than the Space Shuttle on re-entry though higher than a supersonic jet at Mach 3. Here are a few figures for skin temperatures for comparison, hottest first. These are the figures for the hottest parts of the spacecraft or plane:
SKYLON’S ZEPPELIN-LIKE TRUSS CONSTRUCTION, WITH A REINFORCED GLASS CERAMIC AEROSHELL
Modern planes have “stressed skin” structures, where the skin of the plane itself takes up all, or most of the external load from the wings, tail, other stabilizing structures and heavy components such as the engine (See fuselage for details). But the Skylon uses a structure much more like a zeppelin or a small plane. It’s girder-like with a thin glass ceramic outermost shell, which is just a heat resistant covering and doesn’t take any stress at all.

Structure of the Skylon - internal truss framework made from carbon fibre reinforced plastic composite held together with Kevlar ties. It has aluminium propellant tanks suspended inside it. Covering that, it has a thin outer aeroshell of a high temperature silicon carbide fibre reinforced glass ceramic material. For details see page 2 of this report
This ceramic outer skin is black, which is why Skylon is shown that colour in most of the artist renderings. This is an animation to show the concept for a mission to orbit, and back, by Reaction Engines who developed the idea. Re-entry starts about seven minutes into the video
VERY LOW TEMPERATURE RE-ENTRY - ORBITAL AIRSHIPS
This approach of reducing the density of the spacecraft to lower its re-entry temperature is taken much further with the plans of JP Aerospace.
Their kilometer scale orbital airship is filled mainly with hydrogen. It’s not only lower density than a plane, and the Skylon; it’s also much lower density even than a normal airship. It only operates above 140,000 feet and is balanced for the upper atmosphere. It also has a huge cross section which it presents to the atmosphere.
This spaceship design consists of a near vacuum of hydrogen floating in a near vacuum of normal air. If they succeed in building it, then it will be able to slow down just through friction in the very tenuous upper atmosphere. By the time it gets to levels dense enough to heat the skin significantly it’s already slowed down hugely, so the temperature of the skin during re-entry is much less of a problem.

JP Aerospace orbital airship - kilometer scale, very very low density - this has the least temperature of all during re-entry, If it works out, the cost per kilogram to get cargo and passengers to orbit would be far less even than the space elevator ($500 per kilogram to GEO for the space elevator, and JP Aerospace’s estimate for orbital airships is $310 per ton to GEO, so 31 cents per kilogram), and it has much less development cost. It would be a leisurely journey as you would get there slowly over several days.
Although it may not look it, its huge V shape is designed to be aerodynamic at hypersonic speeds in the near vacuum upper atmosphere. They have done modeling, calculations and wind tunnel tests with scale models to test this.
So on the way up it gradually accelerates to supersonic speeds, then to hypersonic speeds (by which time it is already in a near vacuum). It has solar panels over its vast upper surface to generate power, and uses these to power ion thrusters. These let you accelerate with a very high exhaust velocity, and so, with a small total amount of fuel, so long as you have plenty of power. It would have no shortage of power with such a large area of solar panels.
ORBITAL AIRSHIP CONSTRUCTION
It has no internal girders. Its outer shell covers an interior of many large bags of hydrogen to give it rigidity and to stop the gas bunching up at its nose. It also has inflatable trusses, with nitrogen filling the gaps in between these components. The nitrogen is vented if necessary and then replaced from liquid nitrogen tanks.
It is balanced to float at 200,000 feet altitude in the atmosphere. But since it is aerodynamic, it also behaves like a glider on the way down. It doesn't look much like a glider to our eyes perhaps, but that big voluminous V shape makes a great glider in the very tenuous upper atmosphere during re-entry.
So what keeps it up is partly aerodynamic lift and partly buoyancy. To start with it’s mainly aerodynamic, as it slows down on its long glide through the upper atmosphere. The aerodynamic effects keep it higher in the atmosphere for longer, and so keep it cooler on the way down. As it slows down to a halt in the atmosphere, it’s finally kept up by buoyancy.
Many details of the design are given in their Floating to Space: The Airship to Orbit Program. They don’t actually give expected skin temperatures. But the design uses nylon rip-stop polyethylene (page 111) which suggests that they expect external skin temperatures well below 100 °C (212 °F) for continuous use.
(Most commercial grade Polyethylene starts to soften at 60 °C (140 °F) and has a maximum continuous use temperature of 65 °C (149 °F), High Temperature Polyethylene can retain its properties up to 100 °C (212 °F) )
On page 109 they say
"By losing velocity before it reaches the lower thicker atmosphere, the reentry temperatures are radically lower.... This makes reentry as safe as the climb to orbit"
It’s an interesting company - in Sacramento, California, JP Aerospace, America's OTHER Space Program. Their idea is that they don’t do any big expensive “succeed or go bankrupt” type tests like SpaceX did in their early years. Instead every stage along the way pays for itself. At present they pay for the tests through pongsats and other ways to lift material to the edge of space. Their tests involve high altitude balloons, and V shaped airships rated for the lower atmosphere. They have also tested a high altitude balloon based airship design.

JP Aerospace hold the altitude record for an airship, propeller driven, remotely controlled from the ground, and flying at a height of 95,000 feet above sea level.
Later on they plan a “dark sky” station at the edge of space which will be of a lot of interest for itself both scientifically and for tourists. It gets the name because at that height the sky will be dark even in daytime, as for the Moon. Next, they plan small airships doing test hypersonic glides back to Earth. Finally they do test flights to orbit with smaller airships, then the first human pilots to orbit, and then huge orbital airships with passengers and cargo.
The idea started off as a US Airforce contract for a near space reconnaissance airship. But the US canceled the contract in 2004 or 2005 after first persuading them to attempt to launch one of their prototypes for a lower atmosphere airship in a 50 mph wind (which would count as a “strong gale”). It was only rated as sturdy enough for launch in a 2 mph wind at the time (an airship is particularly vulnerable in the short time it takes to launch it from the ground). They did this with some reluctance - and it blew apart in the strong winds, causing some minor injuries. The inventor himself sustained three broken ribs. That was enough for the US Airforce to cancel the contract.
JP Aerospace have now solved the problem and can launch their lower atmosphere V shaped airships in any wind conditions. You can read their account of this story here. It’s now a civilian company entirely self financed, and they are not interested in any more such contracts, naturally enough.
It’s probably going to take them a fair while, with this approach, maybe decades but it’s interesting: “watch this spot”.
You might wonder what happens if the airship is hit by a meteorite or orbital debris. From page 112 of the book:
"One of the most common questions asked about ATO is about meteorites. "What happens if a meteor popped the airship?" The answer is very little would happen. A balloon pops because the inside is at a higher pressure than the air on the outside. The inner cells of the airship are "zero pressure balloons". ... There is no difference in pressure to create a bursting force. All a meteorite would do is to make a hole. The gas would leak out staggeringly slowly... "
To find out more about this see their book Floating to Space: The Airship to Orbit Program
The JP Aerospace orbital airships are so lightweight they could never survive at ground level. The slightest wind would tear them apart. So in their plan, they have conventional airships that take passengers up to a docking station in the upper atmosphere, the “Dark Sky Station”, where they then transfer to the orbital airships.
VAMP ORBITAL AIRSHIP RE-ENTRY - FOR VENUS AND TITAN, ALSO EARTH
If you want to fly all the way down to ground level on Earth in one go, then you need a more massive airship. Northrop group’s “VAMP” project to study the Venus atmosphere uses an airship design like JP Aerospace, and they would inflate it outside of the atmosphere, so again that’s very like the JP Aerospace idea. It enters the Venus atmosphere already inflated, and because it is so large (55 meters in diameter) and low density, it doesn’t need an aeroshell.
However, unlike the JP Aerospace design, it’s able to fly in an Earth pressure atmosphere, so it’s not nearly as low density as an orbital airship. It still gets quite hot during the descent.
It inflates before it enters the atmosphere (see patent for details), and rather similarly to the JP Aerospace idea it decelerates slowly in the upper atmosphere, so generating much less heat, because of its low ballistic coefficient. So it doesn’t need an aeroshell, though because its designed to operate right down to the equivalent of ground level on Earth, its denser and its outer envelope is reinforced to withstand up to 1,200 °C (2,192 °F) along leading edges
They hope it can be used for Venus, and also Titan, and possibly Mars.
It would only descend as far as the Venus upper atmosphere, at the cloud tops, where temperatures and pressures are the same as for Earth. The cloud tops also have natural protection from cosmic radiation, and nearly all the ingredients for life. Indeed there are suggestions that it could be a good place for humans to settle outside of Earth. See my Will We Build Colonies That Float Over Venus Like Buckminster Fuller's "Cloud Nine?". Some astrobiologists think there may be life in the upper Venus atmosphere, already, which could have migrated there long ago when Venus was more habitable. The Russians are interested to search for this life, and may include an unmanned aerial vehicle, possibly VAMP in their Venera D mission to Venus in the mid 2020s.
The first tests of VAMP would use the Earth’s atmosphere. So it could also be used for Earth re-entry. It might be useful for surveillance, photographing the Earth from above, and also for scientific studies of the upper atmosphere.
So, let’s now look at the way re-entry is done at present, using aeroshells. Can this be improved on?
AEROSHELL - HIGH TEMPERATURES
The normal way to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at present is to use an aeroshell. This absorbs most of the heat, all the way through the early stages of re-entry, until the spacecraft is traveling slowly enough to drop the aeroshell and deploy parachutes. The spacecraft hits the atmosphere at many kilometers per second, so there is a lot of heat to dissipate. The main methods they use to keep the temperatures within reasonable bounds are:
So external temperatures depend on how effective these systems are, but they still reach 2,000 °C upwards (well over 3,500 °F). They reached rather higher temperatures for the Apollo return from the Moon, as their re-entry was at a higher velocity.

Artist’s rendering for Apollo command module re-entry. Temperatures reached 5,000 °F on the outside of the capsule, or around 2,760 °C. How the Apollo Spacecraft Worked (and old Apollo Flight Tests fact sheet )
Re-entry speeds are
Some materials can withstand even higher temperatures easily, for instance Hafnium diboride melts at 3,250 °C (5,882 °F). It is useful, as it is also good at conducting heat and electricity. It’s a grey metallic looking material, currently used for ICBM re-entry shields and leading edges. For more about it see Hafnium DiBoride (HfB₂). Titanium and zirconium diboride have similar properties.
WHY IS RE-ENTRY SO MUCH FASTER FROM A HIGHER ORBIT SUCH AS THE MOON?
You might wonder why the astronauts returned from the Moon at such a high speed. After all, it orbits the Earth at a speed of only 1.02 km / sec relative to Earth.
The reason is that if you start higher in the Earth’s gravitational well, and drop down to LEO, you accelerate all the way, and actually end up faster than if you started off in LEO originally. If you come back in a transfer from the Moon you hit the atmosphere at 11.1 km / second. There’s an online transfer orbit calculator here. Starting from a higher orbit just makes things worse for you.
The one thing you can do to help with re-entry speed is to orbit the Earth in the same direction that it spins. The Earth’s surface (and so its atmosphere too) moves at 460 meters per second towards the East, or about 1,000 miles per hour) because of its rotation (it’s spinning towards the rising sun).
So if your satellite is orbiting in the same direction as the Earth in an equatorial orbit, West to East, it has 0.92 km / sec less delta v relative to the atmosphere than if it orbits in the opposite direction. This makes re-entry just a little easier.
An orbit in this direction also makes the launch easier. You need around 0.92 km / sec less delta v to get into orbit if you launch from West to East. That’s quite a huge saving in fuel, which is why all the US launches are from Florida, launching over the Atlantic, and why all the Soyuz launches from Russia are from West to East too

Shows the direction of the launches of Soyuz from West to East
This is why it was such a major gaff for the Gravity film when it showed all the orbital debris orbiting Earth from East to West, as Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted.
BALLUTE - INFLATABLE AEROSHELL
But you can achieve a much gentler re-entry using a ballute - a cross between a balloon and a parachute. It works like an aeroshell but decelerates much higher in the atmosphere

In the first ever re-entry test of a ballute by ESA for instance, the maximum re-entry temperature on its skin was 200 °C (392 °F).


Graph from this paper. Measured temperature reached a maximum of 200 °C (392 °F).
BALLOON RETURN FROM ORBIT
Then there’s an idea from 1966 to return a human being from orbit, in an emergency, using a balloon to dissipate most of the heat, though the seat for the astronaut helps as an additional aeroshell. It combines some of the approaches of the previous ideas. It’s never actually been tested in space.

The space engineers in the early 1960s explored many other such ideas detailed here: Rescue. Some seem rather hair-raising including the Paracone - the astronaut just sits in a seat, with their back towards the Earth, and aims towards the centre of a large continent, as its margin of error is 600 kilometers. When it re-enters, then a large inflatable aeroshell deploys with a crushable cone. There is no parachute - it relies on the aeroshell crushing during landing to protect the astronaut.

Paracone. The astronaut has an inflatable aeroshell stowed away in the seat. During re-entry this deploys. They have no parachute - the aeroshell just falls through the atmosphere at its terminal velocity of 42 km / hour (26 miles per hour) and its nose crumples when it hits the ground. It’s a bit like a deliberate slow car crash into a brick wall with a shock absorbing crumple zone.
Another similarly hair-raising idea is MOOSE (Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment). It’s a polyester (PET) film bag, with a flexible quarter inch thick ablative heat shield on the back, which you climb inside, and then fill with polyurethane foam. Unlike the Paracone, you do have a parachute as well, for the landing. Here is how it works:

PARAGLIDING FROM ORBIT
This is another idea originally developed for Gemini in the early 1960s. For a while, before they settled on the familiar parachutes, the engineers thought that after the fiery stage of re-entry, the capsules would glide down to Earth beneath a parasail or paraglider. Those tests were quite promising, though they ran into many issues, for instance getting the glider to unfold. Eventually this line of research ended in 1964, when they changed to the parachutes as used by Apollo. The Russians also used parachutes for the Soyuz flights. For details of the paraglider research, see: Coming Home
Anyway at around the same time, in 1960, the engineers came up with the idea of using the same paraglider approach to go all the way from orbit, right down to the surface, without an aeroshell. This was the idea of the inflatable paraglider (Rogallo wing), called “FIRST” (Fabrication of Inflatable Re-entry Structures for Test), another idea for a space self-rescue system for astronauts.

It could be folded up into a small cylindrical package which would be kept docked to a space station, much as our modern Soyuz TMA is. In an emergency, the crew enter this cylinder, and separate. The paraglider then inflates and deploys. It would re-enter at an angle of 1 degree, with the paraglider angle of attack of 70 degrees. They found that deceleration would not exceed two g’s, and that there would be minimal heating because of the way it glides down to the surface. It would approach the speed of sound at 43 km altitude, and from there it would be able to glide 345 km horizontally before eventually landing. Details here: FIRST Re-Entry Glider
CHANGING SHAPE FOR RE-ENTRY
The Spaceship-One uses a different idea for re-entry. It changes its wings to the “feather” position which also tilts the spacecraft so that it presents as much surface area as possible to its direction of flight, so slowing it down. This is only for a sub-orbital hop at present. The first demonstration of the feather system was in 2011.
The Virgin Galactica crash in 2014 was a result of the pilot accidentally unlocking the feathering system too soon. It then deployed by itself and changed the shape of the rocket far too early, when it still needed to be streamlined.
RETURNING THE FINAL STAGE OF A CONVENTIONAL ROCKET
What about returning a final stage? That also is low mass and it presents a large cross section if you fly it backwards, rocket motors first, with supersonic retropropulsion. So you’d think it might be reasonably easy to do.
First, some background. Every time a spaceship goes into orbit, it needs a final stage, a thin container full of fuel which is burnt right at the end, to get it to orbital velocity. It has to do that, because the spaceship itself is far too small to have enough fuel to get to orbit by itself, even with the help of the first (and sometimes second) stage.
It then discards the final stage, which normally orbits Earth a few times and finally falls back to Earth (apart from interplanetary missions and missions to the Moon, which often use a more powerful final stage, for instance nearly every mission to Mars also sends a final stage in the general direction of Mars too).
So, could a final stage be returned to Earth in the same way that SpaceX have returned the Falcon first stage? Well, when SpaceX returns the first stage of the Falcon 9, it slows down partly through friction in the upper atmosphere. The landing legs alone reduce its terminal velocity by a factor of two. It also has a burn in orbit and another burn just before it reaches the barge. You can see the first stage at the beginning and end of this movie (most of it is for the second stage). That may seem rather similar, but it only has to shed one kilometer per second of delta v, and much of that is done with the two burns.
Elon Musk has said he plans to re-use the final stage in the future, though it’s probably not going to work for the current Falcon 9. Here he answers the question: “Any plans for a reusable second stage?”
“The next generation vehicles after the Falcon architecture will be designed for full reusability.”
“I don't expect the Falcon 9 to have a reusable upper stage, just because with a kerosene-based system, the specific impulse isn't really high enough to do that, and a lot of the missions we do for commercial satellite deployment are geostationary missions. So, we're really going very far out. These are high delta-velocity missions, so to try to get something back from that is really difficult. But, with the next generation of vehicles, which is going to be a sub cooled methane oxygen system where the propellants are cooled closed to their freezing temperature to reduce their density, we could definitely do full reusability”
BASIC IDEA - LIGHTER FOR LOWER RE-ENTRY TEMPERATURES
The basic idea of all these designs is that the lighter it is, or the greater the cross sectional area it presents to the atmosphere, then the higher it is when it slows down, and so the lower the temperature of its skin during re-entry. What matters is the mass per cross sectional area - or more precisely, the ballistic coefficient (which is complex to calculate).
If the spaceship can use a glide to stay high in the atmosphere, this also helps. It also helps if it can use retropropulsion to reduce its velocity before it enters the atmosphere, and as it descends. Then, if it can radiate or absorb heat or ablate, for instance with an aeroshell, or use active cooling (perhaps in the future), this also helps.
Another way around it is to use a space elevator. Though we can’t build a space elevator quite yet, there are other things we could do right away that are rather similar. But first let’s look a bit closer at why we can’t build a space elevator quite yet.
SKYHOOKS
You can also use a skyhook. It’s very like the space elevator, but you construct it downwards from a rather lower orbit than geostationary orbit. The bottom end can’t be attached to anything so it just dangles in our atmosphere, traveling around, much faster than our Earth rotates. That’s why it is called a skyhook. You could then just fly up to the bottom end of the skyhook, and if you fly fast enough you could keep pace with it in our atmosphere, and attach yourself to it. Then once you’ve done that, you can travel up the cable much as you do for the space elevator, until you are in orbit.
USING SKYHOOKS IF YOU HAVE A HANDY MOON
It’s easiest to construct a skyhook, if you have a handy moon or asteroid to attach it to. It’s a bit like the idea of the lunar elevator but constructed on a much smaller moon. If we had an extra moon close to Earth it might be very useful. We don’t have one, but Mars does, two of them. Here is an early concept study to use two skyhooks for Mars from a 1985 paper (described on page 70 of the Tethers in Space handbook):

The idea is - if you build a 6,100 km long skyhook type tether outwards from Deimos then it can throw objects out with escape velocity and also catch incoming spacecraft from elsewhere in the solar system to a gentle rendezvous that only needs docking thrusters, like docking with the ISS.
Then if you build a 2,960 km long skyhook tether inwards from Deimos and a 940 km tether outwards from Phobos, then it turns out that if you drop a spaceship off the Deimos tether, then it is traveling at just the right velocity to send you in a transfer orbit to the Phobos tether. Your transfer vehicle ends up stationary next to the Phobos tether when it gets there, with plenty of time to dock, much as spacecraft do with the ISS. Then you can just go down that tether to Phobos. All this requires no acceleration and no rocket fuel, apart from maneuvering thrusters for the docking itself. It works just as well in the opposite direction, drop your spaceship off the Phobos tether and the tether’s extra velocity will boost it to the Deimos one where it will come to rest with plenty of time to dock there.
Once you are on Phobos, a 1,160 km tether extended downwards towards Mars can be used to drop materials down to an elliptical orbit which reaches down to Low Mars Orbit at a height of 375 km when closest to Mars. Hop David found that slightly longer 1400 kilometer long tether could put it into an atmosphere grazing orbit so that you can use the Mars atmosphere for aerobraking to circularize its orbit.
The total mass for all these tethers if made from Kevlar is not that great considering what it does. You need between 5,000 and 90,000 tons if designed to handle a payload of 20,000 tons.
You could also bypass Deimos and just have a single tether from Phobos upwards to reach escape velocity right away.
The mass of Deimos and Phobos is so great that you could run this system for decades with no noticeable effects on their orbits. They act as a “momentum bank” so you wouldn’t need to be careful about always balancing movement of materials outwards with movement inwards, or using other methods to keep reboosting the tether.
Hop David has explored Phobos tethers in a lot more detail. He finds that a much shorter 7 km tether extending from Phobos towards Mars would let spacecraft dock with its L1 position where the gravity of Phobos is balanced with the gravity of Mars. It’s a tiny amount of gravity, only a ninetieth of Earth’s (0.11 m/sec²), but that way you could land without throwing up a cloud of dust, and also perhaps, without contaminating the surface of Phobos with rocket exhausts, which might well be useful.
Then, a very long 1,400 km tether grazing the Mars atmosphere would mean you only need 570 meters per second delta v to land on Mars. See Lower Phobos Tether and his General template for space elevators.
ROTOVATORS - SPINNING “SKYHOOKS”
We don't have any handy moons like that for Earth, but it turns out that there’s a better way to do it here. Instead of a simple skyhook, you use a “spinning skyhook” or rotovator, often called a “momentum exchange tether”. This spins in such a way that the end closest to the Earth moves backwards relative to its orbit around Earth. - this animation shows the idea:

Cycloid - zortig (wikipedia)
The line there represents half of a tether. A space tether should actually span the full diameter of the circle, but it’s the same idea.
As the tether orbits Earth, it spins, and if you arrange the rotation rate carefully you can arrange it so that the tip closest to Earth moves backwards at just the right speed to be completely stationary above Earth, just for a short while in each spin. You can never manage a stationary tip like that with a a skyhook.
That could be used to take a spacecraft traveling at faster than orbital velocity, (perhaps in a transfer orbit from the Moon or GEO), and slow it down so it is stationary, and momentarily hovering above the Earth’s atmosphere. Once you’ve done that then you can let it go gently, from the tip of the tether, and it falls down vertically, with a parachute perhaps. In the other direction, you could use the same approach to lift a payload, for instance, attached to a balloon, and attach it to the bottom of the space tether when stationary relative to Earth, and the tether would boost it into orbit, or send it to the Moon or in a transfer orbit to GEO all in one go.
SHORTER TETHER THAN A SPACE ELEVATOR
A momentum exchange tether doesn’t have to be as long as the space elevator to do this. You could have a shorter tether which spins more rapidly, in an orbit closer to Earth. That makes it a less massive construction.
It also means you get into orbit quickly. With the space elevator, it could take quite a while to get there. At 200 mph it would take seven and a half days to go up all the way to GEO, and at 2,000 mph it would take nearly 18 hours.
The space elevator can be thought of as a rotovator that rotates once a day and so can have one end fixed permanently to Earth.
This video shows the idea of launching a rocket vertically to meet the bottom end of a rotovator that is rotating at just the right speed to be stationary relative to Earth’s atmosphere. That’s a far easier thing to do than to launch a rocket to orbit.
However we don’t have the materials to do that yet either. Though the tether is shorter, it also has to spin more rapidly. You still need very strong materials, nearly as strong as for the space elevator.
The general pattern is that you need the strongest materials for very short tethers. You also need very strong materials for a tether all the way to GEO. In between, you find a sweet spot where the tethers don’t need to be quite so strong, but still they aren’t far off the strength you need for a space elevator.
If some day we do have space elevator materials, then these tethers would give a great way of achieving a similar effect for much less total mass, and also, because the tether is shorter, it’s a way of getting into orbit more quickly than for the space elevator. But until we have those materials, we need to use a “watered down version” which is not able to hover stationary over the Earth’s surface. However, it would still be enough to make a difference. Normally, you need to travel at about Mach 20-25 to go into low Earth orbit (depending on how high the orbit is). The launch assist tether reduces that to Mach 12 or less.

From: Hypersonic Airplane Space Tether Orbital Launch (HASTOL) System.
This video explains it well:
For more details, see Launch Assist Tethers. You could use the same process in reverse to de-orbit a spacecraft to Mach 12 in the upper atmosphere, and then it glides down from there.
So this would give you a way to slow down your orbiting spacecraft to Mach 12 instead of Mach 20 upwards, which would be quite a plus.
That’s still very fast. It’s four times the speed of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird supersonic spy plane, or Virgin Galactica’s SpaceShipOne (Mach 3.09), and more than twice the speed of the ESA’s projected Mach 5 aircraft:

So you still need something that is much more like a space plane than a normal hypersonic aircraft. But the big advantage is that a Mach 12 or lower space plane is much easier to make re-usable than a Mach 20 - 25 one.
They have other ideas in the paper such as a “two stage tether” where you have a smaller tether spinning around the tip of a larger tether. This reduces the total tether mass, rather like the idea of a two stage rocket launch, for a given tether tip velocity.
Two stage tether idea from their paper. A shorter tether spinning around the tip of the longer tether leading to a greater tip velocity - so slower speed in the upper atmosphere - for less total mass. It’s got some parallels with the two stage rocket propulsion ideas.
REBOOSTING THE TETHER AFTER THE GRAVITATIONAL ASSIST, USING SOLAR POWER, OR BY DROPPING MATERIALS INTO EARTH’S GRAVITATIONAL WELL
The tether loses speed, dropping into a lower orbit to compensate, every time it lifts a spaceplane out of the atmosphere. But it can get back into position in between those gravity assists, by using solar power to send electric current along the tether. This uses the Earth's magnetic field for a motor to accelerate back into orbit.
Or, rather elegantly, it can also do it by de-orbiting a similar payload. For instance, it could de-orbit a spacecraft returning to Earth, or materials exported to Earth from the Moon or asteroids. This was all fully worked out in the plans for the Hypersonic Airplane Space Tether Orbital Launch (HASTOL) System.
ORBITAL RINGS
This is a fun idea. It doesn’t get as much attention in science fiction as the space elevator for some reason. Unlike a space elevator, you can build it already with present day materials, not just on the Moon, or in free space, but as a way to get into orbit from Earth as well. But it is likely to be very expensive to build it in the first place, unless you have a low cost way to get materials to orbit already.
The first orbital ring is very very expensive. But once you’ve built it, you can then send up more materials to expand it easily for a very low cost.
As with the space elevator you just go up to the platform above the upper atmosphere in an elevator. Then in the opposite direction, once you have an orbital ring you can just travel down to the surface in an elevator.
It’s rather similar to the sky towers idea. You are stationary above the Earth, and experiencing nearly full g as you are not in free fall - so you still need some way to get to and from orbit from the ring, but you could use maglev to accelerate along the ring to get to orbital speed.
To build this structure, what you need is a wire that circles the Earth, at orbital heights and moving around the Earth at orbital velocity. It would be very thin to start with; this doesn’t matter. It stays in orbit just through its own velocity, like an orbiting satellite. Run a current through it and then you can have objects levitating on it much like a maglev train. But in the case of a maglev train, the track stays still and the train travels around it at up to hundreds of miles an hour. Here the track travels around the world at its orbital velocity of 7.8 km / sec (if you build it in LEO), and your levitated platform travels along the track in the opposite direction nearly as fast relative to the track, racing in order to stay still as it were.
At 16,500 mph relative to the track, it’s traveling more than twenty seven times faster than the fastest maglev train (603 km/h) and also many times faster than a hypervelocity bullet. But there are no earthquakes, no weather, and its in the hard vacuum of space. If you do that, your platform will be stationary relative to the ground.
So now you can lower a cable down from your magnetically levitated platform to the ground. If you do that just anywhere then there is no way the orbital ring will support it, but you can arrange to have a kink like this in your ring to support it from:

Now the orbital ring consists of two elliptical segments (the diagram is hugely exaggerated in scale; they would both be close to circular) and then the kink gives an upward force that let’s suspend your skyhook, or “Jacob’s ladder” as Paul Birch called it when he proposed the idea in a series of three articles for the British Interplanetary Society.
As soon as you have the first one built, however small, you can then bring up materials along the cable and use it to make your orbital ring more massive, or build new ones. You can build an orbital ring like this at any height. You can also build it at any angle too. It doesn’t have to orbit above the equator, so you can build it along a slanting orbit like the one the ISS follows. You can arrange the balance of forces on the whole system, including the weight of the skyhooks, so that it slowly precesses, and if you do that carefully you can get it to precess once every 24 hours, which keeps it stationary relative to Earth.
So in this way you can actually build elevators up into space from anywhere on the Earth to a platform hovering at the same height as LEO, but stationary relative to the Earth. You wouldn’t be at orbital velocity yet when you get there, you’d just be above the atmosphere and stationary relative to the Earth looking down. But you can then have, say, a maglev train that accelerates along a track along the orbital ring, until you reach orbital velocity.
It’s safe also. The ladders into space are stationary relative to the Earth, so would just fall down vertically into an area a few kilometers long and a few hundred meters wide if they broke. As for the orbital rings themselves, if damaged, they would actually “fall” upwards into a higher orbit. You can read the techy details here: Orbital Rings-I, II, III.
You can build orbital rings around the Moon too. And though orbital rings around Earth would be so expensive to build with rockets, perhaps a trillion dollars (in his 1980s calculation), the cost would go down a lot if you could get materials from the Moon.
It would be a huge asset once built, as the cost per kilogram to send materials into orbit would be only cents. It’s a “bootstrapping problem”. If only we had an orbital ring already, even a small one, it would be very easy and low cost to build lots of orbital rings. But how do we get started? See also the wikipedia article Orbital ring
If one of the other techniques mentioned already gives you a very low cost way to get materials to low Earth orbit (such as skylon, orbital airship, or launch loop) or from the Moon (Hoyt’s cislunar tether transport system), then perhaps we can build an orbital ring as well, for a reasonable cost.
.Check out my book for more surprising astronomy answers like this: Simple Questions - Surprising Answers - In Astronomy,
It is a compilation of some of my quora answers . I’ve just added this answer as the last one in the book.
This is a shortened version of Robert Walker's answer to Why is it so difficult to penetrate our atmosphere with a returning spacecraft? In other words, why can’t the vehicle slowly enter our atmosphere?
Summary: This does not mean that the world is about to blow up into dust within two and a half minutes. It’s like when a friend says “I could eat a horse”. They couldn’t eat a horse. They also don’t want to eat a horse. But they aren’t lying when they say that. They are just using vivid imagery.

Camargue horse - photo by Wolfgang Staudt.
Here is an example story: Doomsday Clock expected to move closer to midnight as threat of global annihilation grows
I have been asked about this story and others like them by several different people who are scared because they take it literally. For young children and those who are not used to the way language is used in these announcements, it sounds as if they are saying that the world will blow up into dust within two minutes. Some are getting very scared that this will happen suddenly and soon.
But this not what it means. That “two and a half minutes” is nothing to do with time at all in these announcements. They could as easily say “two miles” or “two thousand miles”. Then the announcement would be “Doomsday is becoming one mile closer”. Or “Doomsday is becoming a thousand miles closer”. The word “minute” there is essentially meaningless. It’s no wonder that scared people find it confusing.
It is vivid imagery for effect. This is called “hyperbole”,
The clock often stays at the same time for years on end. They move it backwards if things improve and forward if things get worse. This shows its position up to 2016
You can read about the timeline here.
They are saying that there is a significant risk of serious consequences. Such as for instance, flooding, drought, starvation, cities getting bomb damage from nuclear weapons and many killed if we have an all out nuclear war etc. And the reason for saying that is to get politicians to act to prevent it happening.
And by convention, they use a small number of minutes in the announcements if they think there is a higher risk of these things happening. They use a larger number of minutes if they think the risk is lower. That’s all. It is a very unusual form of hyperbole. We don’t often use time like that in our daily life, so it’s no wonder that people find it confusing.
So, yes there are things to worry about. The things I listed, flooding, drought, bad harvests, cities with bomb damage and lots of people killed if we have a nuclear war and so on. But they aren't saying those things are about to happen right now either. They are not saying that we will have a global nuclear war within two minutes. Also they are not saying that we will have flooding of coastal cities within two minutes.
They are things that could happen and we need to watch out for. Many of them will happen several decades from now if they do happen. If we act on their warning, then these things won’t happen. The reason for making this announcement is to stop them from happening.
Just remember, in all theses announcements, all the way through, it’s like when your friend says they could eat a horse. Just about everything they say in these announcements is hyperbole. .
Let’s count all the examples of hyperbole in this one article
See also my: Why we don’t need to be scared of the “Doomsday clock” (short version)
It’s name is rather unfortunate for those who get easily scared by such things. It’s not a clock, and it’s not about Doomsday. So why do they call it a “Doomsday clock”?
Well it’s for much the same reason you might say “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse”. It doesn’t mean that you could literally eat an entire horse.

Camargue horse - photo by Wolfgang Staudt.
So what is it really about? It’s about things that could have large scale effects. For instance a global nuclear war or climate change. Neither of these things could make us extinct. Any more than you could literally eat a horse.
The clock is a graphic like this:

The idea of the clock is to help politicians to make decisions to make the world a safer place.
It’s just a number made up by a group of scientists. They set it to a given number of “minutes before midnight”. Again it doesn’t mean that we have only minutes left to do something about it. It is just a made up vivid picture that’s all. Those “minutes” don’t correspond to any real thing at all.
The clock often stays at the same time for years on end. They move it backwards if things improve and forward if things get worse. This shows its position up to 2016
You can read about the timeline here.
For instance one of the reasons they set it so low last time, three minutes, was because of climate change. The worst effects would be decades into the future. Not minutes.
And we can do something about it. The whole point in the doomsday clock is to get politicians to do something about it.
If you watch one of the Doomsday Clock announcements, you may find it rather scary. That’s because the scientists use the same vivid exaggerations throughout.
For instance in the previous announcement, one the scientists said that a Russian attack could turn the US states into nuclear ash. That’s not true. It couldn’t do that. We don’t have anything that could do that. He meant it in much the same way that you mean it when you say “I could eat a horse”.
This sort of language is called “hyperbole”. Deliberate exaggeration for emotional effect. The listener is not expected to take it literally.
The scientists do this a lot in these announcements. That’s because they want to stress the importance of doing something to the people who are listening. Especially to politicians. When we are passionate about something, we often use hyperbole.
It’s not lying because they don’t expect the listener to take them literally. But they are perhaps more used to talking to other scientists. Perhaps they don’t stop to think that there might be young children watching, and others, who might take their statements on face value.
If you take what they say in that way, that is like going home alarmed and telling everyone that your friend plans to eat a horse. So it’s something to watch out for if you listen to the announcements.
This is a short summary of my Debunked: “Doomsday” clock, Brexit “Doomsday” and use of “Doomsday” as hyperbole - which I’ve written using especially with somewhat younger readers in mind, similarly to the “Simple Wikipedia”. I used shorter sentences. I also worked on the vocabulary level, using simpler words where possible, if there is an alternative. The idea is that it should be suitable for reading levels of 14 upwards.
I sometimes get contacted by 14 year olds who are scared of these stories. Other times I am contacted by their adult relatives who want something written to show to them to reassure them.
If you find this helpful let me know. I can do more short versions of my answers in this way.
Summary:
Yes Russia did “leak” plans for a huge “dirty bomb” to make the entire East coast of US uninhabitable for several decades. But this is an insane idea, and commentators say that it is probably a staged leak designed to intimidate the US. The designs that were “leaked” show a super fast torpedo able to travel under the sea at 230 mph, virtually undetectable, and that does exist, they have known about that since 1995. However they don’t believe that the dirty bomb exists.
The idea of a cobalt bomb goes back to the peace activist Leo Szilard, as a thought experiment. Nobody has built one though there have been nuclear tests that produced small amounts of cobalt 60, for instance as a tracer (add a small amount of cobalt and you can trace the debris by searching for cobalt 60 or there might be cobalt in the bomb anyway as part of the steel casing).
IN DETAIL
First the background to this is that it might be possible to create a nuclear bomb such that if you let of thousands of them, and bombed the entire world, it would make most of Earth uninhabitable except inside protected areas like enclosed air tight domes and nuclear bunkers. It’s a thought experiment by Leo Szilard - Wikipedia The idea is to design a weapon that will fill all of the Earth’s biosphere with dangerously radioactive Cobalt 60. You can do this by adding lots of ordinary cobalt, easy to obtain, which would turn into Cobalt 60 in the explosion.
It would be an insane thing for a superpower to develop. We don’t have cobalt bombs. There have been a couple of nuclear tests that produced small amounts of cobalt 60 in the debris. But they were not designed as cobalt weapons.
There was a “news leak” in November 2015 saying that Russia is building a giant cobalt bomb, twice the size of any nuclear bomb ever tested, which would be designed to cause a radioactive tsunami that would wash 1,500 km inland over the East coast of the US, and make the region uninhabitable for some decades. Technically such a bomb could perhaps be built. But it’s an insane idea. Commentators have suggested it was a deliberate leak designed to intimidate the US and that the equipment shown was actually a torpedo designed to deliver deep sea equipment and surveillance equipment. It’s hard to credit they seriously intend to do this.
IN MORE DETAIL
It is possible to design a nuclear weapon to make the Earth uninhabitable. Theoretically if you could dust the entire Earth with cobalt 60 using enough cobalt bombs you could make it uninhabitable to humans - except of course in protected areas - for instance inside domes covering areas that have been cleared of the cobalt 60. The idea originated with Leo Szilard - not intended as a serious proposal for a nuclear bomb, but as a way to show theoretically that humans could in the near future have the capability to design a "Doomsday weapon".

Physicist Leo Szilard who first hypothesized the nuclear chain reaction, and patented the idea of a nuclear reactor.
He devised the theoretical idea of a "Cobalt Bomb". The bomb contains a large amount of ordinary cobalt and the neutrons from the blast turn it into dangerous cobalt 60. It's designed to produce less radiation damage in the first few hours, but more radiation damage over time periods of years and decades. Areas affected would only become habitable to humans a century after the impact. It was just a "thought experiment" to show that we could in principle build doomsday bombs. They would need only of the order of hundreds of kilograms of cobalt.
The idea is that cobalt 60 has a long enough half life so that it could spread throughout the Earth's ecosystems before it decays away enough so that it no longer kills people.
In practice it probably wouldn’t really work as described. You’d need to do lots of tests and it would probably still have a patchy distribution. Anyway we don't need to worry about cobalt bombs. There have been a couple of nuclear tests that produced a small amount of cobalt 60 in the fallout but they were not designed as cobalt weapons. In one case the cobalt came from pellets used as tracers, and in the other case from the steel casing. For more on this see the wikipedia entry on Cobalt Bomb which has lots of cites to follow up.
This is perhaps the closest we have to a doomsday scenario but no such bombs exist. After all it's not to anyone's advantage to make the world uninhabitable.
I suppose if you want to fix the nuclear doomsday SF stories you could make the weapons cobalt bombs. That wouldn't work for scenarios that have Earth uninhabitable thousands of years into the future, but would work if the author only needs Earth to be uninhabitable for decades into the future.
If some people were able to survive somehow for as long as a century, underground, or in domed areas cleared of cobalt 60, or because of patchy distribution of the cobalt 60, then after that they'd be able to survive fine though with increased cancer risk for a few more decades.
That would fit many post apocalyptic science fiction stories. There is no way a WWIII could make Earth uninhabitable with normal nuclear weapons, but it could with cobalt bombs. But it ain't going to happen in our world.
IS RUSSIA MAKING ONE ANYWAY THOUGH?
However there is this news story from 2015 that Russia might be developing a cobalt bomb to be delivered from a submarine. Not a doomsday weapon, but a weapon that would be designed to cause mass civilian casualties.
It would salt the sea with radioactive cobalt 60 or some other radioactive element, and this then would bathe the port with radioactive slurry that would make it uninhabitable for some decades. A 100 megaton bomb detonated in the sea - twice the size of the largest nuclear weapon ever built, detonated off the eastern coast of the US could also generate a tsunami that would wash 1,500 kilometers inland.
Russia reveals giant nuclear torpedo in state TV 'leak' - BBC News
It was presented briefly on Soviet news as an “Accidental leak”. But this may have been actually an intentional leak designed to intimidate the US.
The supposedly “accidental” leak is at 1.45 into this video where for a short while it shows a close up of a general looking at allegedly top secret plans for a torpedo.
This is a screenshot

It shows designs for a high speed torpedo and this does seem to be real, that they have torpedoes that can travel underwater, at 230 mph and are virtually undetectable. This is the Shkval (Squall), , and it’s not new news, experts have known about it since 1995. It uses “supercavitation” to create a near vacuum at its tip to travel through water with almost no resistance as if traveling through air. VA-111 Shkval
But as for the idea that they would be used to deliver a cobalt bomb, it seems hard to credit that anyone would seriously build such a weapon.
Quoting from the BBC news site:
As they say in this news report:
“Ordinary nuclear weapons can at least be used on purely military targets. This has no conceivable purpose other than killing civilians,” says Acton. “Whether the weapon is real or not,” says Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, “the Russian government must distance itself from this.”
Is Russia building an underwater drone to deliver a dirty bomb?
A detailed study by Edward Moore Geist for the Association of Atomic Scientists Would Russia’s undersea “doomsday drone” carry a cobalt bomb? also comes to the conclusion that though such a device would create large areas of lasting contamination, they would have little control over where those areas would be. They could easily end up harming themselves. He thinks the nuclear powered drone in the slide is probably a real research project, but not designed for this purpose.
“But exploiting this principle in practice would be forbiddingly difficult because of the difficulty of predicting the ultimate distribution of the radioactive contamination, particularly for an underwater detonation like that envisioned for the “Status-6” drone seen in the Russian slide. While the underwater detonation of a massive cobalt or “conventional” nuclear weapon might create zones of long-lasting contamination, Russian decision makers would have little confidence that these areas would be in the intended locations, undermining the strategic case for such attacks. These findings suggest that the Kremlin is not pursuing radiological “doomsday bombs,” even though the nuclear-powered drone on the slide seems to be a real research project.”
NUCLEAR WINTER, NUCLEAR AUTUMN, OR NO GLOBAL CLIMATE EFFECTS?
The best models available at the time predicted nuclear winter up to the 1980s. The early 1980s models were shocking in their predictions, of a cooling by 40 to 60 C (70 - 100 F) immediately after the exchange. The idea of a large scale nuclear winter was the consensus up to around the time of the Kuwait oil fires in 1991. Then the way the smoke behaved caused the scientists to question their models of what would happen to dust and smoke in the atmosphere after a global nuclear war.

Smoke plumes from the oil fires in Kuwait set alight by the Iraqi military forces as they retreated. Scientists predicted that this would lead to a large scale cooling effect but though much of the Middle East went dark, and dropped a few degrees for a short while, apart from that, nothing happened. This lead them to revise models on how smoke and dust is propagated through the upper atmosphere and they discovered that after a nuclear war, the dust would not go high enough to cause a nuclear winter.
As Carl Sagan (one of the scientists who worked on the nuclear winter models) wrote: "it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4–6 °C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared.”
This lead to them re-evaluating the models that lead to the nuclear winter prediction, which were rather crude by modern standards, making many assumptions and approximations. Modern bombs which are much less than one megaton in size, would throw most of the debris up only as far as 60,000 to 70,000 feet which means the debris will rain to Earth within hours or days, close to the point of impact. Our nuclear arsenals are also much smaller than they were at the time of the nuclear winter calculations. Also our cities are constructed in ways that make fire storms less likely. So in short, some would say that probably even at the height of the cold war, we would not have been plunged into a nuclear winter. As it is now, certainly not. Here I’m summarizing Allen E Hall's answer to In a total nuclear exchange where the entire worlds arsenals are used, how long would the nuclear winter last and would we survive? The models still predict asteroid impact witner, because gaint asteroids can send material high into the stratosphere.
Here is the New York Times retro report on nuclear winter.
This is a paper about the suggestion mentioned towards the end of that report, that even a confrontation between Pakistan and India with 100 15 kt nuclear weapons (50 on each side) involved could have global effects.
". Our calculations show that global ozone losses of 20%–50% over populated areas, levels
unprecedented in human history, would accompany the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years. We calculate summer enhancements in UV indices of 30%–80% over midlatitudes, suggesting widespread damage to human health, agriculture, and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Killing frosts would reduce growing seasons by 10–40 days per year for 5 years. Surface temperatures would be reduced for more than 25 years due to thermal inertia and albedo effects in the ocean and expanded sea ice. The combined cooling and enhanced UV would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine."
So that is the polar opposite of those who say it would have no effect at all.. So, we have views at both ends of the spectrum here. However these predictions for a controntation between Pakistan and India come from a rather simplified model. It's a 3D model, not a 1D approximation and in that sense is detailed. But their starting point is from a point after the initial explosions. They just load the atmosphere with carbon soot over the relevant areas of India and Pakistan, and then run the model forward to see how it continues. Even in a 3D model, that's making lots of assumptions. Would the soot end up in the distribution they suggest?
The situation is complicated. Though many fires would break out in cities, some of them may burn for only a short time. Would they combine together to make a firestorm? They didn't for Nagasake which was a city built largely of wood and paper, which would not be permitted with a modern city. But then they might be ground burst weapons, so what difference does that make? What would the end result be in the atmosphere of the complex pattern of many different fires? What would the vertical distribution be? In the example of the Kuwait fires then most of the carbon was distributed in the first few kilometers and did not reach the stratosphere. Also water vapour is another complicating factor. The fires themselves produce water vapour during combustion and more is taken in from the atmosphere and lofted high where it may form clouds, which then will tend to keep the surface warmer than it would be. Also then the excess moisture rains out taking soot and dust with it. The whole thing is very complex. Here is William Cohen talking about it in his 2007 book. He is an expert who started off by supporting the nuclear winter models but doesn't any more.
So in short it's a wide ranging debate. Some think that some form of a "nuclear autumn" is possible. Others think that there would be no global climate effects at all. The idea of a true nuclear winter, turning summer into winter, is no longer on the table. There are lots of cites to follow up in the Wikipedia page on Nuclear Winter which will help. See it's Scientific Criticism and debate section.
It's still not a literal doomsday if there is a nuclear autumn. It's rather similar to the idea of a volcanic winter after a super volcano, where you'd need to grow different crops, adapted for a colder climate until the temperatures recover. I don't mean that in the sense it is easy of course, but it is possible. It is a very similar situation to the situation after a supervolcano, so I cover that in the section What really happens if Yellowstone erupts as a supervolcano, or if some other supervolcano erupts?
NULCEAR FREE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE
The entire southern hemisphere is a nuclear free zone, and without the scenario of a nuclear winter, this means it would experience almost no effects at all from a global nuclear war.

The blue areas here are nuclear free. If we did have a global nuclear war - then there would be no nuclear bombs in those areas at all and no radioactivity either. Also in the areas that are attacked, the harshest radiation is over quickly. The most lethal radiation is nearly all over within half an hour.
The idea that nuclear weapons would cause a nuclear winter has also been shown to be false.
Perhaps if nuclear weapons were thought of like that, as instant city carpet bombing weapons with serious radiation sickness side effects if you are caught in the open close to the attack, it might make it easier to get rid of the things. I think this is an example where perhaps hyperbole actually doesn't help, though it's a natural thing to do.
If you feel you must use hyperbole as a scientist, or you notice that you have just come out with a hyperbole through natural speech, well there is a solution. You can flag it. Say "nuclear weapons could turn the States to radioactive dust - not literally", add the "not literally". It may be a bit lame to do that, but if you are talking to a general audience, it's better than scaring a listener who might take you literally.
So that's a good example of a doomsday scenario that in fact is nothing like doomsday. We have vivid scenarios in popular imagination, movies and books, of a few survivors picking their way through radioactive debris. Or even, everyone dying, as in Nevil Shute's "On the Beach". We may think of them as still risking death centuries later from exploring the cities where the bombs landed. That is a staple of science fiction, but it's a movie / sci-fi trope. You can explore its use in tv / movies / science fiction on the TV tropes website, see


If you click through the links there you'll find many movie tropes that build up a kind of "movie consensus science". Audiences come to expect this as it has been built up over many previous movies they've seen, and it can even seem "wrong" if shown the way things really are. These tropes often get further and further away from reality.
Scientifically a radioactive post nuclear war doomsday is nonsense, at least for the nuclear weapons that we have. After all Hiroshima is a thriving modern city.
For more on this see my Doomsday Debunked - Nibiru Is Nuts - What About Nuclear War, Asteroid Impacts, Runaway Warming,...
The first section is all about nuclear weapons and I have used large sections from it here, just changed the order and put the cobalt bombs first plus added this story about the Russian “leak”.
Summary: yet another asteroid flyby. Not the slightest risk to Earth. Closest flyby before 2200 is 2149-Feb-02 18:59 when it passes at a distance of at least 7.9 million kilometers. That’s over 20 times the distance to the Moon. The idea that it is a “fragment of Nibiru” is just made up by whoever wrote the story, it’s fake news again.
HOW TO CHECK IF THERE IS A RISK FROM AN IMPACT BY AN ASTEROID
It is easy to check any of these asteroid impact stories. Just go to this page : Current Impact Risks which is sorted with the most significant risk first.
If the first entry is blue, white or green there is no significant asteroid impact predicted for the next 100 years. If it is yellow then there is a tiny chance of an impact but it is so low probability that they expect it to turn green or white as they find out more.
If the first entry is orange or red - just go to any reputable astronomy website as it will be headline news. Only if it goes red is there a predicted certain impact. It’s never gone orange or red to date.
The blue ones can hit Earth but are 50 meters or less. They can still have an effect as that’s larger than the size for the Chelyabinsk one but only locally and most just burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere.
In detail
The earliest version of the story I can find online is here, 4th Jan: Nibiru Fragment To Strike Earth in February, Says Russian Astronomer
Copied many times, later version here: Nibiru fragment to strike Earth in february, says russian astronomer, identical text.
I’m not sure you can even call it fake news. More of a satire or joke story as it says
“According to Dr. Zakharovich, 2016 WF9 was one of trillions of asteroids churning around Nibiru in a cosmic whirlpool. Occasionally, the asteroids collide, bumping one another likes balls on a billiard table, sometimes ejecting one another from orbit. In this case, Dr. Zakharovich said, 2016 WF9 was jettisoned directly toward Earth. Using the “slingshot effect,” it first doubled speed circling the brown dwarf star, then doubled that speed to the third power when it spun behind the dark side of the sun, propelling it toward Earth at transversel velocities.”
I think most of us know that the Sun doesn’t have a dark side :).
It’s from a blog that takes almost every news story in the News, and runs it as a story about Nibiru: Someone’s Bones
Here is another story from the blog, about the report of a failed test from the UK Trident submarine: British Sub Tries To Nuke Nibiru, Nearly Ignites War
‘“This was a clandestine operation,” Steele said. “No one was supposed to find out. They had to spin a story to conceal the truth. Prime Minister May learned that Nibiru’s relative position to the dark side of the sun had made it vulnerable to nuclear weapons. She also learned that late last year Kim Jong-un launched nukes at Nibiru, to no affect. She thought British-American technology would be better. She ordered the operation without informing parliament.” ‘
The “dark side of the sun” there suggests it may be meant as a joke. If it isn’t then Dr. Zakharovich obviously isn’t an astronomer as the term is usually understood. Nibiru enthusiasts often claim to be astronomers by which they just mean that they say speculative things about planets and stars, which they seem to think is all you need to do to be an astronomer. It doesn’t mean that they know anything about astronomy or have tried observing the real planets or know anything about how our solar system works. You can tell they aren’t astronomers as the word is usually understood from the absurd things they say.
This is the original NASA announcement it’s based on:

"2016 WF9 will approach Earth's orbit on Feb. 25, 2017. At a distance of nearly 32 million miles (51 million kilometers) from Earth, this pass will not bring it particularly close. The trajectory of 2016 WF9 is well understood, and the object is not a threat to Earth for the foreseeable future."
That’s over 132 times the distance to the Moon. It’s orbit is worked out here through to 2200. JPL Small-Body Database Browser
It never comes close to Earth. It’s closest flyby between now and 2200 is 2149-Feb-02 18:59 when it passes at a distance of at least 7.9 million kilometers.
It’s dark like a comet -comets despite their bright tail have a very dark nucleus with some dark material covering the ice. 2016 WF9 is between 0.5 and 1 kilometer across. But it doesn’t have a tail. That’s not particularly mysterious. It just means it is probably a comet that has flown past the Sun so many times that it has lost all of its volatiles from near the surface, such as ice and carbon dioxide, and so no longer produces a tail. It is half way between a comet and an asteroid.
The calculations aren't by NASA. It's a world wide co-operation of many astronomers world wide. There are many eyes on the calculations and all the observations are available for everyone to look at. This is an area where we can do very exact calculations - look at how New Horizons was able to do close flyby of Pluto - if we'd had any mistakes in our understanding of the gravitational fields in our solar system they could never have done it.
It is easy to check stories like this. Go to the Current Impact Risks
If the first entry is white blue or green, then you know that there is no future impact predicted at present all the way through to 2100. Therefore it is a fake news story.
If the first entry is yellow then it means they don’t know much about it yet but it is very unlikely to hit Earth, and so it will almost certainly soon turn white or blue, as has happened in the few times an entry was yellow in the past.
If the first entry is orange or red then there is more to the story. Check with a reliable astronomical news site to find out what the real story is. But so far, this has never happened.
The ones shown blue may hit Earth but are too small to cause any damage.
Summary: This is just a fake news story. Trump did say “ready to unlock the mysteries of space” in his inauguration speech. And yes we have many mysteries in space to solve. For instance, even our nearby neighbour the Moon has many mysteries to solve. However, for astronomers and scientists, Nibiru is no mystery, it is just plain nonsense. It’s also true that he signed some executive orders on his first day in office. They were to do with the first steps towards repealing Obamacare and towards appointing two of his team to office.
Details
The story is here: Trump Admits Nibiru Is Real, Signs Executive Orders. The story is based on this phrase in his inauguration speech:
"We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the Earth from the miseries of disease, and to harness the energies, industries and technologies of tomorrow."
Trump inauguration: Full text of new president's speech - BBC News
Of course all the Nibiru Nuts jump to the conclusion that this mention of “unlock the mysteries of space” means that he will make a search for Nibiru top priority. As far as they are concerned, that is the only mystery in space. For anyone with any basic understanding of science or astronomy then Nibiru is no mystery. It is just plain nuts.
But there are many mysteries, e.g. is there ice at the poles of our Moon, and if so, how much? Does our Moon have underground caves over 100 km long and several kilometers in diameter, as some of the data about it suggests? Is there microbial life on Mars, is there life in the oceans of Europa, or in planets around other stars, how do galaxies form, about the origins of our universe. For astronomers and for many others then this makes the universe a place of wonder and discovery, not fear and dismay.
This is the image for the story

Another view on it here:

“Trump signed an executive order Friday night directing government agencies to "ease the burdens" of Obamacare while the new administration and Congress work toward repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.”
“Trump also signed paperwork authorizing the elevation of two new Cabinet secretaries. The Senate voted this evening to confirm Trump's nominees for defense secretary, James Mattis, and homeland security secretary, John Kelly.”
Trump Signs Executive Order To 'Ease The Burdens Of Obamacare'
So the story smashes together that phrase from his inauguration speech with the photograph of him signing executive orders to suggest that he is signing an executive order to disclose the existence of Nibiru.
“The executive order rescinded Ronald Reagan’s “Nibiru Secrecy Act of 1983,” an obsolete regulation imposing stiff penalties—50 years imprisonment and unspecified fines—on Nibiru whistle-blowers.”
It’s just made up fake news. The “Nibiru Secrecy Act of 1983,” is also made up. The date 1983 there probably refers to the IRAS observation of infrared sources that the astronomers couldn’t identify to start with and when reporters asked them what they might be after the first observations, they said “I don’t know” and then mentioned various possibilities and one of those was that they might be very distant planets in our solar system.
They soon proved that they were all well outside our solar system and so weren’t planets. For details see Debunked: The IRAS infrared satellite found Nibiru in 1983 by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
Summary - How could we have been contacted by ancient astronauts and not learnt simple concepts in maths that we start to teach children at age 5? Or learnt about basic ideas in astronomy that they would be very familiar with, such as the craters on the Moon, rings of Saturn etc.
First, Nibiru is nonsense. See my answer to How do we know Nibiru isn't real? You might as well call Jupiter Nibiru - which it probably was for the Sumerians.If you mean Nibiru as the Sumerians understood it, then if I understand right, it variously meant the pole star, Jupiter, and some other things
We don’t know of any ancient ones living in Jupiter or on any of its moons. The pole star is 433 light years away and is not about to fly past our sun.
If you mean Sitchin’s “Nibiru” then it is fiction. He predicted it at various dates, not sure of the details but in the far future, 80 years from now or some such. But his planet’s orbit is unstable. It would have been expelled from the solar system, hit another planet or messed up the other planets’ orbits within a million years so well over 4 billion years ago. Hard to say if there ever was a planet om such an orbit, it’s long gone, billions of years ago, long before the dinosaurs, long before even the Moon formed and before the Earth’s oceans formed.
If you mean the 2017 prophecy by David Meade, which is probably what you have in mind as many papers have run it recently and I get asked lots of questions about it - it is just a gathering together of every unverified urban myth about Nibiru, and he hasn’t done any fact checking at all. He seems to think that there are objects in the night sky that can only be seen from a plane flying high up in the sky above South America. That makes no sense. If there is something approaching Earth from the South Pole it is visible from the entire southern hemisphere every clear night. He thinks IRAS found “Nibiru” in 1983 - false. He thinks the Vatican has built a multi-meter telescope - false. Some details here: Debunked: Nibiru will hit or fly past Earth in September 2017 - David Meade’s “prophecy”
Basically if a site has the word Nibiru - if it is about ancient Sumerian they mean either Jupiter or the pole star or an ancient Sumerian deity or various other things, but not an extra planet.
Remember this is from long ago, when they didn’t even have the maths to express an arbitrary ratio like 5/7. Their maths was impressive for their day, but they lacked many simple mathematical concepts that we start to teach children at around age five or six. Though those concepts seem so simple to us, they are the hard earned result of many generations, thousands of years of work by past mathematical genuises.
It’s just unbelievable that we were contacted by ancient astronauts and even if we were their slaves, that we didn’t learn how to use fractions, or negative numbers or zero, from them. Never mind things like knowing about Saturn’s rings, or Jupiter’s moons, or the craters on the Moon, or basic ideas of science and astronomy such as that Earth orbits the sun, or that matter is made of atoms, existence of electrons and nucleus, or that meteorites come from space rather than from volcanoes or stones lifted up by winds, etc etc.
I think there is no evidence at all of any ancient knowledge from extra terrestrials. Though lots of ancient wisdom in philosophy and understanding of human nature and of ways to work with the natural world, an ecological type of wisdom etc. But their best scientists and astronomers and mathematicians just hadn’t got many of even the simplest of modern concepts in those subjects.
There are many images often shared as “Ancient astronauts “

But all I see there are figures with hoods or halos which may mark them out as important figures or who knows what. It’s hardly an accurate representation of a spacesuit :).

Doesn’t much resemble a spaceship to me. Out of thousands of drawings from the past, we are bound to come across one or two that accidentally resemble things that we have today.
Suppose we sent them a drawing of this, back in time somehow:

What do you think they’d read it as?
of course!
Just as we read their figures as astronauts in spacesuits, they’d read our styluses and phones as clay tablets with clay styluses.
We always interpret things in terms of our culture when there is some resemblance.
Originated as my answer to Is 2017 the return of the ancient ones from Nibiru?
This is a claim from a recent Nibiru video. That Eris is Nibiru, is about to hit Earth and is causing earthquakes, also causes global warming, and flooding.
Summary: Eris is a very tiny dwarf planet, a long way away from us, and is not the slightest danger to us.
IN DETAIL
His basic argument is that the New Horizon team said that Eris is further away from New Horizons, than it is from Earth. From this he deduces that it must therefore be close to Earth, and so must be about to hit us in perhaps two years time.
Doesn’t follow at all. To understand how it works see this diagram:

Do you see how it is possible for Eris to be a long way away from the Earth (where the yellow line leaves at the center) - and also a long way away from New Horizons - and yet closer to Earth than it is to New Horizons?
That’s a single frame from this nice animation to show where they all are relative to each other in 3D:
Orbits of Pluto and PT1, New Horizons' flyby targets
More about the extended mission here: Finally! New Horizons has a second target
This is the original video:
This is the book he talks about

Planet Eris and the Global Warming: Cristian Negureanu - this book claims that Eris is also warming up Pluto, Neptune’s moon Triton, is causing the volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s Io, and warming Mars and Saturn,
This is LOL crazy stuff. You might as well try to warm your hands by Pluto on a starry night. So far away and so faint you can’t see it except with a very powerful telescope.
There is nothing at all to be scared about about Eris. And it is not called Nibiru or Hercobulus. Well you can call it those names if you like, but it won’t turn it into a planet about to hit Earth or warming the entire solar system!
As for its name - well Eris which turned out to be around the size of Pluto is what lead to the IAU decision to not classify Pluto as a planet - something that lead to a lot of discord. So the IAU thought it would be an amusing name to call it after a goddess of discord. It’s not at all to do with any suggestion it could hit Earth. That’s not possible. It’s just alluding to that dispute over its planetary status. The alternative would have been to call Pluto, Eris, and also Ceres and perhaps Vesta, and many others planets. Many think that the decision should have gone the other way there (I do also).
Here is its orbit

As you can see, it dips inside of Neptune’s orbit. That’s possible if a dwarf planet is in an orbital resonance with Neptune. It doesn’t dip inside Saturn’s orbit.
There is no chance at all, not even the remotest chance, of it hitting Earth. And even Jupiter is not close enough to cause tides. Never mind the tiny distant Eris. Nor do any of the other planets have any warming effect on Earth.
It is all total BS, by someone who doesn’t understand astronomy or basic geometry. He’s got a good way with words, presents himself well, he may have many talents but he hasn’t got a clue about the topic he is talking about here.
Hope this helps.
Summary: Yes it’s true that some rich people are buying space in bunkers, and the CEO of the company markets them as bunkers to escape from Nibiru, so presumably he thinks that’s a message that helps to sell his bunkers. This just shows that wealthy people are not immune to falling prey to BS merchants who find new ways to part them from their wealth.
IN DETAIL
This story is true. Well actually, what they buy is space in a bunker able to hold 80 people to survive for a year. The shelters are in Eastern Germany and were developed by the Russians during the cold war to survive a nuclear war. There are many such shelters in Europe and the States that the government no longer needs. Indeed - that the governments aren’t interested in these shelters surely suggests that they are hardly preparing for a flyby of Nibiru :). Any government that has anyone on their staff who understands basic astronomy will LOL at that idea. And, why would they be selling off surplus underground shelters if they planned to house all the elite in them?
Anyway this is the company: Vivos (underground shelter). They own a Soviet surplus underground shelter site in Rothenstein, East Germany. And certainly intended for the super rich. Here is a view of the inside of one of the bunkers, as done up by Vivos:

Their communal swimming pool
It was originally an underground weapons storage facility for military equipment and munitions built by the Soviets in the cold war. But they had to sell it because it was too close to a main road to store weapons. Billionaire Bunkers: Exclusive Look Inside the World's Largest Planned Doomsday Escape
According to that article in Forbes magazine, it can withstand just about everything including a nuclear bomb falling close by, airplane crash, chemical and biological agents, etc.
A typical chamber is 5 meters wide, 6 meters tall and 85 meters long. It has a total of five kilometers of tunnels if you put them all end to end.

This apparently is a bedroom from the complex
There are three separate nuclear blast and radiation proof vehicle entrances to the shelter, and each entry is blocked by a 40 ton access door fitted with hardened steel rods, and a second set of airtight sealed doors, to protect against biological, chemical and gas.
So yes - if you are super rich (it’s obviously marketed to billionaires and multi millionaires from the photos), you can buy yourself a space in this bunker. And the CEO, Robert Vicino, gets the red top tabloids like the Daily Star to run stories like this: SHOCK CLAIM: Elite preparing for Nibiru apocalypse NEXT YEAR but the rest of us are DOOMED (Express) or Global Elite Preparing For Nibiru Apocalypse In September 2017: ‘But They Don’t Have A Plan For Us, Only For Themselves,’ Claims Vivos CEO Robert Vicino (Inquistr).
He’s got an obvious commercial reason for promoting doomsday fear of Nibiru. It doesn’t at all mean that anyone who knows any astronomy thinks that Nibiru is real.
It means that someone who is selling underground bunkers has managed to persuade the red top tabloids to run a story to promote his company - and that there are some very wealthy people who are scared of Nibiru - if indeed that’s why they buy space in his bunkers.
Wealthy people are just like everyone else, they aren’t necessarily sensible. They may be good at selling things, or may be that they inherited wealth, or got lucky, won the lottery or whatever. It doesn’t mean they understand astronomy and are immune to being peddled bullshit by BS merchants like Vicino. They are just like you or me, except that for one reason or another they happen to be billionaires or multi-millionaires, and there are a lot of billionaires around now.
If that doesn’t convince you, if you are someone who is ready to believe any conspiracy theory that is floated on the web, even one promoted with an obvious commercial reason- ask yourself - why would governments be selling off these bunkers if they needed them for their own elite?
Governments do have underground shelters, in the cold war especially, also even during WWII, you can go and visit Churchill’s underground shelter in London. And the US is still building them and probably others also. But it’s not to protect against Nibiru. It’s still for the same reason as these were built originally, in case of war, mainly nuclear war.
And since the cold war they’ve been selling them off mainly, though they do still build and maintain some. See Debunked: The US government is building vast underground bunkers to escape from Nibiru by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
So yes, governments do build underground bases. And NO - that does not mean they are preparing for Nibiru! The whole idea of Nibiru is bonkers so for sure no government is going to waste even a moment of thought about it.
And yes, some very wealthy people do apparently buy space in bunkers in East Germany. That doesn’t show that they know anything that anyone else doesn’t. It just means that being wealthy doesn’t make you immune to BS and to being sold lies by people who want some of your wealth.
These papers don’t know to check the Current Impact Risks table before publishing an asteroid impact story. Often they publish harmless asteroid flybys often at many times the distance to the Moon, but embellish them by saying that instead of a flyby, the asteroid is going to hit Earth on that date. The choice is often very strange, there may be many asteroids doing flybys closer to Earth even on the same day as the one they choose to pick out and say is going to hit Earth.

2012 DA14 which did a harmless very close flyby in 2013. A close flyby is still a miss. This one passed closer than GEO, only 17,200 miles away (27,680 km). This one didn’t cause much of a scare - but many much more distant ones do, every year, in articles by journalists who don’t know how to check asteroid impact stories.
This is the one that happened on the same day as the Chelyabinsk one - they knew about this flyby long in advance, the asteroid was discovered in 2012 as the name implies .The Chelyabinsk one approaching from the direction of the Sun on the same day was not spotted until it hit - which is possible for very small asteroids approaching from that direction, but impossible for anything large. Even Chelyabinsk asteroid would have been spotted during an earlier observation opportunity several months earlier if it had been just a bit larger, like double size (say).
I will start this list using a particularly striking false report, 2009ES, because SO many sites ran a story claiming it was about to hit Earth long after it had already done its flyby on September 5th at a distance of 7.2 million kilometers, and I got scared people contacting me as a result. See Debunking: All going to die as a result of impact of Asteroid 2009ES or …
News sites that falsely reported it was about to hit Earth long after its flyby: Nature World News, Metro magazine, Inquisitr, Daily Star, AOL News, iTechPost, International Business Times AU,
You can see the “Chinese whispers” effect here. Here is an early blog that is more or less accurate. China's Largest Telescope Sights an Asteroid Approaching Earth
Except the title itself is a bit misleading - the Purple Mountain Observatory Schmidt design optical telescope may be their largest Schmidt telescope, I don’t know, but it’s certainly not their largest optical telescope. It’s 1.2 meters. By way of example the largest telescope at Xinglong Station (NAOC) - Wikipedia is 5.2 meters in diameter, also has a 4 meter diameter and 2.16 meter diameter telescope.
And this sentence can’t be quoted accurately:
“Zhao Haibin with the observatory said minor planets' trajectories could be changed by stellar attraction from planets such as Mars. Continuous observation is needed to keep track of any changes.”
- the attraction of Mars is easily predicted, and its effects don’t have to be monitored. The trajectories are affected by some minor effects such as the effects of sunlight heating up a spinning asteroid which then rejects the heat on its dark side, on the asteroid’s trajectory. But those are taken account of in the error margins for the predictions.
It’s probably based on that, that the rest embellished it to a Doomsday scenario. This is an early report on just the 9th September which got some of it right but said it risked hitting Earth in time for the US election which was nonsense. Enstars
At some point along the line of news sites copying other news sites, the date of the flyby was lost from the story and after that, there was nothing to stop them from continuing to run it as an impending impact story for the whole of the rest of September. Also that first story talks about the dangers of 10 km asteroids without saying that this was a 10 km asteroid (it wasn’t) - and the later stories then say that it is was miles wide, or 10 km in diameter.
It is between 210 and 470 meters in diameter.- large enough to have widespread local effects though not enough to have global effects. It is listed as a potentially hazardous asteroid so we do have to keep an eye on it - but it is no risk at all for the next couple of centuries.
Many of them falsely said that scientists warned it would be the end of the world. That was just journalistic embellishment. If they’d asked any astronomer who knows about such things they’d have learnt that it had already flown past Earth harmlessly, in some cases several weeks before they wrote that.
It’s almost impossible for us to be hit by a 10 km asteroid in the next century because all the ones that large that do regular flybys of Earth are already known and none of them will hit us. That only leaves comets. They would be spotted on the way in many years before a flyby or hit, and as only 1 in 146 of the flybys are by comets, the chance of a comet impact, already 1 in a million per century for 10 km asteroids, drops to 1 in 146 million or so, so tiny that it’s next to impossible that we are hit by such a large comet. Maybe a close flyby as for comet Siding Spring and Mars, (that was a much smaller comet less than 1 km in diameter)
(WILL ADD TO THIS LIST - this is just one of many such asteroid impact stories that hit the news, all false, since 2015 when I started writing about it and getting questions from scared people about them)
Yes it's a hoax. It's like someone who claims to be an expert on sport, who in the next sentence says that Usain Bolt is a top seeded tennis player and won wimbledon. If you know the basics of astronomy, the things they say are as absurd as that. They give away their complete ignorance of astronomy within a couple of sentences.
"INVISIBLE" BROWN DWARFS
By way of example, they read in genuine astronomy articles that brown dwarfs can be spotted in the infrared when far from any star even in pitch darkness. They conclude from this that they are invisible in ordinary light - that's like concluding that you are invisible because you are warm. Since when did warming something up make it invisible?
CAN'T SEE ANY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PLANET THAT NEVER COMES CLOSER THAN SIX TIMES THE DISTANCE TO NEPTUNE AND A PLANET THAT FLIES PAST EARTH
They read that astronomers think that there is a chance we may have a planet that's in an orbit that takes it at its closest to 200 au from the Sun and at its furthest, 1200 au from the sun - and if it exists, it must currently be at its furthest point or we'd have spotted it already easily. Neptune is 30 au from the Sun - so at its closest this "Planet 9" if it exists reaches more than six times the distance to Neptune - but to be not spotted yet, it has to be five or six times further away than that right now.
They conclude that this proves that they have been right all along that there is a planet in an orbit that goes from way beyond Neptune all the way to Earth's orbit and back again every 3600 years and is currently very close to us, "hiding behind the Sun" and just about to hit us or fly past us. Do you see a difference between these two scenarios? They can't seem to see any difference.
Bill Nye shows the scale of our solar system. If "Planet 9" exists then the closest it comes to Earth is six times the distance to Neptune. It must be several times further away than that at present or we'd see it already. Do you see a difference between this and the idea of a planet that comes as close to the Sun as Earth? They can't see the difference which shows the level of their understanding of astronomy.
IMPOSSIBLE PLANET
Their orbit is impossible because it would cross the orbits of all four gas giants. It can't keep missing them time after time because they have different orbital periods and it would hit one of them or be deflected out of its orbit or mess up our solar system within a million years. If our solar system ever had such a planet, it is long gone ,more than four billion years ago.
Even a 1 km comet would be easy to spot two years before it gets to Earth or Mars as we know from experience too, e.g. Siding Spring found nearly two years before its flyby of Mars and it was between 400 and 700 meters in diameter.
TWO SUNS
Then they go on to pile on the most absurd things. They say that we have two suns. I frequently get people asking me if it is true that we have a second sun and that we are in danger of it flying past Earth! Honestly. Don't they believe their own eyes? This is very easy to check. Don't stare at the Sun. Hold a finger in front of the Sun and then look to left and to right. Hold your finger at anothre angle and look above and below. Do you see a second Sun?
You have just disproved their theory that we have a second Sun.
BALDERDASH AND BULLSHIT
They say so many absurd things. They dress them up in videos with stirring sound tracks and authoritative sounding voice overs. And somehow people who know nothing about astronomy come to believe these things. Who knows if they are just unable to reason logically, or if they are hoaxing everyone else, or don't understand astronomy or what it is. Some are certainly just doing it as hoaxes for the ad revenue. And the ones who are selling Doomsday bunkers obviously have a commercial reason for running these stories. There are dozens of books on it also. It's like a minor industry, all based around balderdash and bullshit.
ASTRONOMY NIBIRU BULLSHIT TESTER - WOULD YOU READ A SPORTS COLUMN THAT STARTS "WHEN USAIN BOLT WON WIMBLEDON IN 2008..."?
I suggest you try out my Nibiru Bullshit Tester - and - well you don’t even need to do that. If a website or a news site or a TV channel or blog talks about a planet called Nibiru in all seriousness and they are not debunking it, then - just cross them off your list of people who know anything about astronomy.
To continue to read after that is like reading in all seriousness an alleged sports blog that starts "When Usain Bolt won Wimbledon in 2008 ...". It's even more absurd than that. Usain Bolt is a human being and could in principle win a tennis tournament, it is just not his sport. But their ideas don't even make logical sense in astronomy. They are bullshit through and through.
Here is my Nibiru Bullshit Tester.
See also my Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]
Many papers publish fake Doomsday stories without checking them at all.

These ones do no checking to see if the story originates from a fake news site:
We know that because they all published this story from a site known to publish fake news, without checking where it came from originally: Debunked: World To End After Two Snowy Days In Salento, Puglia, Southern Italy, Tears On Macedonia Icon
This one published a doomsday video from an anonymous youtube user without any checking and based an entire story and a count down timer to the end of the world on the text typed by this anonymous user into the title field of the youtube video when they uploaded it.
There are many more and I can add to this as I continue. These don’t get caught with the Chrome Bullshit detector plugin because they publish many reliable stories. I’m sure they would never dream of publishing a fake obituary. But for some reason they don’t seem to think any fact checking is needed at all before publishing a story that says the world is about to end, but just republish stories they have read in other papers or that they have seen shared on social media such as facebook.
If we compile a list of the newspapers and online news sites that publish fake doomsday news, then maybe this will be useful? If you know of others to add to this list, do say! I will include also those that publish asteroid impact stories without checking the Current Impact Risks table to see if the story is genuine. Any paper that published an asteroid impact story recently belongs in that list as we have had no genuine impact predictions.
We can do a separate list for fake or unreliable Doomsday news video channels.
One way to think about it is that for these papers, every day is a potential April Fools day for Doomsday stories - except that they don’t give the usual hints that it is an April Fool, and often the journalists themselves have been fooled.
Summary: It’s just red top tabloid nonsense, debunking it because I got a couple of pm’s about it. Whole thing is based on three facebook comments, no link given, authors not identified. And it’s another of these “This is a sign” story where there is no explanation given of why they think the world will end. They just say “I spotted something strange and therefore the world will end”. Nothing here to be scared of.
It’s like the story of Chicken Little. I won’t give the ending until later in the page just in case anyone doesn’t know it :).
IN DETAIL
The article is here, in the Express, it’s so daft I can’t imagine many were upset but I got a couple of pm’s asking about it. END OF THE WORLD: Christians predict apocalypse THIS WEEK as Venus lines up with Wolf Moon. By “Christians” in the title it just means three people who posted comments on facebook, they don’t say who. Could be anyone. No other sources given. Also in the Daily Star
The article claims that Venus will be at its brightest for eight years. Not true. It reaches its brightest in its current cycle on 17th February. Venus at greatest brightness
And of course Venus and the Moon are often in the sky together, at full Moon especially. At full Moon, the Moon is in the sky all night, rises as the sun sets, sets as the sun rises, so it is in the sky together with anything else that happens to be visible at night on that day.
It is true that the 13th of this month is a Friday. It’s the thirteenth of the month because of the calender reform introduced by pope Gregory in 1582 .
It is a Friday is because this day in the week is associated with Venus in many cultures and we call it Friday because in old English the goddess Frigg happens to be associated with Venus.
Nobody is quite sure why some consider the number 13 to be unlucky.
So what does any of that have to do with astronomy or anything astronomical? The Sun and Moon and planets would orbit as they do no matter what calender system we use or what we call the day of the week, or whether or not we think the number 13 is unlucky.
THIS IS A SIGN - LIKE CHICKEN LITTLE TREATING AN ACORN FALLING ON HIS HEAD AS A SIGN THAT THE SKY WOULD COLLAPSE
The words “This is a sign” in this context usually means:
“I noticed something strange and therefore I’m completely sure, indeed adamant, that some completely unrelated strange thing is going to happen like the sky falling on my head”
With Chicken Little there was some excuse, something did fall on his head. It was just an acorn but he was little and not very accustomed to things like acorns. In this case though, it is just a “sign” which has no connection with anything, the connection just made up out of thin air like Frigg spinning fog in the clouds except there isn’t even any fog to spin.
CROSSING SITES OFF YOUR LIST OF PLACES TO TRUST ABOUT SUCH STORIES
So - I hope based on this you can now cross the Express and the Daily Star off your list of papers to pay any attention to? They don’t check a story even if it is only based on three anonymous facebook comments. They are well known in the UK as the “red top tabloids” that often publish sensationalist and even hoax stories.
It’s like every day is April Fool’s day. But they don’t give any clues to tell you which articles are the “April Fools”.
This is a rational thing to do. Once a news site publishes fake news without checking it, then it is rational to distrust it in this topic area. You can no longer rely on it for such stories.
See also my Debunked: World To End After Two Snowy Days In Salento, Puglia, Southern Italy, Tears On Macedonia Icon
A huge number of papers, mainly the more sensationalist tabloids in the UK, ran this story.
As it turned out
LIST OF NEWS SITES THAT RUN FAKE DOOMSDAY STORIES WITHOUT CHECKING THEM
This shows that none of these online news sites have any policy requiring their reports to check up on fake doomsday stories:
Inquistr, Au.com, Sun, Daily Mail. Cosmopolitan , Daily Star, Metro Magazine, East Coast Radio , WBNews, Yahoo7 News, RT, BT.com, Bustle
So - if you read a Doomsday story in any of those, then you might as well be reading those papers on April Fools day.
It's like a site that claims to be about sport saying that Usain Bolt is a tennis player. It's also like a newspaper that publishes fake obituaries - you would never read such a newspaper to see if someone has died or not, once you know it publishes fake obituaries.
So why read these papers for their Doomsday stories when you know they publish fake doomsday stories regularly? If you want to make things simpler for yourself, then whenever you see a fake doomsday story, take a note of where it was published - the paper, website, the TV channel or whatever. Then add it to your list of sites that publish fake doomsday news. And if you find fake doomsday news scary - avoid those sites. In the same way that you would avoid a site that publishes fake obituaries.
Soon you will find you get hardly any or probably no doomsday stories. You may get an occasional surprise like the Telegraph, you’d never think it would publish a fake doomsday story, well I wouldn’t have thought so until they did. After that, cross them off your list too.
I’m compiling a list of the fake Doomsday news I’ve been contacted about - at the end I’ll do a list of all the sites that published fake Doomsday news since 2015 which may help with this.
It’s confusing because many of them wouldn’t dream of publishing this fake story from Disclose.tv : FALSE: Snowden Pronounced Dead by His Girlfriend in Russia
Yet they are willing to publish a fake story about heavy snowfall in Italy means the world will end, or that Venus and the Moon in the sky together on a Friday 13th mean the world will end based on three facebook comments.
They think it is very important not to make a mistake about a single person dying, and so they should be. But they think that no checking is needed at all for a story that says the world is about to end. I think this is because they just don’t take those stories seriously, and don’t realize that they scare anyone. Nothing else makes much sense.
Summary: This is a widely reported story in the tabloids and other papers. The story is that the world is going to end because of two days of snow in Salento in Southern Italy, which according to the story is a sign that we are going to have a massive supervolcano eruption. There is absolutely no scientific reason for connecting two days of snow to supervolcano eruptions. It’s all based on a story in a fake news site which got passed from one paper to another and they lost track of where it came from. Nothing here at all to be scared of.
I’ve also posted this to my Science20 blog here as Debunked: World To End After Two Snowy Days In Salento, Puglia, Southern Italy, Tears On Macedonia Icon
IN DETAIL
They base it on each other’s stories. When you go back to the source, it’s Inquistr which in turn bases it on Disclose.tv which is a website that often publishes fake news including a false story Snowden Pronounced Dead by His Girlfriend. None of them except Inquistr mention that this is the source of the story.
The article is here in the Inquistr: 500-Year-Old Prophecy By ‘Italian Nostradamus’ Comes True, Sparks Fears Of Supervolcano Apocalypse. Other papers running this story today: Au.com, Sun, Daily Mail. Cosmopolitan , Daily Star, Metro Magazine, East Coast Radio , Yahoo7 News, RT, BT.com, Bustle (only one so far to do slight debunking - they couldn’t find the primary source for the “prophecy” and remark that the only sources are from tabloid newspapers that run end of times prophecies regularly)
Many of these link back to the Inquistr article and that in turn doesn’t cite any academic sources but instead it cites Disclose.tv. So this news story seems to be the origin of it all: 'ITALIAN NOSTRADAMUS' PROPHECY OF SNOW IN PUGLIA VILLAGE COMES TRUE It is one of those sites like “Before It’s News” that lets people upload things that don’t get into normal news. Their “about” page is here Disclose.tv
Amongst previous stories they ran a fake news story that FALSE: Snowden Pronounced Dead by His Girlfriend in Russia and they republished a satire news story about NASA being contacted by Aliens as true: FALSE: NASA Admits It Is in Contact with Alien Species and Just Forgot to Mention It
This story was so widely and uncritically reported with none of them except Inquistr explaining that the source is Disclose.tv that I think it is quite a good test to weed out the papers that run stories like this, without doing any due diligence to find out where the story came from, which I was able to do here in a few minutes of googling.
So these are all news sites you can basically disregard therefore as not likely to be reliable in this topic area - since none of them debunk it except Bustle, and that only slightly skeptical about it. Others treat it in perhaps a slightly humorous tone but scared people won’t see the humour in it. And people are getting scared by this story already.
HEAVY SNOWFALL IN SOUTHERN ITALY
So anyway let’s do a proper debunking: First, apparently, it is true that Salento has had two days of unusually thick levels of snow. Video in the article.
This bit though is untrue and must be just journalistic embellishment, probably they never asked a local inhabitant
"But the fears have intensified into near-panic after two consecutive days of snowfall occurred in Salento, a peninsula in southern Puglia, Italy, where, according to residents, “it never snows.”"
It snowed heavily for several days in January 2015 just two years ago. Photos here including a snowman and their dog in very heavy snow. They say there that it was the first time in 30 years. So do two heavy snowfalls in three years mean anything?
We’ve got a cold spell throughout Europe just now. This is one of the predictions of global warming that there will be less precipitation overall ut the individual events will have more precipitation. Similarly for hurricanes that there are likely to be fewer but the individual hurricanes will be stronger on average. So I expect that’s what it is. We’ve had an unusually warm winter so far here in the UK Record breaking winter for England and Wales. It’s more than 2 C above average in the south of the UK, as this map shows:

To find a warmer winter you have to go back to 1869. and that was only 0.1 C warmer. And no other winter has been so warm back to 1659 - that’s for central England which has the longest continuous temperature record in the world.
“The latest end of month statistics show it was provisionally the warmest winter for England and Wales since the record series began in 1910, while it was the third-warmest for the UK as a whole. The warmth has been most notable in the south of the UK with mean temperatures across much of the area more than 2C above average.
“In the Central England Temperature record series, the longest temperature record in the world dating back to 1659, this winter has been the second-warmest at 6.7C, just behind the previous record of 6.8C set 1869.”
Paradoxical as it may seem, it’s part of the same pattern. We may get more of this as the world continues to warm very slightly.
As well as that, the occasional very cold spells in northern Europe winters could be the result of changes in the position of the jet stream as a result of climate change and the warming of the Arctic:

For more on this: Extreme cold winters fuelled by jet stream and climate change
So, to have occasional snow storms unusually far South in a slightly warming world is no surprise at all. But as it turned out, it's not even unusual for Salento :).
TEARS ON ICON
On the icon, this is the icon that allegedly cried. See how it is damaged around the left eye?

It’s the Express anyway, it’s not the most reliable of newspapers, it’s a red top tabloid often publishes sensationalist unresearched stories and sometimes out and out hoaxes (like every day is April Fools day but without the April Fool part of it where they leave obvious clues that it is a hoax): END OF DAYS PROPHECY: Fears for terrifying 2017 event after Virgin Mary painting cries
Anyway if I am permitted to be a bit skeptical - what about damp damaging the painting? If it is a true story. Or maybe something to do with the paints that make up the painting destabilizing? And why would a painting shedding drops of anything, even if it is a miracle, for Catholics that believe firmly in miracles (some of them anyway) and not just ordinary real world physics - why would that mean the world is going to end? Why not just that e.g. the Virgin Mary is crying because of some local tragedy in the village? Doesn’t the Bible say
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father's care.”
If you believe it is a miracle - well - maybe she is crying about the death of a sparrow?
STORY OF POSSIBLE SUPER VOLCANO IN ITALY
The story also ties this in with a previous story about a possible supervolcano in Italy
Italian supervolcano has started to stir to life
So on that, first, why would two days of snow in southern Italy mean that a volcano is about to erupt? It doesn’t make any logical or rational sense. It is just a “sign” which basically seems to mean that if you notice something odd anywhere in the world, that it is taken as evidence that some other unusual hypothesis that you happen to find scary is more likely to happen even if there is absolutely no causal connection between them.
Nonsense! Why would that be the case?
So anyway on super volcanoes, they are very rare indeed. But can indeed happen. They are not world ending events. They happen quite a lot on the geological timescale. 42 supervolcanoes in the last 36 million years
So they are possible. They are amongst the most likely of these devastating scenarios, though that still doesn’t make them that likely.
Those statistics make the chance of a supervolcano before 2100 about 1 in 10,000. So 99.99% certain it won’t happen before 2100.
WHAT HAPPENS IF WE DO GET A SUPERVOLCANO
I cover it in detail here: What really happens if Yellowstone erupts as a supervolcano, or if some other supervolcano erupts?
So anyway from that answer:
The worst supervolcano in recent times was the one that created Lake Toba in Indonesia about 75,000 years ago. It’s 100 kilometres by 30 kilometres, maximum depth 505 metres.


Its ash covered Malaysia to a depth of 9 meters, there’s an ash layer from it in central India that’s still 6 meters thick today, and ash from it is detected as far away as Lake Malawi in East Africa.
It injected 2500–3000 km³ of debris into the atmosphere, and probably killed 60% of the human population worldwide, mainly through climate change impacting on their food supply.
That’s the picture generally, that the main effect is through global climate change, which reduces the temperature globally by about ten degrees C for a decade, together with the direct effects of the deposits of ash on their crops. A large supervolcano like Toba would deposit one or two meters thickness of ash over an area of several million square kilometers.(1000 cubic kilometers is equivalent to a one meter thickness of ash spread over a million square kilometers). If that happened in some densely populated agricultural area, such as India, it could destroy one or two seasons of crops for two billion people.
So yes it can be very serious. We can prepare for it though. With two years warning we can do large scale tests to work out what are the best crops to grow during the event. Also store crops that are currently used to feed cattle or for production of ethanol, for human consumption instead, which would be enough to give us a buffer for the first year. In that way we would be able to avoid perhaps all deaths from starvation, so impact would be far less than it was for early man.
More about this here What really happens if Yellowstone erupts as a supervolcano, or if some other supervolcano erupts?
So now what about the thing about Italian supervolcano has started to stir to life
Well if you read the story - yes this is a supervolcano. It formed the Campi Flegeri caldera 39,000 years ago. But the study only predicts a possible ordinary eruption, not a super volcano eruption.
SUMMARY OF THE DISCUSSION SECTION OF THE ARTICLE
The article is here and open access for anyone to read. But it is written in techy scientific language so you need to know how to read that sort of stuff.
So here is a summary of what they say in the Discussion section. I haven’t done anything here except to rewrite it in non technical terms plus I’ve only “translated” the most relevant sentences.
Magmas near the critical degassing pressure drive volcanic unrest towards a critical state
So this is what they say:
Their model fits an increase in hydrothermal activity and from this they deduce that it is getting warmer. Their model suggests that this warming may be due to addition of water derived from magma. They can’t deduce any structural effects using their model but they notice that the caldera has raised in synchrony with their model’s hydrothermal temperature increase so suggest that the magmas they are studying may contribute to that effect.
But they caution against using their model for prediction at this stage, because the process can be non linear. Forinstance in the case of Yellowsone then the rate of uplift in 2004 - 2008 accelerated, but then it decelerated.
In the case of the Campi Flegeri caldera then it had a pause of ground uplift between 1982 - 1984 and in 2005.
Their conclusion was, direct quote:
“Additional careful scrutiny of monitoring data in the coming months and years is key to interpreting whether hydrothermal heating or magma quenching will prevail.”
In other words despite all the dramatic reporting of this paper, all they were saying is that this mountain might or might not erupt, and that it needs more monitoring to see what happens, and they were just discussing an ordinary eruption also.
MATTEO TAFURI PROPHECY?
As for prophecy well - that is just some person saying they think something is going to happen. Would you rely on prophecy to decide whether to carry an umbrella tomorrow?
I’m not sure why so many people think that prophecy is of any relevance at all to whether or not a supervolcano will erupt. And if prophecy worked, why aren’t all the winners of state lotteries prophets? I can’t even remember hearing any story about someone who says they prophesied the winning numbers and so won that way.
Anyway this is the chap who wrote the so called prophecy according to this story: Matteo Tafuri
“Salento of palm trees and mild south wind… Two days of snow, two flashes in the sky, I know the world ends…”
In a google search, it’s not in google books or google scholar. This is the earliest online reference I can find:
'Salento of palm trees and mild south wind, snowy Salento but never after the touch. Two days of snow, two flashes in the sky, I know the world ends, but I do not yearn,' Tafuri’s prophecy read
It's on a social media site from 2012 and doesn't give any sources. If you know any more do say!
Hope this helps some of you be a bit less scared of this!
Also do check out my book Doomsday Debunked (free online and also available on Kindle) and our facebook group: Doomsday Debunked
This is a claim from Breaking Israel News that this star predicted for 2022 will be the brightest star in the sky and that it will accompany the arrival of the Messiah. Since this is a Jewish paper this is not a “second coming” as they don’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Story here: Will Balaam’s Messiah Prophecy Be Fulfilled When Brand-New Star Appears in 2022?. This story also ran in the Daily Mail here: New star could herald the Second Coming, claims Israeli rabbi
Breaking Israel News is the same paper that published the musings of a rabbi who claimed that the world would end on Sunday October 2nd 2016.
So, first, this is a genuine prediction from astronomy. But it’s not going to be the brightest star in the sky at all. As with other news stories they have got it confused with a supernova. Here is another story from the Daily Mail claiming it will be a dazzlingly bright star: Mark your calendars! A dazzling supernova will appear in the sky in 2022, predict astronomers
It’s actually a Luminous red nova which is in between the brightness of a normal nova and a supernova. So it’s not actually going to be particularly bright. At it’s brightest, it may perhaps reach magnitude 2, the same brightness as the Pole Star.
This is a more sober treatment from EarthSky: Star predicted to explode in 2022 | EarthSky.org
This chart shows where it will be in the sky

Image showing position of the predicted red nova from their press release
At second magnitude it will be similar in brightness to the other stars that mark out the shape of Cygnus, the swan, or the “Northern Cross”.
It’s the result of a merger of two stars in KIC 9832227 a contact binary which is 1800 light years away.
So, far from being dazzlingly bright, it’s a star that you would only notice if you are very familiar with the night sky and the Cygnus constellation. I recommend that you get to know the constellation well now before this star appears or you won’t notice any difference in the sky.
Now, we might get a proper supernova at some point, for sure. We probably get around one a century. We can see their rather beautiful remnants nowadays with our telescopes so can figure out when the light would have reached Earth even for the ones that were hidden by interstellar dust and so invisible to naked eye.
But we get lots of supernovae. On average our galaxy has perhaps one a century or so, but getting on for half of them are hidden from view because of dust in our galaxy. Ten in the last 1,000 years of which 5 were recorded. Three were obscured by dust. One was too far south to be seen from northern Europe and with one, don’t know if it was visible or not.
Sometimes they are very bright. The world doesn’t end when we get a supernova :). Perhaps if I share a list of them it may help.
Rather than be scared of them, we should look forward to them, a wonderful sight. If only we could see a proper supernova. But they are so rare, chances of seeing a naked eye supernova in our lifetime is quite low as we get visible ones only every couple of centuries. It’s been 300 years since the last easily visible one but that doesn’t mean we are “due” one, if it is a random process as it seems to be.
LIST OF SUPERNOVAE
So here is a list of them from 1000 AD. Adapted from the List of supernova remnants - Wikipedia
Brightness in astronomy is measured using magnitudes. They work the opposite way from what you’d expect. Larger positive numbers are fainter so 6th magnitude is very faint. The smaller the brighter and negative magnitudes mean quite a bright star.
Venus at its brightest is -5 so anything as bright as that or brighter would be very noticeable. Sirius is -1.5 so anything brighter than that would be brighter than anything in the sky except for some planets, the Sun and the Moon.
Also note, these images are using enhanced and often false colour. The remnants wouldn’t be anything like as bright as this or as colourful to the naked eye.
W49B About 1000 AD

No observations recorded but it would have been seen around 1000 AD if visible. Distance 26,000 light years.
SN 1006 May 1, 1006

Magnitude −7.5, distance 7,200 light years
SN 1054 or M1 or Crab Nebula 1054

Magnitude -6, distance 6,400 light years
G350.1-0.3 About 1100

Unlikely to have been seen because of interstellar dust. Distance 15,000 light years
SN 1181 1181

Magnitude -1, distance 26,000 or more light years
RX J0852.0-4622 or Vela Junior About 1250

Distance 700 light years. Not observed. At 46 degrees south, it would have been invisible to most of Europe.
SN 1572 or Tycho's Nova, November 11, 1572

Magnitude -4, distance 7,500 light years
SN 1604 or Kepler's Nova October 8, 1604

Magnitude -2.5, distance 20,000 light years
Cassiopeia A Mid 17th Century, obscured by interstellar dust. Recorded as very faint sixth magnitude star by John Flamstead on August 16 1680, he didn’t know what it was

Magnitude 6, distance 10,000 light years
G1.9+0.3 About 1868 - obscured by the dust at the center of our galaxy, no observations

Not observed. Distance 25,000 light years
Summary: Black holes don’t suck everything into them - that’s a common mistake. The stars in our own galaxy orbit our central monster black hole no problem. And the closest of these black holes is 38 million light years away. It is not the slightest risk to Earth.
IN DETAIL
I’ve been asked about this one a couple of times. It’s a case of a title that’s a bit scary if you don’t know what it means. Good example of how just a title can scare paople. The article is here on the ITV news site: Hidden 'monster black holes' discovered near our Milky Way
Now, first, yes we have a monster black hole at the center of our galaxy, at least almost certainly. It is far closer to us than either of these ones. But it is still so far away that the light that gets to us from the galactic core left there in the middle of the last ice age.
We are orbiting around the Galactic Center at a distance of around 25,000 to 28,000 light years. We are as safe from that as we are from the Sun. A planet can orbit a black hole just as it orbits a star, and the stars of our galaxy have been orbiting the central black hole and the denser center of our galaxy for billions of years.
Indeed, the stars orbiting the black hole at the center of our galaxy move so fast that you can actually follow them and see their positions change over time periods of years. The ones that are closest to the black hole orbit at speeds that are a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. Here is an animation of them based on direct observation:
The fastest star in that animation was traveling at 5000 km/sec when it came closest to the black hole, or about 1.66% of the speed of light - this rules out most other hypotheses proving that what we have at the center must be a black hole, or something even more exotic.
Anyway the main thing is that you can see it doesn’t “suck in” the stars around it. They just orbit it, as they would when orbiting any massive object.
There is a small region around any black hole which has the unusual property that if you enter, you can’t exit, and will inevitably hit the center a few seconds or minutes later. That’s the reason for the confusion. But so long as you stay away from this region, known as its event horizon, then you are at no risk from it.
Anyway - there’s a more accurate version of the story here: Monster black holes lurking in nearby galaxies
They found two new supermassive black holes. The nearest one is in NGC 1448 which is 38 million light years away. The reason it stayed undiscovered for so long is that it was shrouded in a cloud of dust and gas.

NGC 1448 which is 38 million light years away - newly discovered black hole at its center. It is not in any way a threat to us.
We know of many other nearby monster black holes. There’s one in the Andromeda galaxy for instance. This is the nearest large galaxy to Earth and you can see it with your naked eye as a faint smudge just on the edge of visibility, if you know exactly where to look on a very dark night far from any light pollution. It’s easy to see with binoculars on a dark clear night.

Andromeda Galaxy (with h-alpha) - by Adam Evans
.It actually spans quite a large part of the sky, far larger than our Moon - but galaxies are not nearly as bright as you might think from science fiction. If you were in a spaceship looking towards our galaxy from the distance of the Andromeda galaxy, you just wouldn’t see our Milky Way unless you turned off all the interior lights and waited for your eyes to dark adapt, then you’d see just the core of our galaxy as a very faint smudge on the edge of visibility. This is what the Andromeda galaxy would look like in our sky if it was as bright as the Moon, it’s huge:

Andromeda if it were brighter - see also Phil Plait’s article about it: Yes, That Picture of the Moon and the Andromeda Galaxy Is About Right.
Even if you look in binoculars though, you don’t see the full extent of it, all you can see is the brighter central part of the galaxy, which is why even maybe some amateur astronomers who have seen it in binoculars may be surprised to learn how large it really is in the sky..
And - yes there’s a monster black hole at the center of the Andromeda galaxy too, but it is no threat to us at all.

This shows the nucleus of the Andromeda galaxy. Unusually, it’s got a double nucleus. The fainter dot to the right actually marks the position of its monster black hole which masses more than a hundred million suns. It also has at least 35 other smaller black holes orbiting its center Trove of Black Holes Discovered in Andromeda Galaxy
Indeed the Andromeda galaxy is actually headed our way and will collide with the Milky Way about 3.75 billion years from now. That’s so far into the future that evolution could go all the way from the simplest multicellular microscopic creatures to humans more than seven times over. And even when the two collide, Earth is not likely to be in any danger - because the stars in a galaxy are so far apart from each other. During the collision it will perhaps more than double the density of stars for a while, depending where we are when it collides - but the stars are so far apart that that still means there is almost no chance of any star from the Andromeda galaxy coming anywhere close to us.
The two black holes at the center will merge eventually with all the stars left orbiting it, making a single elliptical galaxy.
That’s probably where our sun would end up, orbiting somewhere in the outskirts of an elliptical galaxy - though we can’t predict what will happen to an individual star exactly. Some stars get thrown out into the depths of intergalactic space with escape velocity during the collision. That could happen to us, but we’d still be just fine, our skies though would get darker and darker with few stars except in the direction of the milky way, eventually ending up in intergalactic space with no other stars around visible to sight at all. There are many stars like that right now, as a result of previous galactic collisions, out in intergalactic space with completely black skies with no stars visible, from their planet except their own parent sun, and the faint smudges of distant galaxies. Chances are if we still have technology then or whatever beings have evolved on Earth, they’d be migrate to another star during the collision if they discovered their one is going in a direction they don’t want to go.
Here is a short summary, rather good, from Business Insider
And here is a recent simulation of what will happen when the two galaxies collide:
This is what it would look like from Earth, though this is with the brightness turned right up, the first image shows the night sky as it is now but for most of us the milky way is so faint we can barely see it except with really dark skies:

Night sky as Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies merge - notice how as they merge there’s a big outburst of star formation - those red regions are where stars are forming. All those new stars help to fill out the new elliptical galaxy. It still produces new stars, but not nearly so many after that, as most of the gas and dust was used up in the collision that lead to its formation. Most of the stars gradually age. Elliptical galaxies tend to have a much higher proportion of older stars. They are orange in colour, while spiral galaxies are more blue in colour.

MACSJ1423.8+2404 - center of a cluster of galaxies. The elliptical ones are orange, consisting mainly of very old stars such as red and orange dwarfs, and the spirals (like ours) are blue.

A really huge elliptical galaxy ESO 325-G004 surrounded by many other galaxies, see the contrast in colour with the prominent blue spirals like our Milky Way and the orange elliptical galaxies like the result of collision of Andromeda with our galaxy billions of years into the future. The stars in this photograph are nearby stars in our own galaxy. Photograph by Hubble of the cluster Abell S0740 450 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Centaurus..
See also VSAuce’s take on this:
So anyway even monster black holes are no risk at all to Earth, and they are very common, just about every large galaxy probably has one. And their stars continue just fine and don’t get sucked into their black holes, because that’s just not how black holes work. Many science fiction movies get this wrong, though some of them do treat black holes accurately.
Even with the Chrome fake news plugin there are lots of sites that publish nonsense and fake doomsday news. For instance Metro magazine, Express, and several other papers that wouldn’t dream of publishing a fake obituary are totally unreliable in the area of astronomy. You can simplify things a lot by just crossing off your list of reliable sources on this topic if they publish stories that say any of these things:
If you do that then that will eliminate nearly all the fake doomsday news in your google search news feed or shared on facebook, as well as all the news sites and video feeds that publish them.
What are left with after that are papers and blogs that are likely to be reliable sources on astronomy. There might be a few stories that still slip through the net but that will eliminate just about all of them.
If you went to a newspaper and in its sports section it said that Usain Bolt is a top seeded tennis player and has just won a major tournament in tennis, would you continue to use that paper as your source for sports news? No of course not, you’d never trust anything it said on sport ever again. You might continue to read other sections but you’d know that it’s sports editor is a moron, or at least, knows nothing about sport and can’t be bothered to check his stories with anyone else who does know about the subject. You would not read anything in it on sport again probably except for laughs.
To rely on a paper or video channel that says any of those things in the list above is just like relying on the paper or video channel that says that Usain Bolt is a top seeded tennis player. For some reason, though most papers are reliable on sport, and on obituaries, many of them don’t seem to think there is any need to check astronomical stories at all, they just run them based on something they read in another paper or hearsay or goodness knows what.
So there are many newspapers that are very unreliable in the topic area of astronomy - especially the UK tabloids for some reason. As an example, there are very few of them that bother to check asteroid impact stories to see if there is in fact an asteroid predicted to hit Earth. All the dozens of stories published on this in the last year about many separate supposed imminent impacts would have been thrown out at the editing desk if their astronomy or science editor in chief knew to check the Current Impact Risks table. And any paper that runs a Nibiru story, apart from a debunking one, you know right away doesn’t have an editor in chief with astronomical or scientific background.
Also though US papers aren’t as bad as the UK ones, a few of the US supposedly scientific TV channels, especially the Discovery channel, are just appallingly bad in the area of astronomy. They make it worse by mixing up genuine stories with nonsense so you can’t tell if a particular story is accurate or nonsense unless you already have a good grounding in astronomy.
Here is an interesting post from the BBC about how and why journalists end up publishing fake news, because they are in such a rush to get stories out as quickly as possible and because many newspapers don’t have a policy requiring them to check stories shared on social media
“A recent study of local TV stations in the US conducted by Adornato revealed that that nearly 40% of their editorial policies did not include any guidelines on how to verify information from social media, yet news managers at the TV stations admitted that at least a third of their news bulletins had reported information from social media that later was revealed to be false or inaccurate.”
And the original fake news sites earn money through advertising, can be $10,000 for a single fake story that goes viral.
"We've had stories that have made $10,000 (about £8,100). When we really tap in to something and get it to go big then we're talking about in the thousands of dollars that are made per story,"
It’s the same for the fake youtube videos - they earn thousands of dollars from ads. This is at least part of the reason for it, then you get people who fall for it, but without the ads revenue in the first place - the rest would probably never happen or not be as big as it is now, just be a few people with off the wall ideas trying to convince their unbelieving friends that their ideas are correct.

Story here: The rise and rise of fake news - BBC News
Though it’s mainly non scientists, some scientists who are normally reliable sometimes say doomsday scare nonsense. Michio Kaku is notorious for this. I don’t know why he does it - it’s hard to credit that such a distinguished scientist could say in 2012 that Earth faced doom from a “wave of energy” from solar storms on 21st December 2012, in the middle of all that 2012 scare. There was no truth to it at all. He is a frequent guest on these US TV true mixed with fake “science” channels.
David Morrison, expert on asteroid impacts and astrobiology, former director of the Sagan institute and very distinguished NASA researcher, talks here about this issue with Michio Kaku seventeen minutes and fifteen seconds into this video.
So I’d also cross Michio Kaku off your list of reliable sources on astronomy news. He does say a lot of good things, if you have a good background in astronomy, enough to be able to distinguish between the true and the fake news. It’s a great shame to have to say this for someone who is so knowledgeable and who presents science topics so well. But for those who don’t know how to do it, I’d say, sadly, that you should steer well clear of him and treat him as a thoroughly unreliable source in astronomy because of his occasional off the wall statements like this that are just completely false. The effect is worse, because everything else he says is so good, so people come to rely on him.
Debunking story in the Sun: Nostradamus predictions for 2017: Terrifying forewarnings of 16th century prophet revealed .
Nostrodamus was a sixteenth century apothecary and seer. He didn’t make any predictions for 2017. His only dated prediction is this one apparently
"L'an mil neuf cent nonante neuf sept mois,
Du ciel viendra un grand Roi deffrayeur:
Ressusciter le grand Roi d'Angolmois,
Avant après Mars regner par bonheur."Translation:
"The year 1999, seventh months,
from the sky will come the great King of Terror,
bringing back to life the great King of the Angolmois.
Before and after, Mars reigns by good fortune."
There apparently Angolmois is a region in the south of France but has been interpreted as an approximate anagram of Mongolois - the Mongols.
This is one guess at what it meant from before 1999
"The gist therefore seems to be that in July 1999 a possibly appeasing Pope will in some way stir up a leader with Mongol (or possibly Lombard) connections (some French observers prefer to take the word 'Angolmois' literally, and refer it to the former François I, who was duke of Angoulême), with the result that a previously raging war will accidentally flare up again."
Obviously that didn't happen, or indeed anything much else. That is unless with hindsight you apply numerology and claim that he was actually predicting something else. This page claims it is a prediction of 9/11. So anyway that is the only prophecy he made with a date attached. But enthusiasts try interpreting his vague words to mean other things, use numerology, anagrams and so on to extract meaning from them.
For instance, one of the most recent:
These most recent predictions are particularly absurd, published in the Sun (UK Red top tabloid - noted for the way they publish sensationalist stories often with no fact checking and often out and out hoaxes): 'Nostradumus doomsday comet' set to bombard Earth with meteors TONIGHT
Remember that Nostradamus was a sixteeenth century Frenchman.

Portrait of Michel de Nostredame (Nostradamus) by his son César de Nostredame
The predictions come from Axel Noudelman who calls himself a “Digital marketing executive” - he has managed to market these predictions anyway: Top 10 Nostradamus Predictions for 2017
Here are three that seem particularly absurd:
3. Commercial Space Travel
Commercial space travel is the real deal, but beyond orbital flights things will become exponentially more difficult. The moon, asteroids and mining missions are unlikely targets within the next two years.
The first person to hypothesize that meteorites came from space was Ernst Chladni in the late eighteenth century. Before then, the consensus of everyone, including scientists, was that the rocks known as meteorites came from volcanoes or were stones lifted up in strong winds. So he can't have predicted anything about asteroids as he didn't know that such things were possible
4. Wars over Global Warming
Nostradamus believed the possibilities of ‘Hot Wars’ could be escalated in 2017 due to global warming and diminishing resources. As far as the warfare itself goes, the greatest threat in the future will be terrorists and bio-attacks.
He wouldn’t have known anything about global warming or bio-attacks
6. Cloud Computing Will Disappear
Nostradamus also predicted that the term ‘cloud’ will disappear from the phrase ‘cloud computing’ by 2017 because most of the computers will simply be assumed to be done in the cloud.
He knew nothing about computers and calculators except for humans calculating by hand. The first mechanical calculator that we might recognize as such is Pascal's calculator from the seventeenth century, a century after Nostradamus.
The idea of programming didn’t develop until the nineteenth century with Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace who worked out programs for Babbages mechanical calculator and so is often regarded as the world’s first programmer
So I think you can see that the idea that Nostradamus predicted anything about computing or cloud computing is rather absurd.
For more about this, see Debunked: Nostrodamus predicted the end of the world on [insert date here] by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
Originally posted as:
Robert Walker's answer to What are the Nostradamus Predictions for the 2017?
I thought I’d look back on the last year and a half since I started debunking these stories with the blood moon hoax on September 24th, 2015. If you don’t follow these things or have people asking you to debunk the stories, you probably have no idea how many times doomsday is predicted, in the news or in youtube videos. I thought, if I do a chronological list, then it might help those who get scared to perhaps step back and LOL at it. And also for journalists, and those who write blogs etc, to see the scale of the problem of fake doomsday news.
For the asteroid stories, it’s normally an asteroid that flies past at many times the distance to the Moon and with nothing remarkable about them, often larger asteroids fly past closer even on the same day or the same week. I’ve no idea why sometimes one of them hits the headlines and the journalists say it is about to hit Earth. This list will have more stories per month later on as it goes through to 2016, that’s not because more were published, but rather because by the end of 2016 I have quite a few people who share the stories via pm, on my Science20 blog, and in the facebook groups. At present it is running at several stories most weeks, so I think the yearly rate is probably more like a hundred doomsday stories a year that are scary enough that people contact me saying they are worried by them. I’ll also add a list of all the debunking stories for the last year in mainstream media (not counting my own), which will be a much shorter one.
Do also see my Plea to Journalists: Please Debunk Rather than Dramatize "Doomsday" Stories - The Vulnerable Get Suicidal
[IN PROGRESS]
DOOMSDAY NEWS DEBUNKING STORIES
Washington Post, published January 5, Will the mysterious shadow planet Nibiru obliterate Earth in October? No.
Independent, published 24 August 2016 ‘Blood moon’ and ‘rogue planet Nibiru’ are on their way to kill us all, conspiracy theorists wrongly claim
FAKE DOOMSDAY AND DISASTER NEWS IN 2015
May 15th - asteroid 1999 FNS3
Debunked: Just Another Day In Space
May 28th - massive earthquake in California prophesied
Washington post: Despite this man’s predictions, no one’s expecting a massive California quake today
Debunked: Just Another Day In Space
September 24th - asteroid 2012 TT5
Express: Asteroid that could wipe out LONDON on course for hair-raising pass of Earth TODAY
Debunked: The Truth About the “September 2015 Asteroid Impact” and Just Another Day In Space
September 28th, blood moon - means fourth of a series of lunar eclipses
How world ends: not specified, just a sign that it ends
Express: End of the world? What Blood Moon prophets NOW say will happen after 'apocalyptic' eclipse
Mirror: The world could be ending on September 28. And here's why...
Debunked: Just Another Day In Space
December asteroid (not specified which asteroid, no date)
Debunked: The Truth About the “September 2015 Asteroid Impact” (mentioned as another asteroid)
FAKE DOOMSDAY AND DISASTER NEWS IN 2016
Published in October, no date given asteroid 2000 ET70
Though no date is given, some of the stories suggested it was about to hit us in the near future.
Example, International Business Times: Researchers say giant asteroid to hit earth, but Nasa says not in the immediate future
PC Tablet Media: NASA warns of Asteroid threat that could wipe out life on Earth in ...
Daily star: Asteroid could hit Earth wiping out humanity astronomers warn
Debunked: This asteroid was nowhere near Earth in 2016 and due to radar measurements in 2012, has one of the best known orbits of the asteroids, is not going to hit Earth for centuries into the future, Debunking: All going to die as a result of impact of Asteroid 2009ES or 2000 ET70 or [insert name of asteroid here]
September (story ran for most of the month), no exact date given, asteroid 2009ES
Nature World News: End of The World? Massive Killer Asteroid Heading Towards Earth, Experts Warn on Nature World News
Metro magazine: Warning of doomsday asteroid ‘with the power of three billion nuclear bombs
Debunked: It actually did a flyby on 5th September but because one Chinese report about it gave no date they ran the story for weeks afterwards. Debunking: All going to die as a result of impact of Asteroid 2009ES or 2000 ET70 or [insert name of asteroid here]
October 21st claim: Scientists miscalculated orbit of comet Halley and it is due to hit Earth on this date
How world ends: tsunami, earthquakes,
Daily Mail online ran a news story with the title"'Doomsday' comet set to shower Earth tonight" (now changed to Orionid meteor shower set to dazzle Earth up to 20 flashes per hour )
Debunked: Debunking: Halley’s comet is going to hit Earth this week
See also my List of newspapers that run fake or unchecked Doomsday “news”
Both are work in progress.
Summary - another doomsday story about Nibiru which shares many of the misconceptions floating around on the internet. He just repeats them and makes no attempt to check if they are true or not.
He thinks that the gravitational pull of the Earth is so great that an approaching entire solar system will be diverted into a loop around Earth, and he thinks that a planet approaching from the South would only be visible in a plane flying high above South America (for some reason) and lots of other nonsense things.
There is nothing here to be scared about.
DETAILS
This is yet another Nibiru story, publicized in
The journalists who write these stories clearly don't run them past anyone with any credentials in astronomy or science. Cross them off your list of news sites that provide reliable information on astronomy.
It publicizes the book by David Meade: Planet X - The 2017 Arrival I’ll just cover the part of his book that you can read with “look inside” as there is plenty there to debunk already, and the summary of his ideas in Sun magazine
For instance he says that the Vatican operates the Large Binocular Telescope

For debunking see Debunked: The Vatican built a huge telescope, one of the largest in the world, to track Nibiru
He says that Melissa Huffman’s video is of planet X.
For debunking see Debunked: Melissa Huffman did a video of Planet X
He says that the IRAS satellite spotted Nibiru. See Debunked: The IRAS infrared satellite found Nibiru in 1983
He says that Nibiru is only visible in the infrared spectrum. Brown dwarfs are easy to detect in infrared light, even if they are far from any star because they are warm (at least compared to interstellar space) - but that doesn’t make them invisible in ordinary light. That’s like saying that you are invisible because you are warm.
The darkest brown dwarf would be as bright as Betelgeuse at the distance of Jupiter and easily visible in telescopes way beyond Neptune. For details see Debunked: Nibiru is invisible because it is a brown dwarf or made of dark matter
He says it can’t be seen because it is approaching from the south.
“There is no hiding this incoming solar system any longer! It consists of a dark star, smaller than our sun, which hosts seven orbiting bodies, some smaller than our moon and a couple of them larger than our Earth. The dark star is called “Nemesis” or “Planet X.” The blue planet is called the “Blue Kachina.” The planet that is larger than Earth that is orbiting the dark star is called “Nibiru.” It is also known as “The Planet of the Crossing” and the “Destroyer.” There is another object – some refer to it as “Helion.”
“This system is, of course, not aligned with our solar system’s ecliptic, but is coming to us from an oblique angle and toward our South Pole. This makes observations difficult, unless you’re flying at a high altitude over South America with an excellent camera. As it intertwines and approaches it, will come from our south and loop all the way to the extreme north, then come back south again as it exits our orbital path.”
Overwhelming evidence for the 2017 arrival of Planet X / Nibiru
If a comet say, was approaching us from the south, would mean it is easy to see throughout the southern hemisphere. Indeed if it comes from due south, then you can see it all night every night all year round from the southern hemisphere, so long as there is a clear night. So approaching from south or north makes an object easier to see, not harder to see, so long as you live in the appropriate hemisphere and of course there are large numbers of people in the southern hemisphere :)..
This shows an almost total ignorance of astronomy and suggests he has never paid much attention to the real night sky. There isn't any hidden direction that things can come to us from, not the size of a planet never mind a solar system. The Cheliyabinsk meteorite could appear with no warning but that's because it is only 20 meters in diameter.
He also seems to think that Earth’s gravitational pull is so great that a star with several planets orbiting it approaching Earth would be diverted into a loop — the loop around Earth.
His September alignment is a very rough one, that all the planets are so close to the sun that they are impossible or hard to see. Not one that astronomers would pay much attention to. Not even as a "pretty sight" as you can't see it. And they aren't particularly close. The alignment of the Sun with the Moon is of significance because they cause tides and we get our largest tides at new and full Moon every two weeks, the "spring tides". None of the planets are close enough to cause tides and their alignments are of no significance. For details see: Debunked - an alignment of the visible planets behind the sun on 23rd September 2017 is a sign of the end of the world. by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
Debunked: A planet in a 3600 year orbit can hide behind the sun for years on end
And for the reasons why a planet in such an orbit is impossible anyway see my Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]
You can be sure if anyone says something like this in all seriousness that they don't have a decent background in science. They don't understand concepts that you would cover already in any decent high school physics / science course. These are ideas that can be explained even to a very young child with an interest in science indeed,
See also my Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy
This is the video, by Melissa Huffman’
Whatever it is, it can't be a planet or moon. This shows the Moon during a partial eclipse.

As you can see, the Moon itself is completely invisible. It's not lit up by the sun because the sun is behind it. You can see how this works for yourself, if you just use a table lamp, hold an orange between it and yourself, and you will see the dark side of the orange.
The Moon is behind the clouds and behind the scattered blue of the sky. And is completely black against a black sky, if you were to look at it, say, from space. So you don't expect to see it.
If someone thinks they can photograph a planet next to the sun, fully illuminated, and so close that it is the same visible size as the sun, or indeed of any size at all, then you know they haven't yet learnt their "astronomy abc".
It is no shame to have not learnt this stuff. I haven't learnt my "football abc" don't have a clue how the game works. It just shows you have never looked into the topic in any detail, not interested, or somehow missed out on it. Unless you are a journalist - if you are about to publish a news story about Nibiru - do run it past an astronomer first!
EXPLANATION OF MELISSA HUFFMAN'S VIDEO BY MICK WEST
Mick West has looked at her video carefully, recently, and come up with an explanation.
First, he stabilized her video, as you can see here:
If you look at it carefully you can see that her sun sized "planet" is actually moving slightly relative to the clouds. Not nearly as much as the obvious lens flare, but in the same direction. So it can't be a sun mirage but has to be something much closer to the camera.
He then showed that you can get the same effect by putting a sheet of glass in front of a camera at an angle. So it would be easy to hoax a video like this.
This doesn't mean her video is a hoax - it could easily be that it's a result of misthreading a filter on the camera. Or a result of taking the video through a window.
If you engage the threads incorrectly, at an angle, then the glass of the filter will be at an angle to the lens, and then you'll get this effect. He shows that with a cross thread on his own camera which causes a similar double sun, complete with photo of the effect.

Cross threaded filter - easy to do when you put it on in a hurry - causes a similar double sun effect. Photo by Mick West
Just as with her video, when you zoom in on the image, it expands. And is sharp and clear like hers.
It is easy to check something like this if it happens to you. You can do the same test as for lens flare, put your finger in front of the sun and it will disappear - that is unless it is behind a window, in which case, just open the window.
Also if you rotate the camera then it will move if it is a cross threaded filter. It only stays in the same place in the sky if you keep the camera reasonably vertical all the time.
He goes into details here: Explained: Two "Suns" Sanibel Causeway, Florida [Offset Lens Reflection]
Example David Meade: Planet X - The 2017 Arrival - many others also say this. He says that the Vatican operates the Large Binocular Telescope

This is indeed one of the world’s larger optical telescopes - and it had the acronym “LUCIFER ” at one point. It’s also on the same mountain as the Vatican’s small telescope.
This is the Vatican’s telescope

Vatican’s telescope on Mount Graham - see Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope
The Vatican has a long term interest in astronomy - they have operated telescopes for centuries.
With most of these Nibiru conspiracy sites especially, you don’t need much knowledge at all to check for yourself that they don’t check their sources. You can use my Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy.
BULLSHITTERS ARGUING THAT YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM
Within a sentence or two they say some BS thing such as that IRAS discovered Nibiru in 1983, or that Robert Harrington found Nibiru and was murdered to keep it secret etc. Things that you can disprove for yourself easily by just following up the cites in the debunking articles.
But then they will say, or you might feel that
“You have to listen to us otherwise you are biased and only hearing one side of the story”
That is one of the main ways they get you caught up with it, they spout BS and then say you have to listen to their BS because if not you are only hearing one side of the case. They may also say that everyone else is lying or mistaken. So then you go on to read page after page, or watch video after video in an effort to hear both sides of the story.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO LISTEN TO BOTH SIDES OF A BS ARGUMENT
But it’s not true. You don’t have to listen to both sides of every argument. There is no obligation to do that at all. Especially, you are not biased if you click away from bullshit. Once you realize that these people are talking BS, then it is not only okay to click away - that is the natural and logical and rational reaction. Indeed that’s what just about anyone does who hasn’t been caught up in this morass.
There are many reputable lists of fake sites now. Wikipedia has a page which compiles several of them together into a single list. List of fake news websites - Wikipedia. But of course that is not a comprehensive list of all the BS on the web, and we will never have such a comprehensive list. It deals with some (not all) of the worst ones but it is good to develop a bit of a BS detector yourself.
As for learning how to do it yourself, well you can just take a look at some of the stories on a website. If the stories in the topic area that interests you are bullshit, well it’s perfectly rational and reasonable to cross them off your list of news sites that you visit, on that topic, or indeed, at all. There are far too many news sites anyway to visit them all, even all the top ones, every day. There’s no obligation at all to visit any of the fake or bullshit news sites or blogs, not just every day, but ever.
I’d say actually that if the website has a story about Nibiru, or Hercobulus or Wormwood, and it is not a debunking site, that’s plenty of reason to write it off ones list of reliable sources for information on astronomy. That’s not bias, that’s just getting rid of BS.
In that sense some of the more sensationalist papers, would count as sources of fake astronomical news I’d say though not detected by the Chrome BS detector plugin and not in any of the list of BS websites. They can’t be automatically detected as BS because they are reasonably accurate in other news areas. They would never publish a fake obituary, for instance, but what they write on astronomy is full of BS.
Generally, yes, it is good to hear both sides. But people who write BS take advantage of that as a way to get you to listen to them. And you don’t have to read Bullshit.
NO NEED TO READ BOTH SIDES OF EVERY CONSPIRACY THEORY EVEN IF THEY CHECK THEIR SOURCES
Indeed you don’t have to read both sides of a case either even when they do check their sources, and are reasonably sincere. As an example, you don’t have to read both sides of every conspiracy theory you come across.
Most of us probably have friends who tell us we must read both sides of the case for various conspiracy theories. For me, usually it’s about the 9/11 disaster conspiracy theory. But that is just not something I find remotely plausible. My only reason for reading it is to help friends who I feel have been taken in by things that are false. I have done a bit of that indeed, for that reason, and found as I expected that the sources are not reliable. E.g. things like saying they found evidence of sophisticated explosive when it is just nanoparticles such as you’d expect to find in such a high temperature fire anyway that happen also to be found in some explosives, that sort of thing.
So I have read a bit of that particular conspiracy theory - but my only reason for doing it was to humour them really and try to help them. I didn’t need to do it for myself. I read more than enough for my own purposes on that one, long ago.
If you do that - it doesn’t mean that you have decided to become a missionary and to go around converting everyone else to your views on the implausibility of the 9/11 conspiracies or whatever it is. You are not claiming to be an authority on it. You have just read enough on it for your own purposes. You don’t have the need or wish or have any personal interest to read any more on the topic for yourself. And all that’s okay.
If you carefully read both sides of every conspiracy theory that’s out there you can easily spend most of your life just reading conspiracy theories. There are better ways to spend ones life. So, I think even for the ones that seem well sourced, it’s entirely reasonable to say
“I have read enough for myself, and just don’t find it credible. I have better things to do with my life, so I’m not going to bother to follow up that one”.
Or even
“Not another conspiracy theory. I’m tired of them and can’t be bothered reading it.”
Again that’s not being biased. That’s just deciding how you choose to spend your life. There is no obligation even to read enough on the latest conspiracy theory to know what it is.
CHOOSING HOW TO SPEND YOUR LIFE
Even if it is some major political decision, say, about whether the UK should stay in the European Union in the recent BREXIT vote here in the UK, or who you think should be president in the US. Well you don’t have to take part in politics. Democracy depends on enough people voting to be a reasonable gauge of public opinion. But it is not an obligation on anyone to vote on every or any issue.
Voting is voluntary, which means, that if you don’t want to vote or even think about a political issue, or read anything on it, or listen to anyone’s views or evidence or ideas about it. It’s entirely up to you. If anyone says you have to think about it, or have to investigate it, or have to vote, they are way out of line there.
Again it is a matter of choosing how to spend your time. If you think your time is better spent on music, on poetry, on gardening, on having a good time with your friends, well that is what makes us civilized, that people are able to do such things.
NO NEED TO READ NEWS AT ALL
Many people who are scared of Nibiru tell me that they feel they have to compulsively keep reading the stories. But from their descriptions, it doesn’t sound much like OCD. At least I don’t think so, though perhaps some of the techniques of OCD might help, if you have got the ideas obsessively spinning around in your mind and cant’ stop, especially Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
It’s said to be very effective for many people. It involves first noticing your obsessive behaviour and then working with it Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Those techniques might be worth a try if you feel you’ve got in a rut and can’t get out of it. And some people who contact me experience extremes of anxiety, are suicidal, are very upset and they may need and often are getting help from doctors. So of course all of that is necessary for some people.
The main difference is that for I think just about everyone who contacts me about Nibiru so far, they feel that they have an obligation which comes from outside. They think that they have an obligation to society, almost, to read these stories and watch the videos. But you don’t have to do this at all. You are getting scared. Even once you know they are nonsense they still scare you.
So, take a break from it. Stop reading altogether, or at least have a holiday from it. The world will continue spinning as you do so. Indeed, not just fake news, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and bullshit stories. You don’t need to read news at all. Why not have an occasional holiday from reading news altogether?
INDEED - YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO GO ON RETREAT FOR YEARS ON END IF YOU WANT TO - NOT SPEAK TO ANYONE, NOT READ ANYTHING
You don’t have to read news at all. Indeed some people go into retreat for years on end. I’m a Buddhist so I’ll share a story from a Buddhist tradition, but it’s the same in many other traditions, e.g. Christian retreats, that you can go on retreats, shorter ones or longer retreats. Her is a video about it, titled: Cave In The Snow - Tenzin Palmo
Or if you prefer to read it as a story - a shorter account of her life here on the Guardian: 'I spent 12 years in a cave'
They feel they are doing something worthwhile. They won’t vote, won’t listen to political speeches. When they come out of their retreat, there may be a new president or political leader of their party they didn’t vote for, there may be many things that they could have voted for, surveys they could have responded to, emails they could have written in favour of various good causes. There might be famous actors they have never heard of, athletes who have won gold medals, sports teams that have won championships, even wars and other world events they have never heard of. There are many things they could have done with their life instead of going on retreat, including helping others in many different physical ways.
But if you go on retreat - you aren’t saying that you think everyone should go on retreat. You are not undermining democracy. You are not undermining the Olympics or the work of the many people who help others in so many ways, doctors, nurses, charity workers.
You just think that you yourself, at that particular stage of your life, should go on retreat. There can be many reasons for that. Again that’s one of the things that makes us civilized that some people can go on retreat. The people who support them as they do that feel that the retreat is a worthwhile thing to do.
When meditators go on retreat, then generally they are doing it not just for themselves, but for everyone. They are creating space for not just themselves but for everyone, by being in retreat. It’s almost like they are creating an opening out to oxygen and fresh air for all beings by finding space to go on retreat.
Of course it is not for everyone to go on retreat. But perhaps that can give you inspiration to realize that yes, it is okay to have a holiday from reading the news every day, if it makes you scared and anxious, and to find ways to create a bit of space in your life.
Something else, not necessarily sitting in a cave, meditating. Just something else that is not obsessively reading bullshit news about Nibiru. And get a bit of the oxygen and breathing space that meditators get when they go on a long retreat. You don’t need to go on retreat for years. You can find that space and openness in just a moment, whatever it is that brings that space into your life.
Summary: if this object exists, it’s a long way away from the Sun, and does not threaten Earth in any way. It may be a dwarf planet, one of many, at around the same distance from the Sun as Uranus. But it is too soon to know what it is, if it exists at all.
IN DETAIL
The original paper says if the object they found exists, that it is either a small dwarf planet at the distance of Uranus or a larger planet not orbiting our Sun passing by at a distance of a sixteenth of a light year. Either way it is neither anything to do with "Planet 9" nor is it any threat to Earth whatsoever and it is nothing to do with the Nibiru idea as that makes no astronomical sense.
IN MORE DETAIL
This is an observation from the Atacama Large millmeter / submillimeter array,

ALMA-antennas - early photograph after they linked three of them together
First, what the conspiracy theorists say:
And now what the scientists say. This is the original paper. It says
"Unless there are yet unknown, but significant, issues with ALMA observations, we have detected a previously unknown objects in our solar system.
Based on proper motion analysis we find that, if it is gravitationally bound, Gna is currently located at 12−25 AU distance and has a size of ∼220−880 km.
Alternatively it is a much larger, planet-sized, object, gravitationally unbound, and located within ∼4000 AU, or beyond (out to ∼0.3~pc) if it is strongly variable" [1512.02650] The serendipitous discovery of a possible new solar system object with ALMA
In other words, translating it into more ordinary language, the astronomers say that they are not sure what they found, but it may be either of these two possibilities:
Either way it’s nothing to do with the “planet 9” hypothesis. Nor is it any threat to Earth. And it is absolutely nothing to do with the BS Nibiru idea of conspiracy theorists.
For reasons why Nibiru is impossible, and why astronomers just LOL at the idea, see Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]
Summary: The story is true, to some extent - but it’s just helium atoms, like the helium in a child's balloon. It's totally harmless, it's not even ionized and in the tiniest of concentrations of a single atom every few cubic centimeters. If it hits the Earth’s atmosphere, so what? Our atmosphere gets hit by helium from the Sun all the time and has much more helium in it already..
IN DETAIL
This is based on a confused understanding of some genuine scientific research and is being shared on social media at the moment over Christmas. It is not of the slightest risk to Earth. Example video:
And another video on the same theme
So first, some background, The Earth’s upper atmosphere is bombarded by charged ions which cause the aurora - though beautiful to look at, it is of no threat to us.
A solar storm could be of danger to the electricity supply because it has magnetic effects on long range cables tens and hundreds of kilometers long. But the particles themselves, they don’t even get through the atmosphere. It’s equivalent to ten meters thickness of water above us protecting us from ionizing radiation. Cosmic radiation does get through, but our bodies are adapted to this and we can withstand small amounts of radiation like this no problem at all.
But this isn’t a story about solar storms. It’s something much gentler than that.
The solar wind consists mainly of hydrogen nuclei, but some other atoms including helium, and also trace amounts of other elements (C, N, O, Ne, Mg, Si, S, and Fe). See this summary from Stanford university Stanford SOLAR Center -- Ask A Solar Physicist FAQs
So most of the material that reaches us comes from the Sun. Interstellar space consists of a very very thin vacuum and amongst that, tiny trace amounts of atoms. Most of them are charged, and the Sun's solar wind keeps charged interstellar particles (plasma component) away from us,
But in addition to that, there is a flow of neutral helium gas and this penetrates into the heliosphere because it isn’t charged: The Flow of Interstellar Helium in the Solar System
As this neutral helium flows past the sun, the atoms close to the sun get torn apart by solar radiation and become charged, which causes a small cavity.
But most of the gas stays neutral. It is focused by the Sun’s gravity to provide a flow of neutral gas.
So, this is a false colour diagram. It’s not a photograph. The He cone here is still what we’d call a hard vacuum

This shows its composition:

The bottom figure shows that it is quite hot, around 6000 degrees C, and fast flowing, 25 kilometers per second.
It’s density is about one atom every 67 cubic centimeters (0.015±0.03 atoms per cubic centimeter).
By comparison Earth’s atmosphere has 2.5*10^25 molecules per cubic meter (figure from here ), or 2.5 * 10^19 molecules per cubic centimeter, or around 25,000,000,000,000,000 atoms per cubic centimeter.
I think you can see that an atom of helium every 67 cubic centimeters hitting our upper atmosphere, however hot and fast moving it is, is going to do nothing at all to harm us. It’s not even ionized so won’t cause solar storms or magnetic effects. Our Earth’s atmosphere is 0.0005222% Helium already anyway. (Helium concentration in the earth's lower atmosphere) Adding a few atoms of helium to our atmosphere will have no effect at all.
Then for some reason, the videos confuse this with the idea of a galactic alignment. We have an approximate alignment of the Sun with the center of the milky way on the 19th which by coincidence is close to the winter solstice on the 21st.
Back in 2012 an urban myth was propogated that Earth is in danger every winter solstice, due to this alignment.
Christmas originally started as a pagan festival to celebrate the winter solstice but the date drifted. That is enough for them to say that we are endangered by the center of the galaxy on the 25th.
There is not even the remotest connection of this very rough alignment of the galactic center with the Sun on the 19th December and these results about neutral flow of helium. And the galactic center is so far away that we see it as it was in the middle of the last ice age. It can’t threaten us in any way at all, we are just too far away.
They just took bits out of one story, the galactic alignment which was already fiction, changed the date from the 19th to the 21st and then to the 25th - and then took bits out of the other about wisp of helium which doesn’t mention a date that Earth passes through the helium, and smashed them together to make a new story and claimed that this means that this wisp of helium endangers Earth. Balderdash and nonsense.
I debunk the galactic alignment urban myth here: Debunked: We are doomed because Earth will pass through the galactic plane during the winter solstice on December 21st - and the Sun will be aligned with the galactic center on that date
This also is generally how they work with all these stories. Just take bits and pieces from scientific stories, alter or invent dates and times and orbital periods if they don’t fit together - as they usually won’t as after all they are about different things, and then claim that this mish mash of ideas means that Earth is threatened. They can show you diagrams and quotes and so on because they made it like that as a patchwork of bits and pieces from different stories, but they don’t belong together and the whole thing is just nonsense for anyone who knows anything about science or astronomy.
EXAMPLE FROM SPORT TO TRY TO GIVE AN IDEA OF WHAT A JUMBLE THESE STORIES ARE TO A READER WHO HAS A BACKGROUND IN BASIC ASTRONOMY
It’s as if someone claimed to be expert on sport and wrote:
“Tom Usain Bolt from Jamaica won a gold medal and a world record time in the Olympics in London for synchronized diving in 2008”
If I had to debunk that story, then I’d explain:
Tom Daley from the UK, got a bronze medal in the individual performance in Olympics 2012 and another bronze in the synchronized swimming in 2016.
Usain Bolt from Jamaica won a gold medal for 100 and 200 meters in 2008 as well as in 2012 and 2016,
The 2008 Olympics was in Bejing, not London (the London one was in 2012 and the 2016 one was in Rio).
Synchronized diving is not a racing event so the idea of a world record time for synchronized diving doesn't make sense.
Just about every detail in that sentence is wrong, yet break it down to individual words and the individual words are, in a way, correct. Every word in that sentence can be sourced back to news stories about the Olympics. Yet, if someone said that, sentence in all seriousness and then repeated it over and over you would never rely on them as a source on the subject of sport.
So, it’s a jumble together of things that are connected to the Olympics, so in that sense there is a kind of a truth in it - but the sentence as a whole is completely false and says many false things.
That’s how they work. And when I debunk these stories I say things that for people who know a bit about astronomy are as obvious as the things I just said about the Olympics are for people who know a little bit about sport.
So now imagine you debunk a sports story like that and then - well some of the people you talk to say “Oh right, I get it now” but every now and again you come across someone who says”Nonsense, you are lying and are paid by the government to cover up the truth which is that Tom Usain Bolt from Jamaica won a gold medal and a world record time in the Olympics in London for synchronized diving in 2008″
That’s what it is like debunking many of these doomsday stories, such as the ones about Nibiru. That's also why the stories are never covered in astronomy articles or journals, just as the sentence about sport which I used as an example would never be covered in a sports magazine, even if for some reason it went viral and was shared by thousands of people.
This is an example story you might find from 2012 which could get you concerned about this object: Huge asteroid could hit Earth in 2020. It did briefly have a 0.033% risk of hitting Earth some time from 2026 onwards (never had a chance of hitting in 2020). See the old archived version of its table here: 2012 DA14 Impact Risk (old version of the page) That made it 99.967% certain it would miss. It was viewed only for a short time on February 23, 2012, not long enough to figure out an exact orbit before it was lost from view.
It was predicted to do a flyby of Earth in 2013 at a distance of 27,743 km so lower than the geostationary orbit in 2013, the closest any asteroid has been to date, Only a little over four Earth radii away.

That flyby gave scientists the opportunity to make very precise measurements of its orbit which showed it will not hit Earth through to 2200 (usual time period over which they do these predictions).
They removed it from the Sentry risk table on 16 February 2013 so already knew from the pre-flyby observations that it was not a risk, before the flyby.
367943 Duende (2012 DA) - Wikipedia
So, 2012 DA is noted for the closest flyby of an asteroid that missed Earth to date. It is also notable because by a remarkable coincidence (but coincidences do happen of course), it did its flyby on the 15 February 2013 just 16 hours after the Chelyabinsk meteorite impact. It was only a little larger, 30 meters in diameter compared to the 20 meters of Chelyabinsk, yet as you see, we knew about it already nearly a year before the impact.
If the Chelyabinsk asteroid had been a bit larger we’d have spotted it months earlier as for 2012 DA. and if it had approached in any direction except from the sun we’d have spotted it days or maybe a week or so before.
Anyway 2012 DA is of absolutely no danger to Earth in 2020 or at any other time through to 2200. It is a small asteroid and the chances are high that if it eventually does hit Earth that it will land in the sea or a desert area and be harmless anyway. It would also be easy to deflect if we ever need to do it especially with the decades of warning we would have. No need to have any concerns about this one.
See also
You may also be interested in my: “DOOMSDAY DEBUNKED” book
And list of all the posts on this blog (sometimes leaves out the most recent ones until I add them):
First, this is the article I’m commenting on. Earth woefully unprepared for surprise comet or asteroid, Nasa scientist warns. It’s a comment by Dr Joseph Nuth who warns:
“But on the other hand they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially. You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.”

Photograph of comet Siding Spring by Hubble - right hand image is more processed. This comet did a close flyby of Mars and at one point was predicted to have a tiny chance of hitting Mars. In the end it missed Mars by more than a quarter of the distance from Earth to the Moon
If you read the rest of the article, it’s a worthy goal, to prepare us for asteroid impacts of all sizes from the small Chelyabinsk one up to really large 10 km ones.
There are a number of things potentially confusing about this statement if you read it as a non scientist.
So, in more detail:
NOT DUE A MASS EXTINCTION AND SCALE OF DIAGRAM IS MILLIONS OF YEARS
So - that is a scientist speaking as a scientist. But of course the internet picks it up as “we are due” and omits the qualification “but it’s a random course at that point”.
To say that we are “due” a mass extinction is a bit like saying that after you throw nine heads, you are due to throw a tail. Not true. The chance that the next coin toss is a tail is 50/50 for a fair coin no matter how many heads you throw.
So, since it is random, then an extinction that happens every 60 million years could happen tomorrow or it could be 60 million years or 120 million years before it happens. And on average we would expect to wait 60 million years for the next such mass extinction even if the last one happened hundreds of millions of years ago. It’s just as for the coin toss. Same for an extinction event of a size that happens every 100 million years. If you look at the diagram the big five are irregularly spaced.
Some scientists have tried to discern a periodicity in the extinctions of 27 million years. If they are right then we are due the next extinction about 15 million years from now. But that is very controversial and if true, it wouldn’t cover all mass extinctions.
We could get a mass extinction in the near future. But not likely in the next century.
70% OF SPECIES EXTINCT - 0% RISK FOR HUMANS EXTINCT
If you look at some of the past extinction events, you might think that humans could go extinct very easily. The worst of all of those was the Permian–Triassic extinction event during which 96% of marine species and 70% of land species went extinct according to one estimate.

This graph shows some of the major extinctions - note that some of the extinctions spread over several tens of millions of years. This probably doesn’t mean that the extinction took tens of millions of years as this is a graph of the fossil species and due to the Signor–Lipps effect - that a species may seem to go extinct in the fossil record before it actually is extinct because typically you get only a few specimens scattered over time so can easily miss the exact moment of extinction. The extinction that ends the Permian era is thought to have lead to extinction of 96% of all marine species. and 70% of land species.
So based on those figures you might well think that there is a 70% chance that humans would go extinct as a result of whatever causes those extinctions.
However, even after the extinction of the dinosaurs, birds, dawn sequoia, river turtles, small mammals and many other plants and creatures survived. Many species would go extinct after a gamma ray burst or a large asteroid impact, but humans are great survivors. We were at risk in the past before we developed tools and clothing. But with clothes, tools, boats, etc, we are an extremely adaptable species, able to survive anywhere from the Kalahari desert to the Arctic, with only stone age technology. We had already colonized most of the world by the end of the neolithic period.

Overview of Pre-modern human migration - there is debate and controversy about the details, but generally agreed that humans were already present world-wide by the end of the neolithic period (which ends around 2000 BC), or shortly after.
So, as long as we retain at least stone age technology, there isn't much that could make us extinct. Even if we have to go back to beachcombing and surviving on shellfish, which was a staple of early human diet in cold places such as Canada and Scotland where I live, one way or another some humans would survive.

Conchero al sur de Puerto Desead - a shell midden in Argentina. For long periods of time ancient humans survived on shellfish, for so long that they built up these huge shell middens in many parts of the world. See Shell Midden
We can eat shellfish, insects, fish, nuts, fruit, roots, cereals, birds, animals. So long as any of those survive the extinction event, anywhere in the world and so long as humans retain at least stone age level of understanding of technology - ability to make clothes and simple tools and to make boats to cross rivers and seas to find new sources of food - then there would be many survivors and we would not go extinct, even if more than 90% of species went extinct.
Without any technology, turtles, crocodiles, alligators, small mammals, flying dinosaurs (the birds), dawn redwood trees, pine trees, many lifeforms survived the dinosaur extinction impact. And humans with the barest minimum of our technology are able to survive anywhere from the Arctic to the hottest of deserts, or in tropical rainforests. We would survive, some of us, a giant impact like that.
River turtle, Boremys basking on a Triceratops dinosaur skull, Credit: Brian T. Roach, Yale Peabody Museum
How Tough Turtles Survived Dino-Killing MeteorIt did become extinct eventually, but not through asteroid impacts. Probably because it was unable to retract its neck and succumbed to predators.
Homo Sapiens is listed in the IUCN Red list of threatened species - as one of the species of least concern
"Listed as Least Concern as the species is very widely distributed, adaptable, currently increasing, and there are no major threats resulting in an overall population decline."
RISKS FROM AN ASTEROID
We have already found all the 10 km asteroids that do regular flybys of Earth. We have found 90% of the 1 km asteroids. This makes it very unlikely that we are hit by either a 1 km or 10 km object in the next century.
We could be hit by a comet. But they are rare. He mentions the comet Siding Spring which did a flyby of Mars. But it’s important to note that it actually missed Mars by and it was only It was only 400 - 700 meters in diameter, so of a size that would have only local effects if it hit Earth, probably not quite large enough for a tsunami depending on whether it hit into deep or shallow seas and how much it breaks up in the atmosphere - and was discovered 22 months before the flyby, so more than a year and a half. A larger comet would be discovered years before the flyby.
This shows the trajectory of Siding Spring:

It actually missed Mars at a distance of 140,000 km. That’s 22 times the radius of Earth and 36% of the distance to the Moon. Earth is often “buzzed” by asteroids at that distance.
It’s orbit was uncertain when first discovered, as is usual, giving a tiny chance of hitting Mars. But was eventually shown to miss. So if a comet happened to be in a similar orbit but targeting Earth instead of Mars that would be what we’d expect, that it would have a tiny chance of hitting Earth but a few months after discovery or maybe sooner, we’d know for sure that it would miss. It would be exceedingly unlikely for such a comet to hit.
Probably only one impact in 100 is by comets. So it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to focus on defense from comets first. We can deal with 99% of the threat by looking at Near Earth Asteroids and they are also easiest to deflect, as if we can find them decades in advance, just the gentlest of nudges will deflect them away, just microns per second of delta v.
Now I totally agree that we need to put more work into searching for asteroids and detecting them and preparing to deflect them. And eventually also good to speed up detection of comets too, which will happen anyway as a side effect of the asteroids search.
As for having a rocket on standby to deflect a comet, well I think you need to bear in mind that though it could be needed right away, it might also not be used for the several thousand years. So - is that our priority? And as for deflecting asteroids - there are so many different ways to do it and what we use would depend on the exact scenario. For instance for some asteroids, it might be sufficient to “paint” the asteroid white with a white dust. So we would need a spacecraft able to dust it uniformly with white dust to deflect it using the effect. Here is a short video of professor Dave Hyland talking about the idea:
And article
Asteroids No Match For Paint Gun, Says Prof | Texas A&M Today
(or How to Deflect Killer Asteroids With Spray Paint | WIRED)
Its due to the Yarkovsky effect. When the sun heats up a rotating object, then the rotation carries it around some distance before the thermal photons are emitted as heat. The amount of the effect depends on how rapidly the object rotates, but also on how light or dark it is Since most asteroids are very dark, the obvious way to change the amount of this effect is to paint it white. So long as you discover it long in advance, then this may be enough to shift its orbit to miss the Earth (orbital predictions have to take account of the Yarkovsky effect).
I think that with unlimited funding we would devise half a dozen ways of deflecting asteroids, test them, and have them in a “ready to launch” state ready to deflect any conceivable asteroid, even if they may have to wait ten thousand years before we need some of the solutions.
However in the situation as it is now, with limited funding then I think it makes much more sense to focus our efforts on detection.
HOW TO FIND HAZARDOUS ASTEROIDS SWIFTLY
There are new developments in asteroid tracking which may help here. Especially, use of synthetic tracking. The idea is explained in techy detail in this paper. Finding Very Small Near-Earth Asteroids using Synthetic Tracking. For an easier to read summary of it, see “Synthetic Tracking” Set to Revolutionise Near-Earth Asteroid Discovery
The idea is that instead of doing a 30 second exposure, you do many shorter 2 second exposures. With conventional CCD's that adds to the read noise so you get more errors but there are new CCD's developed for medical imaging that permit fast accurate reading, called Scientific CMOS detectors. The Andor Zyla is an example here.

Andor Zyla 5.5 | sCMOS Camera medical imaging camera capable of fast read out with low read error
You can then use this to simulate tracking the asteroid with the camera, which makes the asteroid far brighter in the images.

This image shows a the result of stacking many photographs of asteroid 2009BL with camera set to follow the stars on the left - notice how the asteroid is shown as a streak, and rather faint. On the right, the same photos are stacked to follow the asteroid which then shows as a much brighter spot, and the stars are streaked and fainter.
Image from: DETECTION OF A FAINT FAST-MOVING NEAR-EARTH ASTEROID USING THE SYNTHETIC TRACKING TECHNIQUE
When the asteroid is small and traveling faster across the field of view, the trail can be so faint it can’t be distinguished from background noise when the camera follows the stars. If you know its velocity you can make it much brighter by following the asteroid. But what can you do if you haven’t detected it yet and don’t know which way it is moving? The idea of synthetic tracking is that you take lots of short exposure photos and just try stacking them in many different ways until you find the right velocity and an asteroid pops into vie win the photo. This is time consuming but modern graphics cards permit fast parallel processing which makes synthetic tracking feasible.
This approach can make it easier to spot fainter asteroids. It might mean for instance that you can spot an asteroid ten times further away than before. That means a thousand times the volume of space covered. So this technique can lead to a huge increase in the detection of asteroids.
They found that fewer than eight of these cubesats, fitted with 15 centimeter synthetic tracking telescopes could find more than 70% of NEO's larger than 45 meters in diameter in less than six years. The total cost would be $50 million so a tenth of the cost of Sentinel.
With larger 30 cm telescopes they could find 95% of the NEOs in the same time period. For details see their 2016 Annual Progress Report
These are the asteroids that are most hazardous for us. And $50 million is not a lot. Any developed country could find that out of loose change from its defense budget and it would retire most of the risk from the larger asteroids within six years.
It would still leave the risk of comets, but those are not the priority because they are so rare. If we had loads of funding it would make sense to fund a rocket ready to launch if necessary, even if it is quite possible it won’t be used for 1000 years. That’s the ideal situation, to do both. But with limited funding, detection is surely the priority.
See also my Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them
I’ve now written up this article, somewhat expanded, as: Why Resilient Humans Would Survive Giant Asteroid Impact - Even With Over 90% Of Species Extinct
2002 NT7 originally had a risk of 1 in 250,000 of hitting Earth in 2019 on 1st February 2002. This meant it was almost certain to miss, 99.9996% certain to miss. So it was no surprise that a little while later when they refined the orbit, that they found it would miss in 2019. There was a chance of it hitting in 2060 for a while but that was ruled out too. All that happened rapidly in 2002. It was removed from the risk table on the 1st August 2002.
This does not mean that there was any cover up going on as the conspriacy sites claim. It is just the normal thing. If an asteroid has a very low chance of hitting Earth, like 1 in 250,000 then you expect that it will be proven to miss as you refine the observations. That's what is going to happen in 99.9996% of the cases of an orbit like that. It was notable as the first orbit to reach a positive rating in the Palermo scale. More about it here: 2002 NT7.
This is the orbit of 2002 NT7 discovered 1st February 2002. It was briefly categorized as having a 1 in 250,000 chance of hitting Earth on 1st February 2019. That made it 99.9996% certain it would miss. As they say in the initial announcement “By far the most likely scenario is that, with additional data, the possibility of an Earth impact will be eliminated.”, and indeed further calculations showed it would miss. There was still a small chance of it hitting in 2060 until 1st August 2002 when they proved that it was no hazard to Earth at all in the near future through to 2200. You can see a list of all its flybys predicted through to 2200 here.
To check any of these stories just go to the Current Impacts Risk Table and if the first entry is white or blue then that means there is no risk and the story is either a hoax or a misunderstanding because the table is sorted with the entry of most risk at the top. If the first entry is yellow, orange or red, just head over to any major astronomy news site to find out more, as it is sure to be top news there. Red is the only level that means they are sure it will impact. So far none has ever gone higher than yellow. We have had a couple of tiny asteroids that were predicted to impact a short while before they actually hit but they were so small they would have been classified as blue in that table, too small to be a significant hazard. One landed in the middle of a desert in North Africa and one in the sea to the west of India.
This is another doomsday fake story, from the UK newspaper, the Express. There is no truth in it at all. It’s easy to check a story like this in detail. Just go to the Current Impact Risks table. If the top entry is blue or white, as is the usual situation, then there are no current predicted future impacts on Earth, so the story is false. If the top entry is yellow, orange or red, well go to any reputable site for astronomical news and it will be a top story so then you can read all about it there. Only red means a predicted impact, the other colours mean there is a chance of an impact.
Details
This is actually a story from 2014 but is naturally gaining more attention as 2017 approaches: SHOCK ASTEROID WARNING: Planet earth faces 100 YEARS of killer strikes starting in 2017 I have just replied in a comment there, here is my comment:
We have already found all the Near Earth Asteroids of 10 km or larger. We have found 90% of the ones of 1 km or larger and are finding them at one per month. Will be nearly finished that survey by the late 2020s. There is a tiny chance of a larger comet from the outer solar system, from the Kuiper belt or the more distant Oort cloud. This belt is not newly discovered but has been known about since the 1980s (building on earlier hypotheses).
Here is a video about the observation of the first verified Kuiper belt object - this which must be what they mean by a “second asteroid belt” though actually it is made up mainly of comets, not asteroids.
But for a 10 km diameter comet to approach Earth from so far afield would be extremely unlikely. We get a 10 km impact every 100 million years on average, and last one was 66 million years ago. Only one impact in a hundred is probably from comets so that makes the chance of such an impact this century, now all the NEAs are found and not headed our way, a negligible 1 in 100 million - that's the risk of it happening at all any time this century. We'd also see such a comet years before it got here in the very remote chance of it happening.
As for a 100 km diameter comet, forget it. The entire inner solar system from Mars inwards hasn't been hit by such a comet for well over 3 billion years from the cratering record of Mercury the Moon, Mars ,and what we have of the records of Earth and Venus. The leading explanation for this is that Jupiter protects us against the largest comets by breaking them up, or they just hit Jupiter, or ejected from solar system or hit the Sun. It seems to do a very effective job of this. Not so effective for smaller ones though it does take many "hits for the team" of smaller asteroids too, as the largest target there is in the solar system.
And there certainly has been no announcement predicting 400 impacts in the next century. I can't imagine where that comes from. It is easy to check these stories. Just go to the JPL Sentry Risk Table and you see the current impact risks ordered with the most risky at top. If the topmost entry on that page is white or blue, as it is now, and as is usually the case, then there are no predicted impact risks at all. So never mind not 400, there aren't any at present.
The risk table is here: Current Impact Risks
MORE ABOUT THE KUIPER BELT
This is a very distant belt of objects. First it was just a theory to explain the distribution of comets, but eventually we started to find objects in them. Now we know a lot of Kuiper Belt objects and we know for sure it exists. Very remote though, well beyond Neptune. However it is a source for comets that sometimes come into the inner solar system. We now know of many objects in it
Here is a very short animation of the newly found objects in the Kuiper belt

This plot shows the Kuiper belt objects in blue. The giant gas giants are shown in red.
The N stands for Neptune. Mars, Earth and Venus are all closer to the sun than Jupiter which is labeled J.
The other colours here label various kinds of objects. For details see Kuiper belt plot objects of outer solar system
Objects can hit Earth from the distant Kuiper belt. But the chance of this happening is almost vanishingly small for a 10 km comet - and no chance at all for a 100 km comet as that hasn’t happened in over three billion years. Also we’d see them coming years in advance.
I find the youtube layout rather unintuitive. The main problem is that it is not consistent. When you click on something, often the whole layout of the page changes, and then you hunt around trying to find where to go next. Also its’ often not easy to find out how to get back to where you were before.
As an example recently I had an issue of a new layout with a large video but no comments available on any of the videos. I found the solution for me was to click on a walking person icon at the bottom right of the page which took me back to the classic interface. But then there were no links on the page to get you to the newer interface which you just came from. You’d expect an icon at bottom right to go back again, as that is how you got there, but no, there is nothing there, or anywhere on the page as far as I could see. Also the message you got when you clicked on the icon wasn’t very clear and the main thing you see is a big screen of radio buttons asking you why you chose to go back to the classic interface which most will dismiss. I have no idea even after web searches, how to get back to the new layout should I decide I want it for some reason.
That’s just one example of many.
Important features are often hidden away not just in menus but three clicks away from where you started. As an example, if you own a youtube channel and have many videos in it, you may want to do a search of your own channel. So how many clicks does that take? You have to click on the three bars icon at top left,

then click on My channel which changes the entire layout of the page

Then click Video Manager which changes the layout again (and the top menu disappears replaced by a menu on the left with Videos highlighted)

Then you can search. So it is three clicks away from most pages. But more than that, the layout is a mess, bewildering, constantly changing as you navigate.
It’s a big contrast from Facebook or Quora. Not sure why - why can’t Youtube get a good interface sorted out?
I mean - I am a software developer and I know how hard it is from my own programming. I spend ages trying to get a good interface and still people have issues and I find new things to fix. But you’d have thought Youtube could afford the best interface designers there are. Not so much the programming, just the design. So why isn’t theirs so good? It’s definitely a knack to make a good interface and requires a lot of flair and clever ideas. I’m not knocking them for the interface so much as wondering why it is only adequate, good enough, some nice touches but sometimes confusing? Why it is not brilliant?
This is a comment I just added to the Four Noble Truths talk page. The article propagates several common misunderstandings about Buddhism so you might be interested to read about what is wrong with it. It was fine until a couple of years ago when a new editor came along and rewrote it. In an attempt to make it easier for newbies to read who come to the article with no background in Buddhism, he composed his own four statements to replace the four truths from the sutras. These expresses his own understanding which is based on ideas from the Vedas and is not Buddhist, not in accord with the sutras, as you’ll find out.
The Four Noble Truths form the central teaching of Buddhism, the teaching that according to the sutras Buddha gave soon after he reached enlightenment.
Background - How the Four Noble Truths came to be stated incorrectly in this article
The previous lede stated the truths correctly as the truths of suffering (or more generally unsatisfactoriness), origin, cessation and path.[1]. This is how most books, articles and online WP:RS sources introduce them, followed by a detailed exposition of each truth in turn [2][3][4][5][6][7][8] (For many more cites to WP:RS see the old lede's footnote b). Sometimes they are introduced one at a time as section or chapter headings, however it is still the same approach: short form first then exposition. It is hard to find a source that does it in any other way. This is, after all, how Buddha himself taught them according to the Pali canon.
One of the most distinctive features of Buddhism is that Buddha taught that cessation is something you can realize in this very lifetime. This can be challenging for readers who come to it with the background of another religion. Indeed, though we can all directly realize what suffering and dissatisfaction is from our own experience, according to the Pali Canon, only one of Buddha's first disciples, venerable Kondañña, directly realized the truth of what he was saying about cessation right away when he first taught them[9]. Several readers posted to the talk page complaining that they didn't understand the four truths, not surprisingly, and that is why the lede got rewritten.
Unfortunately, this rewrite turned them into statements describing a way of escape from "this mundane world" at death. This may indeed make them more familiar to you, and so easier to understand, if you are used to other religions. However, that doesn't make them more correct.
1. According to the Pali Canon Buddha realized cessation as a young man of 35
As it is described in the Pali Canon, Buddha spoke to his companions after he realized enlightenment and he told them that he had already realized cessation of dukkha, or suffering and unsatisfactoriness. This was as a young man, aged 35. By this he meant cessation of dukkha in all its forms, not just the cessation of the dukkha of birth. Although he went on to grow old, get sick, and die, like anyone else, he had already reached cessation of the dukkha of old age, sickness and death as a young man.
Professor Walpola Rahula
Professor Walpola Rahula's book "What the Buddha Taught" is widely regarded as one of the best expositions of the central teachings in the Pali canon by both Eastern and Western scholars alike. He was a Pali expert thoroughly familiar with the canon of the Therevadhan sutras. He put it like this in his exposition of the Third Noble Truth[9]:
"It is incorrect to think that Nirvana is the natural result of the extinction of craving. Nirvana is not the result of anything. If it would be a result, then it would be an effect produced by a cause. It would be sankhata ‘produced’ and ‘conditioned’. Nirvana is neither cause nor effect. It is beyond cause and effect. Truth is not a result nor an effect. It is not produced like a mystic, spiritual, mental state, such as dhyana or samadhi. TRUTH IS. NIRVANA IS. The only thing you can do is to see it, to realize it. There is a path leading to the realization of Nirvana. But Nirvana is not the result of this path.You may get to the mountain along a path, but the mountain is not the result, not an effect of the path. You may see a light, but the light is not the result of your eyesight.
...
In almost all religions the summum bonum can be attained only after death. But Nirvana can be realized in this very life; it is not necessary to wait till you die to ‘attain’ it."
The four truths are understood in this way in all the main sutra traditions, Zen [10], Tibetan [11], Therevadhan [12], etc.
Buddha did not have to die to reach enlightenmentedit
Far from the Buddha having to die to reach enlightenment, the Pali Canon also states in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta that Buddha didn't have to enter paranirvana either when he did. Ananda could have asked him to remain to the end of this world period, but he didn't get the hint. [13]
"Whosoever, Ananda, has developed, practiced, employed, strengthened, maintained, scrutinized, and brought to perfection the four constituents of psychic power could, if he so desired, remain throughout a world-period or until the end of it. The Tathagata, Ananda, has done so. Therefore the Tathagata could, if he so desired, remain throughout a world-period or until the end of it."
Although the historical Buddha entered paranirvana when he died, in the Tibetan traditions at least they also have the idea that other Buddhas can "emanate" after they die and take birth as young babies again over and over [14]
No use of the word "rebirth" in the Wheel Turning Sutra which presents the Four Noble Truths
It's also worth noting that the wheel turning sutra[15] does not include the word "rebirth" in any form. Instead the teachings are based around dukkha. This is makes them far more accessible, as all that is required of the practitioner is to recognize the truth of suffering or unsatisfactoriness, which is a truth easy of access to anyone. After that, all that is needed to follow the path is an open mind, and a dedication to seeing the truth and to recognize clearly what you know and what you don't know.
That open mind also applies to what happens when you die. If the truths were based around an aim to end rebirth, then you would need to affirm a belief first, such as "I believe in rebirth", before you could start on the path. This would close your mind to other possibilities. It would be a way of declaring that you are have decided in advance that any other ideas about what happens when you die are wrong. But Buddhists don't have any such creed, even in the Tibetan traditions, which have the strongest emphasis of any on the process of rebirth, including recognition of reborn Tulkus. Instead, you commit to an open mind when you become a Buddhist. See for instance Trungpa Rinpoche's exposition of requirements for taking refuge[16], in the ceremony during which one affirms that one has chosen to follow the Buddhist path.
I know that there is a movement amongst some Westerners to try to identify what they take to be the original authentic teachings and to reinterpret the sutras. In the previous discussion then the other editors provided cites which they claimed presented the view that when Buddha became enlightened, all that happened is that he got an intimation that after death he would never be reborn again. But they were cites to densely argued complex technical discussions in the academic literature, and I was not convinced that these discussions were interpreted correctly.
Whether or not any WP:RS present such views, this is certainly not how the four truths are presented by most Buddhist scholars or teachers, nor is it how Buddhist practitioners understand them, and nor is it how they are presented in the original wheel turning sutra in the Pali canon.
2. Punarmrtyu translated as "redeath" doesn't seem to be a Buddhist termedit
None of the editors in the previous discussion found a Buddhist sutra cite for this word (mentioned in note 1in the current version). It is used in Hindu and pre Buddhist texts but these texts are not recognized as sutras by Buddhists.
Agatigati is a Buddhist term - but can be translated in a less WP:TECHNICAL way as "rebirth and death"
Instead they gave cites to the Pali phrase agatigati, where agati means coming and gati means going. This is translated as
Most Buddhist readers will not be familiar with the term "redeath". If I can take myself as an example reader, I have listened to teachers from many traditions including Therevadhan, Korean Zen and three branches of Tibetan Buddhism (Nyingmapa, Gelugpa and Kagyupa), over a period of 30 years. I have never heard any of them use it. Nor have I ever heard any fellow Buddhists use the word. The word "rebirth" is familiar to most but not the word "redeath". Another Buddhist who responded to the RfC was also not familiar with the term. Perhaps it is only familiar to those who have read many Western scholarly papers on the topic. If one needs a translation of agatigati, what is wrong with "rebirth and death" which avoids need for this technical term at all? The article currently has ten uses of the word "redeath". All of those could be replaced by "death" with no loss of meaning.
As evidence that "redeath" is a rare word in English, and therefore WP:TECHNICAL, it's not found in these online dictionaries:
Punarmrtyu is cited as a pre-Buddhist concept - Buddha made a clean break with the past in the Kalama sutta
In the Pali Canon, in the Kalama sutta, Buddha made a clean break with the past, saying that scriptures and other sources such as the Vedas must not be followed just because they are scriptures but must be tested by "the results it yields when put into practice; and — to guard against the possibility of any bias or limitations in one's understanding of those results — they must further be checked against the experience of people who are wise." (quoting the translator's note).
This makes it different from the situation of Christianity or Islam which both treat the Old Testament as sacred. For Buddhists, the Vedas are not sacred in this sense. So, should the article use the the word Punarmrtyu in note 1? That note gives it as an internal link to Saṃsāra#Punarmrityu:_redeath which is pre-Buddhist. Wikipedia describes it as
"Redeath, in the Vedic theosophical speculations, reflected the end of "blissful years spent in svarga or heaven", and it was followed by rebirth back in the phenomenal world"
In more detail it is described here "Buddhist rituals of Death and Rebirth":
"Alternating between this and the other world constitutes the older stratum of the concept of rebirth. Only now the return to this world is not desired any more, but endured as an intermediate state between heavenly existences... When the alternating between the here and there came to be regarded as unsatisfactory, a new goal finds its expression in the Upanishads: the final escape from the suffering of redeath."
This is a historical section called "Some historical roots : time of death". It is not describing Buddhist ideas at this point. The four statements in the new lede seem to be based on this idea.
Buddhists don't have this idea of heaven as a state between death and rebirth. The sutras do describe states of bliss that one can enter, in this life or future lives, or rather many such, each more refined than the last. Some are described with "luminous bodies"[20], and some as just pure mind. But all this is a part of the cycle of rebirth. These blissful realms, are treated as another rebirth of the many possible in the cycle of Samsara. They are not thought of as separate from Samsara.
The four statements in the new lede seem closely modeled on this idea of Punarmrtyu
The new lede describes a way of escaping Samsara through somehow "stopping karma" so that you no longer have to take rebirth back into this "mundane world". This would seem to have close parallels with this non Buddhist idea of Punarmrtyu or stopping "redeath from heaven":
These four statements do not occur in this form in any Buddhist source. Though that section is heavily cited to the Buddhist literature, it is a WP:SYNTHESIS made up of ideas from many Buddhist sources combined together to make a whole that is no longer Buddhist. Compare the four truths as they were stated in the previous lede:
In Therevadhan teachings death is followed in the next thought-moment by the start of the next rebirth
Therevadhans don't have the idea of an intermediate state between death and the next rebirth at all. Instead, they say that the next thought-moment after your death is the first thought-moment of your new rebirth. Here is professor Walpola Rahula describing this Therevadhan view on death and rebirth in "THE SECOND NOBLE TRUTH: SAMUDAYA: THE ARISING OF DUKKHA".
"The difference between death and birth is only a thought-moment: the last thought-moment in this life conditions the first thought-moment in the so-called next life, which, in fact, is the continuity of the same series. During this life itself, too, one thought-moment conditions the next thought-moment. So from the Buddhist point of view, the question of life after death is not a great mystery, and a Buddhist is never worried about this problem."
The Tibetan intermediate state between death and rebirth is not heaven
Some Buddhists do think in terms of an intermediate state between death and the next rebirth, for instance in the Tibetan teachings. However, it is not described as a heavenly state. Rather, it is described for most beings as like being overwhelmed by exceedingly bright lights and loud noises like the loudest thunder, which most beings run away from, terrified, at that point and so take rebirth again. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead (translation by Chogyam Trungpa with Francesca Fremantle)
"Oh child of noble family, when your body and mind separate, the dharata will appear, pure and clear, yet hard to discern, luminuous and brilliant with terrifying brightness, shimmering like a mirage on a plain in spring. Do not be afraid of it, do not be bewildered. This is the natural radiance of your own dharmata, therefore recognize it.
"A great roar of thunder will come from the light, the natural sound of dharmata, like a thousand thunderclaps simultaneously. This is the natural sound of your own dharmata, so do not be afraid or bewildered...
"Oh child of noble family, if you do not recognize them in this way as your own projections, whatever meditation practice you have done during your life, if you have not met with this teaching, the coloured lights will frighten you, the sounds will bewilder you and the rays of light will terrify you. If you do not understand this essential point of the teaching you will not recognize the sounds, lights and rays, and so you will wander in samsara"
This could hardly be further from the pre-Buddhist Vedic idea of alternating between this life and a heavenly state with the aim of avoiding redeath in order to remain in the heavenly state.
In summary - not a Buddhist idea
Tibetans do have the idea of a Bardo state between death and rebirth, but the aim is not at all to remain within Bardo which is seen as terrifying and bewildering for most beings, and not a heavenly state at all. Rather the idea in the Tibetan Book of the Dead is to find a way to awaken from the Bardo, to awaken to those bright lights and loud sounds, or failing that, to find your way to a fortunate rebirth where you may be able to awaken as Buddha did during that lifetime.
Therevadhans don't have the idea of an intermediate state between death and rebirth. For them your last moment of death is followed immediately by the first moment of the process of rebirth in another lifetime. So, the idea behind Punamrtyu of avoiding "redeath" from an intermediate state between death and rebirth can't even be stated in a Therevadhan context.
The note doesn't make it clear that this is a non Buddhist idea. I think this is another reason to avoid the use of the technical word "redeath" in the article in translations of Agatigati.
Scholars can be expected to understand "rebirth and redeath" in a Buddhist context as meaning repeated ordinary deaths, with each "redeath" leading to the start of the next rebirth in the next moment of thought (in the Pali canon at least). However, a non scholar reader could easily confuse this with the non Buddhist idea of death leading to heaven and "redeath" leading from heaven back to Samsara. This confusion seems especially likely to happen since the footnote links to a passage in wikipedia describing "redeath" in the non Buddhist sense.
3. Authenticity of the Buddhist teachings
This article presents the view according to which the Four Noble Truths are a later development and were not taught by the historical Buddha. This is a view at one end of a continuum. At the other end of the continuum is the view of Prayudh Payutto and several other scholars according to which the teachings of the Pali canon for the most part consist of the words recorded at the time of the Great Council after Buddha died. The only exceptions are some obviously later texts. This is not a view based on faith but rather on scholarship.
In the Pali Canon it's said that after the death of Vardhamana, or as Buddhists refer to him, Nirgrantha, leader of the Jains, Buddha's followers noticed that his followers fell into discussion and dispute about what his teachings were. They didn't want that to happen to Buddha's teachings. At the time Northern India didn't have writing. However, as scholars generally agree, the Brahmins were able to preserve the Vedas word for word through memorization, and many of Buddha's disciples were Brahmins trained to do this. So, the sutras say, they committed his teachings to memory while he was still alive. After he died, then they held a great council during which they agreed on the material in the Pali Canon and recited each sutra in unison.
With this internal evidence from within the sutras themselves, it is at least possible that what we have preserved are the teachings as memorized in the first great council, pretty much word for word. After all, it is generally agreed that the Brahmins achieved that with the Vedas. In support of this view they present these main reasons:
For the details of this view, see
Many scholars hold intermediate views. For example:
Peter Harvey, "Introduction to Buddhism: teachings, history and practices", says
"While parts of the Pali Canon clearly originated after the time of the Buddha, much must derive from his teaching."
Richard Gombrich says in an interview [21]
"There are certain scholars who do go down that road and say that we can't really know what the Buddha meant. That is quite fashionable in some circles. I am just the opposite of that. I am saying that there was a person called the Buddha, that the preachings probably go back to him individually - very few scholars actually say that - that we can learn more about what he meant, and that he was saying some very precise things. I regard deconstructionists as my enemies."
By presenting only one view, and such an extreme view in the debate, the current article is very WP:POV. The wikipedia article on the Pali Canon under: Attribution according to scholars presents the full range of views on this matter, in a WP:NPOV way. Surely the approach used in the Pali Canon article is more in accord with wikipedia guidelines.
NO CANVASING WARNING
Warning - please don’t comment on the wikipedia talk page as a result of reading this. That would count as canvasing on my part and is very much frowned on there. We have to wait for others to sort it out if anyone does. At the moment the editors who want to keep it as it is are in a majority so it’s not likely to be fixed any time soon. That’s understandable because the article as it is now is easier to understand if you are used to other religions. So editors who are most familiar with Christianity, Hinduism, Islam etc are likely to find the current version much more acceptable. And they seem to be in the majority in discussions on that page. The main editor claims to be Buddhist but if so he has very strange ideas on the topic, since he thinks the aim is to “get out of here” to escape from the mundane world which as I said above - is just not a Buddhist idea, not if you are in any of the main sutra traditions that rely on the Pali canon or any of the other Buddhist canons as their source for the central teachings of Buddhism.
This is all over the youtube Nibiru conspiracy videos right now. They are saying that Pastor Paul Begley has predicted that we are going to be hit by a gamma ray burst on 26th December from SGR 1806-20.
Summary - it is no risk at all to us. This is over 50,000 light years away. We have had a burst before and it did cause glitches with some satellites. But Earth’s atmosphere, equivalent to ten meters thickness of water in radiation shielding, protects us nicely.
The gamma ray bursts can’t be predicted anyway, so this is just a made up prediction and it would be an extraordinary coincidence (though I suppose not impossible) that we get hit on that date. But if we do, it’s not going to harm us.

Artist’s impression of the last gamma ray burst from the magnetar SGR 1806-20 which hit the Earth’s upper atmosphere on December 27 2004
So,
In detail
This star is a Magnetar which means a spinning neutron star with a very strong magnetic field. And yes, there was a star quake on December 27th 2004 on this star. The star quake released more energy in a tenth of a second than the sun would in 100,000 years.
It was far too far away to have serious effects on Earth. About 50,000 light years away. The blast was however strong enough to ionize the Earth’s upper atmosphere and it disabled several satellites temporarily.
This is an artist’s impression of the event:
This is where it is in the sky:

NASA release about the event in 2004: Cosmic Explosion Among the Brightest in Recorded History
Luckily the nearest magnetars are thousands of light years away from us. For more about this type of star, see What are Magnetars?
This is his video
IMPOSSIBILITY OF PREDICTION
Some celestial things can be repeated - pulsars can be predicted, because they repeat on a regular cycle. But astronomers haven’t found any such pattern to these gamma ray bursts.
CORONAL MASS EJECTIONS AND SOLAR STORMS
He links his prediction with the completely different idea of the effects of solar storms on Earth’s magnetic field.
These can blind satellites temporarily, e.g. it could knock out GPS - not damage them permanently, just force them to reboot through temporary glitches in memory. So that’s similar to the effects of a soft gamma ray burst. But solar storms can also cause major fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field which causes large currents to flow in long distance cables, such as power transmission cables. This won’t damage your computer or phone - the cables are far too short to be affected by the weak changes in the magnetic field. But the currents induced in cables tens and hundreds of kilometers long could damage the large millions of dollars high voltage transformers. If that happened, it could mean that power is lost for weeks, or months as they are expensive and hard to replace.
The executive order that President Obama signed was to harden transmission lines and to protect them and the satellites against solar storms. This was another story that was way over exaggerated in the media: Debunking: Solar Storms to end all life on Earth
SUMMARY
We can’t predict the next gamma ray burst from a magnetar. Such a burst is of no possible danger to us on Earth, and nor is any other magnetar because they are just too far away. It could blind some satellites temporarily.
We can predict solar storms but only a short while in advance, not days in advance. The effects of a solar storm on satellites are similar. They can also cause power failures, and Obama signed an executive order to find ways to help harden our power cables against them.
A nearby magnetar could damage our ozone layer like a supernova explosion, but there aren’t any close enough to do that. The nearest ones are thousands of light years away.
Summary, most likely no effect. At most, could have an effect on our ozone layer. The danger is from UV light. Our atmosphere shields us from the ionizing radiation, same mass as ten meters thickness of water.
Even if the burst originates as close as a few thousand light years away in our own galaxy, the only effects would be increased UV from an ozone hole, and though it might cause some extinctions (jury is out on that), it would be easy for humans to protect against. As for WR104, at one point they thought there was a chance that it was pointed at us. New data suggests that it is tilted away from us at an angle of 30° - 40° (possibly as much as 45°) which would mean it would miss.
IN DETAIL
First gamma ray bursts are rare. They come in two forms, the long bursts and the short bursts. Long bursts come from supernovae, but only 1% of them cause these bursts, so they are very rare. They are associated with the very most brightest of supernovae (hyperonva). Short bursts may come from colliding neutron stars. For details see The biggest explosions in the Universe. The beam is tightly focused in opposite directions so has to be beamed directly at us, so the chance of us seeing one that is focused on us is low. Typically the beam is focused to within a few degrees. For more details about them and the theory of how they are formed: Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs)
We wouldn't be able to predict a gamma ray burst, as the gamma rays arrive at the speed of light from thousands of light years away, but the chance of it happening is tiny.
If it did happen, then it is a short lived event, from seconds up to hours at most (but the very long events are very unusual).
Gamma ray bursts are very focused, with beams in opposite directions, and would need to be pointed directly at us to cause harm - which is very unlikely. We have seen many gamma ray bursts in distant galaxies, but most are over a billion light years away, which shows how rare they are.
Short bursts are caused by colliding neutron stars. The beams they produce are so narrow that we only spot 0.4% of them. The bursts are so bright we can spot them billions of light years away and most of the ones spotted are over a billion light years away.Gamma ray bursts and pencil-thin jets
NASA gave a research announcement for a paper on How Deadly Would a Nearby Gamma Ray Burst Be? Paper itself is here. Some online sites reported this paper incorrectly as saying that the researchers had shown they were more hazardous than expected. Actually their conclusion was exactly the opposit eof that - they proved that they are less hazardous than expected.

This NASA image illustrates the effects of a gamma ray burst on the Earth’s atmosphere, artist’s impression. Only one side is affected because the burst is over by the time the other side of Earth comes into view.
Our atmosphere shields us from the worst effects. It’s equivalent to ten meters of water shielding us from cosmic radiation and gamma rays. So you don’t need to worry about direct effects of all that radiation - it just won’t reach us (same is true for a nearby supernova).
Most of the effect would be on the ozone layer creating a hole and leading to increase UV light until the hole heals. This increase in UV can then break up oxygen atoms at ground level and so cause increased ozone levels at ground level - so the effect is less in the upper atmosphere but more at ground level.

Shows how UV in the upper layer can cause Ozone smog at ground level
The next graph shows the output of their simulation. Altitude vertically, time in days horizontally. The red shows depletion of ozone in the upper atmosphere, and the blue shows increases of ozone in the lower atmosphere.

The gamma ray burst not only reduces the amount of ozone in the upper atmosphere. It also creates ozone depleting nitrogen oxides. They took the example of a gamma ray burst which hits the south pole most severely, as that has down drafts of air constantly. Those would bring the nitrogen oxides down to the lower atmosphere which is why you see the red regions descending with time. This causes a series of pulses of ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere which then leads to increases of ozone at sea level as the red regions let more UV through to the lower atmosphere. The model assumed a 100kJ/m2 burst from the direction of the South Pole, for a gamma ray burst within a few thousand light years of Earth (that’s very close compared to the diameter of the galaxy of 100,000 light years).
So could this raise the ozone levels enough to be harmful to life? The answer from this study was no. A very nearby gamma ray bursts could raise the ozone levels at ground level temporarily to 10 ppm. To be harmful to animal life it would need to reach 30 ppm. It is also not enough to be harmful to ocean life. Even if all the ozone created at ground level got absorbed in the sea, it would not be enough to be harmful to ocean life. So this disproves the hypothesis that a gamma ray burst could be the cause of the late Ordovician mass-extinction.
This was falsely reported on some news sites as proving that hypothesis that the gamma ray burst caused the late Ordovician mass-extinction. As you can see, that is the exact opposite of what they actually did prove..
However the paper was just about the effects of ozone. UV light remains a hazard after a gamma ray burst and could cause extinctions of species (not humans).
NEARBY GAMMA RAY BURST CANDIDATE
Are there any nearby stars that could go supernova and send a gamma ray burst towards us? Well there is this one WR104, which is about 7,500 light years from Earth. That makes it close enough for that 100 kJ type blast that could damage our ozone layers and it is a “Wolf Rayat star” which is likely to go supernova in the next few hundred thousand years.
Of all the stars of that type we know, it’s the only one that we seem to see more or less facing along its axis. So it could be pointed straight at us. The dust is lit up in a spiral pattern and it is carried around in synchrony with its companion star with a rotation period of 220 days.

More detailed picture here:

It looks as if it is facing us nearly face on. But spectroscopic observations of the star suggest it’s axis is at an angle of 30° - 40° (possibly as much as 45°) which would mean it would miss. See WR 104 Won't Kill Us After All - Universe Today
Though this sparked newspaper headlines about it killing us all, the thing to bear in mind is that even if we did get a direct hit, we’d be protected by our atmosphere and the effects would be on the ozone layer mainly and increasing UV until the ozone layer healed.
MORE ABOUT THE EFFECT OF A NEARBY GAMMA RAY BURST
Our atmosphere would shield us from most of it except some strong UV light due to depletion of the ozone layer. You'd be shielded from that just by standing in a shadow or shading yourself from the light any way you like. So, humans could shield against it easily, just use more sunblock when out of doors until the layer heals. Other creatures of course couldn’t use sunblock and might be more affected by it.
The oxides of nitrogen produced in the upper atmosphere are not concentrated enough to have an effect at ground level and this new research shows that ozone levels at ground level are not high enough to be hazardous even for a very close gamma ray burst. So the main effects are from the UV. So if a gamma ray burst causes extinctions then it would be due to the increased levels of UV light at ground level until the ozone hole heals. But this is something humans can protect ourselves against easily. More about its effects in this paper
Researchers reported in 2013 that Earth might have been hit by a Gamma-ray burst in 8th Century (paper: Effects of Gamma Ray Bursts in Earth’s Biosphere) but this would seem a bit unlikely considering how rare they are. Later research that same year (2013) found that the increased levels of Carbon 14 and Beryllium 10 in AD 775 could be explained by a solar flare instead, see The AD775 cosmic event revisited: the Sun is to blame
A nearby gamma ray burst, only a few thousand light years away, would hit one hemisphere of Earth with a short but intense blast of bright light, X-rays and gamma rays. But our atmosphere blocks these high energy photons, so much so that astronomers have to use space telescopes above the atmosphere to observe them.
Some of the UV light would get through the atmosphere, a brief fraction of a second burst of light, up to ten s of seconds for a long burst. But that seems unlikely to cause a biological catastrophe though some creatures would be affected.
Though the authors don’t say, human eyes are easily damaged by UV light so probably anyone looking at the flash at the time would be blinded, get a big dark spot form in their retina of dead cells, just as you would do if you stared at the sun through a telescope. But then - you might blink or shut your eyes automatically when you see such a bright flash of light, and UV light is blocked by the human eyelids, and if you are looking in a different direction or in a shadow from the burst you won’t be affected.
The main effects even of a very nearby gamma ray burst are
Of those, there isn’t enough nitric acid rain to harm organisms and the nitrate might actually act as a fertilizer for some plants.
The cooling is not that strong, reduction in 1% for some years. Unless the climate was close to some “tipping point” it’s not likely to have a significant effect.
The main effect is from ozone depletion. This would increase the amount of DNA damage from UV light up to sixteen times for a few months, and up to five to seven times the usual levels for several years.
Humans could easily protect ourselves. It’s only light and you could use barrier creams, broad rimmed hats, and clothes covering your skin etc for a few months or years to protect yourself from the UV until it returns to normal levels.
These effects seem too small to do much, so it’s a challenge to understand how even a nearby gamma ray burst just a few light years away could lead to mass extinctions. This is on going research. One idea is that perhaps there would be a knock on effect for instance, from impacts on phytoplankton. They account for half of CO2 fixation and oxygen production, so perhaps even a small effect on them could change the climate significantly. See Gamma-Ray Bursts as a Threat to Life on Earth
CONSPIRACY THEORY “PREDICTIONS” OF GAMMA RAY BURSTS
Sometimes conspiracy theory videos or websites claim that scientists have predicted a future gamma ray burst for some particular date that will devastate life on Earth. If you see something like this, you can be sure that they are an unreliable source for astronomy.
Most gamma ray bursts observed are over a billion light years away and we haven’t yet seen one in our galaxy. These bursts are very rare indeed so it is an unlikely scenario.
Also, they can’t be predicted as they are due to distant events which we can’t observe in enough detail to predict - and it doesn’t seem likely that we can predict supernovae or gamma ray bursts for precise dates in the near future. At the moment astronomers at best could say something like “this star may go supernova some time in the next few million years and if so there is a tiny chance it sends a gamma ray burst along its rotation axis” (most supernovae probably don’t produce gamma ray bursts at all).
PROBABILITY OF A GAMMA RAY BURST WITHIN 50 LIGHT YEARS (SAY)
The nearest likely gamma ray burst in the last billion years is 1000 parsecs away. But could we have a really close one, as close as say 50 light years away? Gamma ray bursts happen every 10,000 to a million years in a typical galaxy. The volume of the Milky Way, our galaxy, is roughly 8 trillion cubic light years and it has has 400 billion stars approx. (going by the higher estimates here).
The volume of space within, say, 50 light years is about 500,000 light years. So you’d expect it to contain 500,000 * 400 billion / (8 trillion) or around 25,000 stars.
Or for 20 light years, 33,510 cubic light years, then you get 33,510 * 400 billion / (8 trillion) = 1675 stars. We actually have probably around 150 celestial objects including white and brown dwarfs. Stars within 20 light-years. So that’s over estimating by an order of magnitude or so as we live far out in the thinner outskirts of the galaxy.
So anyway let’s overestimate throughout for a rough back of the envelope type calculation. So 25,000 stars out of 400 billion, and assume a gamma ray burst every 10,000 years and one in 100 of those (say) is pointed towards us. So that makes it a gamma ray burst pointed towards us and within 50 light years every (400 billion / 25,000) * 10,000 years, or every 160 billion years. Remember that this overestimates the number of stars near to us by an order of magnitude, so it’s probably more like once every trillion years or so. So such a nearby gamma ray burst seems very unlikely.
Even at 50 light years, we’d be protected from most of the damaging radiation by the thickness of our atmosphere. It’s equivalent in mass to a ten meter depth of water. It would be rather similar to a nearby supernova. It’s too unlikely to get much attention in papers on gamma ray bursts, but there are estimates of the effects for a supernova. See What’s a safe distance between us and an exploding star? And for more details, the paper here: Could a nearby supernova explosion have caused a mass extinction?
They find that a supernova within 32 light years (ten parsecs) would not heat up Earth significantly, would not be bright enough to harm the ecology through the light alone. In the year after the event so you’d get as much ionizing radiation as you get normally in between a decade and a century. So significant but it doesn’t seem to be enough to be devastating.
It seems likely to be similar for gamma ray bursts, so the main effects would be on the ozone layer and on nitric acid rain - but we don’t need to look into this any more I think as the event is so very improbable.
WHY DO MANY PEOPLE WHO ANSWER THIS QUESTION SAY THAT WE’D BE TOAST?
I think many of the stories that circulate just ignore the effect of the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s equivalent to ten meters of water which is enough to block out most radiation. Also they forget about how rare they are. Typically they will be thousands of light years away from Earth, happen only a few times in a galaxy and the galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter.
So basically they do back of the envelope calculations rather than reading the scientific research papers on the subject. It’s understandable that they forget about our atmosphere so easily. It doesn’t feel as if it is so heavy. The pressure is equalized inside and out. A bit like the way fish swim in the sea, we breathe the air and have no idea how much weight of air there is above us because we have the same amount of pressure outwards too and are in equilibrium with it.
When you drink water with a straw what actually happens is that you create a reduced pressure at the top of the straw and the weight of the atmosphere pushes the water up the straw into your mouth. If you had a perfect vacuum then you could suck water up 10.3 meters. So the weight of the atmosphere is the same as the weight of 10.3 meters thickness of water. Every square meter of the Earth’s surface has 10.3 metric tons of atmosphere above it.
Here is a video showing how you can suck water up to several meters through a straw, six meters, but not quite 10.3 meters - because you can’t create a perfect vacuum. Anyway - at the end where it shows them trying to suck the water up to the top of a cliff - the atmosphere above us is equivalent in mass to a layer of water the height of that cliff.
That’s what they tend to forget.
So they are right, there’s no warning, but you aren’t toast. Indeed you’d not notice the event itself at all except as a very bright flash - good idea to close your eyes if that happens because the UV light could make you blind.
The effects of a nearby gamma ray burst or supernova, even if it is as close as just a few light years away would be just on the upper atmosphere on the ozone layer leading to more UV radiation - an ozone hole - and possibly nitric acid rain. The ionizing radiation effects are not significant.
SUMMARY
Perhaps Gamma ray bursts could have caused some mass extinctions in the past - but so far we don't have anything that is confirmed to have been caused by a gamma ray burst. It is a minority view hypothesis for the Ordovician–Silurian extinction events - if so this study suggests that they couldn’t have caused this extinction through ozone smog at ground level. That leaves the UV light but it’s hard to see that causing the extinctions to such an extent either. Paper about biological effects of gamma ray bursts here
You don’t need to worry that a gamma ray burst could make humans extinct. Though it could be a nuisance for us. Thankfully they are very very rare. Like supernovae, they can’t be predicted because they happen as a result of very distant astronomical events that we are nowhere near being able to observe with enough precision to predict such a thing.
We can identify stars that are going to go supernova in the next few million years, but that’s the most we can do by way of prediction. Of those only 1% would produce gamma ray bursts and of those, only a few typically would be beamed our way. So very very rare. The gamma ray bursts from colliding neutron stars are also very rare.
See also:
This originated in my answer to What would happen if a strong gamma ray burst were to hit the Earth? Any sort of technology that would withstand its effects? Would the burst affect the entire planet, or is there a chance parts of the planet would be affected to a lesser degree?
Summary: It’s hyperbole . Humans use hyperbole all the time. Exaggerated metaphors for the purpose of evoking strong impressions and strong feelings. It’s not a literal “Doomsday”.
Details
I sometimes get messages from people who are scared because of a story that uses the word “Doomsday” in the title. There were many stories like this after the Brexit vote in the UK, e.g:
They are not saying that the world is about to end. This is use of the word “Doomsday” as hyperbole. It’s like when you say “I am so hungry I could eat a horse”. It doesn’t mean that you could literally eat an entire horse.

Camargue horse - photo by Wolfgang Staudt. If you use the phrase “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse” you don’t mean that you could literally eat an entire horse and indeed you might well be someone who wouldn’t think of eating horse meat at all (e.g. here in the UK where meat eaters have a cultural reluctance to eat horses), but you still use the expression. It’s an example of hyperbole, an image that is exaggerated for effect.
It’s the same for the Doomsday Clock. This is a clock which measures how close we are to some global disaster such as climate change or global nuclear war. It is not a literal time period. At present it is at three minutes to midnight. The last time it was at that point was in 1984.

Timeline for the Doomsday Clock
A group of scientists come together to decide where to put it. It’s just a number and not a literal time period. This is the announcement for 2016
So it is a way that scientists can express their concerns about global issues. The idea behind the clock is to warn politicians and to help avoid global disasters. Note that the speakers also use a great deal of hyperbole there. E.g. talking about the risk of a Russian attack turning the US states into nuclear ash. That’s not literally true.. An all out nuclear war would lead to devastation of many US cities but many people would survive, just as many did with Hiroshima. The radiation levels would also soon return to close to normal as for Hiroshima except for a few hot spots. Similarly when they talk about “blowing up the world” again that is hyperbole and not meant to be taken literally.
Normal human speech is full of hyperbole. And even in situations like this then it just comes naturally to people to use hyperbole and you need to keep that in mind. The reason they use hyperbole is because they want to evoke strong feelings amongst listeners to do something about it, and in such situations then you expect hyperbole.
Hyperbole is not deception. It’s said in such a way that it is supposed to be easy to spot, as when you say “I could eat a horse” there is no way anyone could take that literally. It’s the same with all instances of hyperbole, the idea is to use an expression that is so exaggerated that (hopefully) nobody could take it to be literally true. Similarly when they talk in that video about nuclear weapons “blowing up the world” or “turning the US states to radioactive dust” then that is not meant to be taken literally. It’s meant to be so exaggerated that it is obvious hyperbole as a figure of speech. We don’t have any weapons that could do either of those things.
It can go wrong if someone takes it literally.
And even an all out nuclear war would not be a literal doomsday. See my Debunked: A nuclear war would make Earth uninhabitable - and humans extinct and Debunked: Climate change will make the world too hot for humans
Trump may be many things, but I can't imagine him falsely claiming to be a Messiah to save us all. Also the very idea of a single “antichrist” is not really in the Bible. John uses it in the plural in his gospel, as
It’s warning against false teachings that can lead you astray basically. Numerology can lead you astray easily. The idea of a single future antichrist is a later synthesis. See Antichrist - Wikipedia (Wikipedia tends to be quite good on theology).
This is the alleged 666 on Donald Trump’s coat of arms:

It is very easy to find all sorts of patterns in events, numbers, texts etc. That’s because there are so many ways to combine letters and numbers. Mathematicians sometimes do this for fun. For instance, there’s a famous puzzle to write all the numbers from 0 to 100 using four 4s. This puzzle dates back at least to the late nineteenth century. It was published in an book by W W Rouse Ball in 1882, and earliest mention in print goes back to 1881. Four fours
Here is an example
7 = (4 + 4) - (4/4)
Can you write every number from 0 to 10 in this way? What about writing all the numbers from 0 to 100 using four 4s plus mathematical operations such as addition, multiplication, subtraction, factorial, square root etc. To get as far as 100 requires some serious mathematical talent, but it can be done. Here are the solutions: Four 4’s puzzle. You can go further also. This page goes up to 386. Representation of numbers with four 4's It follows that if you have some text that has four 4s in it, you can use numerology to transform it to mean any number you like between 0 and 100, or indeed up to 386 and probably further too.
And here is a fun spoof of numerology, short exchange of emails after 9/11: Numerology and Numerology Parodies
Previous presidents of the US have also been proved to be the “antichrist” using numerology. E.g. here is the proof for president Reagan Proof that ronald reagan was the 666 antichrist ! Basically it “comes with the job” - if you get elected as president of the US, someone is bound to come up with a carefully worked out proof that you are the Anti Christ.
This originated as my answer to Could Donald Trump be the Antichrist?
Summary The video is not by NASA. It is a video of a program called Universe Sandbox which lets you play around with a model of the solar system, and add new planets to it, or to make your own model solar systems from scratch like a computer game. Someone just added a star or brown dwarf called “Nibiru” to the program and labelled it “Nibiru”. It’s not real. It is no more real than Super Mario.
The video is good one actually to show why a large star or brown dwarf like Nibiru can’t exist!
If our system had a companion star or heavy brown dwarf like this - then the events in this video would have happened over 4.5 billion years ago and we wouldn't be here.
A star or brown dwarf in a 3600 year orbit can’t suddenly appear from nowhere. It would have to have been in that orbit since soon after the solar system formed. The events shown in this video would have happened already over 4.5 billion years ago.
The solar system would then consist of the Sun, it’s companion star and maybe a planet or even several planets that all orbit very close to our sun within the orbit of Mercury, so hot that metals melt - and if close enough the rock also melts and evaporates. And perhaps another planet or planets orbiting similarly very close to “Nibiru”.
Such a system is possible. Half of sun like stars have companion stars, approximately. Sometimes one of the stars in a binary pair will have a very elliptical orbit. If so, you don’t expect to find planets there. If our sun had a companion with an orbit like this, we wouldn’t be here.
So we can know for sure that our sun doesn’t have a companion like this. We wouldn’t be here if it did.
NOTICE HOW EARTH PASSES BETWEEN “NIBIRU” AND THE SUN IN THE VIDEO
You can notice another thing from the video. Notice how Earth passes between the “Nibiru” and the sun several times in the first half of the video. This shows clearly how “Nibiru” if it existed couldn’t possibly hide behind the sun.
Indeed, if there was a planet "Nibiru like that then every time Earth passed between it and the Sun, that would mean that it is on the night side of the Earth (Obviously since the Sun is on the day side). This would make it visible in the night sky, all night, any starry night, to astronomers on Earth.
There is no planet in an orbit like that. But comets can be in these orbits, and that's exactly what happens with them.
EASY TO SEE
Also a massive object like this would be easy to see. Even the faintest coolest brown dwarf is not invisible and would be as bright as Betelgeuse as soon as it got as close as Jupiter. Which is for this entire video.
GOOD VIDEO TO EXPLAIN WHY ASTRONOMERS HYPOTHESIZE PLANET X BEYOND NEPTUNE
Comets, can exist in orbits like that. Comets are very light and there are hundreds of thousands of them out in the Oort cloud. From time to time one of them will get diverted into the inner solar system (happens easily again because they are so lightweight) and they may end up in an orbit like this. Many are already. But they have no effect on the planets of course and they also can’t last long in an orbit like this.
Planets also can be in an orbit like this but only for a short time, like the comets. Within a million years they would be gone. And unlike comets, there is no Oort cloud of planets to resupply the solar system with new planets constantly.
This is the reason that astronomers when they hypothesize a new “planet X” such as the “planet 9” idea always hypothesize a planet that orbits way beyond Neptune. At the most it could come inside of Neptune’s orbit as Pluto does (Pluto was the original “planet X”). That’s possible because Pluto is in a resonance with Neptune. But it is impossible to stay in a resonance with both Neptune, and Uranus since their orbits aren’t in resonance with each other.
If there was a planet in an orbit that crossed all four of the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, then its orbit would be unstable and not last for as long as a million years. Our solar system is around 4.6 billion years old. Any such planets, if they ever existed, are long gone
UNIVERSE SANDBOX
This is just a video made by some enthusiast using Universe Sandbox and they added a heavy companion to the system and labeled it “Nibiru”. Then someone has claimed that it is a NASA video.
If you haven’t tried that program - it lets you take the solar system and just add extra objects to it, as well as make up your own new solar systems, and then watch them evolve.
SEARCH FOR A COMPANION STAR TO THE SUN
If our sun does have a companion star then the only remaining possibility after many searches for it is an unusually cold and unlikely brown dwarf star perhaps 1.5 light years way. This is unlikely because the search that looked for it, the WISE search was able to find even rather cold ordinary brown dwarfs 10 light years away and was an all sky search.
Our sun is almost certainly a singleton - half of sun-like stars are. If it does have a companion, it has to be so far away that it doesn’t cause any instability in our solar system, or we wouldn’t be here. But after many searches it seems increasingly unlikely that we have any companion star.
For more about this see Debunked: Nemesis or Tyche is Nibiru by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
This is because if you read the Nibiru websites and watch the Nibiru videos you will learn that if you see a bright light, anywhere in the sky, East or West, North or South or directly overhead, or anywhere else, any time of day or night, and you don’t know what it is, that it is a planet Nibiru unknown to astronomers (or hidden by them). If you believe this, and if you aren’t very familiar with the sky, are not an astronomer and don’t know what to look out for, you will get plenty of sightings of “planets”. You will see
You’ll see many different bright objects in the sky and if you happen not to recognize one of those you’ll be convinced you’ve seen “Nibiru” and upload a photo or video of it.
You haven’t seen a planet. You’ve just seen a bright light. If they told you that every bright light you don’t recognize is Santa and his sleigh, and you believed them, we’d have loads of reported sightings and uploaded videos and photos of Santa.
Nemesis and Tyche are real hypotheses from Astronomy though a somewhat out of date one. They are amongst the many ideas for a “planet X” - an extra planet, or in this case a star or brown dwarf, orbiting the Sun. It’s certainly possible that our sun has a distant companion, as many star systems are binary (indeed many are also in systems of three or more stars). Sometimes the companion star or brown dwarf is a long way from the other star.
Most of the brightest stars in our sky are binary. But our sun is actually a rather dim star and only about half of sun-like stars are binary and in the case of the even smaller red dwarfs, it seems that most are single (though these figures are disputed and hard to be sure about). See Astronomers Had it Wrong: Most Stars are Single and Binary Star Systems: Classification and Evolution
And anyway our sun is unusual in many ways so why not be unusual in this way too? Probably neither of these proposed stars exist - I think that’s the view of most astronomers. If Nemesis was real it would mean there is going to be an increased number of impacts on Earth due to redirected comets from the very distant Oort cloud, in the future, yes, but that future is 15 million years into the future (various figures there), not next month. The Tyche hypothesis is similar to Nemesis but in a somewhat different orbit that would not lead to extra impacts on Earth at all in the future.
As a result of searches, with Tyche ruled out and most of the Nemesis ideas also ruled out, all that is left of these ideas is the possibility of an unusually cold brown dwarf orbiting 1.5 light years away. However the WISE search was an all sky search, covered entire sky three times, and turned up brown dwarfs ten light years away so it is rather unlikely that they missed on as close as that.
The survey actually covered the two polar regions in more detail than anywhere else, because of the way it swept the sky. Each sweep it did of a fraction of the sky photographed both polar regions, so it covered them multiple times. So it covered the entire sky three times and the polar regions many more times than that. If “Nemesis” does exist, it will be very interesting for astronomers, but of no danger at all to Earth for at least 15 million years. And by then, well maybe we can deflect away any comets it sends our way long before they reach Earth, if the hypothesis is true which is seeming increasingly unlikely.
Nibiru conspiracy sites generally confuse Nemesis with Tyche and claim they exist amd are the parent star for “Nibiru” (in other words that they orbit the Sun with an orbital period of 3600 years and they have a planet orbiting them as well).
IN DETAIL.
Here is an example video about Tyche as parent star for “Nibiru”.
Notice that the news casts are all a bit old fashioned in style? Tyche was proposed in 1999 to explain certain patterns in the orbits of comets - but was proved not to exist in 2014 using results from an ultrasensitive infrared telescope called WISE.

Artist's impression of the NASA Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. Researchers proved that Nemesis and Tyche can't exist in results published in 2014, using data that it collected in 2010 to 2011.
It was an all sky survey and has ruled out the possibility of a Saturn sized object out to 10,000 times the Earth - Sun distance (33 times distance to Neptune), and a Jupiter size or larger object out to 26,000 times that distance. (I.e. 26,000 AU, 867 times distance to Neptune)
In this video, they seem to confuse this with Nemesis - a hypothesized second star which could have lead to excess comets every 26 million years or so if it existed. The hypothesized Tyche was actually given a new name in order to try to avoid exactly this confusion, since it would be incapable of causing these comet "storms".
"Such an object would be incapable of creating comet “storms”. To help mitigate popular confusion with the Nemesis model (Whitmire and Jackson ( 1984), Davis et al. ( 1984)) we use the name recently suggested by Kirkpatrick and Wright (2010), Tyche, (the good sister of Nemesis) for the putative companion."
Persistent Evidence of a Jovian Mass Solar Companion in the Oort Cloud, page 4 (introduction)
Anyway, for Nemesis, the idea was an excess of comets, not now, but millions of years in the past and future. The last extinction in their list is eleven million years ago, so the next one would be about fifteen million years into the future if they were right. See Periodicity of extinctions in the geologic past.
There have been many searches for Nemesis which have never turned up anything. It was finally conclusively proved not to exist by that same WISE survey that disproved Tyche. This survey turned up new brown dwarf stars many light years from Earth, and as a result of this ultra sensitive search, it doesn't seem that our sun can have a companion star or brown dwarf at all, though until around 2014 or so you could still suppose that it did.
There was no way that there could be a new red dwarf star 15 au from the sun as they say in the video, even before this search. That's closer than both Uranus and Neptune (19.2 and 30.1 au respectively).
And you do see red dwarfs through an ordinary telescope. They are indeed fainter than most stars. None are easily visible to the naked eye, but that is because they are so far away. The brightest red dwarf is Lacaille 8760 which is magnitude 6.67. I don't know if anyone has done it - but at that brightness it might just be visible to a keen eyed observer from a very dark site. The closest red dwarf is Proxima Centauri. which is also the closest star known to Earth. It is visible through small telescopes.
But that's just because they are so very far away. Red dwarf stars are just stars, at fairly hot temperature what's more of a few thousand degrees - 3,800 K for instance for Lacaille 8760. Hotter than a potter's kiln. They are brighter than our sun if you orbit close enough to them, and since they are the most common type of star in our galaxy as well, they are one of the key targets in the search for habitable worlds. See Planets Orbiting Red Dwarfs May Stay Wet Enough for Life. And Habitability of Red Dwarf Systems.
He was probably thinking about brown dwarfs. Those are on the borderline between planets like Jupiter and red dwarfs. They don't shine by their own light like a star but are large enough to have a tiny bit of nuclear fusion at some point at least in the early stages of their formation.
They are not at all invisible, but when they are far away from any other star, then they don't emit any light themselves so are black in visible light. They are however warm-ish (-100 °C or so, not what we'd call warm, but far warmer than than the background night sky). That's because they still retain the heat of formation and early fusion. So, even a brown dwarf in total darkness, far from any sun, is bright in infrared and they search for them with infrared telescopes.
Bring a brown dwarf close to a star and it will shine by reflected light in the same way Jupiter does, depending on its albedo. Some may be very dark in the visible wavelengths, but they'd still be easy enough to see by reflected light. For instance the Moon is actually as dark as asphalt but looks bright because we see it illuminated by full sunlight against a dark night sky.
All brown dwarfs are about the same size as Jupiter, incidentally, however heavy they are - a remarkable property. As they get heavier they also collapse in on themselves a bit so don't get much larger.
Anyway WISE has already ruled those out also. It can detect them out to around 10 light years away, and did indeed find brown dwarfs, but none close to our sun. Incidentally it has now been re-activated as NEOWISE and is searching for Near Earth Objects, where it is especially useful for finding dark ones that are harder to spot from the ground but just as visible in infrared as the bright ones.
The name Planet X was not invented by NASA, as they say in the video. Instead, it goes back to Percival Lowell in 1905 and the phrase is used nowadays as a general term to describe a planet you are searching for which you haven't yet proved exists. So if an astronomer, or NASA talks about a Planet X, then that is a short hand to say that they don't know if it exists yet. The very fact that they called it Planet X means they didn't have evidence yet that it existed.
That's all in the first five minutes of the video. I am only an eighth of the way through it and if I debunk everything he says this will surely take very long. I haven't yet come across a single correct statement in it I think. Well about astronomy anyway :).
See also
You may find this useful, if you use chrome as your website browser. It shows a red title if you share or visit a site that regularly has fake news or is generally unreliable like "Above Top Secret". You can still read the story if you want to, you just know that it is from an unreliable site.

Pile of Poo emoji for Apple
Super easy to use. Get it here Bullshit Detector and add it to your browser. If installed correctly you should then see a grey triangular icon at top right of your browser window next to the url bar as in the screenshots below.
This is what it looks like if you visit one of the websites


You also get red bars like that above the links people share on facebook if they link to fake news sites. It works well in my testing with one exception. It doesn’t seem to work for “Before it’s News” (you get a black bar instead of a red one, with no text on it). But hopefully you know that that one is a fake / unreliable site already.
It will only detect some of the fake and unreliable news. You get new sites like this all the time plus many sites have a mix of real news and some hoaxes that the journalists fall for.
So - it doesn’t work in the other direction. If a site is not labeled as BS it may still have a lot of nonsense on it. For instance it doesn’t label the Express as BS, because it has a lot of genuine news there along with the occasional story about “Nibiru” and the end of the world that is complete BS.
And it is just for news sites, won’t try to label the numerous blogs and videos with BS Nibiru nonsense on them including the ones that fall for the fake news stories and repeat them. But it will help eliminate some of the worst sites.
For Nibiru particularly also see my Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy with a few simple things you can check yourself which will help eliminate most of the BS sites right away in the topic area of Nibiru / Planet X.
"Wormwood" just refers to an enigmatic passage in the book of Revelation in the Bible which could mean almost anything:
And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. - (Revelation 8:10-11)
For more about it see the wikipedia article: Wormwood (Bible) - Wikipedia
The word “Wormwood” is a rare word in the Bible. Normally it means something bitter, and refers to the plant Artemisia Absinthium which is used in the alcoholic drink Absinthe.

The book of Revelations is an enigmatic text which wasn’t included in the original version of the Bible and it is easily interpreted in so many different ways that the Eastern Orthodox church has excluded it from the scriptures that can be read from the pulpit (its “lectionary”).
When you read passages like that, bear in mind that back then the leading idea about planets was that they are embedded in crystaline spheres that spin around the Earth, and that the stars also were embedded in a big sphere that span around Earth once a day, and the Sun was in such a sphere too.
They didn’t know about asteroids. They thought that meteorites came from volcanoes or tornadoes and strong winds, blown into the air. They thought comets were an atmospheric phenomenon. They had no idea about modern astronomy at all.

Ernst Chladni - Wikipedia - first to propose that meteorites came from space, in 1704. His work was initially regarded with ridicule

The Wold Cottage meteorite - Wikipedia - first meteorite to be recognized as extra terrestrial by some scientists, in 1795

Fragment of the L'Aigle meteorite shower. These were the first meteorites to be widely recognized as originating from outside of Earth. The fall happened on 26th April 1803. This convinced most scientists of his day that Ernst Chladni was right, meteorites come from outer space
Also the book of Revelations is written in a visionary style. It’s not at all clear that these are supposed to be events that actually happen or will happen. They could also be vivid images conveying some other message e.g. about spiritual practice. There are many ways to interpret it. According to many interpretations it describes events that have already happened, or already happened in part. For instance it may describe the events of the persecutation of first century Christians.
Whatever it is about, it is intended as a message of hope for Christians. And for non Christians, it is not a sacred book for you, so why pay any attention? And for astronomers, well the Bible is not noted for its astronomy, indeed hardly covers astronomy at all. That’s not its strong point. It has many virtues but it is not strong on astronomy or science. It is not even of historical interest to astronomers. Would you use the Bible to predict an asteroid flyby or an eclipse or to navigate spacecraft to another planet or for anything astronomical?
See also Debunked - The world will end because the Bible (or some other sacred book) says so
This goes back to a couple of things. First Robert Harrington was one of many astronomers who have hypothesized that there may be extra planets in our solar system orbiting well beyond Neptune. These would be of no more danger to Earth than Neptune or Jupiter, in other words no danger at all. Astronomers call all such planets “planet X”, where X stands for “unknown”.
So it’s not a single planet but many such hypotheses for different planets. The first “planet X” was Pluto. Though you could make a case for calling Neptune the first “planet X” since although the word wasn’t in use at the time, it was discovered in the same way by looking at the orbits of the other planets and deducing that there must be an extra planet beyond Uranus.
So anyway, they often elaborate the story by saying that Robert Harrington discovered planet X in 1983 and was murdered by NASA or by the government, in order to hide his discovery from the general public.
Robert Harrington, photograph from his obituary Bob Harrington Obituary - he was not murdered. He died of throat cancer six months AFTER his theory of an extra planet beyond Neptune was disproved by Myles Standish using data from the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune.
The truth is that Robert Harrington did indeed hypothesize a planet X beyond Neptune. His paper is here: THE LOCATION OF PLANET X. As you will see at the end, on page 1478, he suggested a possible planet with, as one example, a semi-major axis 101.2 AU and eccentricity 0.411 which makes its perihelion 59.607 by this Ellipse Calculator, so the closest to the Sun it would get is one and a half times the distance to Pluto. He made this prediction on the basis of anomalies in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.
However, six months before his death, Myles Standish used new data from the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune. As a result the mass of Neptune was revised downwards by 0.5%. The data he had been using to hypothesize planet X depended on a more massive Neptune and when you redo the calculations with Neptune a bit lighter,the need for planet X vanishes. See Planet X - no dynamical evidence in the optical observations
Myles Standish’s article was published after Robert Harrington’s death, but submitted long before it and Robert Harrington would have known that his theory was disproved when he died.
And we know for sure that he was not murdered. He died of cancer of the throat. His obituary is here: Bob Harrington Obituary - that’s the more detailed obituary from his observatory. The NY times obituary is here, just says he died of cancer: Robert Harrington, 50, Astronomer in Capital
HOAX IMAGES AND VIDEOS OF NIBIRU DONE AS A PRANK
With all this nonsense about Nibiru, some people have done what they intended to be harmless pranks, just to have their videos and images propagated all over the internet as real.
Dramatic Chipmunk :)
PROFESSOR KAPLAN - ABDUCTED UNDER MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES WHILE OBSERVING NIBIRU
If you read the conspiracy stories about Nibiru, you've probably heard of the mysterious kidnapped and murdered Professor Kaplan, and the chip with a recording of his observations of Nibiru which was found by someone and uploaded to YouTube.
Here "Professor Kaplan" talks about why he did this hoax video originally as a silly prank for his pals, and his attempts to get it taken down - which only fueled more conspiracy theories about the video.
As he says, he isn't actually a professor, he's an astrophysics student doing a doctorate and has to wait for fifteen minutes for long exposures at his observatory. He did it as a joke during one of those long waits twiddling his thumbs with nothing to do. So he wasn't wasting precious observatory time or his own time when he did it. It looks very authentic because it is not a set, it is recorded at an actual observatory. But he didn't do it for YouTube or for public viewing.
He left two clues that it is a joke in the video including an email allegedly from someone else shown as addressed from "Me" to "Me" in a close up shot, and a quiet chuckle at the end of the video as he gets "abducted". Plus of course him being still alive and giving a skype interview after the joke "abduction" at the end shows it is a joke :)
The idea anyway doesn’t make sense. If the secret agencies are going around the world murdering people for talking about “Nibiru” then how come there are so many videos about it on youtube? Entire channels that produce video after video, earning their channel owners thousands of dollars a month of ad income. Occasionally someone will put up a video with a comment saying that they are doing this bravely and expect to be murdered as a result, and the video taken down. But that is just them tying in to this story as yet another hoax / prank and the videos are not taken down.
This is just yet another silly Nibiru story. See also Debunked: NASA has been tracking “Planet X” for decades
I get some people who ask me to reassure them that there is nothing to be scared of from time to time. They watch these videos or go to a website and it says “You should be scared” and just that terrifies them, no matter what the rest of it says.
When these people tell you to be scared in the videos or on a website, it's like someone telling you that you should stand on your head.


Or any absurd thing they might say you should do. There is no obligation on you to stand on your head, if some random stranger tells you to do it.
Actually the ones who tell you to be scared are the ones that should do something. They should stop telling people to be scared and worried.
See also my Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy
This is an example, from “Above Top Secret”, a notorious conspiracy site where people can publish anything. could america be invaded by the chinese & russians on this date? according to the demons, it does., page 1

With I don't know how many people using ouija boards every week there are bound to be a few "accurate predictions". They will ignore all the times they say someone is going to die and nothing happens. Then one time they say someone will die and they do, and they will make a big fuss about it. So it is easy for a method such as this to seem to work when it is just based on chance.
If Ouija boards did tell the future then the people with ouija boards would win all the state lotteries and nobody else would have a chance. That doesn't happen. Indeed I can't remember any story of someone winning a lottery using a ouija board, I mean one of the big prizes millions of dollars not just $40 or something which can happen by chance easily. If you have enough people using the boards often enough, you'd expect it to happen eventually but it's obviously not common.
If you don’t believe in demons, or don’t believe that Ouija boards are a way of contacting them, then there is no reason to believe these stories. So just click away.
If you do believe in Ouija boards, and that there are such things as demons, and that they are actually contacting demons and asking them questions - well why expect them to be truthful? If they are demons then they probably just want to cause confusion and panic and will make predictions out of mischief. The people who use Ouija boards and interpret them in this way say this themselves.
As an example see this story: The End?. The thread of comments talks about demons and warning that they can be tricky and they can't predict things, just pretend to do so. Who knows whether there is some external influence of some sort. Anyway the thing with any of these attempts to contact supernatural beings, is, why would they be truthful, if there are such? Probably supernatural beings, if they exist, have got the full range of frailties of humans and more so.
Or it could well be that it is just some kind of interaction of the people involved, the ones doing the seance, if so, again, why should it be predictive? Perhaps sometimes they contact some kind of collective knowledge or wisdom, which they couldn't access otherwise, but if so, at other times they could equally contact a kind of collective foolishness or stupidity. How could you know? Being way out and spooky doesn't mean it has to be truthful or wise.
I'm Buddhist as some of you may know, in the Tibetan tradition. I've never got involved in any practices of that type, but I know they do have ideas that you can have practices that connect you directly to visionary inspirations which can actually speak to you directly and say things to you and answer questions. There's an idea that you can make contact with inspirations of great compassion and wisdom, so vivid it feels even more real than real life - so they say, which they think is contacting something we all have also within ourselves, for instance compassion, so it is a kind of external awakening internal. It seems external because you are awakening an inspiration that you have blocked off and don't think of as yourself, so you can't see it as yourself, and then can lead to awakening compassion and wisdom in yourself.
So they do have the idea that this can happen in visions and such like. But you can also get visions that seem to be inspiring but are in fact misleading, which they also talk about as "demons" at least how it is sometimes translated. It just means a vision or inspiration that doesn't have the inspiration of enlightenment and may inspire in directions that are harmful rather than helpful to practitioners.
The two can be hard to tell apart, but you can tell by the fruit, if it inspires compassion and wisdom and understanding, and if it leads in directions that are beneficial.
It’s much the same whether you believe there really are supernatural beings contacted in seances, or you think that somehow they contact some collective understanding amongst themselves, or whether it is just a matter of seeing patterns in chance events like an ink blot. If unsure it's best just to ignore such things, and especially so if they say anything that is distressing. While if the practice inspires you and helps you towards wisdom, compassion and understanding, maybe it is useful and valuable, who knows.
The idea of divination is an ancient one. The Ouija boards apparently trace their ancestry back to the ancient Taoists. Instead of using letters on a board, they used a suspended pointer that traced out diagrams in sand or incense ash. But mediums in the nineteenth century found their audience got bored waiting for the drawings, and the drawings were hard to interpret, so changed to a board with letters.
The Quanzhen schools of Taoism sometimes use spirit writing as a way to communicate with their ancient semi-legendary Partriarchs.

Quanzhen Patriarch Chongyang (a.k.a. Wang Zhe) with the yellow nimbus around his head, and his seven disciples. SeeChangchun-Temple-Master-and-disciples-painting
Some modern Taoists in this school believe that they communicate with the Quanzhen Patriarchs through spirit writing. See Teachings and Practices of the Early Quanzhen Taoist Masters
You might also be interested in this Ancient Ouija Boards, Fact or Fiction?
For the background, see my answer to What are the most frustrating aspects of being a Wikipedia editor? and my answer to Is Wikipedia biased?
See also Ideas for wikipedia reform for the long term
WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT THIS
Although there may not be much we can do to change how Wikipedia operates, there are things we can do within their current rules and guidelines. I’ve just had this suggested by a friend. It is something any editor can do, and have started doing it myself. Too many of the cases there are judged by friends and enemies of the accused along with bystanders who happened to come across the argument. Go there and to help provide independent peer review.
As it is now, it’s like having a court case with no judge, no prosecutor, no defense attorney, just an independent admin who comes along and closes the case after the jury have all had their say. And a jury consisting mainly of people who have a connection with the accused or the accusers, and for that matter with the victims too if there are victims. It is no wonder that they find it hard to administer justice fairly.
So - you can help a lot by commenting on some of the cases as uninvolved editors. However it would be easy to make things worse rather than better. So I thought best to make a list of guidelines. Do say if you have suggestions to add t them.
WHAT YOU NEED
This is just a suggestion at present, but I have tried it and it works. See comment with a few details of experiences
You must be
GUIDELINES
If you want to do this, I see no harm in recommending it as:
These boards, especially ANI are meant to be judged mainly by uninvolved editors. So by doing this you are using them exactly as intended.
DON’T BLUDGEON

Coshes and bludgeon Two coshes or "life preservers" of whalebone and lead, plus a bludgeon or hinged truncheon.
There is no need to feel it is “all up to you”. If a few of us went and commented / voted on a case of interest to us once a week or even once a month, they would soon have plenty of uninvolved editors to help to keep the discussions on track.
If you were to go in and comment on every case for a week, or even one case a day for a week, you’d soon annoy the regulars there and there is a chance you’d get blocked or site banned yourself, or harassed in other ways.
So if you do this, I recommend doing it rarely. I’ve just started doing it, commented on a couple of cases. If I keep it up, I’ll do it once a week tops, or perhaps less often, once a month.
In any case it is quite a time commitment. Far better to spend a fair bit of time, even an hour or two or more, researching one case properly, than to shoot from the hip on a dozen cases.
If your comment or vote starts up a discussion - well just be laid back about it. You don’t have to reply.
Generally if you feel
“ I have to reply right away”
that’s a pretty good warning sign that actually it’s best to give it a break. You are there as an uninvolved editor, not there to swing the process in the direction you favour. Check in the next day to see if someone replied. Someone else might well make the very same points you would have made in reply, if so that’s great, or if not the issues may have been clarified by other comments.
In a fast paced discussion, make sure that there are at least a few other comments by others before you comment again. And be careful not to do excessively long posts. See the advice here: Wikipedia:Don't bludgeon the process - Wikipedia
You aren't there to force whatever you consider to be the right answer in the debate. You are just there to present an independent viewpoint as an uninvolved editor. Along with, hopefully eventually, many other uninvolved editors, if this takes off.
WITHIN THE GUIDELINES

If it is done like this, and done in legitimate places like WP:ANI where uninvolved editors are welcomed and encouraged, then I can't see how anyone can have any issues with it at all. It does not fall foul of WP:CANVAS or meat puppetry, or any of the other guidelines, and means using the boards as intended.
Too many WP:ANI debates have no uninvolved editors there at all. Just enemies of the accused, occasionally friends, and then friends or enemies of those who have already taken part and maybe an occasional uninvolved admin or frequent habitue. The few uninvolved editors that comment are often far too busy to read the cases in detail, so it attracts some people who shoot from the hip. They may vote there regularly, doing their bit to try to keep up the levels of uninvolved editor participation. But they don't have time to read the cases at all carefully and often get them wrong.
So we don't want to add to any of that :).
For the background, see my answer to What are the most frustrating aspects of being a Wikipedia editor? and my answer to Is Wikipedia biased? and see also What you can do about the Alice through the Looking Glass world of Wikipedia Editing - Right Now
There are several things wikipedia could do about this I think. During the recent inspire initiative on meta then the contributors came up with some ideas.
A PLACE TO ASK FOR HELP

This is an idea that I was particularly connected with, a space for topic banned and blocked editors to get advice, where they can mention their banned topic. Once you are banned, one of the most frustrating things is that you can’t mention the topic to anyone except the editor who closed your case, anywhere in wikipedia even in talk pages, except as part of an appeal. One day you can talk about the topic anywhere, next day, you can’t mention it to any of your friends or colleagues on wikipedia, even on your own talk page. Nor can you talk about any incidents in the discussions that lead to the ban.
As it is now, the only person you can go to is the editor who closed the action against you. (That page contradicts itself, in one place suggesting you can talk to others as well, but the statement I linked to is the way it is interpreted in practice).
And this is strictly enforced. After you’ve had a topic ban like this against you then interested editors will put you on their watch list so they notice every edit you make, on your own talk page, on someone else’s, anywhere in wikipedia. If you say anything about it to anyone they will notice it (unless of course you talk via email). I talked about it a lot off wiki of course, on quora, on facebook, but couldn’t say a word about it on wikipedia.
So - you can’t ask questions of anyone except the closing admin even about such things as the limitations of the topic ban nor about how to appeal the ban. You can’t ask on other user’s talk pages, or the village pump, or on your talk page, or anywhere.
Sort of like the rules for Christchurch meadow near where I used to live with its rules about hawkers, bowling hoops etc from an earlier era I think :).
The Meadow Keepers are herby instructed:
- To prevent nuisance and indecent, rude or disorderly conduct of every description;
- to allow no bicycles, handcarts, wheelbarrows; no hawkers or persons carrying parcels or bundles so as to obstruct the walks;
- to wheel clamp trespassing vehicles, which will only be released on the payment of a release fee
- to prevent the flying of kites, throwing stones, throwing balls, bowling hoops, shooting arrows, firing guns or pistols, or playing games attended with danger or inconvenience to passers-by; also fishing in the waters, catching birds, bird-nesting or cycling;
- to prevent all persons entering fenced-off land; also cutting names on, breaking or injuring the seats, shrubs, plants, trees or turf;
- to prevent the fastening of boats or rafts to the iron palisading or river-wall, and to prevent encroachments of every kind by the river-side; and
- to ensure that any dog brought on to the Meadow is kept under close control by its owner and that it does not worry or interfere with any animals grazing on the land.
(full transcription here)
Imagine something like that but a dozen or a hundred times more complex.
You can try to find out by reading the extensive documentation, but it sometimes contradicts itself, is very complex, and the way it is implemented in practice may differ from the way it is documented. And again you can’t ask questions on the talk pages of the documentation either except in a very general way not mentioning your banned topic or the details of your situation.
Also many of those banned will be young children. There is no age restriction, see Wikipedia:Guidance for younger editors - Wikipedia Young editors are quite likely to get into trouble there and are told not to disclose personal details including their age, so it’s quite likely that nobody knows they are young, youngsters often have an advanced vocabulary. Others may have learning difficulties too. Others may have mental health issues. Or older people with Alzheimers.
The admins who close the case are often very busy people who just don’t have the time to answer your questions. Also, like some experts who know so much about their subject but find it hard to teach, they often don’t understand why you need to ask them any questions about it either. They know all the answers to your questions of course, but they can’t understand why you don’t know the answers already, and get impatient with you for asking. Most of the questions I asked my closing admin were never answered.
Here is a simple example from my own experience. I wanted to ask:
He didn't give any reason for ending the conversation, so I don't know what rule or established practice my questions violated there. And as you will see, most of my questions I asked him about it in the conversation were unanswered. Indeed he didn’t really answer even the main question about whether I could publicize it on wikipedia before the topic ban is over, though it was pretty clear that unless he gave me the go-ahead to publicize it, that I shouldn’t, so I didn’t. And because you can only talk about it to the closing admin, there is no such thing as a second opinion. The closing admin is also the final arbiter who decides any details that need to be decided after the decision is made, and again there is no oversight, whatever he says is the law unless you try to appeal.
You tend to find out by trying. I tried to talk to someone about an incident in the discussion that lead to my ban, before I knew that was prohibited. My ban period was instantly doubled and I was warned not to do that. I removed that comment and they then returned it to the previous ban period. After an incident like that one learns to play it safe and simply not mention anything that is even remotely connected with your topic ban anywhere on wikipedia unless totally sure it is okay to do it. Which is rather unsatisfactory as you are bound to have loads of questions after you have been topic banned.
So that lead to this idea. To set up an area - either a board on wikipedia or else on meta or somewhere else, where topic banned editors are permitted to mention the subject of their ban to ask questions about it, and just to talk about it and get support from other editors who have been banned as well as any sympathetic admins etc. Then you won’t need to ask the closing admin questions that anyone can answer, only the ones that only they can answer. And can talk to others who have been through something similar to what you are going through and can help you with tips about how to deal with your situation. And just to talk about it all to someone who understands wikipedia.
Please don’t comment on the Request for Comment if you get to it via this answer as that would be canvassing on my part.
DEALING WITH THE STRESS OF BEING BANNED

stress - that pending pile there is rather like what it feels like when you have pages of accusations fired against you in wikipedia, alleging things which you never did
If it hasn’t happened to you, you may not realize quite how stressful it is. You have been happily working on wikipedia. Maybe rubbed a bit against other editors, differences of views, but you think you are just having honest straightforward discussion presenting your views. Then suddenly you find yourself in a kind of what feels like a “kangaroo court” with them using obscure terminology, like WP:CHEESE, which you have to look up before you know what they are accusing you of, people you thought were friendly towards you, at least colleagues, with only differences in ideas about the articles - all piling in and saying you should be topic banned or site banned. Others you have never met on wikipedia also coming in, who know nothing about you at all, never talked to you, never bother to try to talk to you on your talk page to get your side of the story. Strangers saying you must be banned or site banned etc on the basis of lies presented to them by the opposing editors.
Then it drags out, day after day, long complex discussions, people misrepresenting what you did and said. You try to correct those misunderstandings but that makes things worse as they misrepresent your replies to everyone else as you repeating your problem behaviour in the disciplinary discussion itself which is much worse. Often it is best to just say nothing, let the lies stand, and hope for the best.
Then sometimes they say really awful things about you. When you actually care for the project, and feel you have done good work there - then to get people saying you are there to disrupt and destroy wikipedia in a public forum like that, and as a reason to topic ban or site ban you - that can be very stressful too. Even more so when they are strangers whose only knowledge of what you did for wikipedia is what the opposing editors said in their accusations on the board.
It is just awful and very stressful if you have already invested a lot in wikipedia as a project you care about and want to help. I have been contacted by other topic banned editors and you can also read in the discussions online, when they may say in the debates about the case itself or on their talk pages about how stressful it is for them at times. They may have other things to deal with in their lives, yet they feel they have to defend themselves at wikipedia, often against something they never did, but may not have the time, or feel there is nothing they can do about it.
If they are vulnerable to such things it could lead to mental issues / nervous breakdown. It could lead to health issues. In my case it lead to a flare up of gout (very painful) which can be caused by stress. After that, I got medicine from the doctor which I can take at the first sign of a gout attack which stops it in its tracks. So, it wasn’t a big deal, but it gives me appreciation of how it can cause stress related physical illness as well.
So anyway just having a place to talk about it could help. That’s another reason for that idea of a place to ask for help. Just an opportunity to talk to other editors who have shared your experiences can help a lot. Even if the outcome is you decide you just need to move on and take a complete break or indeed never edit wikipedia again - still it may help a lot to have an opportunity to talk about the issues with others. Especially with others who have been in a similar situation as you, understand wha tit feels like, also understand what you are talking about too (most of your friends won’t know what you mean half the time if you try to talk in detail about what happened)
So that’s another advantage of the Grants:IdeaLab/Area for topic banned editors to talk freely about their ban, e.g. to ask questions of experienced wikipedians
On the Inspire lab, there is this idea of a study into the effects and ways to deal with it: Grants:IdeaLab/Impacts on lives of the banned
WARNING FIRST

As often happens there, the editor didn’t say “you are saying too much on this talk page, can you please slow down a bit. If you don’t I regretfully will have to take you to ANI and get you banned from this page”. Instead, one minute I was taking part in the discussion there, next minute I was in ANI facing a prospective topic ban. If I'd have had any warning that he planned to do this, I would have toned down my replies in that debate right away.
So that lead to the suggestion that it should be a two stage process. Not just for the community justice but for all bans and blocks, except obvious cases like vandalism and spamming.
The idea is that you have to post a notification on the user’s talk page telling them of your intent to take them to the boards, unless they reform their behaviour - and then giving them an opportunity to reform for some period of time before you are permitted to actually take them there.
Details of the idea here: Grants:IdeaLab/Require notification first to encourage editors to attempt to resolve things amicably before reporting them for a ban discussion
The idea is that this gives an opportunity for the “problem editor” to cool off, tone down their response, find a way forward. And that if they are taken to disciplinary action, then it should be based mainly on their behaviour after the warning, rather than before, again except in clear cases like vandalism etc.
I think this would deal with a lot of the time wasting issues such as people taken to the boards for trivial moments of irritation etc as well. E.g. with Clarawood123 - if they had been warned first, then a discussion could follow before they go to the board.
At that stage it is not a discussion about what sanction to impose. Instead all those questions about “why am I here” that you get so much nowadays would be thrashed out before they get there in a more amicable situation. By the time they are taken to the board, if it does happen, they know exactly why they are there and are ready to defend themselves against it if necessary.
Maybe it would then have all become clear to everyone. First clear to Clarawood123 that the reason for taking them to the board is because they were suspected of being a property developer, and then clear to everyone else, that actually they are not a property developer and it might never have ended up on the boards at all. Or if it is a real issue then they could reform their behaviour during this period.
They might also just take a wikibreak, go away for a week or two to calm down, which might solve all the issues if it is a case of them getting irritated and stress related.
TRAINING FOR ADMINS
It’s explained here, the idea that admins need training in conflict resolution, people skills, how to de-escalate situations etc.
Grants:IdeaLab/Training for administrators
IDEA OF INDEPENDENT OVERSIGHT OF THE BOARDS
Grants:IdeaLab/An outside observer on the arbitration committee
After all these are just volunteer admins. They are not justices, they are not trained in arbitration. Often the way things are done is very irregular. E.g. in the WP:ANI, it is so common for someone to be taken there for a minor incident such as a moment of anger on a talk page that shouldn’t have brought them there in the first place. Then anyone who they have made an enemy of during their time in wikipedia will pile in lots of accusations on top of that. They bring back old cases from several years ago, in double jeapordy, things long dealt with but don’t explain that and present as if it was new problem behaviour. Then it rapidly moves to a vote to e.g. site ban them based on this old stuff.
Experienced editors there who want to ban people also know that most of the things they say won’t be checked. So there is nothing to stop them from just telling the most outrageous lies there, just to get someone banned because they don’t like them or don’t want their views to influence debates on the content of wikipedia. Sometimes they do. For instance often they put together a tissue of many different fragments of conversation as “diffs” which does not accurately represent what happened at all if you read it in context.
So some oversight to look out for irregularities. Not to apply justice. Just to check that they are following proper procedure and call them out if they aren’t.
The wikipedia project has had tens of millions of funding recently from its campaigns to ask for donations from the public. So can easily afford to do this.
INDEPENDENT VERIFICATION OF CLAIMS SUBMITTED

A lot of the “evidence” presented there just doesn’t withstand scrutiny at all. E.g. a “sock puppet” in one example I looked at that had done only two edits of wikipedia in separate years, both minor, one a phrase edited, another adding one sentence. No way was that a sock puppet yet it was listed as one of several “confirmed sock puppets” of this user and people were voting to site ban them based on this “evidence”. I have no idea how it happened but surely some irregularity.
Sometimes you get claims submitted to the admins that are 10,000 words (should just be 500 but they ignore that limit). There is no way the admins can check these claims in detail, yet they often pass judgement based on them as if everything in it was verified. And the discussions in the community justice page WP:ANI run to many pages sometimes with many statements and there is no way again that those voting there can check them all unless they spend a few hours on the case before voting. I recommend you do if necessary if you want to actually vote in such a case - but most people there certainly don’t.
The admins can’t be expected to read these claims in detail. Nor typically do the ordinary folk who vote at WP:ANI. But why not employ someone to do it? A team of uninvolved independent people. Paid as a job, not volunteers. Who then just go through the claims in such submissions and say of each one “True”, “Not True” and “unsure”, or some such.
They have plenty money to pay for such a team. And this would have a huge impact on Wikipedia I think. By making it fairer, then people will be able to trust these boards to administer justice and that then will improve levels of trust and confidence throughout the project, I think.
They would also add missing information that is needed for a decision, e.g. that it is data from a case already closed.
E.g. in the example I gave, before anyone votes on it, then the independent verifiers would go through and next to the “confirmed sock puppet” would add “Not true”. Also might add “Closed case from two years ago”.
IDEALAB IDEAS
More ideas here - the top ones in the leaderboard Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire/Leaderboard - Meta
This is a list of all my articles in Debunking Doomsday to date. Most are included in my new Doomsday Debunked - kindle book - or Read it online on my website (free). Also these are available all in one page, (sometimes omits the most recent posts) here: Debunking Doomsday
Why the eclipse this August is a wonder of nature and not something to be scared of
Debunked: Nemesis is Nibiru - updated
Debunked: hidden asteroids in new branch of Taurid stream will devastate Earth
Debunked: Asteroid called 3BC2017 will kill millions in June
Debunked: Our sun was born with an “evil twin” which may have wiped out the dinosaurs
Debunked: Stephen Hawking says humans have only 100 years left on this planet
Debunked: 'This is NOT a hoax' Asteroid strike will kill millions in JUNE, shocking video claims
Tense situation concerning North Korea
Analogy of an African elephant with Planet X / Nibiru by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
Debunked: Planet 9 is Nibiru (Again)
Debunked: A huge black hole 8 billion light years away endangers Earth
Debunked: TRAPPIST 1 is Nibiru
Debunked: Galactic superwave theory
Debunked: this bank note shows the orbit of “Nibiru”
Debunked: NASA do all the asteroid tracking and hide information about Nibiru
Debunked: We are headed towards a new ice age
Why a bright light shining on clouds during a sunset is not a passing planet
What it would be like if we really had two suns (or three in this case)
Debunked: the Large Hadron Collider will create mini black holes that will destroy the world
Debunked - The obituary of the teenage girl who committed suicide in 2011 is fake
Debunked: birds singing at night are a sign the world will end
Why you probably don’t have a “phobia” if you are scared of asteroid impacts, two suns, Nibiru, etc
Debunked: Mountain sized asteroid 2014 UR116 headed towards Earth
Debunked: We are in danger from a magnetic pole shift in the near future
Debunked: Earth is threatened by a supernova
Debunked: Doomsday becoming one minute closer
Why we don’t need to be scared of the “Doomsday clock” (short version)
Debunked: Nibiru fragment to strike Earth in February
Debunked: Rich people are buying bunkers to escape from Nibiru
List of news sites that have run false reports that Earth is about to be hit by an asteroid
List of newspapers that run fake or unchecked Doomsday “news”
Debunked: A new star that will appear in the sky in 2022 is a sign of the end of the world
Are we in danger from “Hidden monster black holes found near the Milky Way” - NO!
Debunked: Dire predictions for 2017 by Nostradamus
Fake doomsday and disaster news from 2015 through to 2017
Debunked: Melissa Huffman did a video of Planet X
Debunked: The Vatican built a huge telescope, one of the largest in the world, to track Nibiru
Debunked: You should always read both sides of the argument about Nibiru - or indeed anything
Debunked: ALMA’s Gna (if it exists) is Nibiru
Debunked: Asteroid 2012 DA to hit Earth in 2020
Debunked: 2002 NT7 is going to hit Earth in 2019
Debunked: Earth faces a century of 400 giant impacts starting in 2017
Debunked: A gamma ray burst could make humans extinct
Debunked: “Doomsday” clock, Brexit “Doomsday” and use of “Doomsday” as hyperbole
Debunked: Trump (or any other president or president elect) is the Anti Christ
Why so many people post sightings of “Nibiru” - and why not “Santa” instead?
Debunked: Nemesis or Tyche is Nibiru
Bullshit Detector Plugin for Chrome for Fake News Sites
Debunked: Nibiru is Wormwood so must be real
Debunked: Astronomers get murdered by the secret agencies if they “speak out” about Nibiru
Debunked: Those who say Nibiru is real say that we should be scared and worried - are they right?
Debunked: Doomsday scenarios predicted using an Ouija board
Nibiru Debunked: Yes, we deserve to know the truth about Nibiru
Debunked: This is a “Winged planet” and is Nibiru
Debunked: Paul Cox said that we have two suns
Debunked: Nibiru is at coordinates …
Debunked: The US government is building vast underground bunkers to escape from Nibiru
Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy
Debunked: Nostrodamus predicted the end of the world on [insert date here]
Debunked: The Doomsday argument
Debunked: Have these three sisters predicted the Apocalypse
Debunked: Earth could be struck by a huge asteroid hundreds of kilometers across
Debunked: Mysterious sphere spotted in NASA’s Sun Images
Debunked: A nuclear war would make Earth uninhabitable - and humans extinct
Debunked: Everyone who says Nibiru is not real is lying
Debunked: This tablet from the ancient Sumerians depicts 12 planets including Nibiru
Debunked: NASA has found a brown dwarf in our solar system
What really happens if Yellowstone erupts as a supervolcano, or if some other supervolcano erupts?
Debunked: Carlos Muñoz Ferrada discovered Nibiru
Debunked: Soon we won’t be able to feed everyone because the world population is growing so quickly
Debunked - Stephen Hawking puts an expiry date on humanity
Debunked - The world will end because the Bible (or some other sacred book) says so
Nibiru is so scary because it isn’t real - what can you do to prevent something that isn’t real?
Debunked - Nibiru will hit Earth between January and March 2017 - or any range of dates like that
Debunked: Supermoon on 14th November is the beginning of the end of the world
Why the idea of Nibiru seems non refutable - and how does astronomy really work?
Debunked: How can the videos and photos be hoaxes when so many people believe them?
Debunked: Ancient astronomers knew things we don’t about planets and stars
Debunked: Climate change will make the world too hot for humans
Debunked: We are doomed because Earth is passing through the galactic plane
Debunked: The IRAS infrared satellite found Nibiru in 1983
Where can I get support if I’m scared of Nibiru / Doomsday maybe even suicidal?
Debunked: Nibiru has been found on Google Sky
Debunked: A Solar Storm Put A Crack In Earth's Magnetic Field
Debunked: The eclipse in the US in August 2017 will mark the start of the end of the world
Debunked: NASA warns that 1000 asteroids might hit Earth in the next five years
Dazzathecameraman’s amusing parody about HCT2014 (Huge Chocolate Teapot)
Debunking: Inuit elders say that the Earth’s poles have shifted position
Debunked: Universe will end with a “Big Rip”
Who else says Nibiru is nonsense?
Debunked: Nibiru is invisible because it is a brown dwarf or made of dark matter
Debunked: A planet in a 3600 year orbit can hide behind the sun for years on end
Debunking: Think how stupid you will feel if Nibiru is real
Debunked: NASA has been tracking “Planet X” for decades
Debunked: This is a photograph of two suns
I understand that Nibiru is not real but still feel scared all the time - what can I do?
Doomsday Debunked Kindle Book Draft Cover
Debunked: Why the World will End Surely on 17th February 2017? Shocking Facts
Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]
Debunked: We are endangered by “Star Quakes”
Debunked: NASA is getting ready to Capture Planet X / Nibiru on Camera
Debunked: Doomsday Stories like Nibiru must be true because lots of people believe they are true
Debunking: a president of the US could order a nuclear attack at a moments notice on a whim
Debunked: NASA says that Earth will enter total darkness for 15 days in November
How did we miss the Chelyabinsk asteroid?
Debunking: Halley’s comet is going to hit Earth this week.
Debunk: Planet 9 is tilting our solar system
Debunking: Solar Storms to end all life on Earth

Doomsday Debunked - kindle book - or Read it online on my website (free)
This is an example story: Nostradamus from the Balkans predicted the end of US politics as the world has come to know it
So the first thing before going into any of this is to realize that prophecy has never been established as an accurate way of predicting world events. It certainly is useless for astronomy. Whether it works for anything else I don’t know. But to date, astronomers have not found prophecy to be a useful way of predicting any astronomical events.
When astronomers want to know if an asteroid will do a flyby of Earth, or to advise the general public where exactly to go to observe a solar eclipse and how long it will last for, or decide when to launch a spacecraft to Mars and when exactly it will get there, they use observations and calculations rather than prophecy. So how likely is it that suddenly some prophet will prophecy an astronomical event, and get it right?
Now you can argue about that philosophically. Why do we live in a world where scientific predictions work and prophecy doesn’t or is not very reliable? Why can’t we just see the whole of space and time indeed? Why aren’t we all 100% accurate prophets? You can imagine an alternative universe where prophecy does work with a very high rate of success or even 100% success. But it doesn’t seem that we live in such a universe, and prophecy doesn’t seem to be very reliable in our universe.
Anyway so let’s look at the supposed evidence for Baba Vanga as a prophet who the stories are saying was able to prophecy world events. Is that true?
So, Baba Vanga was a blind Bulgarian herbalist who gained a reputation as a healer and a clairvoyant. She was unable to write and her prophecies were written down by people who listened to her, and of course they were written down in Bulgarian.

This makes it really easy for people to attribute all sorts of sayings to her which she never said. So for instance she is supposed to have predicted WWIII would last from 2010 to 2014 and that the 45th president of the US would be black, etc etc. However it’s entirely possible that she never said any of those things. The articles that say she did don’t give sources.
Some of those close to her were interviewed in Bulgarian - the report is here if you can read Bulgarian Баба Ванга не е предсказвала края на света
- or you can use auto translate to get a rough idea Google Translate
I don’t speak Bulgarian so will take you to a discussion here Baba Vanga The Truth about Her Predictions!, page 1
Excerpts from the interview, translated by vistina for their forum post:
“Каква война? Ванга никога не е правила такива предсказания! Някой си ги измисля, после други ги преповтарят и така се стресират хората. Спекулират с името й, защото всички й вярват”, коментират дългогодишни съседки и приятелки на пророчицата в Петрич. Бойка Костадинова близо 50 г. е била сред приятелките на пророчицата.
Translation: "what war? Vanga has never made such a prediction! Somebody fabricates (those predictions), than others repeats them and the people are getting stressed (by the predictions).They speculate with her name, because everybody believes what she has to tell" says her neighbor and friend. Boyka Kostadinova has been friend with Vanga for 50 years.
“Виждаше и в миналото, и в бъдещето, но предсказания за Трета световна война не съм чула да е правила.” Горева смята, че и предсказанията за атентата срещу кулите близнаци в Ню Йорк, потъването на “Курск”, избора на чернокож президент на САЩ също са преувеличени. Появили се след смъртта й и никой не обявил кога ги е чул от Ванга.
Translation: She was looking into the past, and the future but prophecies about third world war i have not heard from her". Goreva tell that the prophecies about the 9/11, the Kursk and about the black president of USA are also fictitious. They have appeared after her death and nobody have told when she has told those prophecies.
So, no, it doesn’t seem likely that she has prophesied world events and what’s more it doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing she was interested in prophesying whether she could or not.
It is a similar situation with Nostradamus. He was literate so we have his actual writings. But he made many enigmatic announcements, so enigmatic that reading things into them is like seeing shapes in the clouds overhead. You can interpret them to mean almost anything. He made only one dated prediction, for 1999, and nothing apocalyptic happened in 1999. For more on this see Debunked: Nostrodamus predicted the end of the world on [insert date here]
To assess these many claims of the idea that there is a planet headed towards Earth and that this is being kept secret - first, you need to realize quite how small the Earth is compared to interplanetary space.
The Earth travels by its own radius in four minutes. So when astronomers first discover an asteroid they can't know if it is going to hit Earth. Before they can do that they have to know its orbit so precisely that they can say exactly where it will be to the nearest minute or two, years or decades in advance, whenever the impact is predicted. And if a new comet is discovered, the hypothesis is not at all "this comet could hit Earth".
In the peppercorn model of the solar system, the Sun is a soccer ball and the Earth is a peppercorn 26 yards from the Sun. Even if the impactor was the size of Earth or even larger it is like trying to hit a peppercorn with another one from a distance of tens of yards, throwing it blindly in a random direction. The chance of that happening is tiny.
Here is Bill Nye showing the same idea with a somewhat larger scale model with the Sun one meter in diameter:
Hopefully also that helps you understand what a huge fail it is when the Nibiru conspiracy theorists take news stories of dwarf planets beyond Neptune or the idea of a new planet that may exist many times further away than Neptune - and then claim that it is in some way a danger to Earth. Something that orbits beyond Neptune is not in the most remote way any danger to us at all.
The chance is so very tiny of anything hitting Earth in the vastness of interplanetary space, that of all the new comets discovered, and of all the 15,000 asteroids currently being tracked that do close flybys of Earth, not one is going to hit Earth before 2100.
There are 500,000 asteroids in total discovered in the last 30 years.
None of those asteroids will hit Earth before 2100.
To try to find out if an asteroid has any chance of hitting Earth takes weeks of observation. And NASA are not the ones who do those observations. They are a civilian space agency, like ESA and JAXA (the Japanese space agency). Their main job is to put satellites and spacecraft into orbit, and humans too sometimes. It's not their job to actually do the observations, even Hubble observations are done by astronomers internationally who book time on the telescope. And Hubble is the worst possible telescope for detecting asteroids as it has a very narrow field of view to let it look at distant objects at high magnification. That’s no good for detecting asteroids and comets when you don’t know where they are until they are detected.
The best asteroid detecting telescope we have at present is Pan STARRS which detects many new asteroids every day - it's at the top of a mountain in Hawaii and it is run by astronomical associations in many different countries. And those telescopes only do the initial detection at present. This may be improved in future but at present they are reliant on professional and amateur astronomers world wide to do the follow up observations to work out the trajectory and whether it is going to hit Earth or not. And their results are published here, Current Impact Risks table. This is done in an open way and there is no mechanism in place to hide the information. It is hard to see how it could be done anyway even if all the nations in the world wanted to hide the information because it is so dependent on sharing the data publicly.
You can subscribe to the Minor Planets circulars and get exactly the same data all the other astronomers get about newly discovered asteroids and comets to track. You can go and check all the other astronomical observations yourself. You have to be a real geek to do that or to have a lot of background in practical astronomy as they are technical and hard to read but that's not to obscure, that's just because they have lots of data to share so have to present it in a compact format and their readers are used to reading it in that format - also it gets read by computers too nowadays.
And this idea that astronomers would hide impact risks is actually tested in practice too. Apophis particularly had a tiny chance of hitting Earth soon after it was first discovered. This was reported everywhere. Nobody tried to hide it. It would have serious effects if it did hit Earth. The chance of this was only 2.7% meaning a 97.3% chance of a miss - so it is not surprising that later observations proved it would miss.

Discovery image of Apophis, 325 meters in diameter. It initially had a 2.7% chance of hitting Earth on April 13 2029. This estimate was shared with everyone. This made it large enough to take out an entire small country if it hit the Earth. There is no way something like this could be hidden from astronomers as they are the ones who do the observations and work out the orbits. And asteroid discovery is something that is carried out by astronomers, amateur and professional, world wide
Astronomers can find huge things light years away like stars and brown dwarfs and can now find planets too through various methods such as the minute gravitational effects on the motion of stars causing changes in their speed of just meters per second or less because that changes the frequency of light via doppler shift. They can find objects 100s of kilometers in size at the distance of Neptune. They can find them 10 km upwards at distance of Jupiter and have found all the objects of 10 km upwards that do regular flybys of Earth and they have nearly finished the survey of the 1 km objects. The smaller ones like Apophis are harder to survey, but their long term objective is to find all of those too by the 2020s. This may take until the 2030s however, it depends how much money they put into it. It's not a lot you are talking about there, of order of tens of millions to hundreds of millions would be enough to complete the survey.
So my advice would be, if you want something done about impact risk, try writing letters to politicians to try to get them to find those extra tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to complete the survey down to smaller asteroids of tens of meters in diameter. It will not help at all to accuse them of hiding a BS planet that can't possibly exist. How can that help retire the impact risk?
If we do find an asteroid headed our way, then there are many things we can do. We wouldn't just panic and throw up our hands in despair. There are many ideas for diverting asteroids and comets. The more time we have, the easier it is to do it, so making a complete survey is the first priority.
If one was headed our way we'd want to implement big expensive programs to deflect it, so it would be on the news, politicians asking for the money, votes in congress etc to fund a big program to deflect it. If that wasn't possible then they would work out the impact site and start work on an evacuation program and again, the longer in advance you do that, the easier to persuade people they need to move and to actually do the evacuation - much easier to evacuate a million people with several years of notice than with just a few days.
And if it was large enough to have global effects, you could do things like store crops for the previous year to tide through the lowering of temperature and work out what kinds of crops you can grow during the impact winter and so on. And advice on how to protect yourself from the firestorm if there was one, etc etc.
But those large impacts are very very rare. If you think about it, no large asteroid has hit a populated area for the thousands of years of historical records. So - the chance of an impact this century is very tiny. For a large asteroid 10 km or so, it is 1 in a million per century (the last one was 66 million years ago and they happen once every 100 million years on average). But since they have already found all the 10 km asteroids that reduces it to 1 in 100 million per century approximately - only leaves the comets which you can observe years in advance as they approach Earth.
The smaller ones are far more common. We get hit by dozens of Chelyabinsk size meteorites for every single 1 km asteroid. So if we do get an impact on a populated area, it is far likely to be a small asteroid than a large one. The smaller it is, the more likely it is.
So that again hopefully lets you see they aren't hiding anything. I think part of this comes from disaster movies which give the impression that we could have a large asteroid heading towards Earth and discover it only days before impact. Armageddon does a lot of poetic license. Earth hasn't been hit by an asteroid the size of Texas for billions of years and from the cratering record that is just not something that could happen at this stage in the solar system. We could be hit by a smaller 10 km asteroid but this is exceedingly unlikely 1 in 100 million, and we'd know about it many years before impact.
So these movies are just not accurate. They use a lot of fudges in the science for the sake of a dramatic story line.
Yes we do deserve the truth. So don't read the Nibiru sites if you want the truth as they are full of BS. See my Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy. If you use that BS tester then you can click away from most of them after reading the first sentence or at least the first para. And click away from most videos after the first sentence or two as well.
This object on Google Sky is often shared as “Nibiru” - and they also often claim it is in the missing rectangle in Google Sky (an image from the original database which for some reason has been left out of their upload) though it is actually more than twenty degrees away from it.
Anyway it is a fascinating looking object isn’t it:

Closer view

You can find it here on Google Sky
It’s actually a T Tauri star - a very young star, from a few hundred thousand to a million years old, still forming into a star and making its first planets.
Many of them still have protoplanetary disks - denser clouds of gas around them which will soon collapse to form comets, asteroids and planetary embryos


And this, remarkably, is not an artist’s impression. It is an actual radar image of a protoplanetary disk around a very young star HL Tauri - Wikipedia which is thought to be less than 100,000 years old. The dark lanes here probably indicate places where planets are forming, and so “clearing their orbit” of debris from the condensing gas disk.
These very young stars often blow off jets of gas in opposite directions. The jets are then lit up by it in a “reflection nebula”.
Anyway so the “winged planet” is actually not a planet, but a deep sky object. I can’t find information about its distance (anyone know do say) but probably hundreds of light years or thousands of light years away. It is a very young star, probably just started to form planets if it has any (we now think that nearly all stars do form planets). Its name is GN 05.39.2 and its Simbad page is here, which provides more images

Image from its Simbad page
This is another image from 1st December 2011

However if you are a keen amateur astronomer you can go out and take photographs of it yourself. Scott Fergusson did just that, twice, six months apart.
Here also, Dave Greg covers it in his article about the Google sky missing section.
The mystery of the missing section of Google Sky solved [UPDATED], page 1
He also covers a rather similar looking reflection nebula

Parsamian 21 associated with HBC 687 whihc is an FU Orionis star - another type of young pre main sequence star, one that varies in brightness dramatically.
He was joking. It’s a British ironic very very dry sense of humour. Like the humour of the Mitchell and Webb show in this conspiracy theories spoof they did.
Many British people use it a lot in everyday conversation as well, and our comedians make great use of it. That’s a more extreme version, a complete sketch done in a totally dead pan way, more often it is just a sentence or two.
It is absolutely vital for this sort of humour to work that it has to be said totally "dead pan" either you don't give it away at all that it is a joke, or you can subtly hint at it. It's a "wry smile" humour, not LOL but British people find it funny and it is used a lot by the comedians here on TV etc. The nearest to it that those from outside the UK will be aware of is perhaps the idea of an “April Fool” news story. It would completely spoil an April Fool joke if you made it too obvious that it is meant humorously - the humour comes from writing a dead pan serious article about something that is as ridiculous as you can make it without giving away too quickly that it is a joke..
Here is the extract:
Just a joke after they had a problem with a reflection giving a ghost image of the sun. It's the serious tone of voice with which you say something so ludicrous that makes it funny for us. If you make it too easy to see that it is a joke, then it’s not nearly so funny for us, and falls rather flat.
If you are used to it you can tell by the way he says "there is, it's true" - there is a special inflection we often use in that situation that shows it's a joke - a slight upturn of pitch, fading of volume and increase in tempo of speech at the end of the sentence. You don’t have to give that inflection, and if you do, it has to be subtle and easy to miss or again it rather spoils the joke.
Many of the conspiracy sites falsely claim that he is a NASA astronomer. Slooh is an international organization that runs several robotic telescopes in places with good seeing such as the Canary Isles, and uses them for live shows of events of public interest, such as in this case, the transit of Mercury. Its shows are syndicated to media outlets worldwide. Observatories can choose to connect their live feeds with the community. It also allows amateur astronomers to hire the telescopes at a few cents an hour giving them access to multi million dollar telescopes. See Interview: Mike Paolucci, the founder of space-viewing service, Slooh
Paul Cox is an English astronomer who hosts many of the shows and manages most aspects of the Slooh engineering and tech says he immediately saw its advantages for astronomers cloud bound in the UK when he first heard of it in 2003.
It is easy to check for yourself that we have only one sun. Don’t stare as it, because that can damage your vision, and you have no pain receptors at the back of your eye.
Just hold your finger in front of the sun to block it from your vision. Look to either side. Is there a second sun there? After doing that with your finger vertical, hold your finger in front of it horizontally and look above and below? Is there a second sun?
You have just disproved the hypothesis that we have two suns.
This is the key to a real object - it will have a co-ordinate in the sky. It will be in a particular constellation. But it won’t have fixed co-ordinates, not a nearby object in our solar system. As seen from Earth, the co-ordinates change slowly, moving through the sky. A comet, planet or asteroid is never stationary in the sky for long, Every night they can say exactly where it is in the sky.

Comet ISON tracks through the constellations Gemini, Cancer and Leo as it falls toward the sun - this is an example. The position of Comet ISON could be plotted for every day of the year, and you could read exactly where to look to see it - as it slowly moved through Gemini, Cancer and then Leo in 2013 in this example. Any real object will have co-ordinates like this and has to be seen in front of one of the constellations as seen from Earth.
You need a minimum of three good observations to work out an orbit, and that means very accurate observations. If you are to predict if an object will hit Earth you need to know when it will cross our orbit accurately to within four minutes, as that is how long it takes for Earth to travel half its width along the track of its orbit. Of the 15,000 known objects that do regular flybys of Earth with worked out orbits, none of them will hit us before 2100, which shows how hard it is for anything to hit Earth even if it is in an orbit that takes it past Earth every few years.
Whenever I have seen a page or video where they say they have co-ordinates for “Nibiru”, it’s always just some deep sky object usually hundreds or thousands of light years away in Google Sky and they claim it is “Nibiru”. Perhaps a planetary nebula for instance - vast clouds of gas that look a bit like planets, the reason for the name.
They surely don’t know how to work out the coordinates of a real object in the sky or how to find an object at those coordinates with a telescope. However, since they are exploring the night sky in Google Sky, there is no need to do that. They can just read off the co-ordinates from the program.
Of course this means that it doesn’t move, because it is some distant object many light years away and anyway Google sky is just a snapshot of the night sky as photographed in the Sloane digital sky survey and other such surveys.
When they say they have co-ordinates for it in Google Sky they usually mean this object:

It’s a fascinating looking object. But it is not a planet. It is a very distant young star which is blowing off gas in two jets, as its nebula condenses. For details see: Debunked: This is a “Winged planet” and is Nibiru
If you were tracking a comet, say, you would not use Google Sky. It is not a telescope and doesn’t show a real time view. You’d use a telescope to observe it, then eventually when bright enough, follow it with binoculars and naked eye.
So it doesn’t make a lot of sense to try to follow a real moving object in Google Sky. So if someone says “These are the co-ordinates of Nibiru and I found it in Google Sky” - it just means they have found some object while browsing the program which to their eyes looks like what they think a planet should look like. It’s probably hundreds or thousands of light years away from Earth.
This is another urban myth that is often shared on Nibiru conspiracy sites. They claim that governments are building underground bunkers as a place to retreat to when their BS Nibiru hoax planet hits Earth or flies past Earth.
It is true that many governments built bunkers during the cold war, which were designed to protect critical people, with enough of an infrastructure to be able to continue to govern and prevent the country descending into total chaos during and after a nuclear attack. The cold war is over and many of those underground bunkers have been abandoned and sold or put to other uses.
But the US does continue to maintain a number of underground bunkers. I'm sure that nuclear war is uppermost in their minds as a reason for keeping them on, even though a global nuclear war seems far less likely than it was when I was young. They are underground to protect from direct impact and also to protect from EMPs - electromagnetic pulses caused by detonations of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere which can damage electrical equipment.

They may well have other underground facilities that are secret.
You need these even with a conventional war too. After all the UK had underground command posts in WWII, and that was well before nuclear weapons. The Churchill WW2 underground bunker is a tourist attraction now in London.

Map room in the underground Churchill War Rooms in London - from WWII, now a tourist attraction.
So yes, governments do build underground bases. And NO - that does not mean they are preparing for Nibiru! The whole idea of Nibiru is bonkers so for sure no government is going to waste even a moment of thought about it.
Many of the Nibiru website authors claim to be very knowledgeable about astronomy. It is easy to test though, and find out that they don't understand this stuff. Here are some things they may say which immediately show they are mistaken, don’t have the most basic understanding of astronomy, and don't check their sources.

This rather dramatic image has gone the rounds a bit and been posted as a photograph of a double sunset in China. It's actually an artist's impression from NASA of a double sunset over an alien planet.
If someone tells you that we have two suns - then you know they are speaking BS. Click away as that means they don’t have the first clue about astronomy.
It is dead easy to check that we have only one sun. Hold a finger in front of it (don’t stare at the Sun as you won’t know if your eyes get damaged) With the sun blocked, do you see a second sun to either side, or above or below? No! Therefore we have only one sun. It really is as easy as that to debunk this one.
If anyone says any of these things and claims to be an expert in astronomy - that’s like someone telling you that Usain Bolt is a top seeded tennis player and won Wimbledeon and then claiming to be an expert on sport.
That wouldn’t lead you to suddenly wonder if he really is a tennis player and wonder if all the Olympic finals were faked to make him out to be a sprinter. You’d just look at the person who said this askance, or indeed aghast, and then from then on you’d probably never trust anything they say on matters of sport.

Usain Bolt winning the 100 meters in Bejing in 2008. If someone told you he was a top seeded tennis player - that would just lead you to treat that person as someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about in matters of sport.
So - it’s like that if you have even a basic understanding of astronomy and someone says any of those things I listed, or posts them on a website, or a youtube video, you immediately know that this person knows nothing at all about astronomy. They know as much about astronomy as the person who said that Usain Bolt was a tennis player knows about sport.
There are many other things they say that are immediate giveaways that they don't have the first clue about astronomy. Indeed if an article claims to be astronomical and uses the words Nibiru or Hercobulus or Wormwood, then unless it is a debunking site, that is a giveaway sign that the author knows nothing of modern astronomy. But what I've listed there already deals with 99% of them probably. That is except for the ones that have no astronomy and just base their prophecies on miracles and the Bible or such like.
If anyone says any of those things, they don't understand astronomy, just click away. See also my Debunking: You can’t trust anyone except the Nibiru people - everyone else is a paid shill of the government or in some other way motivated to propogate falsehoods
And for why astronomers are sure that Nibiru is just nuts, see
Examples:

Portrait of Michel de Nostredame (Nostradamus) by his son César de Nostredame
On Nostradamus, I think best to quote RationalWiki
"Nostradamus was a sixteenth-century French astrologer and scholar who is best remembered for making predictions about world events. As with all visionaries, his success rate has been perfect in hindsight. This is mostly due to the fact that he wrote his predictions in a mixture of his native French, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Provençal and kept them so vague that they can be shoehorned to fit nearly any set of events:"
His only dated prediction is this one apparently
"L'an mil neuf cent nonante neuf sept mois,
Du ciel viendra un grand Roi deffrayeur:
Ressusciter le grand Roi d'Angolmois,
Avant après Mars regner par bonheur."Translation:
"The year 1999, seventh months,
from the sky will come the great King of Terror,
bringing back to life the great King of the Angolmois.
Before and after, Mars reigns by good fortune."
There apparently Angolmois is a region in the south of France but has been interpreted as an approximate anagram of Mongolois - the Mongols.
This is a guess at what it meant from before 1999]
This is one guess at what it meant from before 1999
"The gist therefore seems to be that in July 1999 a possibly appeasing Pope will in some way stir up a leader with Mongol (or possibly Lombard) connections (some French observers prefer to take the word 'Angolmois' literally, and refer it to the former François I, who was duke of Angoulême), with the result that a previously raging war will accidentally flare up again."
Obviously that didn't happen, or indeed anything much else. That is unless with hindsight you apply numerology and claim that he was actually predicting something else. This page claims it is a prediction of 9/11.
So anyway that is the only prophecy he made with a date attached. But enthusiasts try interpreting his vague words to mean other things, use numerology, anagrams and so on to extract meaning from them.
Both the predictions at the head of this answer were also interpretations of this same passage, and it is easy to find many more attempts to use it to prophecy various end of world scenarios.
NOBODY KNEW ABOUT ASTEROID IMPACTS BACK THEN
Nostrodamus was a sixteenth century apothecary and seer. The first person to hypothesize that meteorites came from space was Ernst Chladni in the late eighteenth century. Before then, the consensus of everyone, including scientists, was that the rocks known as meteorites came from volcanoes or were stones lifted up in strong winds. So he can't have predicted a meteorite impact as he didn't know that such things were possible.
Also - when has anyone successfully predicted any astronomical event using prophecy? While on the other hand, the way we predict them by searching for asteroids and comets with telescopes, working out orbits, and then using computers to find the date of the flyby is very successful. Every day astronomers predict several distant flybys of Earth accurately to the minute. Once the orbit is known, they can predict them to the minute also for centuries into the future. No prophets can do anything that's even a patch on that. Astronomers don’t need to make up vague quatrains that could mean almost anything in order to be successful at predicting astronomical events.
So hopefully this helps some of you to be more skeptical about Nostrodamus's predictions - or rather - what people claim to be his predictions by shuffling the letters and concepts in his vague and confusing quatrains until they come up with something that makes sense to them.
Example: Tech & Science - one-in-500-chance-humans-will-be-extinct-in-a-year-mathematician-claims - News
Summary - this is a rather strange argument that some philosophers find compelling. I’m not sure what else to say except to outline the argument. It is based on some rather weird assumptions.
It is not based on any actual insights into whether we risk extinction - it is just based on pure thought and ideas.
Philosophers have argued it back and forth. And it is most definitely not accepted to be valid by consensus. You’ll find at least as many who say the whole thing is nonsense as you find philosophers who think it all makes sense as a way of deducing something about the future of humanity.
COMPARISON WITH OTHER ESTIMATES
Note in the paper he talks about many ways that humans could go extinct. But he doesn’t evaluate those risks, is not assigning them a probability of his own. He is just using other people’s estimates as a way to compare with his own ideas. He argues that because they come up with similar numbers to him, that this helps to confirm both approaches.
I find that a very weak argument myself. It can easily be a coincidence, indeed he might well have known of their ideas when working on his theory. Or for an influence in the other direction, out of all the literature on the subject, he might have noticed them because they happened to use similar numbers to his as probabilities.
When asked “what is the probability of human extinction before 2100” people will come up with a wide variety of figures.
I myself think the chance is pretty much 0% of actual extinction, as many of the scenarios they talk about such as nuclear war or asteroid impacts just wouldn’t make us extinct - reduce our numbers yes, make us extinct, no. Also the probability of an asteroid impact large enough to have global effects is minute, 99.999999% certain it won’t happen. It’s so unlikely that it is pretty much 0, and it wouldn’t make us extinct anyway. I don’t think they quite realize this.
And others such as human made artificial intelligences taking over the world I find science fiction at present and unlikely for many reasons. There are a couple of scenarios I think may be possible but can be avoided so long as we take reasonable care.
For my take on this, which you may find refreshing as a different viewpoint, see my Could Anything Make Humans Extinct In The Near Future?
THE ARGUMENT
Basically it’s based on the idea that you can think of yourself as born at random at some point in the entire history of humankind.

World population from 10,000 BC to the present. What happens when you project it into the future?
The argument assumes that you are born at a random point along the population curve of the entire past and future of humanity. If that is true, then the chances are that this graph shows half of the total population in the past, when you take all the humans born so far.
So the remaining half of the curve would have the same number of people in it.
If the population stays high at 7 billion with 140 million born each year - then (if this reasoning is correct) the chances are high that it will only last for of the order of a thousand years .
So anyway this mathematician has refined the argument. He assumes that we have 140 million births every year - we have already reached peak child and the population is now growing only because we are living longer. So suppose that now continues endlessly until we go extinct, whenever that is. So now he builds a probability distribution based on this idea that every year we have the same number of children until suddenly we go extinct. Then based on that he works out what the probability of extinction has to be every year to make it so that right now is more or less exactly half way through the population.
Through lots of complex maths then he comes up with a chance of 1 in 500 of extinction every year.
LOADS OF ASSUMPTIONS
However there are loads of assumptions here.
First - this whole way of arguing is itself philosophically and logically challengeable.
This is a much simpler and easier to debunk argument of somewhat the same type:
PROOF THAT I AM PROBABLY CHINESE - OR ELSE - THAT YOU ARE PROBABLY BRITISH
As an example, if just looking at the present, then I’m from the UK, I can argue in a similar way that most people in the world should be from the UK since I was born at random anywhere on the world. Or argue that I am probably Chinese, at least more likely to be Chinese than any other nationality, as that is the most likely place to be born by population.
The philosophers who think the Doomsday argument is valid would challenge whether this is the same type of argument. But I think it is a good example to show the limitations of this way of reasoning and why it is often challenged.
WHAT IF OUR POPULATION DID LAST FOR EVER?
Also another argument. What if some population did last for ever. Then you still have to be born at some point in that population. Freeman Dyson worked out a way that intelligent beings could continue to survive for ever in an expanding continually cooling universe. So it’s not impossible in theory. For his ideas see TIME WITHOUT END: PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY IN AN OPEN UNIVERSE
The argument would never let you conclude that your civilization has an infinite future. Even if perhaps your civilization actually does have one.
HOW CAN OUR POPULATION EVER GET STARTED
Another objection - if the argument is valid, then how can the population of humans ever get started? Because after the first few hundred are born, if one of them stops and thinks to apply this argument, then they would prove that they are probably going to go extinct very quickly. Why is the argument valid now, but wasn’t for those very early humans?
Anyway those are just some ideas to think about. They would all be countered by those who support this argument and then their arguments in turn would be countered by those who think we can’t learn anything by this way of reasoning, and so it can continue back and forth and on and on. Philosophers have built up many elaborate intricate objections and counter objections. If you are interested you can read some of them here: Doomsday argument
But I think for most of us, best to just leave this to the philosophers. Your head can spin and spin if you try to make sense of this. If you are a philosopher you may enjoy that sort of thing. But it probably will never be resolved. Philosophical arguments like this seldom are.
So, first of all, for this story to mean anything to you, you have to be a devout Catholic. You have to believe in the Virgin Mary as a saint who appears to people in dreams and you have to believe that the children in this video met her and that this was a miraculous event. Also of course you have to believe that the Apocalypse can occur as a future miraculous event.
If there is anything there you don’t believe, there is no need to read any further. This story is not for you. If you aren't a catholic, no need to pay any attention to it.
There is no astronomy or science in this so it has to be debunked on religious terms.
This is one of the videos shared about it:
If you are a Catholic, I've found out a bit more, quora answer here which may help you interpret it according to your faith or you can contact a catholic priest maybe for help. It does seem to be something that Catholics do believe to be a true miracle. A bit about it here:
What were the 3 secrets of Fatima? Are they against Catholicism?
Wikipedia article here
Three Secrets of Fátima - Wikipedia
This gives background on Catholic interpretations of revelations - goes into how the apocalyptic visions are part of a tradition of extravagant symbolism not meant to be taken literally. They were a source of comfort for early Christians facing persecution, and still can be today for Christians facing difficult times because of their faith.
"The Book of Revelation had its origin in a time of crisis, but it remains valid and meaningful for Christians of all time. In the face of apparently insuperable evil, either from within or from without, all Christians are called to trust in Jesus' promise, "Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). Those who remain steadfast in their faith and confidence in the risen Lord need have no fear. Suffering, persecution, even death by martyrdom, though remaining impenetrable mysteries of evil, do not comprise an absurd dead end. No matter what adversity or sacrifice Christians may endure, they will in the end triumph over Satan and his forces because of their fidelity to Christ the victor. This is the enduring message of the book; it is a message of hope and consolation and challenge for all who dare to believe."
~So with this three sisters story, there is no actual prediction, and no astronomy. There is also no evidence that they did predict a literal apocalypse and anyway - that would surely go against the teachings in the Bible about false prophets. That's about all one can say.
I think if you are Catholic and want more help with it, best to contact a Catholic Priest for help understanding what it is about.
Also here is my general article about these Biblical ideas: Debunked - The world will end because the Bible (or some other sacred book) says so by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
Asteroid impact stories often use images like this:

That's actually an artist's impression of a planetoid hitting the early Earth by Don Davis. But we are at no risk at all from asteroids like that. The last impact on Earth this big was getting on for four billion years ago. The largest asteroids that could feasibly hit Earth are so small they would span at most a single pixel in that image.
The largest asteroids that could hit Earth are about 10 kilometers across, some of them a little larger. But a 100 kilometer diameter asteroid never hits Earth, hasn’t for billions of years and there is no likelihood of this happening for millions of years into the future.
To put it in perspective, if you had an image of the Earth with 1600 pixels resolution for its diameter, which is a common resolution for an HD computer screen, then a ten kilometer diameter asteroid would be a little over 1 pixel in diameter.
This is about as large an asteroid as would hit Earth. So you can understand why they don't use realistic asteroid sizes in the images. You wouldn't be able to see the impactor at all!
This is a more accurate image, used in many news stories - where they show it glowing but don't show the impactor, and with a close up zoom in on the Earth.

That's the image that was widely used for reporting 2013 TV135 the roughly 450 meters diameter asteroid that we now know will be over three quarters of the distance to the sun away from Earth on that date.
For a larger, 10 km asteroid, this is an accurate artist's impression, from NASA.

About 70 impactors this large or larger have hit Earth since 3.8 billion years ago.
Also check out the image by Don Davis, of Southwest Research Institute from Ancient Asteroids Kept Pelting Earth in a "Late-Late" Heavy Bombardment.
Nothing much would survive in the near neighbourhood of the strike, out to a range of order of hundreds of kilometers. But far away, many would survive the immediate impact.
RISK OF DINOSAUR EXTINCTION TYPE EVENTS
There is a risk of an object as big as ten kilometers in diameter, or a little more, hitting Earth. But how big a risk is it?
What would you say is the probability of this happening - a dinosaur era ending type impact, before 2100? And what is your best guess for when it is most likely to happen next in the future?
If you don't know the answer, you might like to pause reading for a moment and try a guess.

Artist's impression of the impact at the end of the Cretaceous period - credit Don Davis, painted for NASA
The dinosaur extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period happened 66 million years ago.
When asked that question, most people hugely overestimate the chance of this happening again soon. Many, perhaps influenced by dramatic movies, will say there is a high chance of it happening before the end of this century.
Events like the dinosaur extinction impact occur roughly every hundred million years on average.
It's random, so could in principle happen in any century - but the chance of it happening in any given century is about one in a million.
So, if you ask for a best guess about when we are likely to be hit by an asteroid that large, the answer is, probably ten million years from now upwards. It is more likely to be several tens of millions of years before we get hit by an asteroid this large.
To put this into perspective, then since the dinosaur impact, there has been enough time for tiny animals looking like this
to evolve all the way to humans.
It may well be as long again before we have a similar massive extinction type asteroid impact on Earth again. And the dinosaurs didn't have any technology (as far as we know). We could easily survive that event - and what's more we could deflect it also, especially with a bit of warning (more on this later, in What kind of technology could we use to deflect an asteroid?).
This could happen in any century, as it is a random event. But the chance of it happening within the next century is one in a million, so you can be 99.9999% certain that it won't happen this century. Or indeed, you can probably add an extra 9, make it 99.99999% certain, since most of the 1 kilometer asteroids have already been located, and they all miss Earth in the near future, and all the 10 km and larger asteroids that do regular flybys have been found, and none of them hit Earth.
That leaves comets which we’d spot years in advance. As a rough estimate one impact in a hundred is from a comet. If that’s right, then you can add two extra 9s making it 99.999999% certain we won’t be hit in this century, and we’d also spot any approaching comet that large many years before it got here. It would of course be far more likely to do a close flyby than to hit.
Most likely it won't happen for many millions of years. You'd expect to get many flybys first, because Earth is such a tiny target, hard to hit.
Indeed, if there were any astronomer dinosaurs at the time (unlikely) it would probably be obvious even to the naked eye. Assuming it did many close flybys first, every decade or two, as is the usual situation - then something that big, at the distance of the Moon would be as bright as a 10 meter diameter satellite in Low Earth Orbit. I would be easy to spot with the naked eye as a faint moving star in the sky.
In any flybys as close as geostationary orbit, it would approach the brightness of the ISS - the brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon.
WHY WE CAN’T BE HIT BY A 100 KILOMETER DIAMETER ASTEROID
In the movie Armageddon, NASA discover an asteroid roughly the size of Texas heading for Earth, due to hit us in 18 days. If you get your ideas of science from movies you might think this means we could be surprised by a huge asteroid like that with only a few weeks of warning. But this is just movie science.
First, we can’t be surprised by such an asteroid, as it is far too large to be missed by even amateur astronomers with a decent sized amateur telescope, years before impact.

Enceladus hovering over the North Sea - this is smaller than the asteroid in Armageddon, and it can be spotted by keen amateur astronomers out as far away as Saturn. Image credit NASA / JPL. You might also like to check out Cirro Villa's image of Enceladus hovering over Southern England in Asteroids VS. Your Hometown: Fun but Frightening Graphics Compare Asteroid Sizes to Places on Earth
Voyagers 1 and 2 both took over three years to reach Saturn.
WHY WE CAN’T BE HIT BY SUCH A LARGE ASTEROID AT ALL
The known asteroids like Vesta and Ceres are all in nice stable orbits. There’s a tiny chance of Vesta hitting Ceres every billion yeas, but for sure nothing is going to happen there for millions of years into the future.
The ones that can surprise us are Kuiper belt objects, but they come from random directions with random inclinations, and are very unlikely to lie in the same plane as the Earth's orbit or to hit Earth.
We can see that also from the meteorite crater record of the solar system that such large asteroids never hit the inner solar system inside of the asteroid belt, not for billions of yeras. There are no huge craters in the inner solar system younger than 3 billion years, out to Mars.
The Moon, Mercury, and Mars all have huge craters from the late heavy bombardment between 3.8 and 3.5 billion years ago.
Craters on Mars
Impact from 3.8 billion years ago when large asteroid impacts were still common. 3D map of Mars - Hellas Basin on Mars
Craters on the Moon

The Aitken basin at the lunar South pole. It's believed to be over 3.8 billion years but the exact date is hard to pin down. Impact of an asteroid perhaps 170 km in diameter.
Craters on Mercury

Craters on Earth
Earth surely had impacts this large back then as well, but the evidence is probably long erased by continental drift.
The largest crater on the Earth may be the Vredefort Impact Structure in South Africa - this was about 300 km in diameter, when formed. The Sudbury basin is nearly as large, and there are three others in the 100 - 300 km range. See Largest craters ordered by size. These are thought to be the result of impactors of up to 10 or 15 km in diameter.
For the largest I can find, see this Impact of 23-mile-wide asteroid boiled Earth's oceans 3.26 billion years ago (and another link, and scientific paper). When it says it boiled the oceans there - doesn't mean it boiled them dry, just surface layers, and it would come nowhere near making all life extinct. Humans could surely survive even that one if you are in a sub at the time, and after the impact, Earth would remain the most habitable place in the solar system. Anyway - that one is over three billion years ago, soon after the end of the so called "late heavy bombardment" - it is only late compared to the origins of the solar system, early of course from our perspective.
Even though the "late heavy bombardment" was over, there was a tail-end of not quite such huge impacts that continued, perhaps for another 700 million years. Ancient Asteroids Kept Pelting Earth in a "Late-Late" Heavy Bombardment, up to 2.5 billion years ago.
Craters on Venus
Venus is shrouded in a thick layer of clouds, so hard to observe. However, we now know its surface in some detail from the Magdellan spacecraft, which orbited the planet and observed it using radar.
It found a surface with almost no craters. It's easy to see why it has no small craters. Most asteroids up to about one kilometer in diameter or smaller would break up in its atmosphere in an airburst, just as most meteorites up to 30 meters diameter break up in our atmosphere, because its atmosphere is so much thicker than ours.
But they also didn't find many large craters and none at all of the really huge ones. It's the least cratered body discovered so far in the entire inner solar system.
This is probably because it's surface is relatively young. It has no signs of continental drift, and not much volcanism right now, compared to Earth (there are some signs that it has active volcanism, but not many). It doesn't seem to be releasing enough heat. And there are long channels, longest in the solar system, where molten lava must have run in the past.
The leading hypothesis is that the whole planet gets resurfaced every few hundred million years. Because it has no continental drift, so there is no way for it to lose excess heat gradually, and instead it just gets hotter and hotter, until, from time to time, the entire surface "flips", volcanoes erupt everywhere and cover it in molten lava which completely erases the crater record. Most recently 300 to 500 million years ago.
So, we can only say for up to half a billion years of history, but there have been no really huge impacts on Venus in that timescale.
It's largest crater, Mead crater, is 280 km in diameter
Meade crater - the largest crater on Venus, comparable in size to the larger craters on Earth.
Though we don't have direct evidence, it probably has the same history as all the other planets - large impacts only up to around the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment. It must have been hit by something big early on to explain its retrograde motion - most probably about the same time as the formation of the Moon. And surely like the Moon, Earth, Mars and Mercury it had many really big impacts in the early solar system. But all trace of them is now gone.
Explanation of the cratering record - why are there no huge impacts for three billion years?
So, why do we see no really large impact craters in the inner solar system since the late heavy bombardment, and the "late late" heavy bombardment?
First, the inner solar system is almost completely cleared out of "Texas sized objects". There are a few objects of a hundred kilometers diameter or more are all in stable orbits at least for hundreds of millions of years. Ceres, Pallas, Vesta and many smaller asteroids larger than 100 km in diameter, would be devastating if they hit Earth, but they are all in stable orbits in the asteroid belt, beyond Mars, with no chance of an impact, at least in the near future.
Mercury is another object that could hit Earth - it is in a stable orbit at present, but it happens to have a potential future resonance with Jupiter - the rate of precession of its perihelion (point where it is closest to the sun) is just a little faster than the rate of precession of Jupiter's perihelion. There is a 1% chance, in simulations, that it's orbit gets destabilized. In most of those cases it hits the sun or Venus but there is a tiny chance, 1 in several thousand, that it could hit Earth (for details see this article in scholarpedia written by Jacques Laskar, expert in this topic who did many of the simulations).
Mercury, diameter 4900 km, could hit Earth several hundred million years from now, though the chance is tiny, perhaps 99.95% or better chance that it doesn't have any affect on Earth at all. At any rate its current orbit is stable for hundreds of millions of years.
This image shows Mercury in a subtle false colour, using infra red information and was taken by Messenger spacecraft in January 2008.Long term, also, the larger asteroids have chaotic orbits, and Vesta and Ceres have an estimated 0.2% chance per billion years of hitting each other (paper)
So anyway - that's of interest to astronomers, but in the near future for hundreds of millions of years, the largest "Texas sized" objects in the inner solar system, inside of Jupiter, are in stable orbits and can't hit Earth.
And anything from the outer solar system has to get past Jupiter, which tends to catch the really big ones or break them up.
More accurately - anything close to the plane of the solar system, if it is in a Jupiter crossing orbit, is likely to do a close flyby of Jupiter first, because Jupiter's gravitational influence is so large.
Jupiter's Hill radius - sphere of influence - is 53 million km and its distance from the sun is 778 million kilometers.
Earth's hill radius is about 1.5 million km (1,497,000) and its distance from the sun is about 150 million km (149,600,000 km) - ratio of the two is actually larger, but of course, Earth's gravitational influence is much less on anything that passes through its Hill sphere.

Hill sphere of the planets (log plot)
Also see:
Hill Sphere calculator
Also
Planetary Calculator framed home page
lets you find the Hill spheres of all the planets in one go.
So any object coming into the inner solar system, unless it gets into some resonance with Jupiter, is going to encounter Jupiter's hill sphere pretty soon.
So the explanation of the cratering record may be something like this: A large comet on its first flyby of the inner solar system is likely to miss Jupiter but will have almost no chance of hitting the tiny Earth.
Also, if it comes from the outer solar system, it is very unlikely to be in exactly the same plane as Earth and likely to be like Halley's comet.
As you see, Haley's comet, in this orbit, can never hit Earth because it's orbit only crosses the plane of the Earth's orbit when it is about as far away as Venus, far closer to the sun.
So, - if you had a comet that came into the inner solar system for the first time, not likely it is in the same orbital plane as Earth.
How tricky is it for a comet to hit exactly the same orbital plane as Earth?
More exactly, Earth's diameter / distance from sun = 12,742/149.6 million = 0.00008517379 - which is also approximately its angle in radians as seen from the sun.
So to hit the Earth on a first flyby into the inner solar system, without first doing numerous flybys of Jupiter, Earth etc, it has to have the same inclination as the Earth, 1.57 degrees, to within 0.00488 degrees. If you look at the list of currently known Trans-neptunian objects, they have widely varying inclinations. Out of a total of 1971 objects (as of writing), only 25 have their inclinations listed as 1.5 degrees (most of those are cubewanos so never come inside Neptune's orbit).
Not only that though, Earth's diameter compared to the perimeter of its orbit is about 12,742/(2*pi*149.6 million). So, if it does happen to have exactly the same inclination, to two decimal places of precision, the chance of hitting Earth on it's first flyby of the inner solar system, before any flybys of Jupiter or the other planets, is still less than one chance in 74,000.
It needs to be deflected into the same plane first, which it could do with flybys of Jupiter (say), which changes its orbit.
Then many of them hit Jupiter, or hit the Sun, or grazes past it and melt away. Others are thrown out of the solar system. The ones that are left after all that are split into many smaller comets through close encounters of Jupiter or the Sun. These break it up through tidal interactions - the gravitational forces are different on the inner side, and outer side of the comet. As comets have low levels of gravity and are not tightly bound together, they break up easily.
We saw just this happen with Comet Shoemaker Levy. It got split into numerous smaller comets

Then it hit Jupiter, leaving these marks in its upper atmosphere, which gradually faded away.

At the time it was thought that this was a rare once in a century type impact. But then another impact was discovered in 2009

The impact scar here is approximately the size of the Pacific ocean, and the impact was perhaps 200 to 500 meters in diameter, but was not seen before the impact. It was discovered by an amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley, who then discovered a much smaller impact in 2010probably caused by an object just 8 - 13 meters across. And then two amateur astronomers in 2012 observed another impact. This time, by chance, a third amateur astronomer was taking a video of Jupiter at the time, and checking back through his video frames, found that he had recorded the event.
This is another example of the role of amateur astronomers in Astronomy. They can watch targets like this continuously, which the professional astronomers, who have to justify their time on large telescopes, simply can't do. Though Hubble of course, for instance, could get better images of Jupiter, there is no way one could justify pointing it at Jupiter 24/7. And amateur astronomers now have equipment that lets them take photos and videos like this. For more on this, see Impact: Amateurs observe Jupiter taking another for the team.
There must be many impacts we miss as well. For three to four months each year, Jupiter is behind the sun or too close to be observed easily, as seen from Earth. And scars of the larger impacts last two or three months. Based on this, then the best estimate at present (in a paper from 2010) is that Jupiter gets hit by an object between 0.5 and 1 kilometer in diameter every decade. This is five or ten times the previous estimates.
That's about two thousand more than the number that hit Earth.
It also gets hit, they estimate, by objects of size 300 - 400 meters every two years, and for objects of size 10 meters, it gets about 30 - 150 impacts a year.
So, the answer seems to be that, by the time a giant comet from the outer solar system has a decent a chance of hitting Earth, it has probably impacted Jupiter already, or the sun, or escaped the solar system. If it has managed to escape those fates, then by then, with many flybys of Jupiter, or of the sun, it has already broken up into smaller comets of around 10-15 km scale or smaller.
One scenario suggested in a recent paper is this: From time to time, we probably do get large 200 km scale or larger comets come into the inner solar system, similar to Chiron in orbit and size. Chiron, is a "Centaur" - one of the minor planets with unstable orbits crossing the orbits of two or more of the large gas giants in the outer solar system. So if you did get a large comet come into the inner solar system, these seem like good candidates for it.

Orbit of Chiron, crossing the orbits of both Jupiter and Uranus, which makes it a "Centaur" asteroid - a term for an asteroid that crosses the orbits of two gas giants. This is an unstable orbit, and in the future centaurs like this may encounter Jupiter close up.

Chiron in Celestia, with its ring
So then the idea is that they do a series of flybys of Jupiter over a period of a few thousand years. But rather than hit Earth, what happens is they get broken up by Jupiter. That is if they don't get caught by it, the sun, or ejected from the solar system of course.
So then they may increase the number of 1 - 10 km diameter comets in the inner solar system. Those then hit Earth. See Giant Comets and Mass Extinctions of life. This whole scenario is played out over a timescale of many thousands of years, not the Armageddon 18 days :). And the individual impactors are 1 - 10 km in size, but you get a fair number of them one after another.
There is no sign of Chiron doing this yet, or any of the other known Centaur objects.
One of the largest objects that could hit us is 433 Eros, the second largest Near Earth Asteroid 34.4×11.2×11.2 km.

It is a bigger even than the dinosaurs meteorite - and it has 50% chance of hitting Earth in the next 100 million to billion years. But it's not a problem for us right now, it can only hit us if its orbit changes quite a bit first.
A Jupiter family comet, comes in to the inner solar system rarely, so the chance is small of it hitting Earth. We will soon have all of those mapped out.
So - likely to be lots of quite distant flybys in that case before it comes near to Earth.
Even for a Jupiter family short period comet, or a very large NEO, you probably have several flybys before it hits, because the Earth is an absolutely tiny target.
These are probabilities, can't say it is a certainty, but very likely.
Then in that situation, for each flyby before it actually hits, it has to fly past Earth through a particular "keyhole" region close to Earth. If you can get it to miss any of those keyholes, then it won't hit Earth.
So - when they talk about asteroid deflection strategies, normally is based on that assumption. They assume we have several decades of advance warning and many flybys first, or at least one flyby before it hits.
In that case you just need to change its delta v by maybe a fraction of a meter per second, a long time before the flyby so it misses the keyhole, so then misses Earth next time around (or several flybys into the future).
So then you can use quite gentle methods. Ideas include a gravity tractor, or nudging it, kinetic impact, lots of ideas.
For more on this see my Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them
Much of this is an extract from that article.
Debunked: Mystery as huge blue spherical object is captured by NASA cameras (Daily Mail) and Mysterious ‘sphere’ spotted in NASA’s Sun images not so bizarre after all
This is in imagery from NASA’s Stereo A satellite which is currently nearly the other side of the sun from Earth taking photographs of the sun looking in our direction. Dazzathecameraman explains what happened:
So - the camera overheated, and shut down, which then confused the software which superimposed an image from another camera, rotated 90 degrees and possibly flipped, on its video stream output.
Here is the link to the corrupted artifacts page STEREO he mentions in the video.
Advice for journalists - when reporting something like this - these sites have contact details, ask them first before rushing your story to press.
I have links to the faceboook groups he mentions as well as my Doomsday Debunked group on the support page Where can I get support if I’m scared of Nibiru / Doomsday maybe even suicidal?
Summary - a nuclear war would not come even close to making Earth uninhabitable.
BEFORE I START
First I want to say, that I am actually very much in favour of nuclear disarmament. I think that the UK should even disarm unilaterally, see my Is Corbyn Right About The Bomb?- Op Ed. But I think people need to know the truth in any topic like this and make decisions based on truth, not on the basis of people telling them falsehoods that they think will lead them to desired actions.
This answer doesn’t take away from the arguments against nuclear weapons in my view. After all we no longer think that fire bombing cities as for the fire bombing of Dresden is acceptable in warfare. Why should that suddenly become acceptable if the weapon is a nuclear weapon? I think that is all the argument you need.
In addition nuclear weapons cause long term radiation damage to those who were in the blast region and so on. But just equating them to firebombing and pointing out that they kill millions of innocent civilians is enough to make them something that military generals and leaders shouldn’t even consider using in warfare in my view.
So anyway back to the topic of this question.
WHY NUCLEAR WEAPONS WOULD NOT MAKE US EXTINCT
First, the entire southern hemisphere is a nuclear free zone, the worst of the radiation is so short lived it is over in half an hour, there is plenty of radiation left to have long term health effects, increased cancers and other health effects, but the levels of radiation that kill people quickly are soon finished with.

The blue areas here are nuclear free. If we did have a global nuclear war - then there would be no nuclear bombs in those areas at all. Also the harshest radiation is over quickly, the lethal radiation is mostly over within half an hour.
The idea that nuclear weapons would cause a nuclear winter has been shown to be false.
RADIATION FROM NUCLEAR WEAPONS WAY OVER EXAGGERATED
Also in science fiction and popular imagination the radiation from nuclear weapons is far more dangerous than it is in reality.
After all this is modern Hiroshima
The most dangerous radiation is in the form of short lived isotopes which decay over time periods of seconds, to months.
If you are close to the blast then you need to get shelter within half an hour to survive the radiation hazards, and if further away you need to find shelter within three hours.
Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War
Most of the radiation decays rapidly, but there would be local hot spots that would be dangerous for one to five years after the attack. Take your geiger counter with you! Or more likely, evacuate to a place that has not been attacked.
A nuclear war would kill millions, directly and indirectly - but it does not leave the Earth by any means uninhabitable and most of the World’s population would surely survive. If you are in one of the nuclear free zones, then you’d be hardly affected at all.
The main long term effects would be from longer lived isotopes like caesium. Here in the UK we got iodine, cesium and strontium isotopes on our hills after the Chernobyl reactor explosion. Of those only caesium-137 was still a concern two decades later, but for more than two decades afterwards, the sheep farmers from the worst affected areas - from a reactor explosion 3,000 miles away - had to test their sheep with geiger counters before they could sell the meat. Sheep farmers still stuck under a Chernobyl cloud
So - after a nuclear war there’d be restrictions like that over regions far from the war zones. We’d need Geiger counters for quite some time surely. But it would not make us extinct. The main issue would be an increased risk of cancer from eating radioactive food.
NO NUCLEAR WINTER
This was the big bug bear during the cold war. Carl Sagan and others calculated that an all out nuclear war, both the explosions themselves and the firestorms they created, would put so much dust into the upper atmosphere that it would cool the entire Earth for several years afterwards in a nuclear winter.
Now - their calculations turned out to be accurate for asteroid impacts. This is a significant issue though not an extinction causing one, for large asteroid impacts. But several things happened to cast doubt on their calculations for nuclear weapons.
In particular, when the Iraqis retreated after their invasion of Kuwait, then they set many oil wells alight. These created dense black smoke that turned day to night over large areas

But it didn’t have the widespread effects the scientists had expected. As Carl Sagan wrote:
"it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4–6 °C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared.”
This lead to them re-evaluating the models that lead to the nuclear winter prediction, which were rather crude, making many assumptions and approximations.
The conclusion nowadays is that nuclear weapons most likely would not cause firestorms in cities, if they did, the smoke would rarely reach higher than 4 km. Also much more of Earth burns in wild fires every year without putting us into a nuclear winter scenario.
Also modern nuclear bombs are smaller than they used to be. Both US and Russia have eliminated all bombs of more than one megaton. Only China has them now, with about 50 of them. To get the dust high enough for nuclear winter, above 70,000 feet you’d need bombs with yields much more than a megaton. Modern bombs would only throw the debris up to 60,000 to 70,000 feet which means the debris will rain to Earth within hours or days close to the point of impact.
Our nuclear arsenals are also much smaller than they were at the time of the nuclear winter calculations.
So in short, nuclear winter was based on poor science, as it turned out (refuted by the Kuwaiti fires), and probably even at the height of the cold war, we would not have been plunged into a nuclear winter. As it is now, certainly not.
Here I’m summarizing Allen E Hall's answer to In a total nuclear exchange where the entire worlds arsenals are used, how long would the nuclear winter last and would we survive?
You can go there to find out more.
REITERATION - I THINK KNOWING THIS DOES NOT MAKE NUCLEAR WAR MORE LIKELY
As I said in the intro, the after effect of a nuclear war is horrific enough without needing to add in nuclear winter to make it even more horrific as a deterrent. I don't agree with Alan Hall on is conclusion that it makes nuclear war more likely to know that it doesn't cause nuclear winter.
I also think myself that if one country was to drop a nuclear weapon on another and the other one didn't retaliate today - that it is very different from the case of the US and Japan.
With Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the military leaders in the US, didn't realize the full horror of what they were doing. They also had got innured to levels of civilian casualties that nowadays would be unacceptable through such things as fire bombing of Dresden. They thought of it as just another fire bombing like the others done before.
If anyone did the equivalent of the fire bombing of Dresden in the present day political climate - they would find themselves isolated, with universal condemnation from all the other countries. Also we are much more interconnected now. In the modern world such an isolated country can't survive long, it would be a political disaster for them, lose all their influence in the world. Would the US have any power in the UN or have any political say in negotiations, any moral clout at all if it had dropped a nuclear weapon on another country either without nuclear weapons, or one that didn’t retaliate? Or would the Russia either?
They would surely also get really strong united trade embargoes as well, as other countries would do whatever they could to express there disapproval and not to align with them in any way at all.
If the other country has nuclear weapons and retaliates it's different. So it makes a big difference if both sides in the conflict have used nuclear weapons. I think that makes the most logical response of any leader to first not do a first strike, and second, not to retaliate in kind if another country drops a nuclear weapon on you.
Whether a leader of a country with nuclear weapons would be so logical in the heat of a war I don't know, but there are at least some people prepared to say they wouldn't launch nuclear weapons in any circumstances. If Jeremy Corbyn gets elected as PM of the UK in some future election, we will have such a leader here,
Also, why would nuclear weapons be treated differently from fire bombing? The US could easily threaten to firebomb any city in the world as a deterrent, and we’d think that was a horrific thing to do. So why is it treated as acceptable to threaten to drop nuclear weapons as a deterrent?
Anyway - so hopefully at some point we achieve total nuclear disarmament. Meanwhile, it’s good to know it can’t make us extinct and that those who live in nuclear free zones would be hardly affected at all even after a global nuclear war involving all the nuclear weapon holding states. Which hopefully also can eventually become a strong incentive for other countries to develop nuclear weapon free areas. I of course am strongly in favour of a nuclear weapon free Europe for instance. If we can get the idea accepted generally that nuclear weapon free zones make you safer, and that possessing nuclear weapons or relying on protection by a nuclear weapon owning state does not make you safer, we’d be well on the way to total nuclear disarmament I think.
UN NEGOTIATIONS TO ELIMINATE ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS
The UN is going to start negotiating a new treaty to eliminate all nuclear weapons. 123 nations have signed it, the main exceptions, apart from Australia, are the nuclear weapon holding nations. Basically the nations that currently have nuclear weapons are just about the only ones who think they help preserve peace. So - far from being widely accepted as maintaining peace or desirable, the idea that we should hold nuclear weapons is not the norm at all. The majority of nations don’t want them and don’t want anyone else to have them either and don’t feel they need their protection.
Based on that, I think there is a real prospect of eventual total nuclear disarmament but somehow the small number of nuclear weapon holding states have to get on board with it as well, and get involved in measures for serious arms reductions once more.
UN votes to start negotiating treaty to ban nuclear weapons
See also
You see the phrase that the “forests are the lungs of the planet” used so often by people who want to save the forests. And it is easy to get the impression that it means that if we cut down the forests we would no longer be able to breathe.
But - there is NO SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR THIS AT ALL
I'm all in favour of keeping forests and planting new trees - but let's not argue for this on the basis of the need for trees to provide oxygen - as that is just not true as far as I can see. I think it confuses people to use invalid arguments even for a good conclusion.
I cover some of the many reasons why we need to keep our forests below under “REASONS TO KEEP TREES - WHY FORESTS MATTER” - but first let’s see why we will continue to have plenty of oxygen to breathe whatever hapapens to the forests.

First of all the metaphor is a bit back to front as the jungles continually produce oxygen, and they do not produce CO2 (except when destroyed). Our lungs of course absorb oxygen and exhale CO2. So, in that trivial way, they are not really much like lungs at all. But I'm talking here about the way the metaphor is often used in news stories and popular accounts, to say that we depend on the jungles for oxygen. Is that true?
Here are the facts:

There are many other reasons we need forests. And on the very long term, yes we need them for oxygen to breath, along with the green algae in the sea.
But we are not going to run out of oxygen or die of CO2 poisoning due to cutting down trees, or indeed, even through burning fossil fuels. We may get global warming due to increase greenhouse gases and many other major effects but not lack of oxygen to breath.
Actually 70 to 80% of our oxygen comes from green algae The Most Important Organism? | Ecology Global Network
But even if we destroyed all those too in some unimaginable eco-catastrophe we'd still be able to breath the air due to the oxygen that is still in it, leaving centuries for the Earth to recover and start creating oxygen again.
REASONS TO KEEP TREES - WHY FORESTS MATTER
Though we don’t need them for oxygen, there are plenty of excellent reasons to keep trees:
For more about this see Why forests matter

Dwellings of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon rain forest - the place is their home. Tropical forests are home to about a million indigenous people, and about a hundred million people around the edges of the forests depend on their products.
And the news is good here, that many countries are taking action to stop and even reverse deforestation. For instance Brazil has cut down the rate of deforestation of the Amazon by 82% already and aims to stop it altogether and reverse it How to stop deforestation? Make 'good stuff' cheaper
But let's make it clear that we will not have any problem at all breathing as a result of cutting down trees.
Let's focus on the many very real things that can go wrong and that we can do something about. And lets not get people worrying about nonexistent issues that can never happen.
Donald Trump has just been elected as US president, as a Republican climate skeptic. So if you are from the US you may get the impression that this is a political debate between “lefties” who think climate change is real and “righties” who think it isn’t. But it’s only in the US that there is a political debate at all. Here in the UK for instance it has cross party support, and we have a right wing government who have just ratified the treaty

Boris Johnson, foreign secretary and right wing politician in the UK signing the document to ratify the Paris agreement for the UK. UK signs up for Paris climate agreement It has cross party support of all the major parties here. It was put before both houses for scrutiny, and no objections were raised.
We do have a few climate skeptic MPs here still, but MP Peter Lilley told BBC News he didn’t object because he didn’t notice it, he could have got a few names together but it would have been a rather ineffective gesture.
That’s true world wide also, it has support from governments of all political persuasions, unless you think Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran have left wing governments!
You can read the list of countries that have signed and ratified the agreement here, China, India both signed and ratified, Russia has signed and will surely ratify. Paris 2015: Tracking country climate pledges
This site is also useful, tracks the countries and rates them according to whether their actions are inadequate, medium, or sufficient. Since Trump has claimed it is all a plot by China, let’s look at what they are doing: China - Climate Action Tracker
As you can see, they are one of the countries doing a fair bit to deal with climate change. China is set to peak CO2 emissions between 2025 and 2030. It’s not yet sufficient for the target of 2 C by 2100. But they are keeping well within their pledges for the treaty. As with most countries they have to work harder to get down to 2 C and so we hope they will make more pledges as the process continues.
This shows their reduction in CO2 intensity:

China’s Climate Policies: How Have They Performed, and Where Do They Need to Go?
POOREST COUNTRIES ALSO STEPPING UP TO THE MARK
As you may notice in the Climate Action Tracker, the top countries in the list count also amongst the poorest. Ethiopia is top of the list, set to keep us within 2 C by 2100.
Ethiopia - Climate Action Tracker
Although they produce only a tiny fraction of the total carbon dioxide emissions, the poorest countries are amongst the ones most affected, and they are doing their bit to reduce the very small amount of CO2 they do produce. Indeed they are amongst the ones with the most ambitious targets.
Ethiopia already aims for an unconditional 64% reduction compared to business as usual emissions by 2030, equivalent to a 3% reduction against a 2010 baseline. 85% of their emissions are from agriculture and forestry so this is their main focus. They plan to achieve this by such measures as more efficient cooking stoves, and expanding forest cover. You can read details of their emissions reduction plans and climate change mitigation measures here Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
They also plan to increase their pledges before 2020. Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Haiti and 44 other countries members of the “Climate Vulnerable Forum” have said they will update their pledges before 2020, with an aim of 100% green energy between 2030 and 2050 if they get economic support to achieve those goals World's poorest countries to aim for 100% green energy - BBC News
US STATES THAT SUPPORT CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION
Even in the US both right and left wing states are taking measures to combat climate change. Examples of states that are pioneers in this field include California, no surprise, but also Tennessee which has reduced emissions from electricity by 34% since 2005, and Louisiana amongst others. Details here: Trump could reverse 'dramatic' progress on clean energy, experts fear
See also this Analysis of 19 states by Georgetown Climate Center showing a “dramatic shift” to clean energy. Either from climate change concerns or economic reasons.
BUSINESSES BACKING LOW CARBON USA
This is a statement by many US companies asking Trump to stay with the Paris agreement: including DuPont, Gap Inc., General Mills, Hewlett Packard, Hilton, HP., Kellogg, Levi Strauss., L'Oreal USA, NIKE, Mars, Schneider Electric, Starbucks, VF Corporation and Unilever.
365+ Businesses Call on Trump to Support Paris Climate Agreement
CLIMATE CHANGE HAPPENING ALREADY
The Arctic is amongst the most affected by climate change - with the ocean almost ice free in recent summers. Right now as of writing this, it is 20 °C (36 °F) warmer than usual.


See that red spike to the right - that shows how much it is above normal temperatures for this time of year in the Arctic
The North Pole is an insane 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends
For an example of the experiences of people in the Arctic, see this blog post by LEIF MAGNE HELGESEN Pastor at Svalbard island archipelago of Svalbard, closest inhabited area to the North Pole is experiencing very warm weather, rain when it should be snowing, leading to landslides as well as in this example:

Landslide near Longyearbyen kirkegår, October 2016. Photo: Leif Magne Helgesen Svalbard regner bort - Kirkens Nødhjelps blogg (I found out about it from this Washington post article Dear President Elect Trump: Climate change is no hoax
I’m in the UK and we’ve had warm wet winters and heat waves in summer. Temperatures of 30 °C in summer are not normal for us.
Islands in the Pacific are already disappearing beneath the sea. Five Pacific islands lost to rising seas as climate change hits
None inhabited yet but others have had to retreat.
World wide, glaciers are retreating, the oceans are becoming more acidic - just slightly so but enough to endanger coral reefs. This is happening already and the bleaching events are predicted to become more common. An image of a turtle swimming over bleached coral graces the cover of Australia’s coral reefs report:

Australia's Coral Reefs Under Threat From Climate Change
We are already seeing record numbers of heat waves. And this is set to continue. This graph shows how temperature anomalies have changed over the northern hemisphere - not a prediction, but a record of what has already happened.

Details from here Heat Waves: The Details
SCIENTIFIC BACKING
The most quoted figure is 97% of climate researchers, see Scientific consensus: Earth's climate is warming but some surveys come up with a figure of 100%.
Here is a climatologist criticizing the 97% figure as not high enough. The author says that papers written about effects of climate change, mitigation etc should be taken as endorsing unless they explicitly reject it, similarly e.g. to papers on continental drift or the impact origin of lunar craters which will only very rarely explicitly endorse the established theory. On that basis rather than 97% it's more like 99.9% or more
"Of 24,210 abstracts, only five—one in 4,842 or 0.021 percent—in my judgment explicitly rejected AGW. Two of the articles had the same author, so four authors of 69,406 rejected AGW. That is one in 17,352, or 0.0058 percent."
WHAT ABOUT LIVESTOCK, AND JUST HUMANS BREATHING?
This is something you might well ask if you have watched “cowspiracy”. However it exaggerates the situation. For a criticism of the film by the union of concerned scientists: Movie Review: There’s a Vast Cowspiracy about Climate Change.
Livestock produce 8-18% of greenhouse gas emissions according to the paper they cited, not the 51% of Cowspiracy - that is for all livestock world wide, not just beef. It's still a lot. But there is no conspiracy to hide this. It seems a very active area of research with many papers. These are the google scholar search results for 2016.
Methane has a much shorter residence time in the atmosphere than CO2. Around twelve years compared to 100 years for CO2 (however the situation for CO2 is complex, some of it is removed within 50 years, some remains for thousands of years, more on this later). For the figures see The Scientific Basis
As for CO2 from breathing, then that’s carbon neutral. Every time you eat, you convert food to CO2 which you then breathe out. However that food would have decayed anyway so you are just speeding up the process of decay. When the farmer grows the food next season all the CO2 you breathed out gets taken up again into the plants. That’s the reason for the oscillations every year in the CO2 concentrations graphs

VERY LONG TERM EFFECTS OF CO2
The situation for CO2 is complex and doesn’t follow the exponential decay curve you might expect. The average lifetime of a CO2 molecule is around 4 years in the atmosphere. But that’s for the more rapid processes such as plant growth, and absorption in the surface water of the ocean. Much of that gets circulated back into the atmosphere again. The slower cycle of removal of CO2 from the atmosphere is complex and behaves in surprising ways.
For instance after adding a pulse of CO2 to the atmosphere, half is removed in 50 years. You might think, half would be removed again in the next 50 years, but no, it takes 250 years to get down to a quarter of the original concentration. Finally, around 15 percent of the original pulse remains in the atmosphere pretty much permanently, for thousands of years. CLIMATE CHANGE - the IPCC scientific assessment
So of the roughly 32 billion tons of CO2 humans added to the atmosphere in 2010

From the Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers
So you have to be careful how you do the calculations.
That’s why it is important not just to stop the increase in CO2 emissions, but to dramatically reduce emissions if we want to stay within 2 C rise by 2100, and even more so to stay within 1.5 C. It’s also why we have to act quickly, by 2020, if we hope to remain within 1.5 C by 2100.
WHAT ABOUT THE MODELS - WHEN WE CAN’T PREDICT THE WEATHER FOR NEXT YEAR, HOW CAN WE BE CONFIDENT IN MODELS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE?
A while back the models weren’t as good as they are now, perhaps a decade ago. But science has moved on a lot. Those who still criticize them. e.g. on social media often misunderstand how they work.
Yes it’s true that if you run the models with slightly different starting parameters then the weather will be completely different for, say, one year ahead. That’s because of the butterfly effect - a small change in initial conditions equivalent to a butterfly flapping its wings can make a difference between whether or not a hurricane forms months or years later.

That's why they can't predict a hurricane the year before it happens. Surely we will never be able to do long term predictions like that accurate enough to predict the exact date of every hurricane. You can’t have sensors monitoring every flap of a wing of every butterfly in the world.
However, they can run the models lots of times with different starting conditions, varying them slightly corresponding to the uncertainty in measurement there always is - then run them for a decade, or five decades or whatever. Each run will have different results on a year to year basis, but trends emerge longer term.
If the hurricanes are more intense on average whenever it is run with the extra CO2, over time periods of several years or decades, and if it always does this, starting with many slightly different starting conditions, then that suggests that we will in fact get more intense hurricanes in the future.
To validate it they set it to predict, e.g. the current decade using data from previous decades. Then other teams will work on the problem from scratch with different modeling methods. If they all come to the same conclusions too - they have a lot of confidence that we will get more intense hurricanes in the future as the CO2 levels rise.
Incidentally it’s often said, incorrectly, that the prediction is for more hurricanes. Actually the models currently predict an increase in the intensity of hurricanes, with stronger winds and more rain. However they also predict a possible decrease in the number, so though there is less confidence in this, there may be fewer of the weaker hurricanes as well as more of the more intense ones. See Tropical Cyclones (Hurricanes and Typhoons)
MORE PREDICTIONS FROM CLIMATE SCIENTISTS
This is from the 2014 IPCC report Climate change threatens irreversible and dangerous impacts, but options exist to limit its effects - UN and Climate Change
Once we achieve zero emisions, the temperature of the atmosphere will stabilize quickly but the world will remain warmer, and will not cool down back to 1950 levels. Instead, temperatures will stay at the same higher temperatures for many centuries. That is, unless we remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period after we achieve zero emissions.
There are many longer term effects also.
The ocean warms only slowly, influenced by the warm air above it. The ice in Antarctica melts even more slowly, and those also contribute to sea level rises (any ice floating on the sea, such as the ice in the Arctic, makes no difference to the sea level when it melts, but ice on land such as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will raise the sea levels when the melt). Over the long term, a thousand years into the future, the Greenland ice sheet is almost certain to vanish completely eventually if we reach 4 C, and may vanish even at only a 1 C rise, leading to a sea level rise of seven meters.
So the sea levels will continue to rise for a long time to come again no matter what we do. But by acting quickly we can reduce the amount of the total future rise.
Ocean acidification will continue for centuries, and strongly affect marine ecosystems.
Other risks include the possibility of abrupt and irreversible regional-scale change in the composition, structure and function of marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, including wetlands
However we shouldn’t go away with the view that this means that the Earth is going to become uninhabitable!
WORLD GETS MORE HABITABLE IF ANYTHING, NOT LESS SO - IT’S THE CHANGE THAT’S THE ISSUE
In the short term the worst case scenario is that the world gets 4 °C hotter by 2100, and the Paris climate change agreement measures so far will reduce the rice to 3.4 °C - all temperature rises here are relative to pre-industrial levels.
So that’s obviously not going to make it too hot for us. The main issues are due to the speed with which the climate is changing, not the final climate which may be more habitable in some ways. Earth is actually unusually cold at present. At times in the geologically recent past the world has been so hot that there were palm trees as far north as the Arctic circle, no ice at either pole and typical polar temperatures 10 C.

500 million years of climate change. As you can see, on the timescale of millions of years. Earth has never been this cold for the last 45o million years. In this diagram, one part per thousand of oxygen 18 corresponds to around 1.5 - 2 C
Most of the time Earth has no ice at all at its poles, no permanent ice at all except at the top of high mountains. Compared to that, the Earth is unusually cold at present. We are in the middle of an interglacial but geologists would say we are in the middle of an ice age still, technically, since we have permanent ice at the poles.
In the worst case scenario, the world stabilizes at 7 C hotter than pre-industrial levels many centuries into the future - assuming we have stopped creating CO2 by then.
RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE - NOT POSSIBLE UNLESS WE CAN FIND AND BURN TEN TIMES THE COAL, OIL AND GAS AVAILABLE IN OUR WORLD
In theory we could make the world uninhabitable by triggering a runaway greenhouse effect, but to do that we would have to burn ten times the total reserves of oil, gas and coal in the world.
The temperature rises even with no restraint on global warming aren’t nearly enough to melt Antarctica. The world will still be very habitable and on the cold side of normal if anything.
The reason that so many countries signed the climate change agreement in Paris is not to protect humans from extinction, which was never a risk. Nor is it to prevent Earth’s climate changing, which it does slowly all the time anyway.
It is because the speed of the change is going to have effects on our environment (e.g. bleaching of coral) and it’s also going to be expensive to deal with the issues later. If we act now, it doesn’t even need to impact on our standard of living. It’s a case of policy change mainly. Promoting clean energy and measures to reduce carbon dioxide. If we act later, it probably will impact on quality of living and more than that, many people will need to relocate and it will impact on the environment in various ways
It’s a case of paying a bit more now, or even maybe not paying much, just planning now, to avoid much larger costs a few decades into the future and at the same time to protect fragile environments too, which are at risk because of the speed of the change..
Even the speed of change isn’t that unusual - our climate has been relatively stable for 10,000 years so it is a fast change compared to the last few thousand years - but during the ice age between 18,000 and 180,000 years ago then it fluctuated rapidly even within a few decades. Abrupt Climate Change During the Last Ice Age
But for us, living at a time of relatively slow climate change, this is something we are not used to
NOT A PROBLEM OF SURVIVAL
Also the idea isn’t at all that global warming is something we couldn’t survive. Put enough money into it, flood defenses, growing new crops that farmers aren’t used to in their region, relocating people, building new foundations to replace the ones destroyed by melting permafrost in Alaska and Canada, building houses to withstand flood damage, more severe hurricanes, better disaster reliefe and so on - we can cope with it. But it would be expensive.
Rather, the idea of the climate change agreement is that it is far more expensive to respond to climate change like that - than it is to prevent it from happening in the first place which we can do mainly through policy changes. The Paris agreements might even have economic benefits too, e.g. transition to clean energy leading to new industries. The nations that work hardest on mitigating climate change, e.g. Germany, and for that matter China which is also putting a lot of finance into clean energy, are building up an industry that the rest of the world will want.
Also if we just let the temperatures rise and mitigate the effects, it has environomental effects too which can't be reversed, e.g. 99% of all corals affected by a 2 C rise compared to 90% for 1.5 C.
LARGE DIFFERENCES EVEN BETWEEN A 1.5 C AND A 2 C RISE
There’s a summary here: “For example, an extra 0.5C could see global sea levels rise 10cm more by 2100, water shortages in the Mediterranean double and tropical heatwaves last up to a month longer. The difference between 2C and 1.5C is also “likely to be decisive for the future of coral reefs”, with virtually all coral reefs at high risk of bleaching with 2C warming.”Scientists compare climate change impacts at 1.5C and 2C | Carbon Brief
There’s a summary here

Note that with 2 C rise, instead of 1.5 C, it’s wheat down by 16% instead of 9%. Maize down 6% instead of 3%.
Rice production however goes up 8% instead of 6% so some crops benefit from a warmer world.
And it has the same figure there that we lose our chance to limit to 1.5 C by 2020 if we haven’t taken enough action by then.
4.5 years from this summer. So end of 2020 I think. .
This is about the Paris agreement, pledges so far should keep temperatures by 2100 to between 2.9 and 3.4 degrees C.
Paris climate deal enters force as focus shifts to action - BBC News
EFFECTS ON THE US
You can look up the predicted effects of climate change on your country, also globally. Once you do that you may understand why so many nations signed the Paris Climate Change agreement.
In the US the main changes projected include:
(quoting from the US Environmental Protection Agency
report Future of Climate Change) -
You can also look up the effects for individual states, e.g. this climate change report for Nebraska
And this is the projection for New York city which experiences higher sea level rises than the global average:


New York City Panel on Climate Change 2015 Report Executive Summary
Other projections include:
HOW HOT CAN THE EARTH GET?
It needs some science fiction scenario where we import oil and gas, from Titan say (which has oceans of methane and ethane), so that we can burn ten times our fossil fuel reserves of oil, gas and coal, and then we could trigger it (an earlier paper suggesting it could be done with just the reserves we have on Earth was shown to be incorrect later on). We would have to be very stupid to do that. So not something to worry about.
In the distant future, billions of years from now, the Earth will become too hot for humans as a natural effect of the sun getting hotter - unless whatever civilization there is around then does something to prevent it such as shading the sun with shades orbiting Earth, or physically moving the Earth using repeated flybys of asteroids or some other method - both of which are feasible with near future metatechnology. Those timescales are so huge that humans could evolve from microscopic multicellular life consisting of a few cells many times over (the process took about half a billion years last time).
In short what we are talking about here is no apocalypse. Humans would survive just fine. But it could have severe environmental effects, and be expensive and hard to deal with.
TRUMP IF HE CONTINUES ON THIS PATH WILL FIND HIMSELF IN A MINORITY OF ONE ON THE WORLD STAGE
The climate skeptics are presenting a tiny chance that perhaps all except one or two experts on climate change, 99.9% of them have got it wrong, and all the anomalous weather we have experienced is just natural variability. They are saying, that we should just take the chance on it, that they are right, and do nothing about it. It doesn’t seem a good deal to me! And just about all the other countries except the US have shown their support for vigorous action to do something about it.
If Trump continues with his policies in the US he will find himself in a small minority of one on the world stage. Meanwhile if anything his stance on climate change seems to be galvanizing the rest of the world to more action on the matter.
The strong and upbeat MARRAKECH ACTION PROCLAMATION which they signed, affirms their strong commitment. They declare that they have seen an extraordinary momentum on climate change worldwide and that this momentum is irreversible, and call for further climate action and support well in advance of 2020.
Here are some extracts from it:
“Our climate is warming at an alarming and unprecedented rate and we have an urgent duty to respond
…
Indeed, this year, we have seen extraordinary momentum on climate change worldwide, and in many multilateral fora. This momentum is irreversible – it is being driven not only by governments, but by science, business and global action of all types at all levels
…
We call for urgently raising ambition and strengthening cooperation amongst ourselves to close the gap between current emissions trajectories and the pathway needed to meet the long-term temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
We call for an increase in the volume, flow and access to finance for climate projects, alongside improved capacity and technology, including from developed to developing countries.
We the Developed Country Parties reaffirm our USD $100 billion mobilization goal.
We, unanimously, call for further climate action and support, well in advance of 2020, taking into account the specific needs and special circumstances of developing countries, the least developed countries and those particularly vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change.
…
The transition in our economies required to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement provides a substantial positive opportunity for increased prosperity and sustainable development.
The Marrakech Conference marks an important inflection point in our commitment to bring together the whole international community to tackle one of the greatest challenges of our time.
As we now turn towards implementation and action, we reiterate our resolve to inspire solidarity, hope and opportunity for current and future generations
MARRAKECH ACTION PROCLAMATION FOR OUR CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
See also Countries unite to defy Trump climate threat - BBC News
Expanded version here: President Elect Trump - Why Climate Change Is No Longer A Political Issue Outside The US with more information also in the comments.
Summary: Would you believe a stranger who came up to you in the street and said "I'm telling the truth, the world is about to end, don't believe anyone else because they are lying"? If you have any sense you'd say "Nuts" and just walk away. Do the same with these two cents hoaxters.
DETAIL
This is a favourite tactic of conspiracy theorist. They say everyone is lying except themselves. Well this is something you can decide for yourself.
In your everyday life, who do you trust? Would you trust a stranger who comes up to you and says to you “You can trust me, I swear, and nobody else at all is trustworthy”? And if they then told you not to trust your friends, relatives etc, would you then accept what they say? Would you continue to trust them after you find that they say one thing after another that is completely false?
Or do you trust people you’ve known for a long time and who you know from your own experience are trustworthy? Do you trust people who say things that you then find out are true?
I think most people would trust people that have proved themselves to be trustworthy and wouldn’t trust the stranger they know nothing about. Yet somehow when they go on the web and see a video by a stranger who tells them to trust them, that they are telling the truth about Nibiru and not to trust anyone else, their common sense goes out of the window and they trust them and don’t believe what anyone else says on the topic.
They come to believe these two cents hoaxters who know nothing about astronomy and they also believe them when they say that all the astronomers who have spent their entire professional lives studying astronomy are either mistaken, lying or paid to cover up the truth. All astronomers, world wide, the hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers and tens of thousands of professionals in just about every country of any size. See Debunking: NASA is hiding astronomical information about extra planets and extra suns in our solar system and even an entire extra solar system
Even when the things people say in those videos are proven to be mistakes and hoaxes over and over, still those who are scared of Nibiru continue to trust that they are telling the truth and everyone else is lying. Even when they begin to realize that they have been duped, often they have a lingering suspicion that perhaps it might be true.
If you go back to the example of a stranger who tells you to trust them and not trust any of your friends and relatives - would you have even a lingering suspicion that they are right? No, of course not, you’d pay no attention to them at all.
HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHO IS ACCURATE AND TRUSTWORTHY IN AN UNFAMILIAR TOPIC AREA
So now part of it of course is that these online strangers are talking about things that your friends and relatives are perhaps likely to know nothing about. So how can you learn who to trust and who not to trust in an unfamiliar topic area?
Well first, do just try grounding yourself in common sense. If someone says we have two suns, no matter how stirring the music they use in the video, no matter authoritative sounding the voice over, no matter how dramatic the images - is this something that is credible? Could we have two suns and nobody notice? If you hadn’t seen those videos, surely you’d say no. So it’s a matter of grounding yourself in your own common sense.
Then - try testing them, just as you would that stranger. Do the things they say pan out?
As an example, the Daily Star ran a story saying that Obama had warned that solar storms could destroy all life on Earth. It is easy to check that what they say about Obama’s executive order on solar storms doesn’t match at all to what he actually said. So now you know that the Daily Star is not reliable in this topic area.
The Nibiru people often say things that turn out to be false when you follow them up. I give many examples in this blog. If anyone tells you that IRAS discovered a hidden planet - see my debunking article: Debunked: The IRAS infrared satellite found Nibiru in 1983. It is easy to check that what I say there is true.
So now - if anyone says that IRAS discovered a hidden planet - you know immediately that this is someone who doesn’t check their sources carefully. They are not good people to go to for information on astronomy and planets.
Debunked: How can the videos and photos be hoaxes when so many people believe them?
You will find other people who are reliable, who check their sources. The best of all are the ones that actually share their sources, so you don’t have to rely on just trusting that they remembered what they say correctly, you can click through and check for yourself.
For more on this, see Debunking: You can’t trust anyone except the Nibiru people - everyone else is a paid shill of the government or in some other way motivated to propogate falsehoods
ASK THEM IF THEY HAVE SUCCESSFULLY PREDICTED ANYTHING ASTRONOMICAL
Ask them, have they ever successfully predicted a comet or asteroid flyby? Have they successfully predicted anything astronomical? Have they ever predicted anything astronomical that the astronomers did not predict? If the answer to all that is no, as it surely would be, why listen to them?
DEBUNK MANY THINGS FROM YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE
You can also check many of the things they say from your own experience. It is easy to check some things. For instance it just takes two observations of the pole star, any clear night, to debunk this one:
Debunking: Inuit elders say that the Earth’s poles have shifted position
If you develop an interest in astronomy and learn about it properly, perhaps join your local astronomy club, you can soon come to see that the whole thing is just a tissue of mistakes, hoaxes, lies, and nonsense. For instance it doesn’t take all that much experience in star watching to debunk the idea that a planet can “hide behind the sun?” for years on end. Perhaps after your first year as an amateur astronomy - or right away if you have a a reasonable grasp of math, science and the basics of how our solar system works already. Debunked: A planet in a 3600 year orbit can hide behind the sun for years on end
WHY ASTRONOMERS ARE SURE IT IS NONSENSE
For the reasons astronomers are so sure that Nibiru not only isn’t real, but that no planet or anything else as massive as a planet can be in an orbit like this, see Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]
You can also look at Who else says Nibiru is nonsense?
OTHER ARTICLES
Other relevant articles:
and many others in my Debunking Doomsday
For support see our new Doomsday Debunked Facebook group and Where can I get support if I’m scared of Nibiru / Doomsday maybe even suicidal?
This image is often shared as an ancient Sumerian depiction of Nibiru. That’s Sitchin’s interpretation.

They point to the eleven dots around a central larger dot upper middle left. Sitchin claims that this represents twelve planets - which includes, he says, our Moon Uranus, Neptune and Pluto (first discovered in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and an extra planet Nibiru which we haven’t yet discovered.
However there is nothing on the tablet to indicate that it is anything to do with planets.
The text on the seal just says
“Dubsiga, Ili-illat, your/his servant.”
The usual interpretation is that the twelve dots represent twelve deities - in a polytheistic belief system rather like the polytheism of the ancient Greeks.
For details see VA243 seal
They did do some astronomical observations. Including a very early series of observations of Venus - the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon.

Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa - shows the times when Venus disappears behind the sun in the evening, reappears as a morning star, disappears as morning star and reappears in the evening, over a period of 21 years.
This is impressive astronomy for so long ago, especially that they recognized Venus as the same object in the evening and morning sky.
But the idea that they were aware of Pluto or planets beyond what we know of today just goes way way beyond this. Venus is the brightest object in the sky after the sun and Moon. Pluto is so faint it required a long search using early nineteenh century telescopes to find it. It's not remotely visible to the naked eye. They would not have known of Uranus or Neptune either - both just possibly might be seen by naked eye if you have superb eyesight on a very dark night but would be indistinguishable from the very many other very faint stars. Uranus was spotted several times by astronomers with telescopes before it was recognized as a planet, just labelled as a star.
And, if they knew about Pluto and some even more elusive distant planet we haven’t seen, why didn’t they know about Saturn’s rings also?
Ceres and Vesta are easier to see, but again, would just be mistaken for very faint stars if you don't know what they are. Nobody recognized them as asteroids until the nineteenth century.
They also didn’t know about Jupiter’s moons - you can see them without a telescope if you have excellent eyesight, by blocking out the light of Jupiter, e.g. behind a building. They are easily bright enough to see, and we normally don’t see them because Jupiter is so much brighter.
As for the idea that it is ancient knowledge due to their contact with extraterrestrials - well why then didn’t they learn a bit of elementary maths from them? The Sumerians used a clumsy system of “unit fractions”. It was advanced for their time but they couldn’t notate a general fraction like, say, 5/7. Instead they worked only with fractions of the form 1/n e.g. 1/3, 1/4, 1/5 etc and a few special cases of 2/n. Is that what you’d expect of people who had been in contact with extra terrestrials? And no knowledge of zero, etc. Didn’t know how to work with negative numbers in the way we do. The ancient maths is very very rudimentary - amazing how long it took for us to develop the most basic ideas in maths. No sign at all of it being “jump started” by contact with extraterrestrials.
Ancient civilizations may well have had wisdom in other ways that we lack or have forgotten. But when it comes to either maths or astronomy, forget about it. No signs at all of ancient wisdom there.
They could however make observations of supernovae, comets, meteorite impacts too. Though they didn’t know what they were, the ancient observations of that sort are useful to us now, because they spotted ephemeral events that we can no longer see today. For instance the Chinese in 185 AD observed the supernova SN 185 - Wikipedia

RCW 86 - the remnants of the supernova explosion which the ancient Chinese observed in 185 AD.
Summary: This is a very distant “failed star” brown dwarf orbiting an orange dwarf star. It is nowhere near our solar system
I can understand the confusion, if you read the announcement they never actually say how far away it is: NASA Space Telescopes Pinpoint Elusive Brown Dwarf - and the illustration talking about a “Foreground brown dwarf” can easily create the impression it is in our solar system.

However, if you read it carefully, it’s clear that it's a brown dwarf orbiting a distant orange dwarf (K-dwarf). There are many brown dwarfs known but this one may possibly orbit especially close to its host star which is the main point of interest. But there again it might not, they had two possible solutions, at a distance of 0.25 au or 45 au. So it’s a rather preliminary announcement.
“By combining data from these space-based and ground-based telescopes, researchers determined that the newly discovered brown dwarf is between 30 and 65 Jupiter masses. They also found that the brown dwarf orbits a K dwarf, a type of star that tends to have about half the mass of the sun. Researchers found two possible distances between the brown dwarf and its host star, based on available data: 0.25 AU and 45 AU. The 0.25 AU distance would put this system in the brown dwarf desert”
A K dwarf there means an orange dwarf star - a bit smaller than our sun but not so small as the red dwarfs. The smaller the star the more common it is, so orange dwarfs are very common.
So - they found a brown dwarf “failed star” orbiting a distant orange dwarf star.
TOO FAR AWAY FOR PARALLAX MEASUREMENTS
Then the rest of the announcement is about parallax. They used two space telescopes, Spitzer which trails the Earth in the same orbit as us but, as far away from us as the Sun, and Swift which orbits Earth, to observe the same background star. They spotted a microlensing event - which means the star got brighter as a result of something passing in front of it. That’s because whatever passed in front of it bends spacetime slightly and so acts as a lens through general relativity - all planets and stars do this. Anyway - this causes it to magnify whatever is behind it and any stars behind it get brightened slightly.
By observing this from two different vantage points they should be able to find a distance to the object in future. But they didn’t observe any parallax this time, meaning that it is too far away for its distance to be measured in that way.
So - it helped them to determine what the limits are - how close an object has to be for them to find its distance through parallax. This brown dwarf was too far away for the technique to work.
Here we are talking about a massive “supervolcano” eruption, which happens rarely.
Summary: Yellowstone erupts rarely, with a chance of perhaps 1 in 80 of an eruption every century. It nearly always erupts as a normal eruption with only limited effects mainly within what is now Yellowstone park,. If we do get a supervolcano, the main effect is on the climate. It would reduce the temperature globally by about ten degrees C for a decade. Crops in the region near to the volcano would also be smothered by layers of ash in the year of the eruption - how much of a difference that makes depends on when it happens in the year. Jets would be grounded after the eruption for some time, over a wide area until the dust settles.
The numbers of supervolcanic eruptions for the whole world (not just Yellowstone) vary between 1.4 and 22 every million years, making the chance of a supervolcano in any century between one chance in 500 and one chance in 7000 approximately. That’s quite a low probability.
We would have some warning, of weeks, perhaps months or years. We could prepare for a supervolcano by testing the crops we’d need to grow in the cooler world for that decade, With enough warning we could also store crops that are normally used to feed animals or to make ethanol to help tide through the first year after the eruption.
A super volcano doesn’t threaten our survival as a species, and is also very unlikely, but it is something that is worth giving some thought to. So now to go into this in more detail:
DISPELLING SOME MYTHS FIRST
First, it’s not at all certain the next eruption would be a supervolcano - indeed it’s far more likely to be an ordinary eruption. There have been 80 non explosive eruptions in the last 640,000 years since the last supervolcano eruption. So that’s the most likely eruption by far. The last 20 of those were mainly lava flows. An eruption like that would disrupt activities in the Yellowstone national park itself, but it’s likely to lead to few deaths and would not be catastrophic.
The average of the two intervals between the last three major past eruptions is 740,000 years and that’s the basis of the often quoted 1 in 740,000 chance of an eruption per year - or 1 in 7,400 per century. But that’s not a very compelling argument. Some scientists think that it may not erupt as a supervolcano again ever. They think it may be winding down in its activity.
Also our understanding of these large volcanoes has moved forward and with modern understanding they think that if it did happen, the build up to a supervolcano in Yellowstone would be detected weeks in advance, perhaps months or years. Volcano Hazards Program YVO Yellowstone
WHAT IF IT DOES HAPPEN?
However what if there is a supervolcano eruption, what happens then?
“The term “supervolcano” implies an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index, indicating an eruption of more than 1,000 cubic kilometers (250 cubic miles) of magma. Yellowstone has had at least three such eruptions: The three eruptions, 2.1 million years ago, 1.2 million years ago and 640,000 years ago, were about 6,000, 700 and 2,500 times larger than the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State.” Yellowstone Volcano & Supervolcano

Grand Prismatic hot spring, Yellowstone National Park. Estimate of 1 in 700,000 chance of an eruption per year (1 in 7,000 per century). which could kill 90,000 people. See What would happen if Yellowstone’s supervolcano erupted?
But how much effect would it have? Well the largest supervolcano was 2.1 million years ago. If it was as large as that, it would be very extensive in its effects. If it was as large as the one 640,000 years ago it would also have extensive effects.
It’s hard to know from studying the geology as most of the ash would be eroded and not preserved. But a recent study in 2014 used a computer model to try to figure out what the effects would be, assuming 330 cubic kilometers of volcanic ash, dense-rock equivalent (so much more thickness for the ash itself).
It’s summarized here: Modeling the Ash Distribution of a Yellowstone Supereruption (2014) and the paper itself is Modeling ash fall distribution from a Yellowstone supereruption
This graphic from their paper shows how the volcanic ash would spread out over the US after such an eruption:

You’d get 1–3 millimeters thickness of ash right out to New York, which is enough to “reduce traction on roads and runways, short out electrical transformers and cause respiratory problems”. There would be centimeters of thickness over much of the mid west, enough to disrupt crops and livestock, especially if it happened at critical time in the growing season. and a meter of thickness out to quite a distance. The worst affected in their list of cites is Billings, population 109,000, which their model predicted would get an estimated 1.03 to 1.8 meters thickness of ash.
Artist’s impression here:

SUPERVOLCANOES WORLD WIDE
First, how likely are they? There’s an estimate here of the probability of a supervolcano happening anywhere in the world, and its effects. They say that there have been 42 supervolcanoes in the last 36 million years. However those came in two pulses and the rate varies between 22 events per million years and 1.4 events per million years.
The worst supervolcano in recent times was the one that created Lake Toba in Indonesia about 75,000 years ago. It’s 100 kilometres by 30 kilometres, maximum depth 505 metres.


Its ash covered Malaysia to a depth of 9 meters, there’s an ash layer from it in central India that’s still 6 meters thick today, and ash from it is detected as far away as Lake Malawi in East Africa.
It injected 2500–3000 km³ of debris into the atmosphere, and probably killed 60% of the human population worldwide, mainly through climate change impacting on their food supply.
That’s the picture generally, that the main effect is through global climate change, which reduces the temperature globally by about ten degrees C for a decade, together with the direct effects of the deposits of ash on their crops. A large supervolcano like Toba would deposit one or two meters thickness of ash over an area of several million square kilometers.(1000 cubic kilometers is equivalent to a one meter thickness of ash spread over a million square kilometers). If that happened in some densely populated agricultural area, such as India, it could destroy one or two seasons of crops for two billion people.
It would also mean that you can’t fly jets in the affected area for as long as the air is filled with ash, but that’s a minor effect compared with the rest of the devastation. As for the “noxious gases” such as sulfur dioxide - these mainly make a difference to the upper layers of our atmosphere by combining with water vapour to create clouds that block out the sun. It’s not like you’d have trouble breathing or anything like that globally - the amounts of gas are far too small for that, it’s manly the effect of dust and clouds on the climate.
We could prepare for this. With just a couple of years of warning, we could do large scale tests to work out which crops we’d need to grow in the cooler world for that decade, and store crops that are currently used to feed cattle or for production of ethanol, for human consumption instead, which would be enough to give us a buffer for the first year. In that way we would be able to avoid perhaps all deaths from starvation, so impact would be far less than it was for early man.
For details, see Extreme Geohazards: Reducing the Disaster Risk and Increasing Resilience from the European Space Foundation, and for the Yellowstone park eruption simulation,: Modeling the Ash Distribution of a Yellowstone Supereruption (2014) which summarizes Modeling ash fall distribution from a Yellowstone supereruption
This answer is based on those two sources, together with the USGS FAQ here Volcano Hazards Program YVO Yellowstone plus I used some details from the Wikipedia article on Lake Toba - you can check the citations there for more details.
(originally published as my answer to What will really happen when the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts?)
This is one of the videos.
This video and story seems to date back to 1999 when amongst other things he claimed that this planet would be visually the size of the full Moon by August 1999
Tribute to the memory and work of the great Chilean astronomer CARLOS MUÑOZ FERRADA
That’s full of nonsense. For instance
“ it was rediscovered in the 80s by the orbiting infrared telescope IRAS, whose head was Dr. Robert Harrington, supervisor of the orbiting observatory of the North American Astronomical Agency (NASA).”
IRAS did not discover any planets. See Debunked: The IRAS infrared satellite found Nibiru in 1983 by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
Robert Harrington didn’t have anything to do with IRAS as far as I know, and his hypothetical “planet X” was disproved a few months before he died when Myles Standish recalculated the mass of Neptune based on the measurements of the trajectory of Voyager as it flew past Neptune. See Debunked: NASA has been tracking “Planet X” for decades by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday and Debunked: Astronomers get murdered by the secret agencies if they “speak out” about Nibiru
COMET DISCOVERER??
The video claims amongst other things that he discovers comets. But he is not in this list of the amateurs who discovered comets from 1978 onwards - even to this day though most comets are found with large automated professional programs, amateurs still find a few each year. But not him.
Also he isn’t in the Wikipedia list of discoverers of comets Discoverers of comets
ORBIT MAKES NO SENSE
Astronomically his orbit doesn't make any sense at all.
Yes, it would be possible for one star to orbit another and a planet to orbit both of them at least for a while - that's a "distant retrograde orbit". Such orbits are stable for a fair while though not for billions of years. The asteroid return mission suggested by NASA was to return a small asteroid to a similar distant retrograde orbit around the Earth and the Moon.
But not to have three speeds 92 km/sec, 300 km / sec and 76 km / sec - it would have a continuously varying speed.
Also - it's just not how astronomy is done. Astronomers don’t try to do all the work themselves. That makes no sense. If he'd discovered a large comet, he'd have submitted it as an observation to the minor planet center. They then woulid send an email around to all other astronomers to track it. Then he'd be listed as its discoverer and everyone would know about it and they'd all join in tracking it and refining its orbit.
NAMING OF COMETS
Also - comets are not named after the person who calculates the orbit, not any more. Halley’s comet was named in that way as were a few of the earlier comets but ever since the early twentieth century they are named after their discoverers. So the claim in the video that they are now named after the astronomers who calculate the orbits and were previously named after the discoverers gets it back to front.
PREDICTION OF THREE DAY ECLIPSE AUGUST 1999
According to this article he predicted a three day eclipse in August 1999, which obviously never happened and again doesn’t make astronomical sense. It’s in spanish - this is with google translate:
“At the end of the 1940s the Chilean Carlos Muñoz Ferrada supported the strange hypothesis that There would be a three-day eclipse on August 11 1999, this event would be triggered by a Strange planet-kite that would approach Dangerously to the Earth12, which generated in Some people some expectation. Since Then, sporadically notes Newspapers in several national newspapers. in 1986 During the passage of the comet Halley, La Prensa Gráfica published a notice of Muñoz Ferrada in Where he speaks of the "influence" that the comet would bring to the earth. A similar news was released again In La Prensa Gráfica on October 7, 1991, with Responsibility of journalist Adrián Roberto Aldana, under the title "Evidence of God Will constitute the possible events during eclipse 99 ", evidently the supposed eclipse of three Days never took place.”
It is just nonsense through and through. If anyone happens to know who Carlos Muñoz Ferrada really was, do say!
Summary Earlier this year, astronomers found a dwarf planet in a strange orbit. They called it “Niku”. Conspiracy theorists claim it is Nibiru - this is just another example of them claiming any new astronomical strange discovery as “Nibiru”. It is no threat to Earth.
Details:
Example story to debunk: NASA confirms that planet Nibiru is falling towards Earth
This is the orbit of Niku:

As you see it is a very strange orbit. It’s almost perpendicular to the solar system and actually goes around the sun in the opposite direction to the planets, so “retrograde”. It crosses the ecliptic (the plane of most of the planets) just inside of Neptune’s orbit.
But it never comes anywhere close to Earth.
Find out more: Retrograde Rock "Niku" Defies Orbital Trend - Sky & Telescope
Meet Niku, the Weird Object Beyond Neptune That Nobody Can Figure Out
This is not so much a particular story as something you hear over and over in internet discussions. It’s not true.
First, our population growth is leveling off, towards a population of perhaps ten or eleven billion by the middle to the end of the century.
We have already reached peak child, and most areas of the world now have fertility levels at or below replacement, and feature a slowly growing, steady or declining population. Our world population continues to grow only because with better health world wide, people on average live longer each year.
The middle of the range projections have the Earth's population trending towards 11 billion by 2100 while lower projections have it level off at ten billion or even start to decline towards the end of the century.

So whatever happens, we aren't headed for Malthusian type exponential growth because we have reached peak child already. In the graph above, the red dotted lines show the upper and lower limits for the 95% prediction interval. The blue lines are for +- 0.5 children per couple average. You can look up the data here, the graphs page for the UN population division.
Though we may not reach peak population this century, most parts of the world have a good chance of stabilizing before then, especially the more developed countries. The least developed countries are the ones that would get most population growth. The most rapid growth is in Africa in the projections. You can see a break down for each region of the world here,

Older figures from 2014. Most of the population growth is in Africa by the end of the century by these figures, with everywhere else leveling off by then, the least developed countries are the ones that grow most rapidly, so that's a reflection of the situation in Africa
So, things are actually looking brighter than one might think. Which isn't to say it will be easy, but there is no reason why we have to ruin ecosystems on Earth.
Then, it may surprise you to know that we actually produce more than enough food to feed the world. We have starvation for political reasons at present. It's an income and distribution problem.
As an example, the world had a food surplus of 510 kcal / cap / day in 2010 increased from 310 kcal / cap / day in 1965. I'm agreeing with you that eating less meat makes things easier. All the indications are that we should be able to feed 10 billion people.
NOT RUNNING OUT OF LAND ON EARTH FOR TEN BILLION PEOPLE, OR EVEN MUCH MORE
We are nowhere near to running out of enough land to feed everyone. Most of the Earth is desert or ocean. We don’t have to cut down rainforests to feed people. We just need to reverse desertification and make more efficient use of what is there.
We are actually doing this already in a small way, with the salt water greenhouses, so I think you can say that not only should we do it, but we already are. This is an Australian desert project. The sea water is used to make water through the sunlight in the desert, and cool down the greenhouses.
These ideas could be used to reverse desertification in the Sahara desert and other deserts. This is how it works:


Diagrams by Raffa be from wikipedia
It not only lets you grow crops in the greenhouses - it can also help make the surrounding areas more habitable, so you’d get trees and crops growing in an area around the greenhouses as well. Doesn’t extract anything from desert aquifers, rather, it adds to them.
Sundrop farms have a large area set out for greenhouses like this now, in the middle of a desert, so this is taking off in a big way in Australia. Early days yet though.
This video just shows the greenhouses, and when they go inside in the video there is nothing growing there yet, not sure why, maybe it is a new installation, but it shows how it’s quite big in Australia.
There are many countries working on reversing desertification Israel does a lot of reversing of desertification.
One of the worst areas of encroaching desertification is the southern edge of the Sahara desert. The first priority there is to stop the spreading desertification - then to reverse it. Many African countries are collaborating in the Great Green Wall project to plant a forest along the southern edge of the desert.
Then, there is a similar project underway there now to the Australian Sundrop farms, using seawater greenhouses.

Technologies - Sahara Forest Project
This gives far more food and living space for the same amount of cost, compared with the billions of dollars to set up a few people in a space habitat. It's also far far easier to build a greenhouse in a desert on a planet with abundant sea water, and breathable air, than to do it on Mars. And as we just saw, with the BIOS-3 system, we would need only 2.5% of the Sahara desert to feed the world. So if we grew plants on Earth in as small an area as we could do for space habitats, we could feed the entire world easily with minimal impact, at least on the mainly vegetarian diet we would need for space colonies.
MORE EFFICIENT AGRICULTURE
If we use ideas developed for space colonies, then we can grow food in a very small area. Conventional agriculture requires one acre of fertile land for each person supported typically.
The easiest way to grow plants for food in space is to use soilless gardening with hydroponic solutions or with aeroponics where plants are grown with roots suspended in a fine mist (uses much less water).
This leads to huge savings in the precious area you need to grow crops. Instead of one acre of farmland needed per person for conventional agriculture (4000 square meters approximately), you can grow 95% of the food, water and oxygen for an astronaut from just 30 square meters, with a conveyor belt system, of rapidly growing crops such as wheat, sedge-nut, beet, carrots, etc. For details see Sending humans to Mars for flyby or orbital missions - comparison of biologically closed systems with ISS type mechanical recycling (also relevant to long duration lunar missions).
Soil based gardening can also be used with the methods of biointensive mini gardening. By using good gardening practices and by careful choice of crops you can grow all the food for one person in 4,000 square feet, about 372 square meters, or less than a tenth of an acre. That's intermediate between conventional agriculture and the conveyor belt type system of BIOS-3.

Grow biointensive - sustainable mini farming - this method needs only 372 square meters of growing area per person.
We can get an idea of how efficient these methods are by working out the total land area needed to feed the world on a vegetarian diet by all the methods. With a million square meters to a square kilometer, then we just need to multiply the numbers by 7,500 to get the area in square kilometers needed to feed a population of 7.5 billion. We get
By comparison, the Sahara desert is 9.2 million km². With the BIOS-3 system, we would need only 2.5% of the Sahara desert to feed the world. The total land area of the Earth is 148 million km². But of course much of that is desert, mountains, ice etc, some is uncultivated and animals require more land area than plants.
SEASTEADING
If we fill all the deserts, or you just don't have a handy desert in your country that's suitable for building on, you can build on the sea,

The Seasteading Institute | Opening humanity's next frontier
We could have sea cities covering much of the seas if we really need more space for people to live.
By a sea colony here, I mean one that only uses the sea water and the air, with a few imports from Earth - as that would be the equivalent of a Mars habitat. There'd be no need for fishing or anything else, just air, and sea water, and the materials to build the original city, and some imports, and if advocates are right about Mars colonies, there would be little by way of those too.
Four fifths of the surface of our planet is ocean, so if we could live on the sea, in more or less self contained habitats, as with the ideas for Mars, that's be like finding four new planets to live on.
The surface area of the Pacific is 165.2 million km². Four times the population of Earth would need about 0.5% of the surface area of the Pacific to grow all of its own food using space colony type technology.
That's actually the aim of the seasteading project too. See their section 5. Sustainability and ecology
"After the concept design is finished, the next challenge is to find the appropriate adaptation strategy – a strategy that creates a safe and livable urban environment on the sea, while minimizing impact on the ecosystems and making efficient use of the available resources. In this section, we explain the Blue Revolution concept and apply it to the seasteading concept"
They explain it in detail there, With its use of aquaponics and aeroponics, it resembles ideas for space habitats.
A sea city would have minimal impact on sea life if done in the same way as for a space colony, growing all their own food inside the habitats. Perhaps this could be one outcome of space settlement, that by learning how to live in space, with such a high priority on efficient recycling, we can also learn to live on Earth as well, with minimal impact. Perhaps both approaches will influence each other.
WHAT ABOUT LIVESTOCK?
This is something you might well ask if you have watched “cowspiracy”. And yes, it takes a lot more land to keep animals than to grow vegetables. So, yes, it will make it easier to feed everyone if we have less meat consumption per head. The figure of 0.5% of the Pacific to feed four times the Earth’s population assumes space colony type technology, so a basically vegan diet, with supplements, but most of the diet has to come from vegetables.
If most people eat large quantities of meat, then that needs more land, of course. However if you’ve watched “cowspiracy” then it exaggerates the situation. For a criticism of the film by the union of concerned scientists: Movie Review: There’s a Vast Cowspiracy about Climate Change.
Livestock produce 8-18% of greenhouse gas emissions according to the paper they cited - that is for all livestock world wide, not just beef. It's still a lot. But there is no conspiracy to hide this. It seems a very active area of research with many papers. These are the google scholar search results for 2016.
Farmers often keep sheep and cows on land that is not used for agriculture. I live on the Isle of Mull in Scotland and much of it is used for sheep. If the sheep were removed, then the land wouldn't be used for agriculture. In principle it could, the ground is peat bog mainly, actually potentially good for agriculture if it was drained - but there are far easier and less expensive ways to grow food than to cultivate mountain slopes, so in practice it wouldn't. It would be labour intensive also and it would be hard to find anyone wanting to do all that hard work to grow food.
Now, if they did stop rearing sheep here, it could return to forest, but only if they culled all the deer, as those would take the place of the sheep. And even if it returned to forest, that's a CO2 sink for as long as the forest grows, but not after that and anyway the grass also and peat bogs are CO2 sinks too, the land here is covered in large areas of peat that take up CO2 from the atmosphere and store large amounts of it.
So - yes if you replace good crop growing land with pasture and keep cows and sheep instead, then it is contributing to CO2 and they use water that may be in short supply, and land that could be used for growing crops. But you can't say that as a blanket statement e.g. to say to the Sami people that they have to stop keeping reindeer - they aren't going to grow crops there instead.

Sami woman with white reindeer
(this includes material from my MOON FIRST Why Humans on Mars Right Now Are Bad for Science )
The article is here: Stephen Hawking Puts An Expiry Date On Humanity Stephen Hawking is a well respected excellent theoretical physics in the field of general relativity, black holes etc. He is famous for such things as “Hawking radiation”. When writing on general relativity he writes carefully and accurately.
But he has something of a tendency to exaggerate threats and say that the Earth is doomed in one way or another. When you follow up the things he says on those topics, they just don’t pan out. If you do that for the things he mentions in that article, you find that none of them threaten survival of humans.
Brilliant physicists, however clever, are just people like anyone else. They are just as fallible as anyone else. We should never just accept something as true because the person who said it happens to be very clever, much more clever than we are.
Let me explain:
GLOBAL WARMING WILL NOT MAKE EARTH UNINHABITABLE
Global warming will make the Earth more habitable if anything, it's the transition that's the difficulty. I won’t say any more here as I go into it in detail here: Debunked: Global warming as terrifying apocalyptic scenario - risking something not far off Venus - story in the Independent by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
A NUCLEAR WAR WILL NOT MAKE EARTH UNINHABITABLE
A nuclear war would not come anywhere near to making the Earth uninhabitable. The entire southern hemisphere is a nuclear free zone, the worst of the radiation is so short lived it is over in half an hour, there is plenty of radiation left to have long term health effects, increased cancers and other health effects, but the levels of radiation that kill people quickly are soon finished with.

The blue areas here are nuclear free. If we did have a global nuclear war - then there would be no nuclear bombs in those areas at all. Also the harshest radiation is over quickly, the lethal radiation is mostly over within half an hour.
The idea that nuclear weapons would cause a nuclear winter has been shown to be false.
None of that is to diminish the seriousness of nuclear weapons, but a nuclear war would not make us extinct.
VIRUSES WOULD NOT MAKE HUMANS EXTINCT
And viruses if they kill their host quickly don't spread far. So a virus that spreads will also have people who are carriers that are less affected by it. It's in the interest of both virus and host that the host survives so if the virus can adapt to keep the host alive also, it will do that.
If it happens slowly, then there's time to find a cure. If it happens quickly then it can't spread to everyone.
Then there are the isolated communities including those in submarines, just remote places with few or any visitors and even the uncontacted tribes. Unless implausibly you have the viruses somehow spread so that they reach every square meter of the Earth it's not a likely scenario. And after all who would engineer a virus that is going to kill the people who engineered it?
Viruses and other diseases can make a species extinct if it is already threatened and close to extinction. But we are not in that situation. Humans are amongst the species least of risk of extinction in the world.
EARTH MAKES THINGS SO EASY FOR US
Our Earth makes everything so easy for us, compared with space colonies. Perhaps one thing they might do is help us to appreciate quite how valuable and wonderful our Earth is, and how rare, as we look back at the beautiful Earth from the Moon or further afield.

Earth rise over the Moon as photographed from Apollo 8, first mission to orbit the Moon, on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 1968
As Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot
"The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand."
There are things that could make us extinct. To my mind the thing we have to be most careful about at present is synthetic biology - creating microbes that are based on a different biochemistry from DNA based life by modifying the way they work in ways that don’t happen in nature. We do have experiments of that sort already, but the scientists concerned take great care to make sure the microbes can’t survive in the wild. Similarly I think we have to take great care if we ever return life based on a different biochemistry from another planet. See my Could Anything Make Humans Extinct In The Near Future?
And for the idea of Earth as its own backup in more detail: Earth best for a "backup"
We could do a backup of knowledge in space. I can see value for that. We could build a repository of all human knowledge on the Moon, see
The Moon is so stable that a backup there could last for billions of years, long after our civilization is forgotten on Earth. It could be an insurance for events here on Earth that lead to us forgetting our civilization. I see that as of value.
But humans themselves going extinct? I don’t see any value going into space to prevent that. As Carl Sagan said, Earth is where we make our stand. If we preserve Earth and keep it in good shape, then we also will be in good shape for the future.
Short summary - planetary alignments can be a pretty sight in the night sky. But they are of no astronomical significance and can’t harm us in any way at all. This particular alignment is an alignment with the sun as well, which means that there is not even anything to see. It’s rather an absence of anything interesting for astronomers who like to observe planets.
The book of Revelation is meant a a message of hope, not despair. It’s so enigmatic though, that you can fit almost any message to it and claim that’s what it is saying. The Bible is not noted for its astronomy, and they didn’t even know that meteorites came from space, thought comets were like high clouds, and they didn’t know that Earth orbited the Sun so didn’t know it was a planet. It doesn’t even have eclipse predictions in it, although a few astronomers at the time could do them (though not nearly as accurately as us). It’s just not a work of astronomy at all. It has much to say in other ways that many people find of great value, but to look to the Bible for a guide to astronomy is to look in the wrong place I think.
DETAILS
There is a very rough alignment with the planets and the Moon spread out over the sky from Leo to Libra. However, there will be nothing to see in the sky because the sun is right in the middle. It's a non event visually, most interesting as one of the few times when you won't see any of the planets or the Moon.
Amateur astronomers like alignments though they have no astronomical significance, just because they look interesting and they can get nice pictures of them. This is the most uninteresting sky you could possibly have if you are interested in visual alignments.
As for the idea of it being a “sign” - this is just a work of imagination and numerology. His page is here: Signs of the End. It spins a story out of the book of Revelations, which is notorious for having so many enigmatic statements in it that you can interpret to mean almost anything.
There are many different ideas on what it actually meant - was a late addition to the Bible. Views about it include:
If you aren’t a Christian then you don’t need to interpret it at all. After all, it was written specifically for Christians.
It is generally agreed it is meant as a message of hope, so if you find it scary, something has gone wrong. The Eastern Orthodox church has gone so far as to exclude it from its lectionary - passages that can be read from the pulpit, because it is so easily misunderstood.
There’s nothing of any astronomical significance on that date. Yes, all the brighter planets are hidden in the bright area around the sun in the sky, so won’t be visible. That’s all. Here is a screenshot

Charts of the Night Sky - shows how all the main visible planets will be hidden in the bright area of the sky around the Sun briefly on 23rd September 2017.
It has no meaning at all. Unless you think you can read signs in the sky like reading signs in tea leaves. It’s not even a pretty sight to look out for in the night sky. It’s rather an absence of anything of interest as you won’t be able to see it because the sun blots it out.
They have just made up a story around the stars and the planets. The constellations themselves are just patterns of stars as seen from Earth. The stars are constantly moving. They are at different distances from us.
This shows how the big dipper is changing:
And this is Orion
More examples here: The fault in our stars: Why the Big Dipper could become the Big Duck
Most of the constellations are not made up of stars that are close together in space either. Look at the constellation from a slightly different angle, if we could travel away from the Sun and it would look different again.
“A scientific visualization of the Orion constellation as viewed from a three dimensional perspective. The true space distribution of the constellation is revealed by circling around the stars.
“The camera begins with a pan across the sky to Orion. The lines of the stick figure constellation are drawn in, which unfortunately gives the viewer an impression of a 2D drawing. As the camera slowly begins to circle around the centroid of the stars, the stick figure quickly breaks into a long extended 3D structure. The camera backs up to keep the entire figure onscreen for the complete circle. At the end of the circle, the camera pushes forward to finish back at the location of the Earth/Sun.
“Note that the stars are rendered with 3D distance dimming relative to the camera position. Stars get brighter or fainter as they are closer or farther from the camera viewpoint. Also, to avoid an obvious distraction, the Sun is not included in the visualization.”
The planets are much closer to us than any of the stars. To say that Jupiter is “in Virgo” is like pointing at a distant mountain and saying your finger is in the mountain. It just means that your finger is between your eyes and the mountain.
It’s like looking at a cloudy sky and seeing clouds that look like fortresses or houses, or boats or animals - and then making up a story about it. Google’s “Deep Dream” generator can turn clouds into images of various creatures:


That could be a fun thing to do but the clouds are not affected by your story in any way. In the same way making up stories about the stars and planets makes no difference to the stars or planets and doesn’t mean that they endanger us in any way at all.
Planetary alignments are very common. For instance there was one early this year with all five visible planets Five planets align: how to see this spectacular celestial show. They are of no astronomical significance but amateur astronomers enjoy watching them.
This is about Muslim views on the Bible Books of Revelation - for them the “Book of Revelation” is not one of their “Books of Revelation”. Islamic view of the Christian Bible. And it’s obviously not a Jewish sacred text. And for any other religion, well they don’t accept the Bible as a sacred text at all, not for themselves, just for Christians, so why should they pay any attention to it?
The book of Revelation, it's a notoriously enigmatic book and you can fit almost any "prediction" you like to it, and many Christians don't think it was meant to predict the future, and others think it was meant as a warning of events that happened already in the first century BC. Whatever the truth of that, at any rate there’s a huge problem of false prophets in modern Christianity, with the Bible itself warning about them, and numerous false prophecies for the last 2000 years of the end of the world. The Eastern Orthodox church has gone so far as to exclude Revelations from its "lectionary" - passages of the Bible that can be read from the pulpit
If you are Christian, then Revelations should be a message of hope, not fear and despair. If you aren't Christian, there is no need to try to interpret it at all as it is written for Christians. Not even Jews or Muslims accept Revelations as a sacred book.
And the Bible is not noted for its astronomical predictions. Remember that back then, they didn’t know that meteorites came from deep space but thought they came from volcanoes or stones picked up by strong winds. They thought that comets were atmospheric phenomena like high clouds. They didn’t know that Earth orbited the Sun, so they didn’t know it was a planet.
The Bible doesn’t even have predictions of eclipses in it, or anything astronomical at all, as far as I know. It’s just not an astronomical prediction book. There are ancient texts that do, not nearly as good as modern predictions but good for their time. But this is simply not the Bible’s strong point.
See also Debunked - The world will end because the Bible (or some other sacred book) says so - which goes into more details about Revelations.
This is an idea that some fundamentalist Christians have - that the world is about to end and that all the good people will be taken up to heaven in the “rapture” and the bad ones go to hell. Often made fun of, and features in several Simpson’s episodes for instance:

Most of these prophecies of a Christian Apocalypse are based on the book of Revelations, which is regarded as one of the most enigmatic books in the Bible. Anyone can read almost anything into it.
It causes so many problems that the Eastern Orthodox church doesn't include it in ts lectionary - the passages from the Bible that can be read from the pulpit. It was a late addition to the Bible anyway - early versions of the Bible didn't include it.
IF YOU BELIEVE IN A DEITY WHO CAN MOVE PLANETS INSTANTLY OR CREATE THEM FROM NOTHING
This is not just an issue in Christianity. Early in 2016 a rabbi predicted the world would end on Sunday October 2nd 2016. Rabbi: Catastrophic Nibiru Causing Extreme Weather Events - Breaking Israel News
He said
“God can do whatever He wants. He can move a planet, put it back in. We have to be aware that there are different scenarios. Hashem prepared all options.”
I got quite a few comments about that one from people scared the world would end last October. Even though only one rabbi is saying this, and for sure most rabbis were not saying the world was about to end. Yet people who don’t even share their religion get scared by it.
So anyway, if you think that a deity could move a planet to a collision course with Earth, well why even call it Nibiru? Why postulate some new planet that no astronomer can see when there are plenty of planets in our solar system already for him to use? Why not just throw Jupiter at us?
If you believe God exists and that he can suddenly put Jupiter into a collision course with Earth, and is of such a nature and personality as to do such a thing, well we wouldn't have a chance of course. Or indeed he could just create a planet from nothing, or transport a planet from the other side of the galaxy instantly. If you have miracles like that, moving planets, as this rabbi said he believed were possible, well, all bets are off.
The only way to answer a religious answer based on supposing miracles is a religious reply and I'm not very well versed in Judaism. In Christianity however, you can certainly do a religious reply as there are lots of warnings about false prophets and by definition all the dozens of people who have predicted the world would end (and more examples here) over the last couple of millennia are all false prophets as the world didn't end.
It's obvious that there is a significant problem in Christianity of false prophets of doomsday, despite the warnings in the Bible about it.
My background here is that I do have quite a strong background in Christianity, enough so I feel I can answer this and point you in the direction of sources. My parents were both ordained ministers in a small Scottish church and my father particularly had a strong academic interest in theology, and in all branches of Christianity, as well as in other religons. I was brought up in a house with shelves upon shelves piled high with theological books, many different translations and commentaries on the Bible, theological works by many authors, and so on. I had a lot of interest in the subject too when I was young, read many of my father’s books. I also studied philosophy at university as a second undergraduate degree.
So though I am not a theologian, and indeed am no longer a Christian either, I’m a Buddhist now, I feel I do have enough background here to point you in direction of some of the basic ideas.
BIBLE IS ONLY ONE OF MANY SCRIPTURES
So, first, the Bible is only one of many scriptures in the world.
The Hindus have their scriptures too for instance which they regard as highly as Christians regard theirs.And there are many other traditions about what happens in the future.
For instance, as an example of another tradition, which I can say a bit about as I’m a Buddhist myself, many Buddhists believe that the historical Buddha is the fourth of a series of a thousand Buddhas that arise from time to time, their teachings last for a few thousand years, then fade away and eventually after many thousands of years new teachings arise again. There are many ideas here but in those traditions, there are 996 Buddhas still to come in our world system, so we have got a fair while yet before the world will end. These are not thought of as “revealed truths” in Buddhism and there is no need for a Buddhist to believe these things, but are rather, just traditional ways of thinking about the cosmos in many Buddhist cultures. They are like stories that Buddhist teachers may teach that have a message within them, but you don’t have to take them literally (though many may do so).
In these traditions also, this particular world system with its 1000 Buddhas is a part of larger and larger cycles ending with destruction indeed, and renewals, because nothing is permanent. But that's in the far distant future,maybe millions of years into the future. This is not a creed, not in Buddhism, but many Buddhists think this way just because that's how they were brought up (the numbers like 4 and 996 here vary depending on the tradition).
So, if you are brought up a Hindu or a Buddhist - or indeed in many other religious traditions, you don't have anything corresponding to the idea of a near future impending apocalypse. The idea simply isn't there.
But within the Christian traditions also, many Christians don't interpret the book of Revelation this way. Let's just take a short look at it.
THE BOOK OF REVELATION WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN AS A MESSAGE OF ENCOURAGEMENT AND HOPE FOR EARLY CHRISTIANS
Amongst Christians, there's a wide range of views on how to interpret the book of Revelation, summarized in "From Adam to Armageddon: A Survey of the Bible", page 178 as
The idea of a literal Armageddon is the fourth of those common ways of interpreting the Bible.
The book of Revelation was added to the Bible at quite a late date. It was originally regarded as heretical by some of the early Christians.
As the author of "From Adam to Armageddon" says
"Regardless of whether Revelation holds the secret of the time and place that history as we know it will end, it holds the view that how one lives matters greatly. That alone makes it of value for those who use it as an authority for their lives.
"Its vision may have been intended primarily to support Christians facing death for their first century faith, but it has served a much broader purpose for continuing Christianity. A book of comfort and devotion, it has called people to faithfulness over the years, while assuring them of the faithfulness of the God it proclaims."
(From Adam to Armageddon: A Survey of the Bible - page 180 )
So, it seems it is intended primarily as a message of hope, originally written for Christians who faced death as a result of their faith and now a general message of hope to Christinas in trouble.
That's why the view 1, that the events described in the book of Revelation have already taken place is also a reasonable view to take, Or indeed the view 3, that it is best understood spiritually.
In both cases it has no future predictive power since it either describes events of the first century AD, or it is meant to be taken spiritually, as a message of hope, with no intention of prophecy of actual events in the world.
Many Christians do take it in those ways.
TEACHINGS TO INSPIRE US
Teachings like this are surely meant to inspire us to look at our lives and treat them as more precious and of greater value and inspire us to live better and more meaningful lives.
If it becomes a message of despair and suicide, then it is seriously being misapplied.
If you end up getting scared and upset - for no reason, especially repeatedly, for one predicted but failed Armageddon after another - I'm sure that can't be Jesus or God's message. Whatever it means, that can't be its central message.
WARNING OF FALSE PROPHETS
Also the Bible warns against false prophets. By definition all the people who have prophesied an end to the world for the last 2000 years, and there have been dozens of them, are false prophets because the world didn't end. And these Nibiru people have falsely prophesied the end of the world numerous times too, so they are definitely false prophets too, no matter what excuses they make for their false predictions.
So, there is absolutely no reason at all to pay attention to alleged prophecies of doomsday if you are Christian. Why should you? They are surely just more false prophets to add to the dozens that have come before. For the large number of false prophets that we’ve had, see this List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events. It’s not complete either.
Some of these people will forecast an apocalypse over and over. They swear blind that their latest prediction is the real thing and will certainly happen. Even their own predictions made just a few months or a year before - they say those were false predictions but this one at last is correct.
If you start to fall for this sort of thing, you will never want for predictions of doomsday and will be scared of it for the rest of your life or until you realize you've been had and just give up on it.
While if you are not Christian - well what do you care what Christians prophecy? The book of Revelations is clearly meant as a message for Christians, whatever it might mean. Why pay any attention to it if you happen to be a Hindu or Buddhist or Jain or Taoist or whatever religion you are? And if you are atheist even more so.
ASTRONOMY IS NOT A STRONG POINT OF THE BIBLE
The Bible has never predicted any major astronomical event. Indeed astronomy is not it’s strong point. And no previous civilization has ever had the accuracy of prediction of astronomy that we have.
World Atlas of Solar Eclipse Paths
An eclipse track map like this one is way beyond the capabilities of any previous civilization on Earth, no matter how astronomically gifted. They just didn’t have the theory, the computers, the telescopes etc needed to make them.
Also, anything you might try to unearth from the Bible can’t possibly be a prediction of meteorite impacts or hidden planets, as they didn’t know that asteroids or meteorites existed back then.
The idea that a planet could hit Earth would have been totally foreign to them. They thought of the sky and stars as separate from Earth. They thought meteorites were created in volcanic eruptions or blown up into the air in strong winds before falling again. They also thought that the Sun orbited the Earth along with all the planets and that the entire night sky and all the stars circled around Earth. Back then they didn’t know that the stars were other suns like our one.
So, far from having a superior understanding of how our universe worked, they had a very inferior approximate understanding.
Now of course they did have a good understanding of human nature, the Bible has a good ethical message. We aren’t superior to them in terms of ethics probably. But they just weren’t astronomers or cosmologists. Even by the standards of their time, the authors of the Bible do not stand out as having a particularly good understanding of astronomy. It is barely mentioned. That’s just not what you go to it for.
So the idea of going to the Bible to try to unearth hidden secret messages predicting astronomical events is absurd. They just didn’t have the level of astronomical understanding to make such predictions back then.
SEARCHING FOR SECRET MESSAGES FROM GOD IN THE BIBLE
To go the Bible to find secret messages about God’s will for humanity might make sense if you are a devout and fundamentalist Christian. However, then you have to bear in mind all the warnings about false prophets which make it clear that the books are not intended to be used in this way. Also it’s worth bearing in mind the practical experiences of all the people who have falsely prophesied the end of the world.
If you are Christian and what I’ve said so far doesn’t reassure you - I suggest it might help to find a Christian pastor or minister who you respect. Most Christian teachers will be sure to say exactly what I say here - that you don’t go to the Bible to find exact dates for the end of the world. There are exceptions. Jehovah Witnesses have predicted the end of the world many times. Failed date predictions of Jehovah's Witnesses. If you are a devout Jehovah’s Witness, then presumably you find those predictions encouraging and they help you to live a fulfilling and positive life.
But most Christians don’t interpret their faith this way. So you may find that going to a minister or pastor in one of the mainstream Christian sects helps you to take a different view on revelations and get another perspective on these alleged predictions from the Bible..
THIS DOESN’T MEAN SCIENCE CAN ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS
I think there are many claims that are not falsifiable by current science at all - without needing to invoke miracles. Especially philosophy - I'd argue that the whole field of philosophy is not scientifically falsifiable. Trying to make philosophy into a science, as with the logical positivists, is itself a philosophical view, and one with many problems. The logical positivist movement is generally regarded by most philosophers as a failure. It raised interesting questions and ideas but did not succeed in putting philosophy on a scientific footing. Indeed science itself is based on many assumptions you can look at with the lens of philosophy.
That’s true also for most things to do with the mind, science can only address those things at the most superficial level in my view. Particularly - when you die - then whatever happens next, all our science in this life becomes like experiments you did in a dream when you wake up, if there is something next after this life.
Dreams can be vivid and realistic sometimes, for some people so vivid that they can't tell if they are asleep or awake, "waking up" multiple times each time just into a new dream, and still find that they are in a dream after apparently proving to themselves that they have woken up. Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize winning famous physicist is one example of someone who had very vivid dreams, so vivid he could examine them with a scientist’s eye. So with that background, how could science ever say anything definitive about what happens when you die?
Maybe it can but if so I think this has to be in some future where science is extended to include some aspect of understanding mind, sort of meld of science, philosophy and maybe some kind of mind experiments? At any rate we don't have that yet.
As a scientist, therefore, I think there is no need at all to ascribe to miracles to have a wide variety of views about what happens when you die. And the view that "When you die that's it" is as much a belief system as any religion, I think. I go into that more in my answer to "Is there life after death" on quora.
So, I think religion does have a proper place. The idea that some scientists have that when you die that’s it, is as much of a belief system as any religion. The best thing as a scientist is to keep an open mind there.
But when it comes to astronomy, planets, and so on, well there science rules supreme. In ancient times astronomers had many ways of understanding the stars and planets that worked after a fashion. But none of them was a patch on modern astronomy There is no other way of understanding how the stars and planets work that is anything like as good as science. It is one of the best and most accurate applications of science that we have.
WORLD ENDING EVENTUALLY
As to why the world would end eventually astronomers predict it will become so hot that it is uninhabitable about 500 million years from now, unless we find a way to do something about it, as the sun heats up on the way to becoming a red giant.
But “eventually” there means so far into the future for life to evolve from the smallest multicellular lifeforms you can only see in a microscope, all the way to humans again.
There are things that an advanced technological race could do to protect that distant future Earth - to use large thin film shades in orbit around Earth for instance - or to move it to a wider orbit around the Sun using repeated flybys of large asteroids. It won't be us anyway probably evolved into something else long before or extinct and new species and civilizations will have arisen by then.
If they do find a way through that heating of Earth crisis - well eventually something else will happen. By “eventually” I now mean so far into the future that those tiny microscopic lifeforms could evolve all the way to humans many times over.
What happens billions, or trillions of years into the future, or even over timescales that are hard to express in ordinary terms? The end of the universe perhaps. Or just that parts of it become uninhabitable.
Maybe on such huge timescales, it gives birth to new baby universes or maybe it ends and then a new universe arises out of its ashes as it were. Or, according to Penrose’s idea, it expands, dissolves into light, and then it forgets its size, and turns into a new “Big Bang” at a point in the past where our universe also didn’t have a well defined size or forward direction in time, starting the process again.
There are many ideas about what could happen eventually. Nothing lasts forever. But our future is sure to be hundreds of millions of years, and the universe, surely billions of years, probably much more. That it surely would end eventually doesn't make the universe and our Earth any less precious.
I think teachings like this are surely meant to inspire us to look at our lives and treat them as more precious and of greater value and inspire us to live better and more meaningful lives. If you end up getting scared and upset - for no reason, especially repeatedly, for one predicted but failed Armageddon after another - I'm sure that can't be Jesus or God's message,if that is indeed what this book is. Whatever it means.
I think this is one of the worst things about the Nibiru hoax, that the people who get scared of Nibiru feel there is nothing they can do.
IF YOU WERE SCARED OF SOMETHING REAL YOU COULD FIND OUT DETAILS ABOUT IT
If it was a real predicted asteroid impact or comet impact, you could follow it every day. Astronomers would know exactly where it is and could give detailed predictions of its position. They’d have been following it for more than a decade and would say, e.g. “Look in the night sky three hours before sunrise and you will see it in such and such a constellation”. They would know where it is every night of the year, and as they refined their observations, could predict exactly where it would hit on Earth and when exactly to the minute. They would know what the effects would be, and there would be people working on ways to deflect it too. As the impact date came closer, if we hadn’t managed to deflect it, you would have instructions to evacuate the impact zone, warnings for those further away to stay indoors, keep away from windows to avoid flying glass, and so on.
BUT YOU ARE SCARED OF SOMETHING SPUN OUT OF SOMEONE’S IMAGINATION
But instead what you are scared of is a made up thing, like HCT2014 (Huge Chocolate Teapot). This is a paraody of many of the Nibiru videos, by Dazzathecameraman - shows how easy it is to make a hoax video like this.
Because it is not real, like HCT2014, there are no details about it, can't be. Or rather there are plenty of details but they are not consistent. There are just lots of people saying contradictory things. You could make another video about HCT2015 and HCT2016, and following this pattern could make HCTnnnn videos for ever.
SO THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO EXCEPT PANIC
There is nothing you can do about it either, except panic again because it isn't real. You have no idea where to look for it in the sky except a vague instruction that you might see it near the sun at sunrise or sunset - but there again it might appear briefly in the West at sunrise or North, South, East, or anywhere in the sky, keep looking and you never know when you might spot it. There are lots of what seem to be details about it, and lots of dates given but they are always wrong, again because it isn't real and the people who make up those dates are just spinning stories out of their imagination.
THEY TELL YOU THAT ALL THE ASTRONOMERS ARE LYING
Then having been told this by conspiracy theorists, they then tell you that astronomers will lie to you about it, and are all paid to lie in this topic area. Or that they will lie because they don’t want to scare you.
That’s absurd given that there are hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers worldwide in just about every country worldwide, probably millions of amateurs, and tens of thousands of pros. For more about the huge numbers of astronomers, amateur and professional worldwide, see Debunking: NASA is hiding astronomical information about extra planets and extra suns in our solar system and even an entire extra solar system
ASTEROID DETECTION IS DONE IN AN OPEN WAY - EASY TO CHECK THE LATEST PREDICTIONS
And asteroid detection is done in an open way, and there is no way that such a thing could be hidden, not when anyone can point a decent sized amateur telescope towards a comet or asteroid and see it for themselves. A planet would be a naked eye object, visible for all except one month of the year when it hides behind the sun. There is just no way it can be hidden. It is easy to check for yourself. Just go to the Sentry Risks Table here Current Impact Risks. It is colour coded, and sorted with the highest risk at the top, so easy to check. Anything white or blue is no threat at all. If you ever see a yellow entry at the top, that means it is a potential risk, but the chances are high that it is a false alarm. Only if you get an orange or red is there a real risk. That has never happened to date. If it goes orange or red, you won’t need to hunt around to find out information, it will be on international news and all astronomical web sites. And if there is an actual impact predicted, you’d get warnings to evacuate the impact zone.
This is very unlikely to happen though. In all of recorded history we have had many volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, but never had a major asteroid impact on a populated area. Indeed not even in a desert apart from meteor crater in Arizona 50,000 years ago.

This is the most recent large impact on land, Meteor Crater - Wikipedia in Arizona. It happened 50,000 years ago. It landed in a desert and most of Earth is desert or ocean. An impact this large if it landed in the middle of a city would be devastating and kill millions. But such impacts are very rare indeed, and the chance of one hitting a populated area is even smaller. We’ve had many disasters in history due to volcanoes (e.g. Pompei), tsunami, earthquakes. But we haven’t had a single recorded example of large numbers of people dying due to a meteorite impact. That shows how rare impacts are.
Though they are so rare, it is well worth our while to do astronomical searches for asteroids that could hit Earth. Unlike any other disaster we’d be able to predict the time and position of the impact to the nearest minute and to within kilometers given a long enough timeline to refine the orbit. We’d also be able to deflect it too. It’s the only natural disaster we can predict so precisely and can also prevent. But it’s not something to be scared about, less likely to die this way than from lightning, or tornadoes. Also traffic accidents of course or medical issues are far more common than either of those.
WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU BELIEVE ALL ASTRONOMERS ARE LYING TO YOU
But if you don’t have much background in astronomy, you may come to believe that all astronomers are lying to you. You desperately want to know where it is, and when it will hit Earth, and the astronomers can’t answer those questions, because it isn’t real. So then you go back to the conspiracy theorist websites and you may be so scared you believe anything anyone says about it.
If you do this you will end up being scared for the rest of your life or as long as it takes to realize that you have been had. The conspiracy theorists are not limited in the way astronomers are. They don’t need to work out orbits, or to track it with telescopes. They just make up dates out of their imagination. Which means they can pick any date. Sometimes they will pick dates that have some astronomical meaning, e.g. an eclipse of the Moon or a super Moon, or eclipse of the sun. Sometimes they just pick a date at random. Sometimes they give a range of dates, e.g. it will happen some time in the spring. Debunked - Nibiru will hit Earth between January and March 2017 - or any range of dates like that
THE HOAXERS AND CONSPIRACY THEORISTS CAN IMAGINE ANY DATE THEY LIKE - ARE NOT LIMITED IN THE WAY ASTRONOMERS ARE
So, again because it is not real, there won’t be any end to people making up dates. Because there is no real data to limit them in any way. They can keep on making up these dates and there is no sign of them giving up. It’s increasing if anything. Originally it was just Nancy Lieder in the business of making up dates for Nibiru to hit Earth. Now dozens of people have joined in and it’s become a money earner on Youtube. If you can make a doomsday video that scares lots of people you can earn hundreds of dollars a month from the ad revenue or even thousands of dollars if you can get into the millions of views a month. It may also get picked up by journalists in search of “silly season” stories and then you have it made financially for a month or two.
So that's why it ends up being so scary - precisely because it isn't real and makes no sense astronomically. That’s also why you can’t do anything to stop it, because it isn’t real. Praying and hoping won’t help either, as the people who make up these stories won’t be influenced by your prayers and hopes. That’s also why it is impossible for anyone with astronomical expertise to give any details about it. There are no details for anyone to give because it doesn't exist.
Meanwhile all this nonsense is distracting you away from the many real things that you can do something about. Things in your own life that you can do something about, and wider things as well like trying to get something done about climate change, asteroid impact and detection, or human rights or whatever larger issue there is that you want to get changed. And if you try to get the government to do something about Nibiru - again - that nonsense is distracting both you and the people who receive your pleas away from the many real things that you could be trying to get something done about.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Well take a look at what astronomers say about it. We are telling the truth. Eventually hopefully you can come to realize that we are telling the truth. See also
Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here] by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
for the reasons astronomers are totally sure it can’t be real.
I understand that Nibiru is not real but still feel scared all the time - what can I do? by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday if you are still scared although you know it is not real.
Who else says Nibiru is nonsense? by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday for the reassurance that big name astronomers say it is nonsense
Where can I get support if I’m scared of Nibiru / Doomsday maybe even suicidal? by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday to get support
Debunking: Inuit elders say that the Earth’s poles have shifted position by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday - for one of the conspiracy theory myths which you can debunk with your own eyes, easily, any clear night. This may help you to understand how astronomers can be so sure that the conspiracy theories are just nonsense. They are all as daft as this one, but this one is one of the easiest to see is false for yourself with your own eyes with minimal understanding of astronomy.
Debunked: A planet in a 3600 year orbit can hide behind the sun for years on end by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday - a bit of basic astronomy which many amateur astronomers would learn in their first year of their new hobby. Once you’ve understood this, you can see for yourself that the idea of a planet hiding behind the sun for years on end is nonsense.
And - generally I’d suggest learning some astronomy, real astronomy, not this “pick a date and invent a story around it” parody of astronomy that you see on the Nibiru websites.
I’ve been asked about this as yet another internet rumour, someone has said that Nibiru will definitely hit Earth some time between January and March 2017. I’d like to explain how you can immediately dismiss any rumour of this sort, where a range of dates is given for an impact of any sort.
The thing is that the Earth moves a quarter of the way around the Sun between January and March.
It moves 30 kilometers every second - that means it moves by its radius in 3.55 minutes. If astronomers found out that a comet was headed towards Earth and they got the time of the encounter wrong by just under 4 minutes that turns a dead on center hit into a miss.

The famous Earth Rise photo taken by the crew of Apollo 8 from orbit around the Moon. Earth moves around the sun so quickly that it traverses a distance equivalent to its own radius in less than four minutes. If something was headed towards the Earth from outer space and you got the time of the encounter wrong by as little as four minutes, that turns a direct hit into a miss. With this background it is absurd to predict any encounter with Earth if you don’t know not only which day it will happen but also the exact time on that day, accurately to within minutes.
So now the Nibiru enthusiasts are saying that they believe that someone just by observing a bright light in the sky that no astronomers have been able to see knows that it is going to hit Earth between January and March next year.
Can you see how absurd that is? Astronomers when they predict flybys of Earth predict them accurately to within a minute or so. They have to as otherwise they wouldn't know that it is going to be a flyby.
The answer is no, nothing like this can happen. First to explain continental drift. All the continents are moving slowly, all the time.
That idea seemed very extraordinary to the early geologists. But now it is generally accepted. The continents are rigid plates that are less dense than the denser mantle below. The mantle is not quite liquid, and indeed the top 100 kilometers is solid rock, but the motion is so slow that even solid rock can be soft enough to move. The whole thing is driven by the heat of the Earth’s core and convective motion.
This animation by the geologist Christopher Scotese shows the continental drift first backwards from the present to 240 million years ago, then it goes forward all the way to 250 million years into the future. Notice how the continents formed a single large continent 240 million years ago and they are predicted to come together to make another large continent in 250 million years in the future. This is thought to have happened over and over, many times in the geological history of our Earth.
So anyway as part of those motions, then some of the plates rub against each other, or collide or pull apart, or one plate will submerge beneath another one - and this causes earthquakes. (Details of the various ways the plates can move.)
Here is a summary for kids about how continental drift works.
If you live far away from any fault line, then the chance of an earthquake is usually very low.
The San Andreas fault in California is an example of a place where two plates are sliding in opposite directions like this.

And, there is a risk of a big Earthquake in California at some point, yes. May happen some time in the next 30 years or so.
Magnitude 8 or larger. New Long-Term Earthquake Forecast for California (3/10/2015 12:30:00 PM)
They are talking about something like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

That really did happen and was hugely devastating. But remember the skyscrapers then weren't as well built to withstand earthquakes in the way modern California skyscrapers are, though they had already designed buildings to be earthquake resistance.
Also 90% of the damage to the structures was due to fires.
"One of the reasons that fatalities in the earthquake were a fraction of one percent of the population and complete collapses were so few is that well before 1906 engineers and architects attempted to build structures with earthquake-resistant features.
"The 1906 fire caused at least ninety percent of the damage to the city and perhaps more. City officials and citizens emphasized the fire in order to receive insurance payments. Ironically, they couldn't over-emphasize the consequences of the fire because a majority of damage was due to the fire. But engineers and architects did learn from the earthquake. They quietly continued to build earthquake-resistant buildings, and put into effect a strong \building code that addressed earthquake danger. After the earthquake, the citizens responded by voting to build a huge water system dedicated to fighting fires, which was earthquake-resistant as well."
Nowadays houses and skyscrapers are much better built than they were then. So that would be a mitigating factor but still it would be devastating and surely many would die.
As for the idea that California would fall into the sea - that's impossible.
One geologist worked out that to have an earthquake that big, you'd need a fault line 6,000 miles long all the way from the pole to the equator, and you would need the entire fault line to slip at once (with all the energy of the slip focused on California). Apart from the improbability of such a vast fault line slipping simultaneously - such a long fault line doesn't exist in our world. See California Geological Survey - Earthquake
Even major earthquakes like the Nepal one shift the land by meters at most. The Nepal earthquake moved the land upwards by between 1 and 2 meters.
Nepal earthquake may have raised all of Kathmandu by 3 to 6 feet - and moved Katmandu about 3 meters southward Nepal earthquake moves Kathmandu but Everest height unchanged

An interferogram showing vertical displacement of land a result of the April 25 earthquake. Here red = vertical displacement of 2 meters - so a few spots were raised by 2 meters. There were horizontal movements also of a few meters.
The geologist I mentioned says this about these types of movies in the introduction
"Whether we view movies as an educational experience or simply entertainment, we all value the ability of movies to help us escape reality for a little while. Sometimes, however, because a movie uses science and technology as a backdrop, the story will be more believable to its viewers, helping them form opinions that might affect their view of reality and, ultimately, the way they live their lives."
"Some moviemakers have relied on a perception of reality that has been fostered over the years by, in many cases, watching other movies. They do this instead of developing equally interesting story lines based on the truth."
California Geological Survey - EarthquakeDOC
I.e. it’s a case of movie makers watching movies that their audience are familiar with so building up a movie based mythology that the audience will go along with because they have been prepared for it by previous movies.
It's known as the California Collapse - TV Trope
CLUSTERS OF EARTHQUAKES
As for clusters of earthquakes - well they can't set each other off, they are too far apart. This is just natural random clustering.
See List of earthquakes in 2015
If you look a the table, then there were 143 earthquakes magnitude six upwards. So it must be quite common for two to happen in a day. There are only 20 magnitude 7 upwards. Still there's a strange mathematical result - if you have a party with 23 people in a room, though the chance that you share a birthday with one of the others is only 22/360, the chance that any two of them share a birthday with each other, when you take account of all possible pairings, is 50%. See Birthday problem.
So at 20 or so a year, it must also be quite common that you get two of the magnitude 7 and upwards earthquakes in a day too.
Earthquakes often cause other aftershocks as they send tremors through the earth that can cause other faults to slip - and occasionally they can be as large as the original earthquake. So earthquakes could cause each other - but probably only over ranges of hundreds of miles, not so likely over thousands of miles. See this story from 2012: Are 4 Big Earthquakes in 2 Days Connected?
We have a full Moon every 29 days. This one is slightly closer. It’s not hugely closer - it’s like the difference between someone 114 meters away and someone 100 meters away. As so often with astronomical events, we get the conspiracy theortsts claiming it somehow endangers the Earth, this time based on numerology related to the date that separate state of Israel was created. Here is a screenshot of the google search results. It is absolutely no danger at all.
It's not an approach in any sense of the word. The Moon is in a stable orbit around the Earth which is in a stable orbit around the Sun and both have been in those orbits for billions of years. And the Moon used to be a lot closer when it first formed. It is very very slowly spiraling outwards. It is not moving inwards at all.
Also supermoons themselves are common too. This is just a particularly close supermoon. The distance between the center of the Earth and the center of the Moon will be 221,524 miles (356,509 km).
It gets even closer on November 25, 2034, a distance of 356,445 km or 221,485 miles. And even slightly closer again on December 6, 2052: 356,421 km, which will be the closest supermoon of this century, though the ones in 1930 and 1912 were slightly closer still. For all the figures, see Closest supermoon since 1948! | EarthSky.org
Great to watch it if we get a starry night. But don't expect too much. It is only slightly bigger and you may notice no difference. More noticeable if close to the horizon. For more about it, a scientifically accurate article, see We’re about to see a record-breaking supermoon - the biggest in nearly 70 years
However it’s also 30% brighter than usual so that is a bit more noticeable. It’s most striking if you contrast it with its opposite, the micromoon, when the Moon is as far away as it can be:

It is a great time to test to see if you can see colour by moonlight :). Some people can, easily, and some can't at all. But a supermoon is your best chance of seeing colour because it is as bright as it can be. Take some brightly coloured patches of coloured material, paper or whatever - red, blue, green, yellow maybe, see if you can see any of them in colour. It's just fun to try. If you are like the majority of people you probably can't but some can. Can ask your friends see if any of them see colour. Obviously in a dark place without streetlights for a fair test.
As for why it is so close - well the Moon is in an elliptical orbit around the Earth. This means it has to have a closest point, the perigee and furthest point, the apogee.
Now when it’s orbit is aligned with the sun, the tug of the Sun’s gravity increases its eccentricity a bit more. The distance between the closest and furthest points doesn’t change (because it’s orbital period doesn’t change, which depends on the distance between the perigee and apogee), but the closest point gets closer to Earth and the furthest point gets further away.
So, when you have a perigee Moon exactly on the line from the Earth to the Sun (on the far side of the Earth from the Sun), then its orbit is also as eccentric as it gets, so it is also as close to Earth as it can get.
This also means you get the highest tides possible on a supermoon day.
So in short, look out for a bright Moon. Also, if you live near the sea, expect the high tides to be as high as they ever get.
Once you get caught up with this idea that Nibiru exists, you are likely to find that there is no way to refute it. You see numerous videos and images shared on line that they say confirm it. The astronomers will say it is nonsense, that the whole idea is BS, but you don’t understand their arguments. Experts on Sumerian say it is Jupiter. But why can’t it just be refuted in some easy way?
Well, let’s look at the instruction you are given by the conspiracy theorists. The message is something like this:
“Look in the sky, if you see a bright object that you don’t understand, wherever it is in the sky, that’s a planet called Nibiru. If you don’t see anything, keep trying and you will see it eventually”
That’s guaranteed to get lots of false observations. The main problem with this as science is that it doesn’t give you any way to refute it, it’s got irrefutability built into it.
ANYTHING BRIGHT IN THE SKY, IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND IT, IS “NIBIRU”
If they don’t spot something bright (apart from the Sun or Moon), as is the usual case of course, they say this just means that Nibiru is hiding.
Here are some examples of images shared as “Nibiru”

This is shared as “Nibiru”. It’s probably an offset lens reflection.

The white dot in this image is supposed to be Nibiru. The author of it - or at least someone claiming to be the author - posted to forums soon after saying it was a hoax. It would be a very easy hoax to do, just add a white dot to a photo. But many didn't believe him and it is still available online as an alleged photo of Nibiru.

This is an artist’s impression of a double sunset on an exoplanet, often shared as “Nibiru”
You’ll find many more such images shared as “Nibiru” and there is no consistency or pattern to them. "Imaginary Bullshit Planet" Nibiru - Lens Flares, Sun Mirages, Hoaxes & Just Plain Silly
ASTRONOMY NEWS AND GOOGLE SKY
They also monitor astronomical news and if astronomers announce that they have indirect evidence of a planet orbiting way beyond Neptune - that’s Nibiru.
They also search online photographs, for instance Google Sky and if they find something unusual there, instead of looking it up to find out that it is, say the Peanut Nebula - they just use their blogs to announce to the world that they have found Nibiru.

The Peanut Nebula - one of many deep sky objects shared as “Nibiru” see Debunked: The IRAS infrared satellite found Nibiru in 1983 by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
So for them, there are countless ways to “prove” Nibiru exists.
NO PREDICTIONS
Meanwhile, because nobody ever makes any predictions about where you should look in the sky to see this “Nibiru” then there is no observation you could do to prove Nibiru doesn’t exist. Even if you just see a bright patch on a cloud that proves that it exists, for these people. No need to check to see if anyone else saw a bright patch in that same direction either. After all anything bright and unexplained is Nibiru no matter where it is in the sky, so what’s the point in checking where someone else saw it?
Is it no surprise that following this approach many people think they have proved that it exists? They don’t know to check for lens flares or offset lens reflections. Many of them have never paid much attention to the sky before. If you start paying close attention to the sky for the first time in your life, then you are bound to notice many things you never noticed before and wonder what they are. If you follow the astronomical news for the first time in your life also, you will find many astronomical announcements that you don’t undestand.
Instead of a sense of wonder, and awe, and a quest for knowledge, to try to find out about our universe - if you follow the Nibiru instructions, you spend all your time whenever you gaze at the sky, day or night, looking for confirmation of Nibiru.
BIRD SPOTTING
They treat planet spotting as like bird spotting, looking out for some rare elusive creature such as the Bittern, a shy bird that is well camouflaged and hard to spot in thick grass:

However planets don’t behave like birds. There is nowhere for them to hide except behind the sun, and they typically can only hide behind the sun for about one month of the year.
Also if you see a planet, then everyone can see it, so long as they have a clear sky. It’s not possible for a planet to be visible at sunset one day, but not visible the day before or the day after and not visible by someone else who lives a few hundred or thousand miles away.
SUGGESTION - TRY WATCHING REAL PLANETS
That’s why I suggest, if you have got caught up in this nonsense, that you try your hand at a bit of simple star gazing. Learn how astronomy actually works. Start following the planets. This is something you can do even with naked eye observation. Learn to find the pole star. Look up the positions of the planets in the sky. Read some basic astronomy books, get astronomy magazines, join your local astronomy club, make friends with people who watch the sky as astronomers. Anything of that sort will help you become a bit more grounded and to understand this better. With only a small amount of experience and understanding of real astronomy, there’s no way you can be fooled by this stuff ever again.

Venus reflected in the Pacific Venus is the brightest object in this view, so bright it can sometimes cast shadows and be reflected in the sea. Above it to the left the next brightest object in this scene is Jupiter. By observing real planets, you can come to understand how planets work. You can look up predictions for where they will be, any night of the year, for centuries into the future indeed. They move through the sky slowly, night after night. And if they are visible, then anyone can see them, any clear night, look in the right place at the right time and you see them. With this experience of watching real planets, you should soon come to see how absurd the Nibiru suggestions are.
Here is a sky chart, which automatically detects your location and shows the positions of the planets, the Moon, and the brightest stars in the sky
Try using those charts, and go out and observe the Moon, Jupiter or Venus or the other planets as they become visible. They appear in the sky exactly at the times predicted, in the positions predicted. That may help you get an idea of how planets work. If Nibiru was a real planet - it would have a position on those sky charts too, and we’d all be following it. Anyone would just need to look up and see it with their own eyes. The instructions would be something like this:
“Nibiru is visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:35 (GMT) – 3 hours and 34 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 25° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:44.”
That’s today’s instruction for Jupiter (on Saturday 12th November 2012). Indeed, since the ancient Sumerians used Nibiru to refer to Jupiter amongst other things you can just substitute “Nibiru” for “Jupiter” and that’s probably the most accurate way to understand the term.
“In the texts that follow, Nibiru was regarded as a planet (specifically, Jupiter, but once as Mercury), a god (specifically, Marduk), and a star (distinguished from Jupiter). If you’re confused, you aren’t alone. This tri-fold (fourfold if you count Mercury) designation for Nibiru is why scholars of cuneiform astronomy have not been able to determine with certainty what exactly Nibiru is. We’ll go into the problem more in later sections. One thing is certain from the texts, though: Nibiru is NEVER identified as a planet beyond Pluto. “
The Myth of a Sumerian 12th Planet: “Nibiru” According to the Cuneiform Sources

Jupiter as photographed by Cassini. The Sumerians used the word “Nibiru” to refer to Jupiter amongst other things.
So now, this is something you can confirm or refute. If you have a clear Eastern horizon go and see if you see a bright object rise in the early morning a bit before 4 am. You can also look at it’s position in the sky chart - it’s in the constellation Virgo. You can verify the prediction for yourself.
That’s how real astronomy works. If Nibiru is indeed Jupiter, then yes, its position in the sky is predicted every night of the year, and you can confirm it exists for yourself - and it’s absolutely no threat to Earth.
REAL ASTEROIDS AND COMETS
As for real asteroids and comets - it’s possible for them to hit Earth. But they are far smaller than planets. We already know all the asteroids of 10 km and larger that do regular flybys of Earth. None of them can hit Earth before 2100.
A comet ten kilometers in diameter, on a Nibiru like orbit would be possible but very very unlikely, around 99.999999% certain it won’t happen this century, and they are easy to spot in our big telescopes several years in advance. You’d be able to find it in a decent telescope every night except for about one month every year.
For a comet in the same plane as the other planets, near the celestial equator, everyone would see it, world wide, on every starry night. If it approaches from the south or the north, it’s viewed from an entire hemisphere, e.g. if it approaches from the North it is visible anywhere where you can see the pole star and similarly if it approaches from the South it’s visible from the entire southern hemisphere except perhaps right at the equator.

Siding Spring Observatory - the comet Cpmet Siding Spring - 2013 A1 was discovered by one of the telescopes in this Australian observatory a year and a half before its flyby of Mars. It was only 400 - 700 meters in diameter and was discovered a year and a half before the flyby. If there was even a small comet headed for Earth it would be discovered at least a year or so before the flyby. A larger one would be discovered many years before flyby.
Anything as big as a planet would be spotted decades before flyby and would be an easy naked eye object for years before flyby - but it is impossible for a planet to be in such an orbit because it is not stable for as long as a million years and our solar system is billions of years old. Comets can be in such orbits because there are large numbers of them, and they are so light weight they don’t destabilize the solar system in the way similar numbers of planets would.
Real flybys also are predicted exactly to the minute. The Earth moves 30 kilometers every second - that means it moves by its radius in 3.55 minutes. If a comet was headed towards Earth and they got the time of the encounter wrong by 4 minutes that is more than enough of an error to turn a dead on center hit into a miss.
So there is no way an astronomer who observes a comet as a bright light in the sky will predict a flyby or a hit, until they know its orbit so accurately that they can predict whe nit will fly past Earth to within a few minutes. They have to be able to do that, as otherwise they wouldn't know that it is going to be a flyby. Nearly all asteroids and comets come nowhere near the Earth - interplanetary space is vast and the Earth is tiny in comparison.
See also my Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them
You can check out the astronomical predictions on this page: Current Impact Risks. It’s ordered with the greatest risk at the top. So if the top entry is blue or white, you know for sure that there is no impact on Earth predicted through to 2100. Occasionally it has a yellow entry - that means there may be an impact but the chance is low and it is far in the future. Yellow entries normally turn white once we have more information.
See also Debunked: Ancient astronomers knew things we don’t about planets and stars
Debunked: How can the videos and photos be hoaxes when so many people believe them?
For why astronomers are sure that Nibiru is just nuts, see Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]
Also Debunked: A planet in a 3600 year orbit can hide behind the sun for years on end
This is a recent dramatic post about climate change in the independent. Donald Trump's victory isn't the most terrifying news today. There's something even worse - I’ve been getting messages by scared people about it.
There's a lot of journalist hype there and click bait. Especially the last bit
“It sounds on the apocalyptic side of bad and, in some ways, it is realistic because ‘business as usual’ just got more likely as Trump wants to rebuild the pipelines … the complete ‘fossilisation’ of the US,” he said.
“It was game over at six [degrees] to be honest. I don’t think there was much more to add, other than turning the planet into Venus.”
"The only way out is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible," concluded Friedrich.
But - this is just way over hyped. Maybe they cherry picked quotes from Friedrich or maybe he got a bit carried away emphasizing the risks of climate change?
For whatever reason, even a 7 C rise is not remotely apocalyptic. Earth right now is warmer than it was during the ice ages but on a larger timescale it’s the coldest it has been for 450 million years.
Usually there is no ice at either pole The water at the poles can reach temperatures of up to 10 C. Even the worst of the climate change predictions come nowhere close to that. We will have ice in Antarctica for centuries, probably thousands of years into the future.
Even as recently as 200,000 years ago Earth was warm enough to have lions and macaque monkeys in the region that is now London and Essex, with probably more of a Mediterranean climate. Macaque fossils have been found as far north as West Runton in Norfolk. Professor S Elton - Durham University and paper here: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/...

Fossil of a lion’s lower jaw from 200,000 BC, Crayford, Essex. Exhibition of early human history at the Natural History Museum
So we have a fair bit of warming before we even reach the climate of the middle Pleistocene, never mind the earlier much warmer climates.
This is a more sober scientist's account of it. A warm climate is more sensitive to changes in atmospheric CO2
"Using these estimates based on Earth's paleoclimate sensitivity, the authors computed the warming over the next 85 years that could result from a human-induced, business-as-usual greenhouse gas emission scenario. The researchers project that by the year 2100, global temperatures will rise 5.9°C (~10.5°F) above pre-industrial values. This magnitude of warming overlaps with the upper range of estimates presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."
"The results of the study demonstrate that unabated human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are likely to push Earth's climate out of the envelope of temperature conditions that have prevailed for the last 784,000 years.
This is their graph:

So, in summary the study suggests that global warming may be more than expected for the same amount of CO2. It’s at the upper range of previous estimates. If true, this means that if we want to remain within 2 or 1.5 C we would need more CO2 reductions than estimated before.
It's not saying that the world will become uninhabitable or anything like that. Indeed it would probably be more habitable than it is now :). Just that the temperature rise and speed of change may be more than previously estimated if we have a "business as usual" situation.
Also it is recently published leading edge research so one shouldn't take it as confirmed. Things like this often get changed after other scientists get a chance to look at it more closely and occasionally they may find flaws in it, even though peer reviewed. It surely needs more research before they agree on it generally if it is true.
As an example, of how leading edge science can change with more research - some time back a scientist published research that seemed to show that if we burnt all the fossil coal, oil, gas, shale oil etc in the world then our climate woudl become like Venus. Later on other scientists found mistakes in his work and deduced that to get a runaway greenhouse effect like that would require ten times the total reserves of coal, oil and gas in the world. The original scientist agreed with that conclusion and retracted his claim.
First, to get a perspective on this, then they have been sharing what they believe to be photos of a second sun or planet about to hit Earth imminently since 2003. This is a historical search for the search terms: Nibiru two suns up to 2011 (you can’t do a search by date like that in youtube but you can in google video search). All those photos and videos were obviously not real, yet, as you can see, many believed they were.
WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE THIS IF IT ISN'T TRUE?
Often lots of people do believe hoaxes. One of the most famous is the Spaghetti harvest April Fool in 1957.
Back then we didn't have the internet and many people believed this hoax, especially as it was narrated by a very respected presenter in the UK, Richard Dimbleby, as respected in the UK as, say, David Attenborough is today. Also spaghetti wasn't nearly as common or as easy to get hold of in Britain as it is today, and back in the 1950s many people in Britain simply weren't aware that spaghetti is made from pasta. It was so convincing, some people phoned in asking where they could buy spaghetti bushes to grow this exotic delicacy in greenhouses, and eat it fresh themselves, as in the video. For more on it see 1957: BBC fools the nation.
So, it wouldn't be surprising at all if some at least of the "Nibiru videos" are fake, or enhanced, because with modern technology such fakery is very easy to do. There are many internet hoaxers out there, who do this sort of thing either for fun, or to advertise a product or a movie, or just for the ad revenue on the video. They may get a significant income from ads if they can make a video that gets shown to millions of people.
This is an example of a well known recent internet hoax which fooled a lot of people.
The person in the video has never even flown in a wingsuit, as he later admitted.
This is about how it was faked
And the whole thing was done just for the product placement in the shower scene part of the way through.
HOAX IMAGES AND VIDEOS OF NIBIRU DONE AS A PRANK
With all this nonsense about Nibiru, some people have done what they intended to be harmless pranks, just to have their videos and images propagated all over the internet as real.
Dramatic Chipmunk :)
PROFESSOR KAPLAN - ABDUCTED UNDER MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES WHILE OBSERVING NIBIRU
If you read the conspiracy stories about Nibiru, you've probably heard of the mysterious kidnapped and murdered Professor Kaplan, and the chip with a recording of his observations of Nibiru which was found by someone and uploaded to YouTube.
Here "Professor Kaplan" talks about why he did this hoax video originally as a silly prank for his pals, and his attempts to get it taken down - which only fueled more conspiracy theories about the video.
As he says, he isn't actually a professor, he's an astrophysics student doing a doctorate and has to wait for fifteen minutes for long exposures at his observatory. He did it as a joke during one of those long waits twiddling his thumbs with nothing to do. So he wasn't wasting precious observatory time or his own time when he did it. It looks very authentic because it is not a set, it is recorded at an actual observatory. But he didn't do it for YouTube or for public viewing.
He left two clues that it is a joke in the video including an email allegedly from someone else shown as addressed from "Me" to "Me" in a close up shot, and a quiet chuckle at the end of the video as he gets "abducted". Plus of course him being still alive and giving a skype interview after the joke "abduction" at the end shows it is a joke :)
HOAX IMAGE
This is an early hoax image from 2003, very rudimentary. The tiny white dot is supposed to be Nibiru.

The author of it - or at least someone claiming to be the author - posted to forums soon after saying it was a hoax. But many didn't believe him and it is still available online as an alleged photo of Nibiru.
I'm not sure which of the more recent photos and videos are out and out hoaxes like this, but surely some of them must be. Or digitally enhanced to make it look more like a second sun or planet.
ARTIST'S IMPRESSION USED AS A PHOTOGRAPH.

This rather dramatic image has gone the rounds a bit and been posted as a photograph of a double sunset in China. There was indeed a double sunset in China as we'll see, but this is not it. It's actually an artist's impression from NASA of a double sunset over an alien planet.
EXAMPLE BLOOD MOON HOAX VIDEO
Many news stories ran this one, based on a youtube video which someone uploaded, this time with the title "EXCLUSIVE BLOOD RED MOON and NIBIRU August 21st 2016". This is a detail of a screenshot from the video.

The authors claim that this video shows a planet next to the Moon casting a red shadow on it, and that it was taken on three separate nights in August from Pennsylvania showing a bright object visually as large as the Moon next to a blood red Moon. It may seem quite impressive unless you've heard of offset lens reflections.
This is how to simulate it with a glass slide on an iPhone.

It can also happen accidentally - the transparent protector for the lens may be misaligned, or with more advanced equipment you may have a misthreaded filter, or you take the video through a window. In most of those situations (except the video through a window), you will notice that if you rotate the camera, the offset lens reflection rotates with it.
For more about this see Kudos To "The Independent" Newspaper For Debunking Nibiru "Blood Moon" Hoax
DUFF PHOTO SHOP VIDEOS
You get many really duff photoshop videos on youtube. I’ve chosen this one to share because all the comments on the video say it is nonsense so hopefully it is so bad that even if you are easily fooled you can see that this is nonsense rather easily.
They claim that the ISS photographed a 3000 mile wide UFO hovering over Earth and somehow nobody else noticed it except the ISS crew
Most of the youtube hoax videos are really low quality like this.
Here is another one, not sure if anyone believed it :), very amateur stuff:
I might share a few more if I can find them. But sometimes as with that “blood moon” video people still get fooled by them.
And yes, people do do hoax videos of Nibiru.
Another idea that comes up so often is that Nibiru is predicted by ancient astronomers. They certainly could have had advanced philosophical ideas. But as for maths and astronomy - no, doesn't seem likely that they ever had advanced far in those fields.
EARLY MATHS - THEY COULDN’T EVEN USE RATIOS
First their maths - though advanced for their time - was rubbish by modern standards. The Sumerians, amongst the most advanced mathematically in the entire ancient world, had this clumsy way of thinking about ratios. They couldn't write 7/10 - for some reason had never thought of the idea of "seven tenth parts" in maths. Instead they would write it as 1/2 + 1/5. I.e. a half and a fifth. Imagine trying to multiply two ratios in that system! Even adding ratios is tricky. They didn't have negative numbers yet, or zero, or logarithms, or hardly any maths at all by modern standards. So were severely handicapped if they ever needed to calculate anything in astronomy.
DIDN’T KNOW THAT EARTH WAS A PLANET OR ASTEROIDS COME FROM SPACE
Also -they didn't know that the Earth was a planet - that was a way out idea suggested by one Greek astronomer. They thought meteorites came from volcanoes, or possibly picked up by strong winds. They thought comets were in the atmosphere, a bit like clouds.
They didn't know about Ceres and Vesta, both of which are visible in the night sky if you know where to look, as very faint stars they could have seen on a dark night. As is Uranus which was plotted as a faint star, several times in different positions on night sky maps before it was shown to be a planet.

Close up photograph of Ceres by the Dawn spacecraft. It’s a faint naked eye object but is hard to distinguish from the many faint stars in the sky. Ancient astronomers never noticed that it moves and so never discovered it as an asteroid / dwarf planet.
Similarly they also never noticed that Jupiter has moons either, again something they could have found out with naked eye observation if they had blocked out Jupiter.
They didn't know about the moons of Jupiter. If you hide Jupiter with something, say behind a building, a keen eyed astronomer can see its moons. So in theory they could have spotted them, but never did.
So how could the ancient astronomers know about the even fainter Neptune (on the very edges of visibility- theoretically possible for a very keen eyed astronomer in perfect conditions) and even Pluto which is never naked eye visible?
If you think that they were told about this by extra terrestrial astronomers visiting Earth - then why did they not tell the Sumerians about Ceres, or the moons of Jupiter or Saturn's spectacular rings?

Saturn, with three of its moons, Tethys, Dione and Rhea from top to bottom, and its spectacular rings. If you believe that we were visited by extra terrestrials that told us about extra planets in our solar system that we haven’t discovered yet, as Zacharia Sitchin believed - then why didn’t they also tell us about the spectacular rings of Saturn amongst other things?
Or tell them that the moon is cratered? When Galileo turned his telescope to the moon he expected to see a perfectly smooth sphere, the craters were a great surprise to him.
And don't you think we'd have picked up a bit of maths from them - at least some simple ideas like ratios or negative numbers or zero?
This is not to show any disrespect for ancient texts. It is just that astronomy is not their strong point. Except for occasional observations such as observations of supernovae which we can now interpret.
Yes they could predict solar eclipses by observing patterns to them. But they could never have produced a map like this:
So why expect ancient astronomers to be able to predict things we can't predict ourselves?
Summary: in the short term the worst case scenario is that the world gets 4 C hotter by 2100, and the Paris climate change agreement measures so far will reduce the rice to 3.4 C - all temperature rises here are relative to pre-industrial levels.
So that’s obviously not going to make it too hot for us. The main issues are due to the speed with which the climate is changing, not the final climate which may be more habitable in some ways. Earth is actually unusually cold at present. At times in the geologically recent past the world has been so hot that there were palm trees as far north as the Arctic circle, no ice at either pole and typical polar temperatures 10 C.

500 million years of climate change. As you can see, on the timescale of millions of years. Earth has never been this cold for the last 45o million years. In this diagram, one part per thousand of oxygen 18 corresponds to around 1.5 - 2 C
Most of the time Earth has no ice at all at its poles, no permanent ice at all except at the top of high mountains. Compared to that, the Earth is unusually cold at present. We are in the middle of an interglacial but geologists would say we are in the middle of an ice age still, technically, since we have permanent ice at the poles.
In the worst case scenario, the world stabilizes at 7 C hotter than pre-industrial levels many centuries into the future - assuming we have stopped creating CO2 by then.
In theory we could make the world uninhabitable by triggering a runaway greenhouse effect, but to do that we would have to burn ten times the total reserves of oil, gas and coal in the world.
The reason that so many countries signed the climate change agreement in Paris is not to protect humans from extinction, which was never a risk. Nor is it to prevent Earth’s climate changing, which it does slowly all the time anyway.
It is because the speed of the change is going to have effects on our environment (e.g. bleaching of coral) and it’s also going to be expensive to deal with the issues later. If we act now, it doesn’t even need to impact on our standard of living. It’s a case of policy change mainly. Promoting clean energy and measures to reduce carbon dioxide. If we act later, it probably will impact on quality of living and more than that, many people will need to relocate and it will impact on the environment in various ways
It’s a case of paying a bit more now, or even maybe not paying much, just planning now, to avoid much larger costs a few decades into the future and at the same time to protect fragile environments too, which are at risk because of the speed of the change..
Even the speed of change isn’t that unusual - our climate has been relatively stable for 10,000 years so it is a fast change compared to the last few thousand years - but during the ice age between 18,000 and 180,000 years ago then it fluctuated rapidly even within a few decades. Abrupt Climate Change During the Last Ice Age
IN DETAIL
The world will be more habitable if anything in a warmer world, e.g. Siberia, Arctic, even Anatarctica eventually habitable.
It’s not about a greenhouse runaway disaster, that just can’t happen. Nor is it about things like Antarctica melting. The temperature rises even with no restraint on global warming aren’t nearly enough to melt Antarctica.
Also the idea isn’t at all that global warming is something we couldn’t survive. Put enough money into it, flood defenses, growing new crops that farmers aren’t used to in their region, relocating people, building new foundations to replace the ones destroyed by melting permafrost in Alaska and Canada, building houses to withstand flood damage, more severe hurricanes, better disaster reliefe and so on - we can cope with it. But it would be expensive.
Rather, the idea of the climate change agreement is that it is far more expensive to respond to climate change like that - than it is to prevent it from happening in the first place which we can do mainly through policy changes. The Paris agreements might even have economic benefits too, e.g. transition to clean energy leading to new industries. The nations that work hardest on mitigating climate change, e.g. Germany, and for that matter China which is also putting a lot of finance into clean energy, are building up an industry that the rest of the world will want.
Also if we just let the temperatures rise and mitigate the effects, it has environomental effects too which can't be reversed, e.g. 99% of all corals affected by a 2 C rise compared to 90% for 1.5 C.
There’s a summary here: “For example, an extra 0.5C could see global sea levels rise 10cm more by 2100, water shortages in the Mediterranean double and tropical heatwaves last up to a month longer. The difference between 2C and 1.5C is also “likely to be decisive for the future of coral reefs”, with virtually all coral reefs at high risk of bleaching with 2C warming.”Scientists compare climate change impacts at 1.5C and 2C | Carbon Brief
There’s a summary here

Note that with 2 C rise, instead of 1.5 C, it’s wheat down by 16% instead of 9%. Maize down 6% instead of 3%.
Rice production however goes up 8% instead of 6% so some crops benefit from a warmer world.
And it has the same figure there that we lose our chance to limit to 1.5 C by 2020 if we haven’t taken enough action by then.
4.5 years from this summer. So end of 2020 I think. .
This is about the Paris agreement, pledges so far should keep temperatures by 2100 to between 2.9 and 3.4 degrees C.
Paris climate deal enters force as focus shifts to action - BBC News
The sea hasn’t risen much but in the tropical oceans some islands are really low and have submerged.
Five Pacific islands lost to rising seas as climate change hits
None inhabited yet but others have had to retreat.
I think the thing is that coral reefs build up to just the sea level exactly, so a small rise over that, if the island is based on a coral reef, will flood it.
There is no risk to life at all, so long as we are willing to pay up the costs to relocate people, flood defenses, grow more crops etc. None of the scenarios mean that. But they could be very expensive, or if we don’t pay to compensate for the things that go wrong, then humanitarian disasters can occur. And they can make vulnerable species extinct as some can only tolerate tiny changes in temperatures - while humans can tolerate huge temperature changes and there is no risk of even the hottest places getting too hot for us especially with our technology. It’s just a tiny increase in temperature not even that 3.4 C in worst case as that’s the rise from pre-industrial.
EFFECTS ON THE US
You can look up the predicted effects of climate change on your country, also globally. Once you do that you may understand why so many nations signed the Paris Climate Change agreement.
In the US the main changes projected include:
(quoting from the US Environmental Protection Agency
report Future of Climate Change) -
You can also look up the effects for individual states, e.g. this climate change report for Nebraska
And this is the projection for New York city which experiences higher sea level rises than the global average:

New York City Panel on Climate Change 2015 Report Executive Summary
HOW HOT CAN THE EARTH GET?
We can get an idea from the “Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” (PETM), 55 million years ago. The Earth got so warm that the average temperatures of the sea at was up to 10 °C at the poles, compared to -2 °C today.
As summarized on the BBC page, How hot could the Earth get?
“The PETM shows clear parallels to today’s world. In particular, the pulse of greenhouse gases that set it in motion seems to have been roughly equivalent to what humans could release if we burnt all recoverable fossil fuels. Those gases warmed the planet by at least 5 °C and maybe as much as 8 °C, probably over a few thousand years”
COULD IT BE POSSIBLE TO TURN EARTH INTO A SECOND VENUS
This idea stems from a book “Storms of my Grandchildren” by James Hansen where he wrote
“If we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty."
However other scientists were skeptical, for instance, as quoted by National Geographic, Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago said
"If we were going to run away, we'd probably have done it during the PETM."
Colin Goldblatt of the University of Victoria in British Columbia followed this up by actually running the numbers, with a paper in Nature Geosciences, published in 2013. Low simulated radiation limit for runaway greenhouse climates. You can read the article in full if you click through the link from the National Geographic page Will Earth's Ocean Boil Away?
The abstract ends:
“A runaway greenhouse could in theory be triggered by increased greenhouse forcing, but anthropogenic emissions are probably insufficient”
The paper itself says it more clearly, making a similar comment to Raymond Pierrehumbert
“The so called “hothouse” climate of the Eocene is the most useful constraint for anthropogenic change. With the solar constant 1% less than today and a few thousand ppmv CO2, the mean temperature was ~ 10 K warmer than today. With CO2 and temperature both higher than we expect in the foreseeable future, this implies that anthropogenic runaway greenhouse is unlikely.”
He also makes a comparison with an earlier geological period, snowball Earth, about 650 million years ago, when possibly nearly all or most of Earth was covered in ice and snow. The concentrations of carbon dioxide built up through this period, over millions of years, as volcanoes continued to emit it into the atmosphere. This is the slow carbon cycle and normally the CO2 would dissolve back into the ocean, taken out of the atmosphere from rain or directly absorbed into the sea. But during a snowball Earth, there's no open water, or almost none, to absorb the CO2. Meanwhile the snow and ice has no effect at all on volcanoes, which continue to add it to the atmosphere as usual, and that's why the carbon dioxide builds up. Eventually enough forms to warm up the world again and the ice melts.
He remarks in the paper that when the ice melted finally, after snowball Earth, there could have been as much as 10% of CO2 in the atmosphere - compared to 0.04% right now. The sun was also 6% cooler than it is today. This didn’t lead to a runaway greenhouse either which is pretty conclusive evidence that it can't happen easily.
He mentions in the paper that if we had 10% CO2 in the future - after a snowball Earth, and with our 6% warmer sun, then perhaps it would trigger a runaway greenhouse when the ice melted. However, that’s hardly likely to happen, so it is a very theoretical idea, perhaps relevant to planets orbiting other stars?
He also talks about this in the National Geographic interview
“What my results show is that if you put about ten times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as you would get from burning all the coal, oil, and gas—about 30,000 parts per million—then you could cause a runaway greenhouse today. So burning all the fossil fuels won't give us a runaway greenhouse. However, the consequences will still be dire. It won't sterilize the planet, but it might topple Western civilization. There are no theoretical obstacles to that.”
His model was a simplification which didn’t take account of clouds, as he explains:
But your model does not consider the moderating effect of clouds.
That's correct. You start off with the simplest model you can, and then you build in complexity. We've calculated the maximum amount of sunlight Earth will absorb and the maximum amount of thermal radiation it will emit. So the next step will be to do some modeling with clouds in, which will probably modify the answers.
Clouds reflect sunlight, but if you put them high enough in the atmosphere, they'll also have a greenhouse effect. On Earth today, the reflection effect dominates—clouds overall have a cooling effect.
Matej Malik1 and Colin Goldblatt investigate it further in this later paper in 2016. They find that the clouds cool the Earth down by reflecting away the heat, more than they warm it up by blocking the escape of infrared into space. The end of this article has a useful summary of research in the topic up to the date of publication.
They mention another more recent paper which takes account of clouds in a detailed 3D model. This paper calculated that to have a runaway greenhouse effect, then the Earth would need to have 375 Watts per square meter from sunshine. They conclude
“With this new estimation, the inner edge of the habitable zone for Earth like planet in the Solar System is pushed inward to ∼0.95 AUs which means that the Earth should not enter a runaway greenhouse state before at least 1 billion years”.
The main thing preventing a runaway greenhouse in this model was not the clouds, as it turned out, but rather, atmospheric dynamics of the water vapour. As a parcel of moist air is heated, with no other source of water to replenish it, it becomes drier, because warmer air can hold more water vapour. As warm air rises in the tropics, it is warmed further and dried out in this way. Then the hot air is compressed as it descends in the sub tropical regions. This creates regions of drier air in the atmosphere, which, as they explain, play the role of “radiative fins” to cool down the Earth.
“As they stabilize Earth tropics today, such dynamically unsaturated regions where water vapor greenhouse effect is reduced stabilize climate against runaway greenhouse by playing the role of "radiative fins" where the emission can exceed the maximum emission for a saturated atmosphere”
What’s more, they get drier and more extensive as the sun gets warmer. The stratosphere also gets cooler (page 6).
The debate continues, as to when in the future the sun will get warm enough for a runaway greenhouse. Maybe half a billion years from now? Maybe a billion years from now? However they are generally agreed that it’s nowhere near warm enough for this to happen at present.
It needs some science fiction scenario where we import oil and gas, from Titan say (which has oceans of methane and ethane), and even then, not sure we could trigger it. We would have to be very stupid to do that. So not something to worry about.
In the distant future, billions of years from now, the Earth will become too hot for humans as a natural effect of the sun getting hotter. But you are talking about timescales here, long enough for humans to evolve a second time all the way from the smallest microscopic multicellular creatures.
On such huge timescales - whatever civilization there is around then may well be able to something to prevent it.
They could
Both of those are feasible with near future metatechnology. But right now, for hundreds of millions of years into the future, we don’t need such heroic measures.
This was a hoax from 2012 and people still worry about it every year during the winter solstice. It’s just not true at all. First there are two things that get confused here - our position relative to the galactic plane, and alignments of the Earth with the galactic center and galactic equator as seen from the Sun. The first is just plain false, we are not passing through the galactic plane or anything like it, indeed we have been moving away from it for millions of years. As for the galactic alignment, yes there is an alignment, that’s true, but it is of no danger to us whatsoever. It is no more dangerous to you than pointing your finger or hand towards the Moon. Indeed, the galactic center is so far away that light that left it during the last ice age is only reaching us just now :). I’ll cover the alignment first as that is what I get asked about by scared people so it seems to be what worries them most about this.
GALACTIC ALIGNMENT
This is different from galactic plane crossing. Galactic alignment is real. But of no significance to us.
It’s true that the sun does align with the galactic core in autumn. But it does that every year, It just means that Earth is the opposite side of the sun from the galactic core once a year and has no astronomical significance at all.
In the same way if you point your finger at the Moon you will create an alignment between your head, your finger, and the Moon.
December 12 is just a winter solstice, shortest day in the northern hemisphere, and this is the same every year. There is also an alignment with the galactic equator and a rough alignment with the center of the galaxy - but this also happens every year, indeed, twice a year, and is just a line of sight effect - like the way that your finger is between you and a mountain if you point at a distant mountain.
We are nowhere near the center of the galaxy. A couple of artist’s impressions may help. We can’t actually photograph the galaxy from outside because we are inside it, but we have a pretty good idea of how it is arranged through our observations of stars and gas clouds and the distances to them. It’s like this:

File:Galactic longitude.JPG - Wikipedia
Another view on it here

Kepler Search Space - this is an artist’s impression to show the direction in which the Kepler mission did an intensive search for exoplanets by looking for dips in starlight from planets passing in front -anyway it gives a good impression of our position in the galaxy.
Earth is orbiting the sun, roughly parallel to the plane of the galaxy. Sometimes it is on the far side of the Sun from the center of the milky way (at winter solstice) and sometimes on the near side of the Sun (summer solstice). It is so close to the Sun that on this scale you wouldn’t be able to tell it apart from the Sun itself.
Can you see that whether it happens to be between the Sun and the galactic center or vice versa is of absolutely no significance whatsoever?
This is the galactic center. The sky in that direction is particularly crowded with stars - most of those stars are very close to us, and we look through a haze of them to the very distant galactic center around 25,000 to 28,000 light years away. All those stars are between us and the galactic center along with many others that are too faint and distant to be seen. The light that reaches us just now from the galactic center left it at a time when London and New York were covered in ice sheets kilometers deep in the depths of the last ice age.

Here is a video about the galactic center:
GALACTIC PLANE
As for the galactic plane, we are several dozen light years above it at present, and moving away from it. We probably won't cross it for another 30 million years or so according to this article in EarthSky: Did Earth cross the galactic equator in 2012?
Here is a discussion on astronomy stack exchange, one of the participants links to a 2016 paper which makes it 56 light years above the galactic plane (17.1 parsecs) and the sun moving away from the plane currently at about 7.25 km/sec (both of those values approximate with quite large margins of error)

We are currently moving away from the galactic plane and the sun will cross it perhaps 30 million years inot the future. So if there is any increased risk of asteroid impacts during galactic plane crossings, it’s a long time into the future.
As for whether there are more asteroid impacts when we pass through the galactic plane - well there was some data seemed to support that idea back in 2008, but it no longer seems likely.
This is part of the general idea that we go through periodic extinctions - with lots of reasons suggested for why that might be. Passing through the galactic plane is just one of many hypotheses.
If you look at the data - there does seem to be a rough periodicity of extinctions. Some people think it is real, others, maybe more of a coincidence. It’s quite striking but not compellingly so.
This is the most recent paper I found on it: Periodic impact cratering and extinction events over the last 260 million years - and it cites earlier papers.
For an astronomer a million years is "close" in time. If it is real, and that last paper is correct, then the most recent one was about 16 million years ago and it happens roughly every 26 million years. So next maximum impact rate would be perhaps 10 million years into the future.
Different authors will come up with different figures for when they think it will happen next, but they all have periods much larger than 16 million years which puts the next extinction event millions of years into the future if the theory is correct.
SUMMARY
We are nowhere near the galactic plane and in fact are moving away from it at present. Some astronomers think we may get more comet impacts on Earth when it passes through the galactic plane. If that is right, it will happen millions of years into the future.
The Sun and Earth roughly align with the center of the galaxy, by coincidence, during the winter and summer solstices. This has no more astronomical significance than the alignment of your hand with the Moon if you wave hand in the direction of the Moon, or indeed the Sun in daytime. You wouldn’t expect to be blasted by deadly radiation when you happen to align your hand with the Sun :). The light from the Sun is not influenced in any way by your hand and the light from the Galactic center is not influenced in any way by the Earth orbiting the Sun. It’s just a line of sight effect and neither Earth nor the Sun is anywhere near the galactic center which is a very distant object, 25,000 to 28,000 light years away.
GRAVITATIONAL LENSING - POSTSCRIPT
I wonder if this is in any way related to gravitational lensing? The Sun does act as a lens. When the Sun is between us and the galactic center then as seen from the Earth the stars in the galactic center will be very very slightly closer together. This is however a minute effect. And the focus of the gravitational lens is 550 AU away or over 18 times the distance to Neptune.

The FOCAL Mission: To the Sun's Gravity Lens
There is a plan to send a spacecraft out there. It would not be fried by distant radiation :). But the Sun would act like a giant extra lens in a telescope.
The way it works is that you would of course see our planets around the Sun from a distance of 550 au. Just dots of light. But along the cylinder of observation - a narrow cylinder the diameter of our Sun, then - a Hubble space telescope at the sun gravity lens focus could spot Mercury around our Sun, as just a pinpoint of light - but also it could spot something as small as Mercury at any distance, even thousands of light years away, just as if it were only 550 au away. It’s especially useful for reasonably bright objects, depending on how well you can block out the sun’s light. Could give us detailed close up observations of the atmospheres of distant stars for instance.
So makes a great telescope for rather specialist observation - but to use it you have to be 28 times the distance of Neptune and it still would not produce harmful levels of radiation even at the focal point, just a brighter more accurate image in a small region around the Sun heavily distorted but you’d be able to undistort it computationally.
See also:
The 1983 IRAS observation claim comes from a press conference. IRAS looked into the far infrared for the first time ever (blocked by our atmosphere on Earth). The astronomers said it could be anything from a tenth planet to a distant galaxy. This was the first time they were able to observe the night sky in this fequency range - and they had just got a few observations - not enough time to work out if the objects were moving or stationary in the night sky (any planets in our solar system will move across the night sky). This is what the paper reported:
"A heavenly body possibly as large as the giant planet Jupiter and possibly so close to Earth that it would be part of this solar system has been found in the direction of the constellation Orion by an orbiting telescope aboard the U.S. infrared astronomical satellite. So mysterious is the object that astronomers do not know if it is a planet, a giant comet, a nearby "protostar" that never got hot enough to become a star, a distant galaxy so young that it is still in the process of forming its first stars or a galaxy so shrouded in dust that none of the light cast by its stars ever gets through. "All I can tell you is that we don't know what it is," Dr. Gerry Neugebauer, IRAS chief scientist for California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and director of the Palomar Observatory for the California Institute of Technology said in an interview." Washington Post, December 30 1983.
Later they found out that some were distant galaxies with a star burst of new galaxies and some were dense gas clouds in our galaxy. Check out Phil Platt's "Planet X Saga: Science".
For more details, see Tom Chester's account - he is one of the members of the original team that found the far infrared sources. The WISE survey eventually proved there is no planet larger than Saturn up to 250 times the distance to Pluto and a Jupiter sized one has to be at least 650 times the distance. Any new planets have to be further away than Pluto right now, and larger ones should be far far away from the sun or we'd detect them by the reflected light from the sun.
This is the brightest object in the infrared sky:

It’s not a planet. It’s the Peanut Nebula around the carbon star CW Leonis. It's a striking object in infrared, the brightest object in infrared outside of our solar system. But it is absolutely no threat to Earth. It's between 390 and 490 light years away.
It's so far away that when we look at it, we see it as it was four centuries ago because that's how long it takes light to get here from there. You can see it on google sky here
It's huge, yet it's one of the few deep sky objects that changes visually in a short period of time. This cycles back and forth through the changes over a period of three years.
Animation from here. IRC +10216
It's a fascinating object. But absolutely no risk to Earth at all! See also Nibiru it is Not. Indeed it's stars like this that created many of the elements that are the basis for life, such as carbon, and explosions like this that brought those elements into the interstellar space, so that eventually they got incorporated into the clouds of gas and dust that collapse to form new solar systems. So - it's actually a life giving star.
Carbon stars like this are stars like our Sun that are a bit heavier and hotter and so are able to burn helium into carbon in large quantities, but not heavy enough to go supernova. They are deep red in the visual spectrum. And just as our sun will do after it goes red giant, they throw off much of their mass as huge nebulae as they get to the end of their life, and that's exactly what we see here. They produce much of the interstellar dust, and in the early galaxy there must have been many of them (they have short lives as stars go). And rather poetically they also seed interstellar space with diamond dust :).
First, if at any time you are feeling suicidal and wants someone to talk to - say in the middle of the night or some time when he has no friends to speak to around - there's always the telephone lines to the Samaritans (in the UK) or another suicide prevention charity where you can speak to volunteers trained and experienced in talking to suicidal people and helping them. For details see Befrienders international.
There are a several facebook groups where you can post for feedback from knowledgeable people who will help debunk a video or image you have seen which scares you:
You can also join our new and lively
:)
You can also comment on any of my Science20 posts which often have long threads of comments. Also reading answers to other posts there may help. At the moment I’m getting most posts on these two articles, usually a post every day or two:
If you prefer to contact someone in private, I'm available on Quora though I may not reply instantly, I try to reply within 24 hours - unless I get cut off the internet as happened once a few months ago and can happen as I'm in a remote part of Scotland.
If I'm online, messaging me on quora or facebook is the quickest way to get to me. My quora profile is here, it's easy to join and then you can message me via a link on my profile page.

Quora is easier than facebook because you can message me right away as soon as you join. On facebook you have to ask to be friends first which may lead to a delay - and I do get quite a lot of obviously spam facebook friend invites, as many do there.
I will friend anyone who is genuine so if you want to be facebook friends, do message me about Nibiru. Do be sure to explain why you are contacting me as on facebook - just mention doomsday or Nibiru or whatever in your first message as you get a fair bit of facebook messaging spam. I’d probably ignore it if you just say “Hi” or at least not answer quickly as that’s what spammers often do.
Anyway, my facebook profile is here: Robert Walker
Also do talk to friends as well. Everyone needs help at some point. It's not a failure to seek help, it shows strength actually.
Nibiru enthusiasts often find unusual looking objects in Google Sky and claim they are Nibiru. For instance, here is a very long post by a Nibiru enthusiast claiming to have found Nibiru in Google Sky in the Infrared

It’s actually the Peanut Nebula around the carbon star CW Leonis. It's a striking object in infrared, the brightest object in infrared outside of our solar system. But it is absolutely no threat to Earth. It's between 390 and 490 light years away. It's so far away that when we look at it, we see it as it was four centuries ago because that's how long it takes light to get here from there. You can see it on google sky here
It's huge, yet it's one of the few deep sky objects that changes visually in a short period of time. This cycles back and forth through the changes over a period of three years.

Animation from here. IRC +10216
It's a fascinating object. But absolutely no risk to Earth at all! See also Nibiru it is Not. Indeed it's stars like this that created many of the elements that are the basis for life, such as carbon, and explosions like this that brought those elements into the interstellar space, so that eventually they got incorporated into the clouds of gas and dust that collapse to form new solar systems. So - it's actually a life giving star. Carbon stars are stars like our Sun that are a bit heavier and hotter and so are able to burn helium into carbon in large quantities, but not heavy enough to go supernova. They are deep red in the visual spectrum. And just as our sun will do after it goes red giant, they throw off much of their mass as huge nebulae as they get to the end of their life, and that's exactly what we see here. They produce much of the interstellar dust, and in the early galaxy there must have been many of them (they have short lives as stars go). And rather poetically they also seed interstellar space with diamond dust :).
It's a striking object in the infrared and no surprise that someone coming across something visually extraordinary like this would build a story around it, supposing it to be a planet in our solar system. Indeed when they did the first surveys of the infrared from space, using IRAS, in 1983, astronomers themselves didn't know what many of the things they saw were, when they spotted many infrared sources they had never seen before (our atmosphere filters most of the infrared out, so they were best seen from space).
You may see this shared as “Nibiru”

Rather striking isn’t it :).
It’s actually a distant nebula (I can’t remember the details now, so will look it up)
[MID EDIT]
These photos and videos are nearly all lens flares. Some are offset lens reflections. If you haven’t tried it before and attempt to photograph the sun then the extremely bright light overwhelms your camera optics and causes all sorts of strange effects.
Some of them are photos of the sun lighting up clouds in bright spots. Apparently many people have just never looked at the sky much before and are not familiar with the way the sun can light up patches of cloud anywhere in the sky.
It is easy to check that we have only one sun and that there is no other bright object close to it. Go out any clear sunny day and block out the sun with one finger (don’t stare at the sun as it can damage your eyes without you knowing until later). Do you see a second sun next to it? Look to either side then hold a finger in front of it horizontally and look above and below as well.
IN DETAIL
If you look online you will see many alleged photographs of a “planet” next to the Sun. So first, let’s see why the very idea that you could photograph a planet next to the sun is absurd. If the planet is closer to us than the Sun, then it will be lit from behind.
A very young new Moon looks like this, as seen from the ISS:

The sun must be just off the picture to the left of the Moon since it is lit from the left and behind.
If you are lucky enough to watch a partial or total eclipse, you see the Moon pass in front of the Sun, and it is totally invisible until it starts to block out the Sun because it is lit from behind, and the clouds and the scattered light that makes the sky blue is between us and the Moon:

You can also see this with satellites - here is the ISS crossing in front of the Sun, notice that you only see it when it crosses the Sun itself and then you see it as a shadow not a bright object
So if you see something like this, Melissa Huffman’s video which got a lot of attention from those who believe in Nibiru:
Then whatever it is, it can’t be a planet close to Earth.
We do sometimes see planets in the daytime sky when they are at the far side of the Sun. This is a picture of Venus and a new moon in the daytime sky

As you see, Venus is a tiny tiny speck of white. You can see it if it is far from the Sun and the sky is a bit dark. You can even see Venus and Jupiter in the daytime sky, but to see it you need to block out the Sun and then you may spot it as a white spot against a blue sky that is nearly as bright as it is. It’s hard to spot, you need to block out the sun and know exactly where to look to see it. It’s even harder to photograph.
For more about seeing Venus, or Jupiter in daytime with photos, see 10 surprising space objects to see in the daytime sky | EarthSky.org
So, whatever Melissa Huffman saw, it was not a planet. So what was it?
EXPLANATION OF MELISSA HUFFMAN'S VIDEO BY MICK WEST
Mick West has looked at her video carefully, recently, and come up with an explanation.
First, he stabilized her video, as you can see here:
If you look at it carefully you can see that her sun sized "planet" is actually moving slightly relative to the clouds. Not nearly as much as the obvious lens flare, but in the same direction. So it can't be a sun mirage but has to be something much closer to the camera.
He then showed that you can get the same effect by putting a sheet of glass in front of a camera at an angle. So it would be easy to hoax a video like this.
This doesn't mean her video is a hoax - it could easily be that it's a result of misthreading a filter on the camera. Or a result of taking the video through a window.
If you engage the threads incorrectly, at an angle, then the glass of the filter will be at an angle to the lens, and then you'll get this effect. He shows that with a cross thread on his own camera which causes a similar double sun, complete with photo of the effect.

Cross threaded filter - easy to do when you put it on in a hurry - causes a similar double sun effect. Photo by Mick West
Just as with her video, when you zoom in on the image, it expands. And is sharp and clear like hers.
It is easy to check something like this if it happens to you. You can do the same test as for lens flare, put your finger in front of the sun and it will disappear - that is unless it is behind a window, in which case, just open the window.
Also if you rotate the camera then it will move if it is a cross threaded filter. It only stays in the same place in the sky if you keep the camera reasonably vertical all the time.
He goes into details here: Explained: Two "Suns" Sanibel Causeway, Florida [Offset Lens Reflection]
Incidentally it’s more strictly speaking, an offset double reflection. The light comes into the glass from the sun on the far side, hits the near side of the glass, bounces back through “internal reflection, hits the far side then comes back to your eye or your camera but now it’s offset because of the angled glass and those two reflections.
This is one of the Mick West’s images, where he created an offset lens reflection artificially:

Note that the main image of the sun is irregular and fuzzy because the sun is so bright it overwhelms the camera. The offset reflection is much less bright so can be photographed as a perfect circle. It’s round because the sun is round. The offset lens reflection can even seem to be behind leaves as in this example - that’s because the original is behind leaves as well which you can’t see because it is so bright. See Explained: Two "Suns" Sanibel Causeway, Florida [Offset Lens Reflection] for the details
This is another example of an artificially made offset lens reflection using glass attached at an angle in front of the camera
However that’s only if you have a sheet of glass attached at an angle to the lens -either to do it deliberately, or a cross threaded filter, or a transparent lens protector (on a mobile phone camera, say) attached at a slight angle.
If you take the photograph through a window, then the offset lens reflection will stay in the same position as you move the camera.
See also my Simple Ways To See Nibiru Is Totally Nuts - And Limits On Planets Hiding In Our Solar System
Offset lens reflections can be particularly puzzling if the sun is reflected in the sea or a lake, because the reflection in the lake can get offset and reflected in the lens as well to create an effect like this:

It may look as if the light to the right of the sun is reflected in the sea. But it’s in the wrong position for that. The bright light is higher above the sea, so if it was a real reflection its reflection should be further down like this:

What’s happening here is that the real reflection of the sun is very bright and is copied to the new position above and to the right of the sun.
If you look really closely at the supposed reflection of the second sun, it is not matched with the ripples behind it:

The supposed reflection of the “second sun” here is just an offset lens reflection of the real reflection to the left, shifted up and across. The real reflection looks larger because it is so bright it overwhelms the camear.
This photo comes from a quora question: What is this bright object next to the sun?
LENS FLARES
Many of the videos and photos are of lens flares. Since some lens flares move and others don't, or not so much, it is easy to think that the one that doesn't move is "real" but it isn't.
It is easy to test for lens flares.
As he says, so many people get fooled by this. Some are probably intentional hoaxes, some confused, in any case they don't have a clue.
When you get effects like this, it shows that there was too much light for the camera to handle and the bright light bounced around inside the lens system creating lots of bright spots and lights. This happens very easily if you point a camera at a bright object.
The basic reason for this is first, because the different frequencies of light are refracted by different amounts. So if you just used a plain glass lens, then maybe red is in focus and blue isn't, leading to rainbow effects. Cameras use complex lens systems to make sure all the light focuses at the same point. Also it may have a telephoto lens which obviously is going to be much more complex to allow it to focus and magnify as you zoom in.
Even with a simple lens, light can bounce around inside it through internal reflections. With a complex system of lenses such as modern cameras usually have, then it's no surprise at all that you get lots of complex patterns of light like this when you point it at something bright enough for some of the light to bounce back from the many internal surfaces inside the lens.
SUN SHINING ON CLOUDS
Another thing you often see, shared as “Nibiru” is just the sun shining on clouds. If you live in a place that has many clouds and you are someone who watches the sky, you are probably used to this sort of thing:

sun & clouds, photo from Flikr by funca88. This shows rays of light from the sun shining through gaps in the clouds and lighting up other clouds. On a day like that you may well get bright patches all over the sky - often directly opposite the sun too. I live in the West coast of Scotland, a place that gets lots of cloud of this type - this is just a normal sunset for me. However from the youtube videos of “Nibiru” shared online it seems that to many people, this sort of thing is not so familiar to them. They share any bright light shining on clouds as “Nibiru”.
OTHER THINGS - REFLECTIONS ON BUILDINGS
Isn’t this a marvelous illusion of two suns :).

You can see what it is from this zoom in on the apparent second sun at the left:

It’s just a reflection of the sun in the windows of a skyscraper. I was totally baffled by it when I first saw it, having lived most of my life in rural areas or small cities without skyscrapers. But if you live in a place with skyscrapers you probably recognized it immediately.
For more on this see Debunked: This is a photograph of two suns by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
OUT AND OUT FAKES
You also get many fakes, which are easy to do nowadays with video editing tools. This is one of them, so silly I think it must be meant as a joke:
But you’ll find many such. If you’ve seen any science fiction movies you probably know how easy it is to fake videos of things in the sky with modern CGI techniques. Indeed, what’s surprising about the Nibiru hoax videos is really how lame many of them are. It is really easy to do a Nibiru hoax and people will do it just for fun as in this example - I think it is just a joke because there are no ads showing on the video.
Or they may be done for the ads - trying to get lots of views and clicks on the ads which can earn the uploaders thousands of dollars of youtube ad revenue if they get millions of views.
Debunked: How can the videos and photos be hoaxes when so many people believe them?
DEEP SKY OBJECTS
Nibiru enthusiasts often find unusual looking objects in Google Sky and claim they are Nibiru. For instance, here is a very long post by a Nibiru enthusiast claiming to have found Nibiru in Google Sky in the Infrared

It’s actually the Peanut Nebula around the carbon star CW Leonis. It's a striking object in infrared, the brightest object in infrared outside of our solar system. But it is absolutely no threat to Earth. It's between 390 and 490 light years away. It's so far away that when we look at it, we see it as it was four centuries ago because that's how long it takes light to get here from there. You can see it on google sky here
MANDATORY STARE AT SUN WARNING
Don't stare at the sun to see if you can see Nibiru. Newton stared at the sun for an experiment and he lost some of his vision for a fair while. Eventually he got it back but you might not be so lucky - some people get permanent vision loss in this way.
The radiation that damages your eyes is mainly UV light - and this is not visible. So even if the sun looks dim, behind clouds for instance, you don't know if it is safe without a UV light detector. Infrared also harms your eyes especially if viewed through binoculars or a telescope. And there are no pain receptors in your retina - and the damage often shows up only some time later - you may think everything is fine but then gradually lose vision.
Just don't do it. It is reasonably safe when the sun is right at the horizon with a flat open horizon - which is why people don't lose vision staring at a beautiful sunrise or sunset - but even then best not to stare for long.
So don't stare at the sun. If you want to check if we have two suns, just block it out with your finger. Then, do you see another sun next to the sun? No? Then you have disproved this idea that there is a second sun visible in our sky, which some of the Nibiru believers think. Some of them believe it is not just an extra sun, or a planet, but an entire separate solar system consisting of a sun with several planets, hiding behind our sun, but from time to time visible next to it.
SO WHY DO THEY SAY THIS?
It is of course possible for lots of people to believe something that’s false. Up to the middle ages nearly everyone was totally sure that the sun circled the Earth as did the planets and the stars too. In 2012, by some figures 10% of the Earth’s population thought the world would end. For more on this, see debunked: How can it be false when so many people share photos of “Nibiru” next to the sun or a second sun? by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
This is just nonsensical BS. For more about this, see Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here] by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
Originated as my answer to Is there life after death?
Scientists try to answer this by relying on science. But the scientific method works entirely by using an empirical approach, experiments with physical things. So how can science give us an answer about what happens when you die? It depends on how you think about life and death. If you use the analogy of a dream, then this way of reasoning can be quite compelling.
ANALOGY OF A DREAM
So, there is the idea, that it is just a dream and you might wake up at any time. This is a philosophical view that is impossible to disprove really. It's more compelling if you are someone who has vivid and lucid dreams. A lucid dream is one where you know that you are dreaming and so can look at the dream carefully, knowing that it is a dream.
Richard Feynman, famous Nobel laureate physicist, was able to do this when young - later he decided to stop lucid dreaming. But while he could do it, he investigated his dreams like a scientist.
"...The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see each hair. You know how there's a little area of color just where the sun is reflecting--the diffraction effect, I could see that! I could see each hair as sharp as you want: perfect vision!
"Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the tack. So the "seeing department" and the "feeling department" of the brain seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they don't have to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and there's no thumbtack. I run my finger down the doorframe, and I feel the tack!"
(long quote from Feynman on Reddit.com)
And you can experience pain during dreams also. Including pains that you don't have while awake. It's a rare experience, but does happen. Some dreamers can wake from a dream with high levels of pain, and the pain vanishes because it was just a dream pain.
And many people have the experiencing of waking from a dream, only to find that they are still dreaming. Sometimes the experience is so vivid that even when they finally wake properly, after several false awakenings, they may be unsure whether they have woken up properly yet, or are still in a dream. See this web survey of false awakening.
With that background, what if this is a dream? There isn't really too much more to say here, philosophers have argued it for centuries, and nobody has a knock down way to prove that you are not dreaming. You could dream all the science and experiments. They seem coherent - but are they? All you really have is the present moment in a dream - and the rest is your memories which are dream memories if it really is a dream. I don't think there is any way to prove that it isn't. You can do experiments in the realm of mind, where you direct your mind in particular ways and see what happens, as Richard Feynman did. But these are not recognized by science at present. Except in research on dreams, and those only in a limited way.
Scientists often assume that the only way to understand the mind properly is to look at the brain. So, there's a kind of underlying assumption that everything we think and feel can be explained in terms of brain processes. It's important I think to realize, that is just a hypothesis. It is not proven.
ANALOGY OF A COMPUTER
They also often go further and say that the brain is just a computer running a computer program. That again is just a hypothesis. I go into this a fair bit in some of my articles on artificial intelligence: Why Strong Artificial Intelligences Need Protection From Us - Not Us From Them
I don’t think there is any evidence at all yet, that the mind is a computer program, for the reason given there. Some things are analogous, for sure, the computer is a good metaphor for some aspects of how our minds work and computers can do things that we thought of as only the province of humans in the past. E.g. playing chess or go - but they don’t do it in the way humans do. We have a natural tendency to anthropomorphise anything that resembles us, even dolls and action figures. Back in the sixteenth century people were very impressed by clockwork automata, such as Jacques de Vaucanson's seventeenth century flute player. Or this lady playing an organ by Jaquet-Droz from the eighteenth century - the organ isn’t powered like a music box, she actually plays it with her fingers.

Or automata that could imitate human handwriting with a real quill pen:

You could actually program it, in the sense that you gave it a list of letters to write so could change what it wrote to anything you like.
CIMA mg 8332 Automaton in the Swiss Museum CIMA.
Philosophers from that time period used clockwork as analogies for the whole universe, and for actions of humans also. In the Mechanical philosophy of Descartes etc. Descartes wrote, about our perception of light, sounds etc, their imprints on the imagination, their retention in memory, our appetites and passions, and the external movements of our body as a result:
“I wish you to consider all of these as following altogether naturally in this Machine from the disposition of its organs alone, neither more nor less than do the movements of a clock or othe rautomaton from that of its counterweight and wheels…”
This analogy is still in our thinking to some extent, in metaphors such as “you are wound up” using the metaphor of a wound up spring in a clockwork machine. Or “I can see the cogs turning” as a metaphor for slow thought processes. Nowadays we know that the brain doesn’t run like clockwork but there are some close analogies. We also no longer think of it as like a hydraulic machine, another early metaphor. And to some extent yes it is mechanical, many parts of our body, e.g. our skeleton, and our heart pumping the blood, function in mechanical ways. The hydraulic metaphor is valid also, much of the way our body works is hydraulic. Now we have this computer metaphor. But I think so far it is no more than a metaphor and partial explanation still. Indeed - anything a computer can do can be done with clockwork, only more slowly and requiring a much larger machine. So in a way this computer metaphor we use today is just the old clockwork metaphor updated. There is nothing essentially “electronic” about a computer. And of course there is nothing resembling a transistor in the brain - so our brains certainly don’t work like a computer in detail.
Anyway even if there was a way to prove that the mind works like a computer, it still wouldn’t prove that when you die that’s it. If you use the analogy of a dream, that’s like a dream in which you prove to yourself conclusively that you are a program running on a dream computer - and then you wake up. It still won’t get you outside those limitations of science.
ASSUMING THE CONCLUSION
Obviously, if you start with the premiss that everything can be understood only through physical experiments - then the scientific approach can never prove existence of life after death. It is pre-biased to come up with the answer "No". They can only define life and awareness in terms that tie it down intimately to the body, because they don't recognize any other way of investigating this as valid.
About the only place in science where you have any acknowledgement that mind may have a role to play at all is in Quantum Mechanics, where they talk about observers, and the way observation influences what you can see in surprising ways. Observation is so intimately tied up with what you observe, that you can't actually say that an electron, say, has a particular location or velocity unless you observe it first.
What is observation there except activity of the mind? That might suggest perhaps that you can't completely eliminate the mind when you try to understand how the world works.
Still, even knowing that, if you are deeply ingrained in scientific thinking, you may think that there is no other way to think about awareness and consciousness. The whole thing may seem obvious to you, that when your brain dies, then that has to be the end of awareness and life and consciousness.
SCIENCE CAN’T PROVE THE VALIDITY OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
But - science is itself not able to prove that science works. You can't prove scientifically that if you let go of a ball, it will fall to the ground. In a dream, you may be able to fly just by willing to fly. You may be able to throw a ball into the air and hit the Moon with it. Why can't we do things like that in real life? Science can't answer questions like that. Only philosophy can address that, or religion, or - has to be something outside of science itself, to try to understand why science works.
Some scientists are so out of touch with philosophy, that they can't understand how there can be any such subject, except as a science of how the mind works and the thoughts that people have. But their very science itself depends on a number of deeply held assumptions. To examine those, and understand why they work, and how they work,requires philosophy.
LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE
Similarly science can't explain why there is anything at all. Even those who try to explain our universe using the idea that somehow it appeared as a quantum fluctuation out of nothing (Stephen Hawking’s idea) - that's just one theory, not proved, and many dispute it, with many other theories. But in any case, it just pushes the problem back. It doesn't explain why there is such a possibility as a quantum fluctuation, or what kind of a nothing could have a universe suddenly appear out of it. Fundamentally, it still can't explain why there is anything here right now.
Nor does science have any answers to why we suffer. It can help greatly with sickness, suffering, ill health, good food etc. Education. But in many cases you may be in pain and science can't do anything to help. Even when you enjoy life to the full, you know that there is no way that scientific research will let you continue like that for ever.
So, science has limitations. Some people think that there are simply no answers to any of those things. Some think there are answers of one kind or another. But there isn't any scientific experiment you can do, at present anyway, to decide if they have answers or not.
CONTINUATION AFTER YOU DIE
So back to the idea of an afterlife. I'm taking that in the very general sense - the idea that there is some continuation after you die. For me, I think that this continuation may be in the form of future lives as a human, animal, insect, or types of beings that we don't know exist yet. I believe, for various reasons, that I've had many previous lives and forgotten them all. I don't claim to have any proof of this at all; it just the idea that makes most sense to me :).
Others have other ideas. Ancestor worship, Hindu ideas of a soul, again with many rebirths, Theosophical ideas, Christian ideas of a heaven and hell, Ideas of pure lands etc. I don't think there is any way to decide between those possibilities, and many others. But I think that the belief that when this life ends "that's it" is as much of a faith or belief as any of those and as little supported as them.
If you are already convinced that we can't learn anything except through experiment, then this argument won't persuade you. You have closed your mind to any other possibility. But if you think there is a possibility of things you might be able to understand directly through the mind - that opens the possibility that all of this, this world, my body, external world, this computer I'm using etc etc - is in some ways a construct of mind.
It’s like a dream. With other beings in the dream also. Experiments do work, it seems. So there must be a lot of coherence to it, and maybe in some sense there is a reality to it. Far more coherent than any dream. But still - there is no way you can actually prove conclusively that you are not dreaming right now. So on that basis, all this experimental data about brains and so on - that's like dream experiments. In a dream you might prove many things, but when you wake up - all of that complicated dream is gone and you are on to your real life or your next dream.
IF AWARENESS ENDS AT DEATH, HOW CAN THIS BE HAPPENING NOW?
Then another thing that might shake your confidence that when we die, that's it - what happens after you die? That's the end of your awareness. So - at that point, there is no you left to have lived previously. So how can your life have actually happened at all? How can now be happening, if in the future, there will be nobody left to have had this experience?
This argument simply won't work at all if you are deeply ingrained with scientific ways of thinking. But for others, it might give pause for thought. I know some of you will read this and just say "nonsense, this chap is daft and he may be a nice enough chap in other ways but he has gone off his rocker here, he is not capable of critical thought".
But others, maybe you will find a few ideas here to get you thinking about it? There are many scientists who are Christian, Muslim, Jews, Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, Taoist, etc. They don't find it at all incompatible with their beliefs, to be scientists. They know that they haven't empirically proved their beliefs scientifically. But they also consider science to be limited in the domain of what it can and can't prove. And give themselves permission to go beyond the realm of science, and to consider philosophy, and religious ideas.
So, I’m saying, you don’t have to believe in miracles to be a scientist like that. Just to recognize limitations of the scientific method. Just to be open to that possibility, that there might be something else after you die - I think that is by far the most scientific approach also. Because it's unscientific to assume anything without proof. To say that “when you die, that's it”, is as strong a statement as to say that when you die you will definitely take rebirth or end up in some particular afterlife or whatever ones belief may be.
There are a few scientists who are out certain that when you die that's it, like Richard Dworkin. Many more are just not sure what happens and open to various possibilities.
For religious people, I think it helps to acknowledge that you can't prove anything in this topic area. That can actually help your faith be stronger - because by looking carefully at this, acknowledging that you don't know, then you can see more clearly what it is you do believe, and why you do. But at the same time recognizing that others of other faiths believe other things about what happens when you die. And that there is no way to decide between any of those on scientific grounds.
In this way I think we can have greater tolerance of different religions for each other and for those who think that this life is all that there is. The idea that this life is all there is, amongst some scientists, has become as strong and irrational a faith as a religion. They simply can't see any possibility that there might be other ways of looking at things. Basically these scientists have a belief system in which the scientific method can settle all questions. That is as much a matter of faith as any religion that has been preached by some great teacher in the past.
It can't be proved, and the arguments they produce in support of it are no more valid than the many proofs of existence of God, or the arguments about numbers of angels dancing on a pin. They seem valid only because you have subscribed to this view that science will explain everything, so deeply, you can't even see that you have subscribed to it. That's as dogmatic a point of view as the most extreme kind of religious fanaticism, seems to me, as someone who has a strong background in science, maths and philosophy.
IS THERE SUCH A SUBJECT AS PHILOSOPHY?
Some scientists think there is simply no way to investigate things except by the scientific method. That rules out the entire realm of philosophy. There is no way to study philosophy using the methods of science. You can't do experiments to decide questions in philosophy, by the very nature of the subject.
If you think you can settle questions in philosophy with scientific experiments, that suggests you have never had any philosophical questions or thoughts - quite rare but true of some scientists indeed. Or maybe you used to think about philosophy as a child - I mean the ordinary natural philosophy everyone does or most people do rather than the academic subject - and have since forgotten that you did it.
So with this background, how could science ever say anything definitive about what happens when you die? Maybe it can but if so I think in some future where science is extended to include some aspect of understanding mind, sort of meld of science, philosophy and maybe some kind of mind experiments? At any rate we don't have that yet. As a scientist, therefore, I think there is no need at all to ascribe to miracles to have a wide variety of views about what happens when you die. And the view that "When you die that's it" is as much a belief system as any religion, I think.
See also my youtube video:
The original story is here: A Solar Storm Put A Crack In Earth's Magnetic Field
This is not doomsday. The word “crack” there is journalistic poetic license, not a scientific term. These are new measurements of something that happens with solar storms anyway. And the “wrecking havoc” in the article also is not quite what you’d think.
Solar storms can’t harm us on Earth though a really powerful solar storm can cause long lasting electricity blackouts and temporary glitches with GPS satellites. Some think we need to be hardened against those more than we are now.
The main effect of solar storms is that they can cause vivid aurorae
RADIATION - NO PROBLEM FOR US AT ALL
Our atmosphere protects us from cosmic radiation and solar storms. It's the equivalent of 10 tons of water shielding above us in mass. Nothing that happens to the magnetic field can do anything about that radiation shielding. We just don’t need to be worried about radiation from space at all.
We do get cosmic radiation - very penetrating, gets to the ground and you see it in cloud chambers. We are adapted to be able to deal with that background level of radiation which is constant 24/7 year round.
But the solar storms are much more slowly moving and they simply can’t penetrate our atmosphere at all.
Even when the Earth's magnetic field flips, as it does often, last time only 41,000 years ago, it doesn’t harm us.
The main predicted effects are a weakening of the ozone layer, more aurora of course and compasses pointing east / west instead of north during a reversal which takes over a century. Oh, and migrating birds wouold get puzzled and might end up in the wrong continent etc.
In the middle of the flip the field doesn't vanish altogether but is much weaker than it is now. That doesn't make anything extinct as far as we can tell.
But this is not about magnetic reversal either. Our magnetic field is still stronger than usual and both magnetic poles are close to the geographical poles.
We are not even in the middle of a magnetic pole flip. It is just a normal solar storm when magnetic field levels are nominal.
MAIN EFFECTS OF MAJOR SOLAR STORM - COULD DAMAGE TRANSFORMERS ATTACHED TO LONG DISTANCE CABLES AND TEMPORARY GLITCHES IN SATELLITES
If we got a major solar storm like the Carrington event, in the C19, then the main effects are on long distance cables. Back then telegraph operators observed sparks from the devices and some were able to send telegrams without need for power because the storm itself powered the cables.
That's because though the magnetic fields are weak, they do have a noticeable effects on multiple kilometer long cables.
Not on your laptop etc. But could knock out the very expensive multi million dollar main transformers that convert very high voltage long distance transmission down to intermediate levels for sending on to step down again to domestic levels.
It's only the really big transformers that need to be protected, big millions of dollars units. They can definitely be hardened against storms. It's mainly a matter of whether they need to
The experts don’t seem to think the smaller transformers that route power on to your home are likely to be affected. I think the cables attached to them are just not long enough to matter. You need really long cables many kilometers long to get the most damaging effects.
POSSIBILITY OF BLACKOUTS
So it could cause blackouts, possibly for months. That's the main concern of magnetic storms.
Experts disagree on how hardy the transformers are to this effect and whether this would happen and they are investigating and may have to harden them, is last I read about it.
It could also knock out GPS - not permanently, just gliches causing the satellites to reboot and so be on the blink for a while. Can't actually damage them but can change the state of computer memory / programs leading to need to reboot into safe mode type reactions.
As for ISS, I'm not sure, would have to look up what they would do in the event of a Carrington type event. Do they have a solar shelter there?
This is another of these stories where a small group of christian fundamentalists seize on some astronomical event and claim that it will mark the end of the world. And then for some reason newspapers decide to run with the story, the “red top tabloids” especially. Do a google search and you will see something like this:

It’s so sad, because total eclipses are a wonderful astronomical phenomenon and we can enjoy them rather than worry that they mean the end of the world :).
So anyway - it’s hard to debunk a religious “prophecy” like this because they claim mythological things, Jesus, or angels and such like suddenly appearing and destroying the world.
We never see such things in our telescopes. There is no evidence that celestial beings destroy other stars. We see a universe that has been proceeding according to the normal laws of physics for billions of years. Also many Christians don’t believe in a literal apocalypse, while many other religions don’t have the idea at all.
But if someone says as a matter of religious belief that they believe such events will happen - well - evidence from physics and astronomy won’t help them, you probably have to respond in religious terms.
So I’ll do that, but first, let’s look at the astronomy and see why a solar eclipse is of no danger at all to us.
The solar eclipse happens when the Moon passes between the sun and Earth. By a coincidence the Moon is visually almost exactly the same size as the much larger sun. Sometimes it passes in front of the Sun rather further away and we get an annular eclipse. Here you can see that the Moon is visually smaller than the sun:

Annular Eclipse. Taken from Middlegate, Nevada on May 20, 2012.jpg - Wikipedia
And sometimes it is total, and that’s one of the great spectacles of nature

As the moon blocks out the sun from our view, then you see the red prominances and the subtle white corona, features that you normally can’t see at all because the details are flooded out by the brightness of the sun itself.
However you only see that if you have the Moon exactly in line with the Sun. It’s different from a lunar eclipse which is visible to everyone. Most of the world will not see the eclipse at all. This shows the eclipse track for the August 2017 eclipse. To see anything at all you will need to be somewhere along that line during the event.
If you are within the region of that line you will see a total eclipse. But if you are a bit away to one side or the other, this is what you see.

And if you are further away still, you won’t see anything.
Although eclipses are spectacular, astronomically they don’t have much significance except as an opportunity to see the solar prominences and corona, stars in the day time, and historically the position of stars during a solar eclipse were used to confirm Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
The Moon goes between the Earth and the Sun every full Moon but it normally passes above or below the Sun. From time to time it passes exactly in front, when its orbit is aligned with the Sun as seen from Earth.
The solar eclipse is just the Moon’s shadow passing over the Earth. This video of a solar eclipse as seen from a geostationary satellite explains:
So - there is no way this is any threat to us. The shadow passes over the Earth and then is gone. I hope understanding the astronomy can help with some of your fear if you are one of those who has got scared that the world will end next year.
We get many solar eclipses also. This is a diagram of all the solar eclipses from 2001 to 2025 from NASA. It shows the eclipse track
Those blue ones are all total eclipses. No annular eclipses during this time.
They’ve made these maps for centuries into the past and the future from the 30th century BCE to the 30th century CE
This for instance is from 2021 to 2040 - many annular eclipses during this time span:
World Atlas of Solar Eclipse Paths
So, it’s a perfectly natural event, not in any way unusual. The Moon has been doing this for billions of years, since it formed. Billions of years ago it was much closer and the eclipses would have been much more frequent.
I hope this helps you understand that solar eclipses are not in any way world threatening. It’s a wonderful, beautiful thing to see. I’ve seen partial eclipses but never seen a total eclipse and hope one day to be able to see one with my own eyes :).
RELIGIOUS ASPECT
Most of these prophecies of a Christian Apocalypse are based on the book of Revelations, which is regarded as one of the most enigmatic books in the Bible. Anyone can read almost anything into it.
It causes so many problems that the Eastern Orthodox church doesn't include it in its lectionary, the passages from the Bible that can be read from the pulpit. It was a late addition to the Bible anyway - early versions of the Bible didn't include it.
Christians interpret Revelations in many different ways, with the four main interpretations
Only the last approach of those four leads to the idea it might be describing real world events in our future. Many think that 1 is true, that it describes events that already happened in the first century AD.
Also the Bible warns against false prophets. By definition all the people who have prophesied an end to the world for the last 2000 years, and there have been dozens of them, are false prophets because the world didn't end. And these Nibiru people have falsely prophesied the end of the world numerous times too, so they are definitely false prophets too, no matter what excuses they make for their false predictions.
One thing that's certain is that the book is intended as a message of hope which comforted Christians who were persecuted in the early days of Christianity. If it becomes a message of despair and suicide, then it is seriously being misapplied.
So, there is absolutely no reason at all to pay attention to alleged prophecies of doomsday if you are Christian. Why should you? They are surely just more false prophets to add to the dozens that have come before. For the large number of false prophets that we’ve had, see this List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events. It’s not complete either.
Some of these people will forecast an apocalypse over and over. They swear blind that their latest prediction is the real thing and will certainly happen. Even their own predictions made just a few months or a year before - they say those were false predictions but this one at last is correct.
If you start to fall for this sort of thing, you will never want for predictions of doomsday and will be scared of it for the rest of your life or until you realize you've been had and just give up on it.
While if you are not Christian - well what do you care what Christians prophecy? The book of Revelations is clearly meant as a message for Christians, whatever it might mean. Why pay any attention to it if you happen to be a Hindu or Buddhist or Jain or Taoist or whatever religion you are? And if you are atheist even more so.
The Bible has never predicted any major astronomical event. Indeed astronomy is not it’s strong point. And no previous civilization has ever had the accuracy of prediction of astronomy that we have. An eclipse track map like the ones above is way beyond the capabilities of any previous civilization on Earth, no matter how astronomically gifted. They just didn’t have the theory, the computers, the telescopes etc needed to make them.
Also, anything you might try to unearth from the Bible can’t possibly be a prediction of meteorite impacts or hidden planets, as they didn’t know that asteroids or meteorites existed back then. Also, the idea that a planet could hit Earth would have been totally foreign to them. They thought of the sky and stars as separate from Earth. They thought meteorites were created in volcanic eruptions or blown up into the air in strong winds before falling again. They also thought that the Sun orbited the Earth along with all the planets and that the entire night sky and all the stars circled around Earth. Back then they didn’t know that the stars were other suns like our one. So, far from having a superior understanding of how our universe worked, they had a very inferior approximate understanding.
Now of course they did have a good understanding of human nature, the Bible has a good ethical message. We aren’t superior to them in terms of ethics probably. But they just weren’t astronomers or cosmologists. Even by the standards of their time, the authors of the Bible do not stand out as having a particularly good understanding of astronomy. It is barely mentioned. That’s just not what you go to it for.
I write about it some more in the second half of this article, which if he is Christian may be helpful: September 24th, 2015 - Just Another Day In Space - Asteroid Flybys, "Blood Moons" And Armageddon Demystified
This is a very bizarre story. It appeared on various news sites online including this example: NASA warns 1000 asteroids hurling towards Earth and might collide in next five years
They claim to source it to NASA but don't give any cites to a NASA press release. Then they go on to say
“Nasa knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth, so the probability of a major collision is quite small. In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years,” said a Nasa spokesperson. “NASA has also made asteroid detection a top priority, and are developing strategies for identifying asteroids that could pose a risk to our planet.”
So how do you make sense of that? They claim that NASA warns that there are 1000 asteroids due to hit Earth in the next 5 years, but the only quote from NASA in the article says this is nonsense. Why do journalists publish such nonsensical self contradictory stories? I got a few pm’s and comments about it and tried to find what the source was that lead to this but couldn't find any explanation.
That 1000 is similar to the number of asteroids of diameter 1 kilometer or larger in the NEO database. NASA have found 90% of those and shown that none of them threaten Earth. There are 10% of them still to find and they are finding them at a rate of about one a month. By the 2020s they will have found 99% of them and that will pretty much retire the risk from a 1 kilometer asteroid - unless of course for the unlikely possibility that they find that one of them is headed our way.
I suspect that some journalist just misunderstood a press release or a statement about the 1000 asteroids of 1 km in diameter and then wrote it up in this way, and the others then all copied them (as they often do). But impossible to know for sure as the articles don’t give a source for the story.
It’s about the same time as the announcement that astronomers have reached the tally of 15,000 asteroids discovered so far Tally of known near-Earth asteroids and comets hits 15,000

NASA Survey Counts Potentially Hazardous Asteroids - all the orange asteroids in this illustration are ones that do flybys of Earth, so “Potentially hazardous”. However we also know that none of those ones will impact Earth any time before 2100. Interplanetary space is vast and Earth is tiny and it’s not easy for an asteroid to hit such a small target in the vastness of the space between the planets
So it might be related to that. Discovery of more near Earth asteroids, all of which miss Earth, of course does not increase the risk of hitting Earth. :They were there all along, it is just that our more sensitive telescopes can now spot them. They discover about 30 new asteroids per week, or more than three a day nowadays.
Some of you may enjoy this, it’s a paraody of many of the Nibiru videos, by Dazzathecameraman - shows how easy it is to make a hoax video like this.
Summary - This is just exceptionally unlikely. Theoretically it is possible but as far as worrying about it, forget about it.
The chances of any celestial object even getting as close as Neptune in any one million year time period are minute:
The chances of any of these getting as close to the sun as Earth, hitting Earth or hitting the Sun are vanishingly small. .
IN DETAIL - BROAD PICTURE
Let’s start with neutron stars, as amongst the hardest to detect. There are several hundred million neutron stars in the galaxy as a rough estimate (see Compact Objects in Astrophysics) . Most of them would be very old and cold, due to supernova explosions billions of years ago and an old cold neutron star would be very hard to detect, that's true. You might think that with so many of them, that we’d have a chance that one of them would hit us. But the galaxy is also very huge, as worked out by Phil Plait The volume of the Milky Way, our galaxy, is roughly 8 trillion cubic light years
HOW MANY OF THEM ARE THERE WITHIN TWELVE LIGHT YEARS?
With the volume of the galaxy 8 trillion cubic light years, the calculations are simplified if we look at a volume of 8 thousand cubic light years, i.e. in a sphere of radius twelve light years.
So those several hundred million neutron stars correspond to about ten neutron stars within twelve light years. By comparison our galaxy has 400 billion stars (you get various estimates here, some say 100 billion, I’m going by the higher estimate) which makes it around 200 normal stars in that same 8,000 cubic light years. There may be twice as many rogue planets as stars so that makes it 400 rogue planets in that same region. About one star in a thousand is a black hole. See Black Holes. So that same 8,000 cubic light years would have 0.2 black holes on average.
As for brown dwarfs, there may be as many brown dwarfs as stars according to recent research, see How Many Brown Dwarfs in the Milky Way? However the WISE survey found that we in a region of the galaxy with very few brown dwarfs, about one brown dwarf for every six stars. NASA - WISE Finds Few Brown Dwarfs Close To Home
So in short we have
within that twelve light years radius.
Stars are from several hundred to a thousand times more common than neutron stars. That might surprise you given that many stars have short lifetimes and of those many end in neutron stars - so what has happened to all those stars that reached the end of their lifetime billions of years ago?
The thing is that those bright stars are far outnumbered by the numerous fainter stars. Most stars are red dwarfs with trillions of years long lifetimes - Red Dwarfs: The fascinating stars that live for trillions of years ).
SO HOW LIKELY IS IT THAT A STAR DOES A FLYBY?
Stars, even though they are much more common, are also very unlikely to do close passes of the solar system. Never mind hitting the Earth, or the sun, they are extremely unlikely to get as close as Pluto. The closest flyby of a star in recent past is Scholtz's star, which passed 0.8 light years (around 9.6 light months) away 70,000 years ago. https://www.sciencedaily.com/rel...
By comparison Pluto is 5.5 light hours away. So - when a very rare close encounter may take a star 9-10 light months away - how likely is it that a star would pass as close as 5.5. light hours away? With neutron stars a thousand times less common than stars, how likely that a neutron star would come anywhere near our solar system?
To get close enough to pass between Earth and the Moon it would need to pass just one light second away. To hit Earth it would need to hit us accurately to the nearest 0.02 light seconds - within two hundredths of a light second. The sun’s diameter is 4.64 light seconds, so to hit the Sun it would need to get within a few light seconds of it.
I think you can see that all these things are so unlikely it will surely never happen.
IMPOSSIBILITY OF CAPTURE
And it is just a single pass, because if any rogue planet, or neutron star, or black hole or anything were to pass through our solar system - it would be going too fast to do anything except just fly out again.
Capture into solar system orbit by Jupiter - tracing the path of Voyager 2 or Voyager 1 backwards - is so very improbable you can forget about it. It is easy for a solar system to eject a planet, and very hard for it to capture one. That’s a bit like the way it is easy for a cup to break but very hard for a cup to spontaneously assemble from the broken pieces on the floor.
Another analogy - it would be theoretically possible to drop a pin on a hard polished floor and for it to land point down balanced exactly. And if all the tiny drafts of air pushed in the right way to keep it balanced, it could stay balanced like that for an hour or more. It's possible but surely even with the thousands of pins dropped on polished floors, it's surely never happened in the history of humanity!
EXACT CALCULATION OF THE CHANCES
So now, what is the chance that Earth or the Sun is hit by any of these, or that they come into our solar system?
I’ve found a way to do an exact calculation
There's a formula, we can use here, from Perturbation of the Oort Cloud by Close Stellar Approaches. Our sun has approximately 4.2*D^2 encounters with other stars every million years.
There D is the diameter in parsecs of the spherical region around the star.
Neptune's semi major axis is 4.49506 billion kilometers so it's diameter is around 0.00029135 parsecs. So substituting that for D, every million years there is 1 chance in 2.8 million (calculated as 1/(4.2*0.0002913^2)) of a star passing closer to the sun than Neptune.
There may be twice as many rogue planets as stars, so that means one chance in 1.4 million of one of those passing closer to the sun than Neptune every million years. Over the 4.5 billion years of history of our solar system, this is so unlikely it has almost certainly never happened, a one in three thousand or so probability that any star has got as close as Neptune since our solar system formed.
For brown dwarfs, with one of those in the local region for every six stars that makes it one chance in 16.8 million.
So then back to our neutron stars, then there is less than one of those to every 20 normal stars, so that makes it one chance in 48 million of a neutron star passing closer to the sun than Neptune in a million years.
For black holes, then as only one star in a thousand forms a black hole, then that makes it once chance in 2.8 billion of a black hole coming closer than Neptune.
So to summarize, chances of getting closer than Neptune are
These are almost vanishingly small chances already.
Now for the chance of a star hitting the Earth. Now D is 12,742 km, which is 4.129401e-10 parsecs. So now the calculation is one in 1/(4.2*(4.129401e-10)^2).
So the chance of a star hitting Earth in the next million years is about 1 in 1.3962931 * 10^18. Or about 1 in 1,400,000,000,000,000,000
We can also look at the chance of a star hitting the Sun. Now D is 1.3914 million km, or 4.5092203 × 10^-8 Parsecs 1/(4.2*(4.5092203e-8)^2) makes it 1 chance in 117,000,000,000,000.
So to summarize, every million years there is a
So about one chance in 117,000 billion of it happening every million years. With 400 billion stars in the galaxy, we get one chance in 117,000/400 or about one chance in 300 that we get a collision between two stars somewhere in the galaxy every million years. With the galaxy 13.21 billion years old, then it may have happened 13,210/300 times or about 44 times since the galaxy formed, that one star has hit another star.
For rogue planets double those figures, so about 88 collisions of a rogue planet with a star in the whole galaxy. For brown dwarfs, divide by 6, 7 collisions. For neutron stars, divide by 20, so we might have had a couple of collisions of neutron stars with another star. For black holes divide by a thousand - probably no black hole has hit another star in our galaxy since it formed.
So we have the figures for anywhere in our galaxy, over the entire time period since it formed:
Those are averages though.
The stars are much more densely packed in the center of the galaxy, so stellar collisions there should be more common. The galaxy also has a giant black hole in its core, and stars must collide with it quite often.
I’ve also assumed that there is not enough gas or dust to cause significant drag on the approaching object. That’s true for our sun but not true for newly born stars or stars that hit the accretion disk of a black hole.
However, we are at no risk of getting anywhere near the galactic center, for the same reason that there is no risk of Earth hitting the sun. We orbit the galactic center at a vast distance of 25,000 light years, in a long term stable orbit.
In the universe as a whole, there are so many stars that such collisions are common. There are about as many galaxies in the observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy. In such a vast region of space, even rare objects like neutron stars and black holes can collide. By way of example, collisions of a neutron star with a black hole cause some of the enigmatic gamma ray bursts - the shorter ones.

Artist’s impression of a neutron star captured by a black hole. In a Flash NASA Helps Solve 35-year-old Cosmic Mystery
This is of no danger to Earth whatsoever
This is the easiest of all the Nibiru beliefs to debunk. Go out any starry night, find the pole star, go out a few hours later and the pole star is in the same place and all the other stars have shifted around it. This shows that the Earth’s axis still points towards the pole star, as it has for centuries.
(If you make sky trails you’ll notice that the pole star is actually about two thirds of a degree from the celestial pole).
IN DETAIL
This is another central belief of the Nibiru people - that the Earth’s poles have shifted or are going to shift. This is one of those sites, saying that the Earth's axis shifted back in 2003. You'll find this sort of thing all over the web. Many people believe the Earth's axis has already shifted, killing many people, and that this is what causes many earthquakes, and that it will continue to shift until it points south instead of north. Here is another such story, often repeated by those who believe in the pole shift idea, "Earth has shifted"-Inuit elders issue warning to NASA and the world"
That may seem very impressive, you'd expect Inuit elders to be familiar with the sky and to understand things like this. But no, it seems they are not. Maybe a new generation that lives in houses as none of them live in the traditional way any more, less familiar with nature? Who knows, it's an intriguing question.
Or it might be that what they said is mistranslated. All we have there are subtitles. I’d be interested to know what they actually say from anyone who speaks Inuit.
Anyway whatever they say, the idea that the Earth’s poles have shifted is just plain wrong. This is the easiest of all the Nibiru people’s beliefs to debunk, you can do it for yourself, any starry night.
You don't need to take a look at where the Sun rises and sets, as these sites suggest. That changes throughout the year anyway, and who remembers where it rose before 2003 or whenever it was they say the shift happened?
It's easy to spot the pole star (this is for the Northern hemisphere - if in the southern hemisphere you'd use the southern cross as a starting point to locate the celestial south pole). You can find polaris using the two stars at the end of the big dipper (or plough) - it's quite a faint star, but easy to spot as it's in a rather blank area of the sky, no bright stars there. With a clear night you'll also see the other stars making up Ursa Minor, a sort of smaller scale version of Ursa Major.

How to find the pole star (sketch from wikipedia)
Once you've done that, take a note of where it is in the sky. And then just come back a few hours later. You'll spot that it is still in the same place in the sky, and that Ursa Major and all the other constellations have moved around to another position relative to it.
BTW this way of finding the pole star is the flag of Alaska.
Whenever there’s a clear night you’ll be able to look up and see “yes that’s the pole star in its usual place”.
Here is a youtube video showing how the stars move during the night, and stacked to make a star trail photo at the end. You can see the big dipper at the beginning.
And here is a similar one from the southern hemisphere.
Maroondah Reservoir Star Trail from arteliz on Vimeo.
You can check easily that the pole star stays in the same place all night and is visible every clear night of the year.
Dave Greg (Dazzathecameraman) has a video which goes into this in more detail:
That immediately debunks all this nonsense about the Earth’s poles shifting and the idea that we have had more earthquakes than usual due to Nibiru shifting the Earth’s axis.
It is also easy to check that navigators for centuries have used Polaris to find due north and that it is still due North as it always was. You can even go back through the historical records and plot the drift of position of the pole star due to the 52,000 year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes.
Also, the night sky is not attached to the Earth in any way. If the Earth's axis shifted, Polaris would not shift with it. It's 434 light years away, light from Polaris has spent centuries getting here. So if the Earth's axis shifted, it would no longer point at Polaris.
There's nothing we can do at present that would affect the tilt of the axis of the Earth. The axis is stabilized by the Moon. Mars has no large moons, only small ones and its axis continually changes like this, but very showly, over timescales of millions of years:

Changes of tilt of the Mars axis
Earth's axis though keeps the same tilt, and all that changes is the direction of its axis

This changes the direction of the North pole very slowly over a 25,700 year cycle. See Polar Shift and Equinoxes drift.
The reason the Earth's axial tilt doesn't change is due to the stabilizing influence of our Moon.
THIS ALSO DEBUNKS THE IDEA THAT A PLANET CAN BE ONLY VISIBLE FROM THE SOUTH OR NORTH POLES
This simple observation of the pole star or the southern cross, which anyone can do, any clear night (unless right on the equator) also immediately debunks all the ideas about Nibiru being only visible from Antarctica or the Arctic. There is no need to travel to Antarctica to see the southern cross or to travel to the Arctic to see the pole star. If anything was visible from those places, it would be visible from the entire southern hemisphere, or northern hemisphere, respectively.
Anything that was due north of us in the night sky, in the same direction as the pole star, would be visible every clear night from everywhere in the northern hemisphere, just as the pole star is. Similarly anything due south would be visible every night from everywhere in the southern hemisphere (apart from regions close to the equator where both the north and south pole stars are close to the horizon).
If anyone tells you that Nibiru is only visible from the North pole or the South pole, or they tell you that the Earth’s axis has already shifted, and that many earthquakes are caused by the Earth’s poles shifting, as so many of the Nibiru people do, then you know immediately that they don’t understand the most basic ideas in astronomy. Either they have never learnt how to find the pole star, or if they did, they didn’t understand its significance. Either way, they are not reliable sources in astronomy, and it is best to ignore anything they say about astronomy.
TRUE POLAR WANDER AND NUTATION
This idea may have arisen as a result of a confusion of pole shift with magnetic pole shift. Or it could be due to confusion with true polar wander.
The Earth’s poles do shift very slightly each year, a phenomenon called “true polar wander”. But this is a minute effect, a motion of centimeters per year. At its fastest the poles can move ten meters in a century. This is due to such things as the continents shifting and ice caps melting. For instance the Earth’s axis changed when the ice melted at the end of the last glaciation, and it is shifting now as a result of climate change. See NASA: Earth's poles are tipping thanks to climate change
This tiny effect can’t cause earthquakes or create any noticeable effect on the apparent position of the sun or the stars in the sky.
The Earth’s axis also shifts in position by an extra half a degree on an 81.6 year cycle (half a degree is about the same as the visual diameter of the Moon).
This is due to the influence of the Moon, and is a phenomenon known as nutation. The Moon’s axis also shifts, precesses, by a rather larger 1.5 degrees over the same period. Details here
Again, this causes no problems to us at all. This is a much larger effect than true polar wander - you could actually measure it, by naked eye even, with good tools, but you would need to do precise astronomical measurements to notice this effect.
MAGNETIC POLE SHIFTS
As for magnetic effects, that needs to be a separate debunking post, but in short, our magnetic poles are close to the geographic poles and move all the time. This is nothing new. The north magnetic dip pole which hoaxers say is in Siberia is in fact traveling towards the geographical North pole at present across the Arctic sea. The magnetic field strength is decreasing, but that’s from a level above normal. So there is no sign at all at present that our magnetic poles are shifting. It’s something that does happen, last time 41,000 years ago and it does not cause extinctions. Will happen some time in the next few hundred thousand years and in the middle of the shift, for a while our compasses will no longer work to show north but will sometimes point East or West etc. It reduces the amount of ozone in the ozone layer, so you’d need more sun barrier cream on sunny days, and it may confuse migrating birds. That’s about the sum of its effects and is not a problem at all, it would take a century to happen, and there is no sign of it even starting yet.
So, this is yet another of many very theoretical ideas about how the universe (not our world) might end. If this theory is correct, the universe may end at some point many billions of years in the future, after a time period several times longer than the age of the universe, as a result of “dark energy”.
We have good evidence that the universe as we know began about 14.5 billion years ago. Some think that was the beginning of time and there were no other previous universes, and others think it is just the latest in many such events. Whatever the explanation, if you look far enough back in time you just see very high temperatures everywhere throughout space. As the universe expanded those high temperature photons stretched out and became microwaves which we can detect to this day.
However what is not nearly so clear is how the universe will end.
Some think it might just continue to expand endlessly. Others think it may end in various ways. So the “Big Rip” theory is one of many ideas about how it might end.
As you can see from this diagram, according to this theory we are not even half way between the beginning and the end of the universe. The end of the universe in this theory is 22 billion years into the future.

To put that into perspective, half a billion years is how long it took for the most simple of microscopic multicellular creatures like this to evolve to a human being:

So it’s enough time for that evolution to happen again 44 times over. And it is just one of numerous theories.
According to another recent article on this theory, the time is 100 billion years into the future, so time enough for that to happen 200 times over, see Dark energy could force the universe to gradually unzip itself
Yes, eventually perhaps our universe does come to an end but there are many different theories. Others think it would take more than hundreds of trillions of years. I like Roger Penrose's idea - he thinks that as it expands, all matter eventually decays into light (even the proton) - and that once there is nothing left but light, that then the universe forgets what size it is, and so becomes a new young universe again with a new "Big bang" - that's his "conformal mapping" theory.
One thing that is reasonably clear, that at the moment our universe is very young, and many stars are forming. However, eventually if it continues like this, it will run out of gas to make new stars. Star birth will become a rare event - and galaxies will consist mainly of old stars that will eventually over really immense timescales run out of fuel and then fade away.
Some think we could escape from the universe by manipulating space time. Create a new baby universe or travel into whatever comes next.
Freeman Dyson had another idea. He thinks that it is possible that as the universe gets older, then everything gets colder and slower but that beings will adapt to that by getting slower and slower, more and more sloth like - of course they don't see themselves as slow or see the universe as cold, it just seems normal to them.
So his idea - that even though each subjective "second" gets longer and longer so eventually e.g. their seconds are as long as our years, you can make the future infinite (so long as the protons don't decay - if they do then eventually everything will turn into light - nobody knows if they do or not - they last a long time and nobody has observed them ever decay, but is possible they do on huge timescales).
Anyway, so there are many ideas about what might happen in the long distant future. This is just one of them. But whatever happens, it’s for way into the distant future. It’s clear that our universe is very young. And it’s also got very energetic things happen in the hearts of galaxies, black holes swallowing whole stars. Enormous release of energy. Has been doing that for billions of years. This seems to cause no problem at all, to the rest of the universe.
So it seems our universe is robust, young, and got a long future in front of it, on the basis of what we know of it so far.
This is a good summary about the various main theories. Nobody knows which is most likely though the "Big freeze" is the most popular theory I'd say. They are all about events billions of years into our future.
Speak to anyone with a decent background in physics or astronomy or science - and they will just LOL at the very idea that we might have two suns or an extra planet hiding behind the sun. Here are some famous astronomers who have talked about how nonsensical the idea is:

Brian Cox who colourfully called Nibiru "the imaginary bullshit planet"
Here is Brian Cox's tweet about Nibiru.
If anyone else asks me about "Nibiru" the imaginary bullshit planet I will slap them around their irrational heads with Newton's Principia" - tweet by Brian Cox
- he is a particle physicist associated with the Large Hadron Collider in Europe - and he is a very popular TV expert presenter on astronomy in the UK who has done many television programs and TV series on astronomy

Neil deGrasse Tyson called it "A marvelous work of fiction" by people who flunked physics at high school. He is a very popular TV astronomer in the US, also an astrophysicist and director of the planetarium in New York City.
For a short overview of this from NASA: Why the world didn't end in 2012.
On Nibiru they just say
"Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?
"A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012 and linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 - hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.
..."Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?
"A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.
For debunking right now
Some facebook groups set up to help people who are scared about Nibiru by helping to debunk the stories - for instance you can post videos and photos there of what is claimed to be Nibiru to ask for advice about what they show.
The idea of a dark matter planet is a very far out idea, but first, normally the Nibiru people say it is invisible because it is a brown dwarf. That is easily dismissed.
You can see humans in the dark with an infrared goggles. That doesn't mean we are invisible in daylight. Similarly, a brown dwarf is not invisible in the light of our sun either.
WHY BROWN DWARFS ARE NOT INVISIBLE
A brown dwarf is just a planet like any other, on the borderline between planets like Jupiter and red dwarfs.
They are planets that never got quite hot enough to shine like a star. But still got hot enough for some fusion to occur, so that they do radiate a bit in the infrared.
To say they are invisible is a bit like saying that you are invisible because you are warm and radiate in the infrared. In a dark room with no light you would be invisible to the naked eye but easy to spot with an infrared camera.

Infrared dog. Though a dog is very bright in infrared, shining by its own generated infrared light even in a pitch dark room, this does not make it invisible in visible light
You shine a bit more in infrared than a lizard does, unless the lizard has been warming itself all day in the sun, because you are warm blooded. Does that make you invisible? No.
In the same way brown dwarfs are more visible in infrared than some planets. But that doesn't make them less visible in visible light.
It’s the same with brown dwarfs. They can’t be seen when they are a long way away from any star, because it is so dark there. But they are still easy to spot in the infrared. So brown dwarfs, far from being harder to see than planets, if anything, they are actually easier to see because they shine by their own infrared light even in pitch dark. (Planets do too, to some extent, due to the left over heat from formation and radioactive materials in their core).
When close to a star they are easily seen by reflected light like any other planet.
All brown dwarfs are about the same size as Jupiter, incidentally, however heavy they are - a remarkable property. As they get heavier they also collapse in on themselves a bit so don't get much larger.
Some brown dwarfs are very dark. But our Moon is too, it’s as dark as worn asphalt, and yet is bright in our sky because the Sun is so bright and it reflects just a fraction of that light to us, but it is enough to make it the brightest object in our night sky. It does not produce any light intrinsically, it is all reflected light from the Sun. It only looks so bright because the sunlight shining on it is so very bright and because the night sky is dark.

When we see the bright moon in the sky - this is what we are looking at, dark rocks as dark as worn asphalt. It looks so bright because the sunlight hitting it is bright, and because we see it against a dark night sky. This is a rare lunar meteorite, a meteorite found on Earth that comes from the Moon. Lunaite (lunar breccia)
Brown dwarfs vary a lot in how dark they are, but the very darkest brown dwarf at the distance of Jupiter would still be as bright as Betelgeuse.
BRIGHTNESS OF A BROWN DWARF AT THE DISTANCE OF JUPITER
This paper gives a figure. It says brown dwarfs can be from 0.4 to 0.05 for the albedo. Lower numbers there are darker. The Moon's average albedo is 0.12. So that's darker than the Moon.
A brown dwarf would be roughly same size as Jupiter (as gas giants get more massive than Jupiter they get denser but not much larger).
Jupiter's albedo is 0.343. So a brown dwarf at the distance of Jupiter would be about a seventh of the brightness of Jupiter.
Given those albedos we need to find how much dimmer it is than Jupiter in apparent magnitude. As usual I'll indent the calculation to make it easy to skip.
One magnitude corresponds to multiplying by 2.512 (fifth root of 100) for historical reasons.
So to find the magnitude of the darkest possible brown dwarf by reflected light at the distance of Jupiter, its dimmer by a factor of 0.343/0.05, or 6.86
So we want to find x such that (2.512)^x = 6.86. So x log(2.512) = log(6.86) so x= log(6.86) / log (2.512) or 2.09. So it would be 2.09 magnitudes fainter than Jupiter
Jupiter at its dimmest has magnitude -1.6.
So the darkest brown dwarf, at the distance of Jupiter would have apparent magnitude 2.09-1.6 (as stars get fainter the magnitude increases) or 0.49.
So the darkest brown dwarf, if at the distance of Jupiter when it is furthest from the Earth, would be roughly equivalent in brightness to Betelgeuse, top left star in the shoulder of Orion.

Deep sky image of Orion by Mouser. Betelgeuse is the red star at top left. It has apparent magnitude 0.42, close to the apparent magnitude 0.49 of the darkest possible brown dwarf at the distance of Jupiter at its furthest.
So, no, we couldn't miss a brown dwarf, even in visible light.

Betelgeuse is the bright slightly reddish star towards the middle of this picture, by Till Credner, marking out the left shoulder of the constellation Orion. This is one of the first constellations an amateur astronomer learns in the Northern Hemisphere. It is easy to spot, and Betelgeuse is one of the easiest stars to find in the sky and amongst the brightest and easiest to see.
The darkest brown dwarf at the distance of Jupiter would be as bright as Betelgeuse
WHAT ABOUT A DARK MATTER PLANET
Dark matter is matter that does not interact with ordinary matter in any way except gravitationally. It would be totally invisible to sight but you’d feel its gravitational effect. It is a theoretical idea - there is some evidence for it but the evidence is interpreted in different ways and there are man experiments searching for it, but so far with no success. It may well exist but if so, it is very hard to spot.
The idea of dark matter is main stream, many think it is possible. But it’s hard to see how dark matter could form planets. Ordinary matter can “stick together” with friction and electical effects - but dark matter only interacts with ordinary matter, and itself too, gravitationally. So how could it stick together to make a planet? There is no way for it to lose energy. All it can do is to annihilate itself creating energy. There is this rather far out idea that dark matter could heat up planets far away from any star in areas that have very high concentrations of dark matter (if it exists) like the center of our galaxy, Dark matter could make planets habitable But - that’s a halo of dark matter gravitationally interacting with an existing planet. There is no way for it to form planets, see Does Dark Matter Form Dark Planets?
However we can look at this in a more general way. Instead of dark matter as understood by theorists, let’s look for any form of matter not yet known including asteroids, gas clouds, as well as the hypothetical "dark matter". So it's also relevant to things like "Nibiru".
Any matter inside of Saturn would be easy to spot from its gravitational effects on Mars, Saturn and the Earth. The reason they chose those three planets is because we have had Cassini in orbit around Saturn for years, and many spacecraft sent to Mars, and of course with Earth also - it means we have very precise measurements of their position in their orbits going back many years now.
Then, taking account of the effects of all the known matter in the solar system, they concluded that we are missing less than a seventh of the mass of Ceres. Ceres is in turn less than 1/78 of the mass of the Moon.

Artist’s impression of Cassini’s Saturn Orbit Insertion. Cassini is currently orbiting Saturn and has done so for many years. We have very accurate distance measurements to our spacecraft around Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and other places.
To explain their observed positions exactly we have to take account of all the known matter inside of Saturn’s orbit of any size, even many of the larger asteroids. If there was as much as a seventh of the mass of tiny Ceres missing in that entire region, we’d notice the effect on the positions of our spacecraft which are exactly where they are predicted to be.
To put it another way, if you had an asteroid with same density as Ceres, with this amount of mass, then its diameter would be 950*cube root(1.17/8.958) km or about 480 km in diameter.
So if all that matter was concentrated into a single object inside of Saturn's orbit, it can't be larger than about 480 km in diameter. Or if it was made of ice, it's diameter would be 950*cube root(2.161*1.17/8.958) km, or about 623 km in diameter.
That’s an upper bound, so we probably don’t have as much missing mass as that, and what there is that’s missing is probably in the form of small asteroids as we know there are lots of small asteroids still to be discovered.
So there are certainly no planet mass objects inside of Saturn that we don’t know, or our spacecraft’s orbits would be influenced in ways we could detect easily.
For more on this see Constraints on Dark Matter in the Solar System but it’s a bit techy so for an explanation of it in detail see my "Imaginary Bullshit Planet" Nibiru - Lens Flares, Sun Mirages, Hoaxes & Just Plain Silly
The other issues with a planet massed object in the solar system also apply. A planet’s orbit just can’t be stable over a millions of years timescale. Either it’s orbit or our planet’s orbits would have been disrupted billions of years ago.
For more about this see Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here] by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
This is something that Nibiru enthusiasts have as a cornerstone of their belief system. They believe that the mysterious Nibiru is hiding behind the sun and has been hiding behind it for years - since after all they have been saying that it is hidden behind the sun since 2003. Actually, a planet or comet in a long period orbit like Nibiru can only hide behind the sun for about one month of each year during its many years long approach to the Sun or Earth.
For many reasons why the whole idea of Nibiru is just BS, see Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]. But here we will just look at this idea that it can hide behind the sun.
To understand why this particular idea in their belief system is nonsense you need to know that the sky is divided up into constellations, which are rather like countries on a map of the Earth, but in the sky. Any celestial object, including the Sun, has to be in one of those constellations.
Because the Earth spins, the stars seem to cross our sky once every day. And because the Earth orbits the Sun, the Sun seems to move against the fixed stars once a year. You can confirm all this with your own eyes easily by tracking the sky through the year.
The Sun only hides one constellation of the zodiac each month.

You can find out which constellation it is in for any month from this EarthSky page.
Dates of sun’s entry into each zodiac constellation | EarthSky.org
Those dates are for 2015, but the pattern is the same each year, you’’ll be at most a day or so out if you use those same dates for 2016.
ASIDE ON THE CONSTELLATIONS - WHY THE ASTRONOMICAL CONSTELLATIONS DON’T MATCH THE ASTROLOGICAL ONES
By the way, the constellations there don’t match the ones used in Astrology. The constellations are irregular in size, some larger, some smaller, and there’s a thirteenth constellation Ophiucus which is not included in the twelve astronomical constellations. In addition the constellations will seem misaligned if you are used to astrology - for instance the sun is in the astrological constellation of Virgo Aug. 23 - Sept. 22 (The 12 Zodiacal Constellations and the Signs of the Zodiac ). But it is in the astronomical constellation of Virgo Sep 17 to Oct 31,
The reason for this is because first, the astrologers divided the sky into twelve equal parts, so the astrological signs never matched with the star groupings exactly anyway, and they also ignored Ophiucus. Also the Earth’s axis slowly changes direction tracing a circle in the sky, the phenomenon known as precession of the equinoxes.

Axial precession. The Earth spins around its axis but the axis itself traces out a small circle in the sky over a period of 26 million years. This changes the position in its orbit where each hemisphere experiences its longest and shortest days, and the position of the equinoxes occur (day and night equal length because the Earth’s axis is neither tilted towards nor away from the sun).
As a result the constellations hide behind the sun at different times of the year, slowly drifting around so that a constellation that hides behind the sun in summer eventually becomes one that hides behind it in autumn, then winter, then spring, then 26,000 years later it gets back to its original position as a constellation that hides in summer. Virgo has shifted in this way by nearly a month towards autumn as a result of precession of the equinoxes since the system of astrology was first developed. Astrologers however continue to use the old divisions. So if you were born with the sun “in Virgo” according to astrologers, actually it is more likely to be “in Leo” according to the astronomers.
For details about all this from the viewpoint of astrologers, see Ophiuchus – a 13th Zodiac Sign? No!
So, as of writing this, end of October, the sun is in Virgo. That means you can’t see anything in the constellation Virgo right now, and Libra, the next constellation in the list, is an early evening constellation, indeed, because the sun is about to pass int Libra, it is also pretty much hidden from view. The previous constellation in the list, Leo is an early morning constellation.
HOW TO FIND THE CONSTELLATION WHICH IS IN THE SKY ALL NIGHT
To find the constellation which is in the sky all night, you want the one diametrically opposite Virgo, six months earlier, and that’s Pisces. So right now, Virgo is hidden, also Libra (most of it), and Pisces is visible all night.
All the other constellations of the zodiac are visible some time during the night.
You can check this out by looking at a star chart for your region. Here is the star chart for the UK, typical for the Northern hemisphere. UK Sky Chart - Astronomy Now
Try setting it to different times of the night for today - and different times of the year, to see which constellations are visible when. It is easy then to check with your own eyes that these star charts are accurate - go out any time of night and just check that what you see is what is shown on the chart and that the visible planets are in the positions shown on the chart.
Here are the details for the end of October, which gives an idea how it works.
In detail, right now, then Pisces, Aquarius, Capricornus, Sagitarius and Ophiuchus are all visible at 6 pm where I live. Libra is in bright twilight at 5 pm.
By 5 am, Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer and Leo have joined Pisces in the sky and Aquarius, Capricornus, Sagitarius and Ophiuchus have set.
So of the thirteen constellations of the zodiac (including Ophiuchus which for some reason astrological star charts don’t mention), Pisces is visible all night, so if a planet was in that constellation you’d see it all night.
In fact Uranus is in Pisces right now so if you have a good telescope you can see it all night. It will be hidden behind the Sun for a month or so six months from now.
Jupiter is in Virgo so is currently hidden from view. But it won’t be hidden for long, and six months from now, it will be visible all night.
Neptune is in Aquarius so is an evening through to early morning object at present. It will be hidden behind the Sun in February, and visible all night in a good telescope six months later, in August.
All planets in long period orbits behave like this. They are hidden for one month of the year, are visible as either evening or morning objects for the remaining eleven months, and they are visible all night six months after the month when they are hidden.
COMETS ARE VISIBLE NEARLY ALL YEAR ROUND TOO
We don’t get planets like Nibiru because it just doesn’t make sense as a planet, at this stage in our solar system, billions of years after its formation for all the reasons explained in Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]. But we often do get comets in similar orbits and they are visible nearly all year too, apart from about one month of the year.
Typically we observe a small less than 1 km diameter comet well over a year before it reaches close to Earth or Mars. For instance comet Siding Spring which did a close flyby of Mars on 19th October 2014

Artist’s impression of Siding Spring doing a close flyby of Mars on 19 October 2014
It is a small 400 - 700 meter diameter object and was discovered 7.2 au away from the sun in the constellation Lepus, or further away than Jupiter. It was discovered well over one and a half years before its flyby of Mars. A comet would take longer than that to reach Earth. And that’s a tiny comet. One as big as say 10 km in diameter would be discovered several years before its flyby of Earth or Mars.
So the idea of even a comet hiding behind the Sun for years on end before a flyby of Earth just makes no astronomical sense at all. A planet even more so. A planet would be an easy naked eye object, visible all night for at least part of the year, for many years before it got anywhere close to Earth.
WHAT IF IT APPROACHES FROM THE NORTH OR SOUTH?
Sometimes people will say - “Aha - but what if it approaches from the North or the South - can’t it hide then”.
No, that just makes it worse. If it approaches from the North pole for instance, then it will be in the constellation Ursa Minor so is visible all night every night of the year in just about the entire Northern hemisphere.

A comet or planet approaching from the north pole direction, Polaris - Wikipedia , is visible all night every night over most of the Northern hemisphere
If it approaches from the South pole, then it is in the constellation Octans which is visible all night all year round throughout most of the southern hemisphere
The new Earth sized planet that was announced as discovered indirectly around Proxima Centauri actually was found near the south pole, in the constellation Centaurus not far from the southern Cross.

Location of Alpha (and Proxima) Centauri shown with a pink arrow. Though this planet itself is so far away it is too faint to see even with our largest telescopes, anyone in the southern hemisphere (except right close to the equator) can see Alpha Centauri with naked eye on a clear night, every night of the year.
Similarly a planet (impossible) or a comet (can happen) approaching from a direction close to the South pole would be visible all year round, any clear night, throughout all of the southern hemisphere apart from regions close to the equator
WHAT IF IT TRAVELS FASTER THAN MOST PLANETS OR COMETS
First, the Nibiru people have been saying that it is hiding behind the sun since at least 2003.
But anyway, there’s a maximum speed at which planets or comets can approach the sun. They can’t go faster than the solar system escape velocity, or they would no longer be bound to the Sun and would head off into interstellar space and never come back again (this happens sometimes to comets that come into the inner solar system just a bit too quickly).
Here is a List of hyperbolic comets here - a comet through perturbations of the planets can end up going a bit faster than solar system escape velocity - and as a result it gets ejected from our solar system.
If it is gravitationally bound to our sun, as a planet in a 3600 year orbit would be, it has to take at least a decade to get from beyond Neptune to the Earth / Sun (that’s how long the New Horizons spacecraft took to get from Earth to Pluto traveling at faster than solar system escape velocity).
WHAT IF IT DOESN’T HAVE A REGULAR REPEATING ELLIPTICAL ORBIT LIKE THE OTHER PLANETS
The Nibiru enthusiasts say that Nibiru has been hiding behind the sun for years, which means it has to follow the sun's path in the sky, which means it has to have been in a one year orbit for years.
You could try saying it is in a 3600 year spiraling orbit hidden behind the sun all the time spiraling inwards and then outwards - but that's not what planets do of course. You’d have to tear up all our understanding of gravity. This is why Brian Cox, famous UK astronomer and particle physicist - our equivalent of Neil deGrass Tyson, so memorably said
If anyone else asks me about "Nibiru" the imaginary bullshit planet I will slap them around their irrational heads with Newton's Principia" - tweet by Brian Cox
Newton’s Principia is his great work where he demonstrated that the inverse square law of gravitation could explain the motion of all the planets. With some minor tweaks and refinements due to General Relativity, which mainly affect Mercury, every planet, comet, asteroid, minor planet, follows the laws Newton outlined in his Principia.
Basically to stay hidden behind the sun it needs some kind of an engine to drive it like a spaceship.
We also know that there is no planet sized alien spaceship doing that either, as we do have several spacecraft the other side of the Sun. Mars for instance is often the other side of the Sun and our spacecraft on the surface take photographs of the night sky from time to time.

Curiosity’s first photograph of Earth and Moon, photograph taken shortly after sunset
Here is another photograph of the night sky with sun just below the horizon, from the surface of Mars. You can see Earth, Mars' moon Deimos, and Mercury. These photographs never show Nibiru. No planet sized alien spaceship there :).

Also we have two telescopes, Stereo A and B which are currently on the other side of the Sun from us looking towards the Sun.

NASA lost contact with one of them for a year due to a mishap as it passed behind the sun but has re-established contact now NASA Reestablishes Contact With STEREO-B
But as well as that, we know that it is impossible for there to be a planet sized mass anywhere inside of Saturn’s orbit as it would have perturbed our spacecraft’s orbits noticeably. Indeed the total amount of missing mass in that region is less than a seventh of the tiny Ceres which in turn is a seventy eighth of the mass of the Moon. We probably don’t have as much missing mass as that, and what there is that’s missing is probably in the form of small asteroids as we know there are lots of small asteroids still to be discovered.

Artist’s impression of Cassini which is currently orbiting Saturn and has done so for many years. We have very accurate distance measurements to our spacecraft around Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and other places.
To explain their observed positions exactly we have to take account of all the known matter inside of Saturn’s orbit of any size, even many of the larger asteroids. If there was as much as a seventh of the mass of tiny Ceres missing in that entire region, we’d notice the effect on the positions of our spacecraft which are exactly where they are predicted to be.
For more on this see the second half of Debunked: Nibiru is invisible because it is a brown dwarf and “only shines in infrared” - FALSE - or made of dark matter by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
For reasons why the whole idea of Nibiru is just BS, see Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here] by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
I get this often, people say - what if it is real, won’t you all feel so stupid?
Well that’s like someone saying to me “What if it turns out that you have had a cow in your kitchen all your life and you never noticed, how stupid you will feel?”
Yes I would feel very stupid if I suddenly found a cow in my kitchen which had been there all my life, for sure. But it ain’t going to happen :).
And instead, think how stupid you will feel, 20 years from now, if you’ve been scared of Nibiru for twenty years and nothing happened.
It might help to hear this account of someone who used to be very scared of Nibiru, upturned their entire life as a result, and then gradually realized that they had been had by a hoax. An intelligent guy too, a computer programmer, used to logical thinking, he talks about how that logic went out of the window once he got so scared of Nibiru.
And for why astronomers are sure that Nibiru is just nuts, see
Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here] by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
To understand this, you need to know that by tradition, ever since Lowell called Pluto "Planet X" before they found it, astronomers call undiscovered hypothetical planets beyond Neptune "Planet X". The "X" there stands for unknown.

Percival Lowell, a wealthy US businessman, mathematician and astronomer who lived from March 13, 1855 – November 12, 1916 and spend much of his wealth and time searching for Planet X, a planet he thought existed beyond Neptune,
The idea wasn’t a daft one. Neptune was discovered by a mathematical analysis of the orbit of Uranus.
But it turned out that his theory was incorrect. Clive Tombaugh continued the search after he died and found Pluto 14 years after his death, but later on when Pluto’s moon Charon was discovered and they calculated the mass of Pluto, it was too small to be his planet X.
Since then, by tradition, astronomers refer to any hypothetical undiscovered planet beyond Neptune as “planet X”. The X there stands for “unknown”, not the Roman numeral X for 10, after all Pluto the ninth planet, as they thought of it then, was planet X before it was discovered. If astronomers refer to planet X this means it has not been observed at all. So no, NASA have not been tracking planet X. If any of these get proved to be real, it will be given a name, like Pluto, and the X means it is not known to be real yet.
Percival Lowell's three early searches for Planet X
Though they didn’t call it “Planet X” the search for planets beyond the ones we know goes back to Urbain Le Verrier in Paris and John Couch Adams who predicted Neptune in 1845. So you could say that Neptune was the first “Planet X”. So astronomers have been tracking “planet X” since September 23–24, 1846
The Nibiru enthusiasts take all these hypotheses, no matter what the orbit, even Nemesis which if it existed would be more than a light year away in a very distant orbit around the sun - they say they are all the same planet and are in fact Nibiru in a 3600 year orbit crossing the path of all four gas giants, an astronomically absurd orbit for a planet, that can't be stable for as long as a million years.
That's why they say NASA has been tracking it since 1983. They could as easily say that astronomers have been tracking it since Lovell wrote his 1903 book, The Solar System, outlining his reasons for believing that a planet X could exist. It would be equally false.
They often elaborate the story by saying that Robert Harrington discovered planet X in 1983 and was murdered by NASA or by the government, in order to hide his discovery from the general public.
The truth is that Robert Harrington did indeed hypothesize a planet X beyond Neptune. But six months before his death, Myles Standish used new data from the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune. As a result the mass of Neptune was revised downwards by 0.5%. The data he had been using to hypothesize planet X depended on a more massive Neptune and when you redo the calculations with Neptune a bit lighter,the need for planet X vanishes. See Planet X - no dynamical evidence in the optical observations
Myles Standish’s article was published after Robert Harrington’s death, but submitted long before it and Robert Harrington would have known that his theory was disproved when he died.
And we know for sure that he was not murdered. He died of cancer of the throat. His obituary is here: Bob Harrington Obituary - that’s the more detailed obituary from his observatory. The NY times obituary is here, just says he died of cancer: Robert Harrington, 50, Astronomer in Capital
So, the reason that Nibiru conspiracy theorists are able to say that astronomers have been searching for Planet X since the 1980s, is because they first identify "planet x" with Nibiru even though all the planet X searches are for planets with orbits beyond Uranus and the Nibiru idea is for a planet that crosses the path of all the four gas giants, an impossible orbit not stable for a million years.
They then treat "planet X" as a single real planet although there were many different planet X searches, most of which have been proved not to exist. The idea of searching for planets beyond the ones known at the time goes back to 1845 with the search for Neptune. So you could say, accurately, that astronomers have been searching for "planet X" type candidates since 1845.
But they are not "Nibiru" and Neptune and Pluto which we know do exist, are no threat at all to Earth. The same is true of all the other planet X candidates, if any of them exist.
We have just had two major earthquakes in Italy on the same day - Italy earthquakes: Strong tremors shake central region - BBC News - whenever we get a cluster of earthquakes I get the question - does this not prove that Nibiru exists?
That’s a fallacy called Affirming the consequent - Wikipedia
If someone owns Fort Knox, then he or she is rich.
Bill Gates is rich.
Therefore, Bill Gates owns Fort Knox.
There are many other ways to be rich.
Similarly, the Nibiru enthusiasts claim that if Nibiru exists there would be increased numbers of earthquakes as signs of its impending approach.
Because of this “prediction”, every time we get a couple of earthquakes on the same day, or a few major earthquakes within a couple of days, the Nibiru enthusiasts all start chattering away saying that this means Nibiru is on its way and about to hit Earth.
So their reasoning is
If Nibiru exists, there would be clusters of earthquakes
We have just had a cluster of earthquakes
So Nibiru must exist
There are many other reasons for earthquakes. Also, they often cluster together, either through chance, so many earthquakes every year some are bound to happen within hours of each other, or if they are close together, one can trigger another or they can both be caused by the same thing, e.g. movement of some sort.
A FLYBY WOULDN’T CAUSE EARTHQUAKES ANYWAY
So, the Moon (nearest thing we have to a planet doing a flyby of Earth) causes tides. Our Earth is quite squishy on the large scale and it deforms this way and that every day - the tides go all the way around the Earth once a day. The sea tides we all know about, but smaller "earth tides" too. The Sun raises tides but only because it is so absolutely massive, and it doesn't cause earthquakes either, and its tides are smaller than the Moon's.
The Moon may cause some of the larger earthquakes to be larger than usual, a recent study suggests - every full or new Moon. So that’s every 14 days. Moon’s pull can trigger big earthquakes
Tides drop off as the sixth power so if a planet is ten times further away it has a millionth of the tidal effect. So Jupiter has no noticeable tides on Earth at all. A planet has to be very very close to raise tides.
The idea of a planet doing a flyby of Earth is nonsense anyway in our solar system. But in some other solar system or in the early solar system when planets did do close flybys of each other, they would have raised tidal bulges but only when so close they would be big easy to see visible disks in the sky. And not disks that appear and disappear according to whim as if hidden in a "star trek invisibility cloak".
So even a huge planet unless it came very very close, would not cause earthquakes. It would cause tides first, before it could trigger Earthquakes. We don’t have any unexpected tides.
Earthquakes on Earth, the ones of any size, are usually the result of continental drift, or of volcanic eruptions, motion of magma etc. And the sun or moon don't do things like that to our Earth. It's driven from the interior by the excess heat in the interior finding its way to the surface
WHY DO WE GET CLUSTERS OF EARTHQUAKES?
Well first, you get earthquake swarms, lots of earthquakes all triggered by the same cause, but not related.
You also get earthquakes that trigger each other, aftershocks. This shows the aftershocks of the magnitude 6 earthquake in Central Italy on August 22ns of 2016.

BIRTHDAY PROBLEM - WE WILL GET CLUSTERS ANYWAY BY CHANCE
Then, the total number of earthquakes per year is much more than you might think. The number of magnitude 6 or larger earthquakes per year, on average is 120. Earthquake Statsitics - Statistic Brain
That means that there’s a magnitude 6 earthquake every three days on average somewhere in the world. But that doesn’t mean that they happen equally spaced every three days. If you have only 23 events in a year, there is a 50/50 chance that you get two of them on the same day, that’s the Birthday problem . That’s much higher than the chance that one of 23 people has their birthday on the same day as you.
With 70 events then it is a near certainty, 99.9% certain that you have two of them on the same day at some point in the year. It’s also very likely that you have three or more on the same day at some point in the year.
So, we should expect to get clusters of two or more magnitude 6 earthquakes on the same day rather often. But we don’t normally notice them because they are not reported.
However if there is a magnitude 6 or larger earthquake that actually kills many people or causes damage to buildings then reporters for a few weeks will tend to report every magnitude 6 earthquake in the world, so then you get the false impression that suddenly we are seeing more earthquakes than usual. It is just that more are getting reported than usual. If you have friends in earthquake prone regions they may tell you about earthquakes too, tremors that shake their house, say, when normally they wouldn’t mention them as they are an everyday occurrence for them.

It’s certainly very striking to look at :).
I thought surely it must be a photoshop fake, - no natural phenomenon I can think of and it’s not a camera glitch evidently.
But it turns out it is a genuine photo. Just not a photograph of a second sun.
One of the best and most puzzling double sun photos I've seen. Can you figure out what it is before I reveal the answer? I’ll add in some space so you need to scroll down to see the answer.
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ANSWER
It’s the reflection of the sun off a glass building in Manhatten :). Photo taken from a kayak I think.
Original here
“All those glass buildings have their uses! :-)”
and here: But I Saw It on the Internet… where the author, Vladimir Brezina, explains that after releasing this photo in 2015 they got thousands of visitors intitially from Malaysia, searching for pictures of two suns:
“Needless to say, this makes no sense whatever, and our picture just shows the sun’s rays reflected off the glass wall of a building… “
Here is a zoom in on the high resolution version of the image to prove it:

Vladimir Brezina has lots of other striking and lovely photographs. Many are of kayakers in the sea next to New York, or are taken from close to sea level height, as from a kayak.
That's normal. The people who contact me about this often feel scared for a fair while after they realize intellectually that it is nonsense.
The best thing to do, once you are sure it is nonsense, is to just stop clicking through to read the stories. They have an effect like propoganda, or like advertising, especially as they also use stirring music, a lot of them, and impressive sounding voice overs and images that you find impressive. All this works on you and if you don't have the astronomical background to see that it is just BS, then you come to get scared just through repetition. You can come to believe things that common sense would tell you is nonsense such as that we have two suns, just through repetition like that. If you stop clicking through, then they will gradually disappear from your feed. You can also do other things to help.
You may get a false impression if you tend to click through to read stories like that, because Google adapts to your personal preferences, if you are logged into a google account at the time, and it does that even if you are logged out too. So you may well get many more stories about those things appearing in search results than most people. Normally these stories just don't turn up at all in normal searches unless you search for them explicitly.
You can deal with that if logged in by clearing your web search history or just pausing it, and if logged out, you can disable the feature to use your logged out search history to customize searches.
Of course this may mean that you get more search results that don't interest you in other topic areas. Up to you whether that is worth it for getting fewer of these hoax / urban legend results.
This is a youtube video about it:
The information there though is out of date. When signed out you go to
https://www.google.co.uk/history...
to opt out of personalized searches
and when signed in, you go to https://myaccount.google.com/act... which lets you pause youtube search history (using the blue slider) and also Web and App activity. But I don’t think that will deal with this issue (correction, sorry, earlier version of this page said it would).
If you want to make a complete fresh start, you can delete your search history. This means that for a while your searches of course won't be tailorized to your preferences. It also means you can’t use the search history to find videos you watched before you deleted it.
If you are okay with that, then it should help.
Either way, just don't click through to the stories about Nibiru, Wormwood etc if you ever see them and they will soon disappear completely.
You should then just see normal search results without these stories like everyone else who has not got caught up in this.
You don’t need to delete your search history though, if you need to keep it.
Tiy don't need to do anything except to just stop clicking through and over a period of time, they will disappear from your search results as you show that you are not interested in them.
Also if you get scared about such things easily, I recommend that you don't visit "Before It's News" because that's a notoriously conspiracy theory slanted site where anyone can post anything with no vetting and no checks at all about whether they are truthful or if the whole thing is just made up for clicks.
On facebook, you can customize how it prioritizes stories for your news feed. You can also click on the menu at top right of any story in your news feed and choose to hide it and to show less of this type of story.
YOUR DOCTOR
If you are scared all the time, or a lot, as happens so often to many of the people who contact me, it's also definitely worth seeing your doctor if you haven't already.
As an example of the sort of thing many people nowadays have generalized anxiety disorder, just tendency to be anxious all the time. If so, there's a lot they can do to help - self help, cognitive behaviour therapy, meditation, medicine which help with the serotonin levels in your brain. Details here: Treating generalised anxiety disorder.
Some of the people who contact me about these fears find it helps to visit a doctor so it may be worth a try. Gets you over the difficult rough patch when you are just scared all the time, to get a bit of a break from all that fear and to begin to see things in a different way.
EXAMPLES TO SHOW CLEARLY HOW FEAR DOESN’T MEAN THAT THERE IS SOMETHING TO BE AFRAID OF
Surely we all know of examples when we were afraid of things that were not dangerous to us. One of the funniest is when young children become afraid of their own shadows.
As another example, probably not the same thing at all but as an example of how we are dependent on our bodies, and how you shouldn't believe that you are going to die just because suddenly you feel convinced that you are about to die - you can become totally convinced you are about to die if you get stung by a particular tiny jellyfish the irukandji jellyfish

Small box jellyfish, possibly Carukia barnesi , one of the jellyfishes responsible for irukandji syncrome. Photo Carukia barnesi - by Forgez Wikipedia (there are many other photos of Carukia barnesi but I can’t find one right now that has a suitable sharing license tp include here)
You can read the story of its discovery here: Irukandji Jellyfish. Carukia barnesi
This jellyfish is not dangerous to most people, if you get out of the water and get treatment, but for some reason people who are stung by it become convinced they are going to die, although they don't.
See Apparently There’s a Jellyfish Whose Sting Causes Feelings of Impending Doom
You can get a similar feeling if you eat too many nutmegs, like huge numbers of them. See feeling of impending doom.
INTERVIEW WITH A FORMER NIBIRU BELIEVER
It might help to hear an interview with a former believer who managed to work through the panic.
TALK TO ME
You are also of course welcome to talk to me, via the comments threads on any of my articles, and if it helps to contact me via pm you can contact me via my profile page on Quora. It is easy to join and then you should see an option there to message me.
SUPPORT NETWORK
There are several facebook groups too where you can post for feedback from knowledgeable people who will help debunk a video or image you have seen which scares you:
You can also join our new and lively
See also Where can I get support if I’m scared of Nibiru / Doomsday maybe even suicidal?
Just done a cover draft for my Doomsday Debunked book which I hope to write some time in the next week or two.

The cover shows Cassiopeia A - Wikipedia, a supernova remnant approximately 11,000 light years away.
A blurred out version of this image is sometimes used as the cover picture for Doomsday Stories, though it is of no conceivable threat to Earth. The stories generally don't explain why they are using a blurred out image of Cassiopea A.
The blurred out image actually originated as an image for a story for the Big Rip theory,, where it is tangentially related because distant supernovae were used as data for that theory. It is of absolutely no danger to Earth.
I’ve got lots of material, and the draft outline for the book is here:
Draft preface:
"Humans have a great tendency towards hyperbole - vivid exaggeration to get a message across, or to make a story more vivid. We get bombarded by so many doomsday scenarios in the press and in youtube videos. Some are scientifically plausible, and some are just hoaxes or so absurd to astronomers that they can hardly credit their ears and eyes when they learn that anyone might think such things are true. So how much truth is there in these. Indeed is there really anything that could make humans extinct?
"In this book I go through them all and examine them closely. The aim is to find the truth behind the stories, unexaggerated, just present them as is. I think there is plenty that we do need to be concerned about, such as climate change, extinction of species, environomental degradation, human rights and so on.
Exaggerated ideas of future doom distract us from real challenges which we can actually do something about. They also lead some people to be really scared and in some cases even suicidal. There is no need to be scared of this at all, as I hope will become clear as you read the book.
I’ve written this book and also did my many online doomsday debunking posts as a result of hundreds of comments and personal messages by scared people who ask me to debunk one or other story of the end of the world.
"All proceeds from the book will go to suicide prevention charities. At present the plan is to donate them to Befrienders International.."
If you live in a place with many planes flying around, you may notice that at sunrise and sunset, you get lots of planes flying back and forth in front of the sun obscuring it with vapour trails. For those who buy into the Government covering up Nibiru conspiracy idea, it’s quite natural to then wonder if somehow they are doing this to obscure the sun.
This image helps to explain what is going on here

Those are equally spaced circles five kilometers apart at typical heights that jet planes fly, superimposed on Google Earth. Discussion here.
They seem to get closer and closer as you look further away because of a similar effect to the way railway sleepers seem to get closer and closer - due to perspective.

You often notice this effect with clouds. If there are clouds dotted over the landscape evenly, with big gaps in between them, the sky is likely to be clear overhead - but as you look in the distance the clouds seem to get closer and closer together and near the horizon it looks as if there is just an uninterrupted bank of clouds:

Mixed cloud formations, Karthaus Township, Clearfield County - photo by Nicholas A. Tonelli
This does not mean that the clouds are closer together at the horizon. Someone standing over there, taking a photograph and looking back this way would get a similar view and where you are standing, to take the photograph, to them looks as if it is beneath a solid bank of clouds.
Here is another example, this time taken from slightly above the clouds

So, if the planes are equally spaced, you'd expect to see far more of them close to the horizon than overhead. If you happen to be in a spot that few planes fly over, even just say 20 kilometers away from the nearest flight path for planes, you would only ever see planes flying near the horizon, of the commercial planes in normal flight paths.
So, seeing planes only near the horizon is a perfectly normal thing to happen. If you try looking in the middle of the day when the sun is high in the sky, don't expect you'll get many planes fly in front of it then.
As for the idea that they are deliberately obscuring the sun from you - that just can't be, unless you think the whole operation is directed for your own personal benefit. After all someone who lives underneath wherever the planes are would see them fly overhead and someone who lives the other side of where they are from you would see them low above the horizon in the opposite direction from the sun.
It's just not possible for a plane to fly in such a way as to obscure the sun for more than a few people in a very narrow path - the path basically of the faint shadow cast by its vapour trail on the ground.
If you aren't in that shadow it won't obscure the sun for you. To obscure the sun for everyone, planes would have to fly constantly, releasing so much vapour that you never see a clear sky, just clouds.
It's normal to have more clouds near to the horizon and including vapour trails -for a similar reason to the railway tracks again. If you have a few clouds scattered here and there over the landscape at random, and you are on the ground, then just as for the vapour trails, nearly all the clouds will seem to be close to the horizon.
That is indeed what you see here in Scotland if you go up a mountain and can see for miles and miles on a clear day and you may have clear skies overhead and a few clouds here and there and then clouds around the horizon in all directions. It's just this perspective effect. Someone else 50 miles away who to you seems to be in a region of total cloud would look back in your direction and think you are in a region of only cloud also. Because the clouds cluster together so much in the distance.
Update: The youtube account has been closed, hurray! This is the link to the video - with the “account closed” notice.
Summary: This is just some random guy or gal who typed a date into a youtube video title and made a custom youtube thumbnail. The video itself is an unauthorized copy of someone else’s video which didn’t have a date. This is the third date change. Originally it read 29th July, then 31st October, now 17th February 2017.
It's earned them an estimated $12,200 to $30,000 and it's clear they are unscrupulous about this so will just keep changing the date for as long as they earn money. It's the equivalent of an income for someone, for a few minutes work every few months. It's no wonder that people with no moral scruples do such things, and there are other Youtube doomsday video channels that are run only for ad revenue.
For some inscrutable reason, journalists run stories about these videos, so helping them to get millions of views and clicks and thousands of dollars of ad revenue.
If we could get youtube to stop ads on these videos, they would no longer have any motive for them and would stop. If we could get journalists to stop being so gullible and just posting a story about any youtube video by anonymous people with a striking sounding title and video thumbnail, it would make a big difference too.
If you want to try to do something about it please sign and share my two petitions:
DETAILS
This is a re-run of a hoax from 29th July this year, with a new date in the title of the video. The video was originally launched with the title "Why the World will End Surely on July 29th - Shocking Facts". Journalists ran it as a story in many of the online news sources that don’t do much fact checking, but most shockingly, it was run in the online version of the Telegraph. This is a respected mainstream broadsheet newspaper in the UK. The story said that the world would end on the 29th July 2016.
The Telegraph version of the story had a count down timer to the end of the world at the top of the page (now removed) and a stream of fake tweets about our impending doom. You may be able to spot its humorous tone, but the vulnerable miss this. I got many comments from scared people on my articles, asking questions such as when it would happen in their time zone. For them it was deadly serious. They thought that the world was going to end when that count down timer reached zero.
This is the image used by the Telegraph story. It's become one of the generic images used for doomsday stories. It’s actually a fuzzed out version of this image of Cassiopeia A, a supernova remnant 11,000 light years away by the Chandra X Ray observatory. Nothing at all to do with Earth or our solar system!

A fuzzed out image of Cassiopeia A was originally used as a cover image for stories about the "Big rip" theory. The only connection with the big rip theory is that the research for it involved study of the red shifts of distant supernovae, and I've no idea why they fuzzed it out. This image is now often used for Doomsday stories, with no connection with supernovae and no explanation of why it was used, as for the Telegraph article.
The only basis for the date in the story was the video title text typed in by an anonymous youtube video uploader, "Why the World will End Surely on July 29th - Shocking Facts" and a custom youtube thumbnail they made for their video. There is no way to know who did this, as their identity is hidden behind their youtube channel name.
The video itself was an unauthorized copy of someone else's work, using amateur graphics, elaborating on events described in the book of Revelations, one of the most enigmatic books in the Bible. This book is so easy of misinterpretation that the Eastern Orthodox church has excluded it from the list of Bible passages that can be read from a lectern.
The original authors of the video posted a disclaimer:
"Someone is re-uping our videos and saying that the end of the world is July 29th. It seems to have got some publicity in online news sites, who are saying WE said the world would end on the 29th. Nothing is going to happen on July 29th. We have never claimed such a thing, this date is just another false date being promoted online."
for more about this see my World Did NOT End On 29th July! AWFUL "Silly Season" Story - Journalists Please Be More Responsible
This story, based entirely on a date in the title typed in by some anonymous youtube user for their unauthorized copy of someone else's video ran as a major "Doomsday story" on many news sites online, and the video racked up six million views.
The video now has nearly 7 million views, and all their copies of it in total have over 9 million views, enough to earn the anonymous perpetrator an estimated $12,200 to $30,000 from Youtube ads revenue, from this hoax so far, and it had around 16,000 subscribers at its peak, - naturally many have unsubscibed when nothing happened but it still has over 14,000 and as of writing, they got 1,200 new subscribers in the last month. This is for a youtube channel "End of Times Prophecy" with only that single video on it with different titles. They have now changed the doomsday date to a date in October and continue to accrue views and ad revenue.
They are currently earning between £55 - £886, or around $67 to $1000 per month see their Channel Statistics (this is according to SocialBlade which uses a wider range of ad revenue figures)
As another example the site Nibiru Planet X 2016 with over 1.5 million subscribers, which earns an estimated £250 - £4,000 or $200 to $4800 a month from youtube ads, see their Channel Statistics
Incidentally if you go to the video itself (which I won’t link to directly here, don’t want to boost their link count) then you’ll notice that comments are disabled. It used to have a long list of comments, and many replies to the comments too by scared people. I posted a debunking comment and they immediately (same day) disabled comments for the video, so that they all disappeared. Which surely confirms it is a hoax done just in order to earn ad revenue, they can’t be genuine or they’d have replied to my debunking comment.
The youtube ad revenue clearly encourages unscrupulous hoaxers to create Doomsday videos which scare vulnerable people. So I’ve done a petition for youtube is to stop running ads on Doomsday videos altogether.
This is not an unusual step as they already do halt ads on videos when they think it would be immoral to earn anything from them themselves. I would say that this falls into that category. It's immoral to earn from videos targeted at vulnerable people who become scared and suicidal as a result of watching them. So please just halt ads from these videos. Those who genuinely believe that the world will end can still upload their videos, so it is not any kind of restriction on freedom of speech, just a decision on what forms of income are morally acceptable for youtube ads.
PETITIONS ON Change.org
If you agree on this point, do sign and share the petitions which I started on The world’s platform for change. They are:
PLEA TO JOURNALISTS AND SCIENTISTS
I don't think any of this can be dealt with by legislation. Instead I have several pleas to journalists and scientists, and also a recommendation for youtube.
The main plea for journalists is just to be aware that your stories are read by vulnerable scared people. Imagine that a ten year old girl is reading your story and going to ask her mother or father about it, and then write your story for her, and that might help.
More specifically, do avoid using words like Doomsday and Apocalypse in the title or the text itself for that matter. Those who get easily scared by such things sometimes send me links to stories about e.g. financial crisis predictions after Brexit, and if the story uses the word Doomsday in the title, they will ask me "is this something to be scared of". They are worried that it is some sign of the end of the world.
Of course this is a perfectly respectable literary trope, the use of hyperbole for dramatic effect. There is nothing wrong with it per se. But those particular words are very scary to some people and I think are best just avoided altogether.
Also please consider writing debunking stories. As the Independent showed, a debunking story can often get more clicks and views than the doomsday ones. Such stories can be written in an engaging fashion. Use all the power of language, and vivid imagery, but use it for the purpose of debunking, rather than to promote doomsday ideas. There are plenty of doomsday stories published every month and if we had an equal number of doomsday debunking stories published each month it would go a long way towards addressing this issue.
DEBUNKING STORIES
Those who worry about these things often tell me that they can't find any doomsday debunking stories apart from mine, since 2012. Please consider writing stories that they can read so they don't get the very false impression that everyone thinks the world is about to end.
If you aren't sure how to write a Doomsday debunking story my outline for a future book. Debunking Doomsday may give some ideas, as it's organized by subject with links to my articles and answers.
Then for scientists writing about asteroids, I suggest that you try running things past anyone vulnerable, for instance a ten year old, and find out what their take home message is from your presentation. You might be surprised about how it differs from the message that scientists like yourself and your colleagues get.
This is a shortened version of my article: Journalists - Please Fact Check Your "Doomsday" News Stories -They Terrify Young Children And Vulnerable People
Example: Stephen Hawking Says 'God Particle' Could Wipe Out the Universe
Stephen Hawking does indeed say this. But what he doesn’t make clear is that this is a very academic scientific debate about an unlikely scenario that can’t really happen right now.
Some of these scenarios are just nonsense like Nibiru and can’t happen. Some are real but low probability. You can expect a small but destructive asteroid every few thousand years or a big one every 100 million years.
But this scenario is just vastly unlikely, improbable beyond belief that it could happen right now. Let me explain:
First, if it could happen, then you’d expect it to have happened already in the first 1/10,000,000,000th of a second along with the other symmetry breaking when gravity split off from the other forces, when it was tremendously hot. For an example timeline for the other forces, see Unification of the Fundamental Forces.
Since that hasn’t happened, the false vacuum has to be very stable, or else, probably as we find new physics we find out that it is not in a false vacuum state at all.
And yes, on the basis of the measured mass of the Higgs boson, the false vacuum has to be very stable. Joseph Lykken says that an event that triggers a patch of true vacuum, if the theory is correct, happens on average once every 10, 000, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion years.
That means it is nothing to be worried about. This is so improbable that it can't really happen at all. The chance of winning the Euromillions jackpot for instance is 1 in 139,838,160. The chance of a false vacuum in any particular century is less than the chance of winning a string of twelve Euromillions jackpots one after another without a single miss. Just to win it once is incredibly unlikely. And I don’t mean the chance of anyone winning them all.
Rather, it’s as if you bought twelve tickets for Euro Millions, those were the only lottery tickets you ever bought in your lifetime, and you won it every single time. Do you think that could happen?
For those of you who live in the States, with a chance of 1 in 292 million of winning the US powerball, then if you play it 11 times, and win every time, as the only lottery you ever play in your life that's still far more likely than a false vacuum decay somewhere in the universe in the next century, if the theory was correct.
How tiny are your chances at winning the Powerball jackpot? This tiny.
To put it another way, you'd have to have an immense lifetime to be concerned. If you lived as many million years as a normal human lifetime has seconds, and then as many of those time periods as a human lifetime has seconds, and as many of those vast time periods as ... nine times, then you might have some cause for wondering if perhaps it would happen in your lifetime. It still probably wouldn't.
In detail:
So, this is just an idea that some scientists have. Normally they think of it as something that, if it happens at all, happens not just trillions of years into the future but vast time scales so vast you need 1 followed by a hundred zeros to express the number of years between then and now.
Stephen Hawking said that in theory it could happen now through "quantum tunneling". Lykken said in response that the situation is strange if matter is on such a knife edge between stability and metastability and that it may be a sign that the calculation may be wrong. He gives the example of supersymmetry - a theory according to which particles we know about have other paired much heavier particles we haven't discovered yet. According to that theory our universe would be stable.
We know in any case that the standard model of particle physics is wrong, because it doesn't explain, for instance, gravity. It’s not compatible with general relativity. So I don't think one needs to put much credence on the theory. Stephen Hawking also is fond of saying dramatic things like this.
The first answer here goes into it a bit What did Stephen Hawking mean when he said that the Higgs Boson could become metastable at energies above 100bn GeV, and why would this metastability lead to catastrophic vacuum decay?
A bit more background. The idea is that our universe might seem to be in the lowest possible energy state, but actually is metastable - that it could collapse to an even lower energy state if nudged in the right way.

This shows the idea, how if somehow we could be nudged over tht hump in the higgs potential we might fall down the other side into another state which would have different laws of physics from the ones we enjoy now. We would not survive that transition. It might go to another stable state or just fall endlessly changing all the way with no final state.
If the only other available minimum is higher than our current one then ours is a stable state and we don’t need to worry about a nudge sending our universe into another state. But if it is a lower level than ours then in principle we could be nudged over the hill as it were into that lower state so then our current state is metastable.
It’s obviously a very unlikely thing to happen because our Universe has stayed as it is for nearly fourteen billion years with nothing like this happening. But is it at all possible?
So the thing is that the stability depends on the mass of the Higgs boson. And when they found it, with the LHC, they calculated that our universe might be completely stable, or it might be that it is metastable with this lower energy state available. It is just on the edge, according to standard particle physics.
So that got physicists rethinking this question - if our universe is metastable then just possibly there may be some way it could collapse into a lower energy state. It’s a rather academic question as most think if that is possible, it happens at vast time scales into the distant future.
Anyway the calculations suggest that the universe is borderline metastable though it could be stable within the margin of error, within 1.3 standard deviations. That’s not much, so it is quite possible that it is stable. To find out exactly they need more precise values of the mass of the Higgs boson, and top quark and various other parameters.
If our universe is in a false vacuum state, then you have to ask how we got there. It’s especially puzzling because our universe was much hotter earlier on, so if it was possible for it to get out of its false vacuum state, why didn’t that happen already in the first fraction of a second? Here is Professor John Ellis talking about it:
He is saying he thinks this means that we need new physics, because otherwise why didn't the universe get out of the false vacuum in the early universe when it was much hotter? He thinks that the new physics is supersymmetry and that we have a chance to find this with the next run of the LHC. In other words he thinks that curve graph is wrong.
Here is Joseph Lykken talking about it
The relevant part is 30 minutes in, he says
"If you actually estimate the numbers, most likely it will take 10^100 years for this to happen, so probably you shouldn't sell your house and you should continue to pay your taxes.
On the other hand it may already have happened and it might be on its way here now. And you won't know because it is going at the speed of light so there's not going to be any warning.
Now more interesting to us as physicists is fact that when you do this calculation, using standard physics which we know about, it turns out that we are right on the edge between a stable universe and an unstable universe. That's essentially why it will take so long. If you change those numbers a little bit we would have been wiped out already., or it would never happen. But we are sort of right on the edge, where the universe can last for a long time but eventually it should go boom. So that's very interesting to physicists, so why is it happening, why are we right on the edge? There is no principle that we know of that would put us right on the edge. So one of two things is happening here.
Either we are living right on the edge between a stable and an unstable universe, in which case we would like to explain that, or the calculation is wrong and everything I just told you is just the wrong calculation, but in that case there is something else that has to go into the picture that has to be to do with the Higgs boson and must be very fundamental because it has to change this fundamental property of how the Higgs boson works. And I have two candidates for you for that. One is dark matter which I already mentioned, and the other is supersymmetry, which I'll mention in a moment."
He means that it is incredibly unlikely for it to happen at any time.
YOU’D NEED AN IMMENSE LIFETIME FOR IT TO BE REMOTELY POSSIBLE WITHIN YOUR LIFETIME
According to their calculations then it’s only likely to happen within your lifetime if you have an immensely long life.
If you lived for
10, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 years,
or in trillions,
10, 000, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion years
then there is an evens chance that it might happen at some point within your vast lifetime. If you have a lifetime of only a century or a few thousand years or even a few billion years, it’s so incredibly unlikely to happen in your lifetime that you might as well say it is impossible.
CONSIDER A BRICK
Some people find it hard to understand how something can be so improbable that for all practical purposes it is impossible. Why do people writing about this, and even Joseph Lykken say that it could happen at any moment, when really, it couldn’t?
So to understand this, consider a brick.

Like almost any object that’s not close to absolute zero, its molecules jiggle about because of heat all the time. Suppose that at some moment all the molecules that made it up happened to be jiggling in the same direction, out of the ground. Just by chance, nobody is doing anything to it. Normally when one atom jiggles up, another one somewhere in the brick jiggles down and it stays in the same place. But this time, just by chance, every atom jiggles up in the same moment of time. An accidental brick wide synchronized jiggle. If that happened, it would leap up in the air.
However that’s just a theoretical impossibility because the chance of that is so tiny. You don’t need to keep an eye out for flying bricks leaping out of the ground as a result of the random heat motion of their atoms.
Now if bricks had only a half dozen atoms, yes they could leap out of the ground. But they have so many atoms that for all practical purposes it is impossible for them to do this.
So, it’s like that. Theoretically it could happen right now, right here, anywhere, if the theory was correct. But in practice, no it couldn’t. You might as well call it impossible, for the same reason that you’d say it is impossible for a brick to leap into the air from its thermal agitation.
To put it another way. In any given century, well the chance of it happening at all, anywhere in the universe, is roughly equal to the chance of throwing a fair dice 128 times.
If you did this once only in that year, your chance that you get 128 sixes in a row is the same (approximately) as the chance of it happening in that year.

If you throw a dice 128 times and get a six every single time - the chance of that happening is around 1 in 4 * 10^99.
That’s about the same as the 1 in 10^100 chance of the false vacuum turning into a true vacuum in any particular year, anywhere in our universe - if the theory is correct (which it probably isn’t as our physics is incomplete)
So, not something to worry about. That’s so improbable that it can't really happen.
NEW PHYSICS
However it's also very likely that we just don't understand the situation fully, as we know our understanding of physics is incomplete. In that case, then we would expect to find an explanation which would probably show that the universe is stable and it doesn't have even that tiny chance of happening.
In particular
And there are probably lots of other things we don't know about that would mean it can't happen.
It’s only a few years since we found the Higgs boson. Up until then many thought it wouldn’t exist and hardly anyone thought it would have this mass in just the right region for a false vacuum state.
After all, Stephen Hawking lost a $100 bet when the Higgs boson was discovered. Now he is predicting it will be metastable. He could easily be wrong about that too. He has a track record of predicting scientific doomsday things without putting a great deal of thought into them. See my Debunked - Stephen Hawking puts an expiry date on humanity. He is not as bad as Michio Kaku in this respect, but he does seem to relish his doomsday forecasts.
Anyway - Stephen Hawking is very likely to be wrong again. As they do the next runs on the LHC they might find more Higgs bosons or prove supersymmetry or find dark matter and any of that could make the theory false.
At any time we have numerous theories in astrophysics. At most one of those theories can be true as they contradict each other. But most likely they are all false and the truth is something nobody has thought of so far.
That it's possible at all is puzzling to physicists, it should either happen or not, and it takes a lot of explaining to understand why it would be so right on the edge as that and it could be that it is due to dark matter or supersymmetry stabilizing the universe.
So, in short, they may well end up proving that the universe is stable after all and that this scenario is not possible at all. It is all very speculative at this stage, and if the universe is unstable then it’s only on mind bogglingly huge time scales. You’d need to have a lifetime of about
10, 000, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion years
for it to be something to lose any sleep about.
See also Will the Higgs Boson Destroy the Universe???
And this BBC news story explains it quite well for ordinary folk Cosmos may be 'inherently unstable' - BBC News
Also this one by Pauline Gagnon is good: Quantum Diaries
This is good too, and has an excellent explanation of what “metastable” means using analogy of a bar stool.
Nibiru is just an internet myth / hoax. There is no genuine astronomy behind it. They quote lots of astronomical news stories but they misunderstand them.
The idea of a planet in a 3600 year orbit or a 360 year orbit that crosses the paths of all the gas giants is an astronomical nonsense, BS.
[NOTE TO DEBUNKERS - you are welcome to copy / paste as much of this text as you like to use for your debunking comments on videos on youtube etc]
Here are some of the absurdities
MORE ABOUT WHY NIBIRU’S ORBIT IS UNSTABLE
The Nibiru orbit is unstable and would not last as long as a million years in our solar system because it crosses the paths of four gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all with different orbital periods. It's like rope skipping
Missing a planet on every orbit is like jumping a rope. You can do it if there is only one planet to miss each time. Pluto does that with Neptune, it goes inside Neptune's orbit every time it is closest to the sun, but that's no problem because it is in a resonance with Neptune and just like someone rope skipping - whenever they land on the ground the rope is not there so they don't get tangled up in it. Similarly every time Pluto gets closest to the sun, Neptune is not there and is elsewhere in its orbit so no problem.
But now imagine you have to skip four ropes simultaneously, you have to jump in a regular fashion (because orbits repeat exactly) and those four ropes are being turned at four different speeds with no resonances between them. That would be impossible. Similarly it is impossible for Nibiru to keep missing all four gas giants on every orbit for long. It can't keep that up for as long as a million years. Our solar system is over 4 billion years old. So such an orbit is impossible.
PLANETS BEYOND NEPTUNE
Astronomers do often hypothesize planets that orbit beyond Neptune. They call all these planets “planet X” where the X there doesn’t stand for 10, it stands for unknown, X as in unknown quantity. Pluto was called planet X before they discovered it,
So, if you see a story about “planet X” then it means they don’t know if it exists or not. It’s just a hypothesis.
The Nibiru people seem to think that all these hypothetical planets are real planets.
Then they also ignore all the parameters in the hypothesis. Scientists publish a paper saying there might be a brown dwarf that orbits 1.5 light years away from Earth. (That’s the idea of Nemesis, which is now pretty much disproved after the Wise infrared survey didn’t find it, and would have found a brown dwarf unless it was unusually cold).
The Nibiru people then skim read this paper and conclude that it proves that there is a planet called Nibiru in a 3600 year orbit that comes into the inner solar system and is already in the inner solar system and about to fly past Earth or hit it a few months into the future or a few weeks into the future.
They don’t seem to see the discrepancies between what the scientists say and what they are saying.
They behave like script writers for a movie.
If you make a movie, your ideas don’t have to make scientific sense, they just have to seem plausible enough for most of the audience to be able to suspend disbelief. Even scientists can enjoy movies like that, I like Star Trek and Doctor Who though much of what they say just makes no scientific sense at all.#
REAL LIFE IS NOT A MOVIE SCRIPT
But it doesn’t work in real life. In real life and astronomy the ideas have to make sense and the Nibiru ones don’t.
BIZARRE INCONSISTENT IDEAS
They say really bizarre things. They think that a planet in a 3600 year orbit can stay behind the sun all the way through its orbit. The sun goes through twelve constellations every year. Jupiter goes through one of the zodiacal constellations each year. A planet in a 3600 year orbit would go through them even more slowly. From that it’s easy to see that it’s impossible for a planet in a long period orbit to “hide behind the sun”. But they don’t seem to be able to understand this.
They believe, many of them, that the Earth’s poles have shifited. You just need to go out any starry night, locate the pole star, go out an hour or two later and check that it is the only star that hasn’t shifted and you debunk that idea with your own eyes. Due North still points towards the pole star. They can’t see this.
They also believe we have two suns and that this second sun appears in photographs take in a cell phone camera. It is so easy to debunk this. that just about anyone will just LOL if you say we have two suns, except the Nibiru people.
On any sunny day block out the sun with your finger. Do you see a second sun? (Don’t stare at the sun itself as your eyes can be damaged and you feel no pain as you have no pain receptors in your retina and effects can happen much later like hours later you start to lose your sight)
I find it incredible that anyone even gives this a moment of thought, whether or not we have one sun or two.
IT’S LIKE PROPOGANDA
But I’ve come to understand how it works I think. It’s like propoganda. If you watch lots of videos and read lots of stories then you come to believe it through repetition, if the videos and stories seem impressive to you. Much as people come to beleive in propoganda. Also a bit like the way advertising works.
For this to happen you have to have no understanding of physics or astronomy, but there are many people who flunked physics at school, and indeed why should everyone understand physics :). I’m not good at languages and have no idea about how baseball or american soccer works.
RESPONSIBILITY OF JOURNALISTS
So I think that youtube videos and newspaper reporters are part of what leads people to get so scared about things that if they could relate to their own common sense, they would see are nonsense.
I’ve done a couple of petitions on Change.org
Youtube: Petition to Youtube to Halt Ads on Doomsday Videos
Petition: Let's End Dramatized Reporting Of "Doomsday" Stories - The Vulnerable Get Suicidal
Do sign and share, it may help.
OBJECTS THAT CAN HIT EARTH
As for other objects that could hit Earth, well we have a survey of all the NEOs of 10 kilometers upwards and know their orbits well, and none of them can hit Earth before 2100. We could be hit by a comet but that’s now a 1 in 100 million probability, can be 99.999999% sure it won’t happen this century, and we’d be able to track it for at least a year and probably much longer on its way in if it was a large comet like that.
It is possible for a 1 kilometer object to hit Earth with only a few weeks of warning as though we know 90% of those, that leaves 10% of them still to find. We will have 99% by the late 2020s and are finding one of them every month at present.
An object that large is large enough to cause a tsunami, or to have serious effects on land, and put enough dust into the atmosphere to have some global effects. If we found such an object headed our way we’d need to evacuate the impact zone and couldn’t do much to deflect it at such late notice.
But this is very very unlikely. After all it has never happened in recorded human history and is no more likely to happen in this century than any other. Indeed is less likely because we have found 90% and they are not headed our way so the known probability of it happening is a tenth of what it was before we found those 90% of them. So we can be more confident that it won’t happen than anyone in any previous century already. By the 2020s we will be a hundred times more confident than we could be e.g. last century. Unless we find one headed our way of course, in which case it’s most likely to do several flybys first so we can deflect it, easy to do if it has a flyby of Earth.
Can’t say it is impossible but it’s very unlikely, and ordinary things like traffic accidents or health issues are far more significant. Even being killed by lightning or a tornado is more likely than being killed by an asteroid.
But we can do something about it. For half a billion dollars we can build a space telescope to do an infrared survey from inside of Earth’s orbit close to Venus to find most of the objects down to 20 meters within a decade.

Sentinel telescope developed by the B612 foundation. They have not yet managed to find enough funds to complete it although they did raise many millions of dollars. They were going to partner with NASA but they pulled out due to lack of funding. Any major technological country world-wide could fund this and hardly notice the effect on their defence budget.
It would sit inside of Earth close to Venus's orbit giving it a good field of view of NEOs close to the sun. It looks away from the sun to avoid being blinded by it - and it can then see faint NEOs that are in between the Earth and the Sun which is the hardest place to spot them from our current Earth based surveys. It would help fix that blind spot for asteroids that come from the direction of the sun. It looks in infra red because the asteroids are far more obvious in the infrared.
Eventually it would spot just about everything out there that's in the vicinity of the Earth orbit.
Idea is that it would find nearly all potential impactors down to 20 meters diameter.
If we find anything headed our way then with a decade or two of warning it would be easy to deflect.
It doesn’t make much sense to build an asteroid defense system based on expensive rockets that might not be needed for a hundred million years into the future (for the 10 km asteroids) or thousands of years inot the future for the smaller ones.
So unless we had huge amounts of funding ,the first priority is to do surveys and detect them. If we find something headed our way we can then build the defences against them, and if we do a complete survey we would expect decades of warning and can deflect them easily. So the priority right now is funding to detect them. We are doing quite well there. But for a tiny fraction, of say, the amount the UK government just voted to spend on renewing the Triden tnuclear weapons, an amount so small the defence budget of any major country would hardly notice it, we could find nearly all the asteroids down to 20 meters in diameter within a decade.
I think an ET would find it astonishing that we spend so much on defending ourselves against each other, yet none of the advanced countries in the entire world can find half a billion dollars for a space telescope to find the NEOs that threaten us from space.
For more on that, see Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them
My Nibiru debunking articles are here
And you can tell from the hundreds of comments on those articles how many scared people there are, genuinely worried by Nibiru. It’s so sad, that they are so scared of such a daft idea, which I think most of them would admit is rather daft if they could just calm down enough to be able to connect to their basic common sense and good judgement. Especially young people and people who don’t have a strong background in science or astronomy.
See also my answer to Why do some people still believe in Nibiru?
This is a copy of my answer to When will Nibiru hit Earth?
Star quakes only happen in neutron stars. (Star Quakes (wikipedia)) These are the remnants of super nova explosions and nothing to do with our sun.

However we do get vibrations in our sun. They are like sound waves, though much lower frequency than sound on Earth. Here is some of the sound of the sun speeded up to reach audible frequencies, we don’t actually hear this but they can do videos of the sun and then work out the sound from the movements of its surface:
There is no danger to us from this.
Debunked: NASA is getting ready to Capture Planet X Nibiru on Camera
What they are reporting there is actually an attempt to photograph the so called "Planet 9" - that’s an on going attempt that may take several years to find it, if it exists. They only have a rough idea where to look so need to take many photographs looking for a faint dot that moves between two of the frames.
This is the telescope they will use to search for it. This is just a video about the telescope, not about Planet 9:
The Planet 9 is not Nibiru. If it exists, it's in an orbit that never takes it any closer to Earth than several times the distance to Neptune, and it has to be at the furthest part of its orbit for us to have missed it so far. That's what Mike Brown is talking about.
It is particularly ironic to cite Mike Brown as an astronomer searching for Nibiru. He has written a long article saying that he will answer emails on any topic except Nibiru because it is such nonsense. This is Mike Brown's article about Nibiru: I do not ♥ pseudo-science
And this is my own Debunking Doomsday blog, in a post that explains clearly why planet 9 is not Nibiru. Just look at the diagram for its possible orbit, and judge for yourself: Debunking: Planet 9 is Nibiru
This is something I get told over and over in comment threads and pms about Nibiru especially. Certainly it is true of all doomsday stories, that if you search for them on google or youtube, you find lots of videos and newspaper articles in support of them and generally you have to do a lot of searching to find a debunking article, no matter how absurd the story is or how inaccurate.
But large numbers of people thinking something is true doesn’t make it true. . This is the logical fallacy “If it is popular it is true” or “Argumentum ad populum”
Many people have believed prophets that said the world is about to end for many centuries, at least 2000 years and those were all false prophets as the world didn't end.
In 2012, a tenth of the world population, 750 million people, thought that the world was going to end and they were all wrong. So you can get millions of people believing something and they can all be wrong.
For a more mundane example, for most of human history everyone thought that the sun orbited the Earth, and even after a Greek astronomer raised the possibility that Earth orbited the sun, nearly everyone ignored him (for good reason, he didn't have very strong data in support of his ideas - he needed new ideas which we didn't get until Kepler and Newton, and a telescope would have helped).

The Earth within seven celestial spheres as depicted by Bede in the eleventh century.
The circles are labelled, from outside in, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury, Moon[?]. Outside all of those were the fixed stars and the idea was that all those spheres rotated around the Earth at different speeds.
The astronomers debated how far away these spheres were. In the middle ages most thought that the distance to the outermost sphere of fixed stars in the Ptolemaic theory was 19,000 Earth radii. Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus.
(Modern measurements make the distance to the sun from Earth over 20,000 Earth radii. (distance to sun, 149,597,870.7 km using the value of the Astronomical Unit, and radius of Earth 6,371 km).)
If you were born in the Middle ages, no matter how brilliant you were, how mathematically gifted, until Copernicus came along, you’d have thought that the sun, stars and planets were slowly spinning around the Earth. Probably you would have laughed at anyone who said otherwise, and called them a fool.
For most of our history, most people thought this was the true picture of the universe or something like this - Earth at the center and the planets and stars in celestial spheres - they were all wrong
So it is easily possible for the entire population of Earth to be wrong about something.
WHAT ABOUT NIBIRU?
Often there are no debunking articles in the search results later than 2012 (except for my blog posts and also quora answers by various authors here, which you may find if you search long enough).
For many doomsday stories I don’t know of a debunking article other than my own or the quora answers by many people again.
So does this mean that they are true?
Well as an example, I challenge you to find a debunking article about the 2009ES asteroid scare, the asteroid that safely flew past Earth on 5th September at a distance of 7.2 million kilometers. I don’t know of anything except my own posts. See Debunking: All going to die as a result of impact of Asteroid 2009ES or 2000 ET70 or [insert name of asteroid here] or a “Level 3 Planet Cracker” by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
It is so simple to check these things, yet none of these journalists who wrote those articles about 2009ES knew enough about astronomy to look it up in the close approach tables to find out that it had already done a flyby on the 5th September. They just kept writing articles saying it was due to hit Earth for the rest of September!
And it’s the same for videos. You have to search long and hard to find either a Nibiru debunking video or a Nibiru debunking article, and the ones you find generally date back to 2012.
That's the reason for my two recent petitions:
If youtube stopped running ads on Doomsday videos that would remove the economic incentive for unscrupulous people to upload hoax doomsday videos just to earn thousands of dollars in ad revenue. That would help a bit. You'd still get all the people who upload their videos that they think show two suns etc, but you'd get much less of the fake news channels with hoax videos about Nibiru. Then if the journalists were to write debunking articles instead of doomsday articles, then that would make a big difference too, because many people, like you, will search to try to find a debunking article. If lucky eventually they find mine. Apart from that, the only ones for most of the stories date back to 2012.
This does not make the stories true!
I started this Debunking Doomsday blog to try to help. Also I've decided, I'm going to try to get an op ed published somewhere prominent like the NY Times or the Guardian / Independent here in the UK, that might help, about this issue.
Summary: Legally the president makes the decision and everyone else then scurries around and follows his or her orders; in practice it's not going to be that simple in peace time especially. He or she doesn’t just have a button to press and the weapons fire; it’s a figurative expression. A president who gave that order in peacetime would surely be treated as temporarily deranged and ignored. They would need broad support, from their defense secretary especially.
However, in the event of an imminent attack on the US they decided that the president has to be able to launch a response within minutes. This is a result of the cold war and the idea of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). For that reason the president has been given authority to launch an attack on his or her own without consultation. That's the origin of their power to launch. But it's only meant for situations where they believe that another country has already launched nuclear weapons towards the US.
Although legally the president could invoke this ability in any situation, and just launch nuclear weapons on a whim because they are angry or having a bad day or whatever, they would surely be ignored if they tried to invoke this ability to launch within four minutes in peacetime. Legally that would be mutiny, but those who refused to obey the orders could argue that their president is deranged and unfit to serve, and at any rate in such circumstances nobody would be likely to challenge the refusal to obey their commands except the president themself. It would probably lead swiftly to impeachment.
IN DETAIL
First to be scared of nuclear war certainly is a rational fear. It’s not a hoax or an absurd idea like most of the ones I debunk. I had some fear of nuclear weapons during the cold war. Including nightmares that we’d been hit by nuclear weapons. I’m sure many did back then.
Not so much now, because I don’t feel that an all out nuclear war is likely myself. We are much more connected world wide, than before, with internet, and fast communications, satellites etc, and though there are tensions between Russia and the US, also involving China, it’s nothing like what it was during the cold war, seems to me. And everyone has so much to lose in an exchange of nuclear weapons.
Anyway many people are worrying about the US president or Putin starting a nuclear war, particularly the US president as a result of the short exchange on nuclear weapons between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the third debate.
Many people in these online debates talk about a two person rule. But no, that doesn't apply to the president. I'm using as my sources here the NY Times article: Debate Over Trump’s Fitness Raises Issue of Checks on Nuclear Power. and the Politico article by a Bruce Blair , a nuclear security expert: What Exactly Would It Mean to Have Trump’s Finger on the Nuclear Button
It says that a president can order a nuclear attack all by himself or herself in theory, as the two person rule only applies to missile silos and submarines. The defense secretary doesn’t have to approve it, as he or she is second in chain of command to the president who makes the order.
"The NCA consists only of thePresident and the Secretary of Defense or their duly deputized alternates orsuccessors. The chain of command runs from the President to the Secretary ofDefense and through the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Commanders of the Unified andSpecified Commands."
World-Wide Military Command and Control System, DoD Directive S-5100.30
But in practice a president who ordered a nuclear attack in peacetime might well face some kind of a mutinous action, refusal to follow his orders, moves to be declared unfit to govern etc.
This actually happened to president Nixon, not that he ordered an attack, but that towards the end of his presidency they no longer trusted him with the nuclear button, because of drink problems etc. So, though it was not legal for them to do it and probably mutinous considered from a legal point of view, the secretary of defense James R. Schlesinger instructed the military to divert all emergency orders especially any involving nuclear weapons, to him. In the circumstances nobody was likely to challenge this.
There’s a difference here between a decision to do a first strike, and a response to an attack. After being told about an attack, the president may have only minutes to decide whether to treat it as a false alarm or to respond, and what response to take.
That’s what Hillary Clinton is talking about here in the third debate, six minutes into this extract.
It’s confusing because she pivots. She starts by talking about Trump’s idea of a unilateral nuclear attack in peacetime. But the end of her sentence when she talks about the 4 minutes and saying that former presidents say Trump is not a suitable person to respond in a situation like that she is talking about response if you hear that there has been a nuclear attack on the US. Is it a false alarm? Do you get on the phone to Putin or to China or N. Korea or whoever? Or do you just respond right away.
She is saying at that point that he is not a fit person to make such a decision.
But she isn’t saying that a president in peace time can launch a nuclear attack with only 4 minutes of warning for no reason. If a president did that I’m sure they would be treated as temporarily insane, of diminished responsibility, and ignored. Whether it is Clinton or Trump or whoever it is.
But because of the pivot it’s not so clear, she is somewhat giving the impression that Trump would be able to launch a nuclear weapon in peacetime within 4 minutes.
If challenged I’m sure she’d deny that is what she meant. It’s the sort of thing politicians often do in debate to score a point, pivoting like that.
Incidentally I think it is totally immoral to launch nuclear weapons at all and if someone has dropped a nuclear weapon on your state, heaven forbid as they say, then it does not make it acceptable to use them. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition in the UK, and long term opponent to nuclear weapons has said that if he is prime minister he will never give the order to launch nuclear weapons. Theresa May has said unequivocally that she would, if it came to it, the first prime minister to answer this question in the affirmative (previous ones have refused to answer). So we have quite a polarity in politics on this matter here in the UK.
POSITIVE VISION FOR THE FUTURE
Also - longer term, I believe that it is definitely possible that we could end up with worldwide nuclear disarmament. Personally, I’ve been against nuclear weapons all my life, you may know that Scotland wants to disarm, and it’s a policy of the SNP. and if it became an independent country it would give up its nuclear weapons. Also the leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn wants to disarm. Very few nations actually do have nuclear weapons.
Africa, Australia, New Zealand, South America - they all have formed nuclear weapon free zones. The entire Southern Hemisphere is a nuclear free zone.

All the blue areas on this map are nuclear free. And most nations of course don’t have nuclear weapons of their own. Only the red zones here actually have their own nuclear weapons. The orange ones are nuclear weapons sharing.
It’s about time we had a few more nuclear weapon free zones in the northern hemisphere.
Nuclear-weapon-free zone - Wikipedia
HUMANS EXTINCT AS A RESULT OF A NUCLEAR WAR
So also some people worry we would all go extinct as a result of a nuclear war. But if you think about it only the people in the red or orange zones are likely to be hit by nuclear weapons - as nuclear weapon states mainly target each other.
The chances are that the entire southern hemisphere would have no nuclear weapon hits at all.
And anyway humans are much harder to make extinct than you might think. We are amongst the most reslient of all animals. As mammals able to survive almost anywhere, cold or hot, travel easily, eat almost anything because we are omnivores, able to farm, cultivate anything edible. And for sure could take precautions against radioactivity.
This next section is not really part of the debunking but hope you don’t mind if I add a section about it as someone who has a long standing conviction that we need to work towards ending nuclear weapons altogether:
WHY IT MAKES MORE SENSE TO GP NUCLEAR FREE
This also is one reason why it actually makes more sense from a safety point of view to give up nuclear weapons. As someone who has been a long standing opponent of nuclear weapons for the UK, I don’t see how it gives us any security at all. It’s not as if the only thing stopping Russia from taking over Europe is our nuclear weapons. And anyway when they want to invade somewhere like the Ukraine or whatever, nuclear weapons don’t stop them.
It just makes no sense to me it just makes us a target. The SNP is against nuclear weapons, the majority of the residents of Scotland. In the debate in the UK parliament one of the main reasons they gave for retaining nuclear weapons was because we would then keep our seat in the security council. They thought if we gave up our nuclear weapons we might no longer be a permanent member of the world security council. That’s really backward thinking, seems to me. If nuclear weapons are seen as a prestige symbol, how can we ever get rid of them?
They also said we need nuclear weapons for multilateral disarmament. But you don’t need multilateral disarmament to create a nuclear free zone. The African nuclear free zone resulted from unilateral disarmament by South Africa. If we are ever to have a European nuclear free zone, then unilateral disarmament by the UK seems a good way to start.
And as for the idea that would make us dependent on the US -that’s only if you think nuclear weapons give us security. If you don’t think that ,then it doesn’t make us dependent on them at all. Rather it makes us more independent as we don’t spend more than 200 billion dollars on nuclear weapons which takes away from the budget we could use for other things. Military generals in the UK say that nuclear weapons are an outdated and useless defense system, they don’t see any need for it in their campaigns it just does nothing for them.
As a pacifist myself I am uncomfortable arguing for increased military expense on conventional weapons. But that is what would happen if we reduced nuclear weapons that they would be more capable in conventional arms. Perhaps also we’d have some extra budget for non military things, let’s hope.
The US of course would find it much harder to go nuclear free and not suggesting they do so unilaterally, better to do it in collaboration with Russia, China and everyone else.
But in the UK we can go nuclear free and start to turn thinking around so that instead of thinking of nuclear weapons as prestigious and making you strong, more people start to see them as outmoded, expensive, useless. And hopefully start to get the idea that it is actually prestigious to give up nuclear weapons. That may then eventually lead to a nuclear free world.
DO NUCLEAR WEAPONS “PRESERVE PEACE”?
On whether it saved lives in Japan - well it’s mainly a US rather than a Japanese perspective I think, that it might have saved lives eventually. Not the sort of thing that you’d use to justify a foreign country dropping nuclear weapons on your own cities.
Then, whatever you think about whether they should have used it at all, I think it was unacceptable to drop it on a city. Why didn't they drop it on an uninhabited island off Japan if they had to do it? That would show its awesome power. I don't find the argument valid at all that they had to kill large numbers of people to show how powerful it was. And had to do that twice what's more. Albert Einstein who was one of the people who advocated developing the bomb was horrified that they actually used it and many others at the time in the US said it was the wrong decision to make.
A friend has made an interesting point, that for the generals it seemed like a fire bombing of cities, for instance the fire bombing of Dresden, which had already happened before.

Center of Dresden after fire bombing by the UK in WWII, image from the German Federal Archive. Firebombing of cities in WWII is a highly controversial action taken by the Allied forces with much debate since then.
Which actually I think is morally beyond the pale too, and it surely would not be considered acceptable as a policy by generals in a modern conflict, but they had gradually through more and more of that sort of thing got used to that as something they did in war time.
Only the scientists like Albert Einstein really understood the horror of a nuclear bomb at the time. As for whether (if it is true that it reduced the number of deaths) that it justifies it in hindsight well the thing is it is easier to use such arguments to justify it on another country. Try turning that around and suppose the nuclear weapons were dropped on the US (or whatever country you are citizen of) which for some reason had a fanatical government at that time. It doesn't work so well that way around.
And at any rate that’s past history. We now all know how horrific nuclear bombs are. And nowadays hardly anyone, military generals or anyone, would say that it is morally acceptable to fire bomb a city to oblivion as for Dresden in a modern conflict.
As for modern conflicts, then if, say, North Korea was to drop a bomb on Japan, or South Korea or even, somehow, the US, well they would get immediate condemnation of the entire world. China would no longer be able to support them in any way, and that would surely be the end of their regime, seems to me. We are in a world so interconnected that it is not possible for a small industrial nation to stand against the entire world like that.
While if the US then responded by dropping a nuclear weapon on N. Korea, that would then turn condemnation against the US and China would then feel justified to continue to support N. Korea. It makes no sense politically for the US to respond by retaliating in that situation. And in a nuclear free world, if N. Korea was the only remaining country with nuclear weapons, it would be even more stark, if they dropped nuclear weapons against another country with them the only country in the entire world to retain the nuclear weapon.
I think what we need is a change of attitudes according to which nuclear weapons are seen as useless, expensive, immoral, and instead of being a matter of prestige are a matter of denigration and ridicule by all the other countries.
DOES THIS MAKE THE WORLD LESS SAFE TO GIVE UP NUCLEAR WEAPONS?
No, not at all! Those of us who say we should work towards nuclear disarmament, establishing more nuclear free zones, encourage unilateral disarmament of the smaller countries like the UK etc, aren't saying that US or anyone else should give up their conventional military.
But I don't think there is any evidence that nuclear weapons stop countries from invading. It did nothing to stop Russia invading Ukraine or to stop them from what they are doing in Syria which many object to. It did nothing to stop Saddam Hussein. It is doing nothing to stop North Korea. It surely does nothing either to stop superpowers or small nations. It just puts everyone on edge and makes it possible that there could be a horrible disaster / mistake. That's how I see it.
IS THIS NOT AN UNREALISTIC HOPE - THAT EVERYONE WILL BECOME SAINTS?
I don't think it is unrealistic at all. It doesn't need people to be especially evolved or to have a higher consciousness or anything like that. After all nearly all countries don't have nuclear weapons. And all of the southern hemisphere is nuclear free already. The people there aren't saints or special in any way, they just see it as sensible. Australians for instance aren't champing at the bit to have nuclear weapons. Rather the opposite, the very idea is unthinkable to them, that they would adopt nuclear weapons, for most australians and new zealanders etc. The won't even permit the presence of ships carrying nuclear weapons from other nations.
I think it just needs a change of attitude like that in the rest of the world. Sort of like apartheid in S. Africa. For many decades it was just the norm. But then there was a change until it became unthinkable. Not because people became perfect, just because of a change in ideas.
On a simpler level, when I was young then it was thought to be extremely eccentric and dotty to try to recycle. Now everyone does it, in the UK anyway. Even in the remotest areas - I live half a mile from a tiny village of 200 people on an island, by a single track road with passing places, and we have separate bins for every household for paper and glass and a recycling truck come round once a fortnight. If you drive you can go to the nearest recycling center which typically will have several dozen different bins for computers, bicycles, washing machines, carpets, clothes, shoes, garden waste - you name it, if it can be recycled, there's a bin for it.
I understand from friends that though it is common in the big cities in the States, in some rural areas it is still not done, and recycling is still ridiculed as it was here when I was a child. If so, I expect it is only a matter of time before it becomes normal there as well.
Recycling in some form is now supported pretty much world wide.

Recycling bins in Japan,image by Jorge. In the 1960s and 1970s recycling was something that a few eccentrics would try to do, with no recycling centers, and no support for it at all. Now you get recycling collection services going around to every house, collecting the recycled card paper and glass along with the domestic waste in separate bins, here in the UK at least. And there's recycling pretty much world wide now, surely most countries have it though some may embrace it more than others..
That's not because we are much better people than we were in the 1960s and early 1970s. It is just because of a change of society and ideas.
So, I think we need a similar change according to which nuclear weapons are thought of as unsafe, expensive and useless and most important, just silly. Rather than making you powerful, they make you vulnerable and other countries would ridicule you for being so backward as to think that nuclear weapons help you in any way.
If they can come to be seen like that, as a matter of ridicule, and the sort of thing that leads other countries to treat you with very low esteem, if you still have them, then the change will happen perhaps almost by itself like the end of apartheid once the ball got rolling. And we do have the example at least of the nuclear free zones in the southern hemisphere to show that it is possible.
See also my op-ed here Is Corbyn Right About The Bomb?- Op Ed
I’ve now written this article up as Debunking: A President Of The US Could Order A Nuclear Attack At A Moments Notice On A Whim on my Science20 blog
This is an old chestnut of a hoax in a new dress. NASA Confirms Earth Will Experience 15 Days Of Complete Darkness in November 2015
It’s on newswatch33 which is a fake news site. Newswatch33.com – fake news - website profile - ThatsFake.com
Not worth debunking in detail, the whole story is just absurd nonsense, and as it is a fake news site, it is not meant by its writers to be taken seriously.
Here is the Snope page about it: FALSE: NASA Confirms 15 Days of Darkness in November
Here is the Universe Today’s debunking of it
No, There Won’t Be 15 Days of Darkness in November. It’s Another Stupid Hoax. - Universe Today
Although this story doesn’t say it, I have read a hoax which I can’t find now suggesting that we could have a fortnight of darkness due to passing through the shadow of Venus.
This is what Venus looks like when it transits the sun inj 2012, the last time it will happen for 105 years:

Venus transit,June 5, 2012, photographed by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft. False colour obviously. Credit: NASA/SDO, HMI
As you can see, Venus is far too far away to cast a shadow on Earth at all during the rare times it transits the sun.
There’s no astronomical phenomenon known that could happen in our solar system and block out the sun for 14 days. Or even for one minute apart from lunar eclipses as the Moon is the only object close enough and large enough to block out the sun in our solar system.
Timelapse of a solar eclipse. The Moon is the only object in our solar system that can block out the sun as seen from Earth. It blocks it out completely for a maximum of a few minutes. A total eclipse is visible from a narrow “eclipse track” that traces across the Earth.
For the 2017 eclipse in the US, see this track plotted on google maps: Total Solar Eclipse of 2017 Aug 21
Okay this isn’t actually debunking anything but it’s a natural question. Why didn’t the astronomers spot it and for that matter, why didn’t the Russians spot it on their radar? And the answer in short is that the only reason they missed it is because it is so small and approached from an awkward angle.
If it had been a bit larger we’d have spotted it months earlier. and if it had approached in any direction except from the sun we’d have spotted it days or maybe a week or so before.
Also, if we’d had our present day telescopes operating back in the 1980s we’d have discovered it then when it did a very close flyby of Earth.
Then, there’s a space telescope we could launch for $450 million that would find most small asteroids even right down to 20 meters in diameter within a decade, and also since Chelyabinsk there are new asteroid detection systems in place that will help to find most assteroids, even small ones , sooner, though an asteroid as small as Chelyabinsk from that particular direction remains a challenge to spot from Earth and needs either a long timeline of observations going back decades, or to have a space telescope closer to the sun to look at parts of the sky we can’t see easily from Earth.
So first, why didn’t Russia’s early warning radar system spot it? Well this image helps make it clear

The fans there show the Russian radar sweeps. They are ideal for detecting ICBMs which would approach from somewhere else on Earth. They are not designed for detecting asteroids. It would waste power and it would make them less efficient if they looked in all directions in space, where ICBMs could neer come from.
So, the simple reason is that the Russian radar is designed for detecting ICBMs not asteroids. They can tilt their radar up to angles of 34.5 degrees if necessary e.g. to track satellites but they need to be asked to do that - since nobody knew that Chelyabinsk meteorite was on its way they had no reason to tilt their radar scan to look for it.
More details: How did Russia's early warning system miss the meteorite? Nuclear missile-detecting radars never saw it coming
Asteroids also approach very quickly, Chelyabinsk was traveling at around 40,000 miles per hour or 17 kilometers per second, a normal speed for an asteroid impact though some are slower than that. In one minute it would travel 1020 km, more than twice the distance from the ISS to the Earth’s surface.
So what about the astronomers? Well Chelyabinsk was a tiny asteroid only 20 meters across and it approached from close to the direction of the sun.
This is it’s orbit

Diagram from here: Chelyabinsk meteor mystery 3 years later | EarthSky.org
So it actually was in the night sky, most of the year, it just was too faint to see at that distance even with our most sensitive telescopes, because it was so small. If it had been just a bit larger, it could have been detected months earlier.
It actually did a close flyby of Earth back in February 15, 1982 at a distance of bout 140,000 miles (224,000 km) - that’s closer than the Moon - which changed its orbit to one that hit Earth more than three decades later.
Eventually as we keep observing the sky we will find the faint astseroids like this also but it could take decades to find most of them.
HOW MUCH DAMAGE COULD IT DO?
An impact at that angle even over a city would mainly cause broken glass and such like - could hurt people near to windows as for Chelyabinsk.
However as you can see from the image above, it is just chance that it came in at a shallow angle. If the path was shifted a bit more to the right in that diagram it could hit the Earth more directly at a steep angle. That would have been much more dangerous for humans. It was about a one megaton explosion, slightly less, harmless as an air burst. But if it happened near the ground it could be devastating.
“For a 1-megaton explosion the optimum burst height is about 1700 meters (a mile) and widespread structural damage occurs for any blast below about 5000 m (3 mi)
I'm a little surprised that something only 20 meters across could be so dangerous, it did have a high relative velocity though, 15 km /sec. Well above average for Earth meteorites though not as high as short period comets
There’s a webinar about it here:
I was interested also to hear that it's really hard to model whether or not you get tsunami for ocean impacts. Usually you’d say that 20 meters in diameter is far too small for a tsunami and that it would need to be more like one kilometer - but it could cause a tsunami depending where it hit and the result is hard to model.
WHAT IS THE RISK FROM SUCH AN ASTEROID?
The risk of hitting a populated area is very low because first of all, most of the Earth’s surface is water, and then of the land area, most is uninhabited or sparsely inhabited. Then many of the impacts would be at shallow angles because you have to hit Earth pretty much dead center to get a steep impact.
So - the next asteroid to hit Earth of this size will probably not kill anyone, but it could be hazardous, similar to Chelyabinsk and it could be much worse.
This is also by far the most likely size of asteroid to hit us as the smaller ones are much more numerous. We are probably hit by asteroids this size roughly every 80 years I’ve heard as a ballpark figure. E.g. mentioned here: Incoming! New Warning System Tracks Potentially Dangerous Asteroids
Since only a fifth of the Earth’s surface is land, that makes that 80 year time period correspond to once every 400 years for an impact on land, and thousands of years for impact on a populated area. And a possibility of a tsunami for impacts on water but hard to model, probably most won’t be.
Which does not mean that we are safe for the next 4oo / 1000s of years. We could be hit tomorrow or not be hit by another one for centuries. We were hit by another one in Siberia after all in Tunguska. And though it’s very unlikely, the next one could also hit on a populated area.
It's much more likely that you are hit by lightning, or a tornado, or an earthquake or tsunami or volcanic eruption than one of these. All of those have happened many times to many people. There are actually a few historical records of individual people killed by small meteorites, none since the beginning of the twentieth century. But no instances of many people in one go except a rather dubious Chinese one that seems more likely to be a hail storm with large hailstones.
[will add in the information about historical records of death by meteorite in the C19 and earlier, can’t remember where I have that data just now]
WHAT CAN WE DO TO RETIRE THIS RISK?
If we can find them well in advance, there are many ways we can deflect them. If we can warn of them a day or two in advance that is still time to evacuate the impact zone. ~Detection is the key and this is definitely an addressable problem, it mainly needs funding. Astronomers know what to do to find them.
They are making great strides with the asteroids we can spot from Earth. See Tally of known near-Earth asteroids and comets hits 15,000. They discover about 30 new asteroids per week, or more than three a day nowadays. But some of the smaller ones can only be seen easily from space (or else if we wait for some decades for a close flyby to image them).
The risk though shouldn’t be over played. It’s more likely that you are killed by a tornado or by lightning and traffic accidents and health issues are far more important statistically. But it is a preventable type of accident, can warn to the minute when it will happen and can actually deflect it given enough time. It’s surely well worth finding the funding to detect and deflect them.
It’s up to politicians really and the general public, what our priorities are. The cost of the Sentinel space telescope is $450 million which could find most objects down to 20 meters in diameter with in 10 years and it would be in orbit between Earth and the Sun so able to find the hard to see asteroids that approach us from the direction of the Sun more easily, especially since it uses infrared and they are easier to spot in infrared.
It costs only a fraction of a percent of the cost of Trident renewal which the UK just voted for, and it’s actually a price that a philanthropic billionaire could find too. Anyone reading this got a few hundred million dollars in spare change and want to sponsor a mission to find most of the 20 meter diameter and larger asteroids within 10 years?
Or perhaps pressure on politicians would work. I know there are many natural disasters to protect against. However this one does deserve some attention because it’s the easiest to actually prevent. There is no way to stop an earthquake or a volcano or a tsunami, just have to focus on predicting it. But we can not only predict asteroid impacts years and decades in advance, exactly to the minute, we can also deflect them given enough time. Spot an asteroid a decade or two decades before it hits, and we can deflect it even rather easily, especially if it does a flyby of Earth before the impact as is the usual situation.
There are many ways we could do it but the priority is to find them first. If we find an asteroid headed our way, it shouldn’t be hard to raise the funds for an asteroid deflection mission.
SMALL ASTEROID EARLY WARNING SYSTEM
There’s also work on early warning systems. This one wouldn’t work for Chelyabinsk as nobody spotted it before the impact, but it’s a new computer program Scout, which automatically checks all the observations submitted to the IAU minor planet center for ones that may be on potentially hazardous tracks. It then prioritizes those and sends messages to astronomers to take a closer look. So they then get lots of observations of them quickly. It should increase the warning time of even tiny asteroids smaller than Chelyabinsk from a few hours to a day or two. It won’t work for an asteroid approaching from the sun, but it will work for most small asteroids. Incoming! New Warning System Tracks Potentially Dangerous Asteroids
Another approach is to add more telescopes to look for them automatically from many places on Earth so we can see them quickly. That’s especially useful for small faint asteroids that we might only detect a few weeks before they get here.
That’s the idea behind this scheme from the ESA due to come on line in the near future ESA's bug-eyed "fly-eye" telescope to watch for Earth-threatening asteroids They are motion detectors, don’t actually image the asteroids very well, but alert astronomers to the possibility that something nearby is moving across the sky quickly, so that they will look at it more closely.

FINDING MORE ASTEROIDS QUICKLY
Then, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope being built in Chile, first light 2019 begin science operations in 2021, and full operations in 2022 is a very unusual large mirror telescope. It’s mirror is 8.4-meters in diameter, and unlike most large telescopes which are designed to focus on a tiny spot, it will have a very wide field of view, 3.5 degrees diameter, or just short of ten square degrees, with sharp vision right across its field of view
It will use a 3.2-gigapixel CCD camera to do paired images of those ten square degrees of the sky every 15 seconds all night every clear night (so a total of 30 seconds for each ten square degrees).

That should speed up the detection of the fainter asteroids, sub kilometer scale as far as the main asteroid belt. It should increase the number of known asteroids and comets of all sorts 10 to 100 times. It will image the whole sky every three or four nights in two colours, a total of nearly a thousand full sky surveys in ten years, and take so many photos of the sky that it will be able to do its own orbit determinations for the asteroids (normally follow up measurements are needed for all the asteroids detected). Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). This will let it find the orbits of the asteroids very accurately as well. For details see: [1511.03199] Asteroid Discovery and Characterization with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)
By comparison, Pan STARRS, covers 7 square degrees with each 30 second exposure, 1.4 gigapixels, see Wide-Field Imaging. It has two 1.8 meter diameter telescopes. Pan-STARRS - Wikipedia
So it is faster, higher resolution and more sensitive than Pan STARRS. Also, it’s in the southern hemisphere, so complements Pan-STARRS, which is in the northern hemisphere. Pan-STARRS already finds most of the asteroids to date. Once the LSST comes on line it should increase the rate of discovery even more.
GOAL TO FIND 90% OF ALL ASTEROIDS OF 140 METERS AND ABOVE BY 2020
The NASA Authorization Act of 2005 set the goal to find 90% of all asteroids of 140 meters or larger by 2020.
"detect, track, catalogue, and characterize the physical characteristics of near-Earth objects equal to or greater than 140 meters in diameter in order to assess the threat of such near-Earth objects to the Earth. It shall be the goal of the Survey program to achieve 90 percent completion of its near Earth object catalogue (based on statistically predicted populations of near-Earth objects) within 15 years after the date of enactment of this Act."
We have already reached the goal already for asteroids of 1 km and larger and should have no trouble reaching it by then. Found 90% of the roughly 1000 asteroids that large, and are finding one a month at present.
However the smaller ones are more of a challenge. There are about 30,000 NEOs of 140 meters or larger.
LSST could achieve this goal within 12 years, and potentially faster if it is optimized for searching for NEOs. However, it will come into operation until 2020 (first light) and 2022 (first observations). Also it is currently funded for only 10 years and was funded for many science goals, not just NEOs. So although it will find many NEOs by 2032, it will not reach that 90% target. The LSST team have proposed extra funding to extend its mission to 12 years and to optimize it for NEOs - which if it is accepted could mean it reaches that target by 2034.
HOW TO RETIRE THE RISK PRETTY MUCH COMPLETELY
For half a billion dollars we can build a space telescope to do an infrared survey from inside of Earth’s orbit close to Venus to find most of the objects down to 20 meters within a decade.

Sentinel telescope developed by the B612 foundation. They have not yet managed to find enough funds to complete it although they did raise many millions of dollars. They were going to partner with NASA but they pulled out due to lack of funding. Any major technological country world-wide could fund this and hardly notice the effect on their defence budget.
It would sit inside of Earth close to Venus's orbit giving it a good field of view of NEOs close to the sun. It looks away from the sun to avoid being blinded by it - and it can then see faint NEOs that are in between the Earth and the Sun which is the hardest place to spot them from our current Earth based surveys. It would help fix that blind spot for asteroids that come from the direction of the sun. It looks in infra red because the asteroids are far more obvious in the infrared.
Eventually it would spot just about everything out there that's in the vicinity of the Earth orbit.
Idea is that it would find nearly all potential impactors down to 20 meters diameter.
If we find anything headed our way then with a decade or two of warning it would be easy to deflect.
The Sentinel spacecraft didn’t get enough funding and work on it is paused.
NASA however is still following up an alternative approach NEOCam with a slightly different strategy, situated at the L2 position. If it is funded, this should help close the gap for 140 meters and larger.
However that still leaves the three million asteroids of 30 meters and larger, which are still large enough to be quite hazardous. NEOCam is not as sensitive as Sentinel for these.
NEW DEVELOPMENT SYNTHETIC TRACKING OF ASTEROIDS
However there are new developments in asteroid tracking which may help here. Especially, use of synthetic tracking. The idea is explained in techy detail in this paper. Finding Very Small Near-Earth Asteroids using Synthetic Tracking. For an easier to read summary of it, see “Synthetic Tracking” Set to Revolutionise Near-Earth Asteroid Discovery
The idea is that instead of doing a 30 second exposure, you do many shorter 2 second exposures. With conventional CCDs that adds to the read noise so you get more errors but there are new CCDs developed for medical imaging that permit fast accurate reading, called Scientific CMOS detectors. The Andor Zyla is an example here.

Andor Zyla 5.5 | sCMOS Camera medical imaging camera capable of fast read out with low read error
You can then use this to simulate tracking the asteroid with the camera, which makes the asteroid far brighter in the images.

This image shows a the result of stacking many photographs of asteroid 2009BL with camera set to follow the stars on the left - notice how the asteroid is shown as a streak, and rather faint. On the right, the same photos are stacked to follow the asteroid which then shows as a much brighter spot, and the stars are streaked and fainter.
Image from: DETECTION OF A FAINT FAST-MOVING NEAR-EARTH ASTEROID USING THE SYNTHETIC TRACKING TECHNIQUE
When the asteroid is small and traveling faster across the field of view, the trail can be so faint it can’t be distinguished from background noise when the camera follows the stars. If you know its velocity you can make it much brighter by following the asteroid. But what can you do if you haven’t detected it yet and don’t know which way it is moving? The idea of synthetic tracking is that you take lots of short exposure photos and just try stacking them in many different ways until you find the right velocity and an asteroid pops into vie win the photo. This is time consuming but modern graphics cards permit fast parallel processing which makes synthetic tracking feasible.
This approach can make it easier to spot fainter asteroids. It might mean for instance that you can spot an asteroid ten times further away than before. That means a thousand times the volume of space covered. So this technique can lead to a huge increase in the detection of asteroids.
They found that fewer than eight of these cubesats, fitted with 15 centimeter synthetic tracking telescopes could find more than 70% of NEOs larger than 45 meters in diameter in less than six years. The total cost would be $50 million so a tenth of the cost of Sentinel.
With larger 30 cm telescopes they could find 95% of them in the same mtime period. For details see their 2016 Annual Progress Report
See also my Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them
It is easy to check any of these asteroid impact stories for yourself. Just go to the Sentry Risks Table here
Current Impact Risks
It’s sorted with the asteroid of most risk at the top and it is colour coded, so easy to check. Anything white or blue is no threat at all. If you ever see a yellow entry at the top, that means it is a potential risk, but the chances are high that it is a false alarm. Only if you get an orange or red is there a real risk. That has never happened to date.
I assure you if it goes orange or red, you won’t need to hunt around to find out information, it will be on international news and all astronomical web sites. And if there is an actual impact predicted, you’d get warnings to evacuate the impact zone. This is very unlikely to happen though. In all of recorded history we have had many volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, but never had a major asteroid impact on a populated area. Indeed not even in a desert apart from meteor crater in Arizona 50,000 years ago.
So chances are that this is not going to happen for thousands of years into the future and by then if we still have space technology we have probably been expecting it for a few thousand years, centuries at least, and surely would either deflect it, or just mine it away to oblivion with space mining.
It’s not impossible that we get a largish meteorite impact, even one large enough to destroy a city, or a small country. It’s enough of a risk that we need to detect these things, and even more so the smaller ones like Chelyabinsk. .
As for a “level 3 planet cracker”, I’ve no idea what it means. It sounds like something out of Star Wars.
However whatever it is, it’s not possible. Such things did happen in the early solar system, when the planets were forming, one of them created our Moon. But they haven’t happened for billions of years since the solar system settled down, the largest ones that can hit us are about the size of New York, not tiny, quite large, but neither planet cracking or at all able to make a species as versatile as humans extinct. And the chance of something as large as that is very remote. We already know all of the 10 km diameter asteroids that do regular passes of Earth.
So planet crackers are just impossible at present, in what is a quiet time of our solar system.
MORE DETAILS ON 2009ES
One of these asteroids, 2009ES was photographed by a Chinese observatory in early September, one of the many asteroids photographed every day. For some reason this became a major news story. This asteroid was discovered in 2009, as you can tell from the name. It flew past Earth at a distance of 7.2 million kilometers on the 5th September. The original story did not give a date for a flyby and as a result, the story continued to be repeated in online news sites, predicting the end of the life on Earth, for much of September. Here is an example story: End of The World? Massive Killer Asteroid Heading Towards Earth, Experts Warn on Nature World News and Warning of doomsday asteroid ‘with the power of three billion nuclear bombs’. on Metro magazine.
2009ES has its close approaches mapped out through to march 2200 when it will pass Earth at a distance of between 1.4 million kilometers and 1.42 million kilometers. It has a diameter of between 210 and 470 meters - large enough to have widespread local effects though not enough to have global effects. It is listed as a potentially hazardous asteroid so we do have to keep an eye on it - but it is no risk at all for the next couple of centuries. For details see 2009ES in the JPL Small-Body Database Browser and more details and links here: Asteroid 2009 ES Fact Sheet
More details on 2000 ET70
As another example, right now, many of these online news sources are running a story about 2000 ET70 which isn't anywhere near us this year. The closest it gets to us before 2100 is a flyby at a distance of 5.52 million kilometers on the 19th February, 2059 at 9:20 am. They don't give a source for the story so it's impossible to work out how the misunderstanding arose. If you do a google search for 2000 ET70 the news is full of stories saying that this will be a disaster and kill us all. See this screen shot.
2000 ET70 would not kill us all if it hit, none of the NEOs are that big.
But it is a large asteroid, diameter about 1.5 km, it’s large enough to cause a large tsunami also to have some global effects on climate for a few years and obviously, it would devastate an entire country if it impacted on a populated area.
It is one of the better known NEOs with radar imaging. See Radar imaging and physical characterization of near-Earth Asteroid (162421) 2000 ET70 - they have computed its orbit so precisely that they know it accurately from 480 - 2813 CE. The minimum distance from the Earth over this time period is 4.7 million kilometers. So though it is a potentially hazardous object long term, it’s no threat to Earth for at least 800 years.
HOW TO CHECK AN ASTEROID FLYBY STORY IN DETAIL
First, the designation of an asteroid starts with its date of discovery. So for instance 2000 ET70 was found in the year 2000.
I’ve already explained about the NASA Sentry Risk Table. The risks are ordered with the highest risk at top. It is colour coded so is easy to check.
If the top entry is blue or white, there is no current risk known from any asteroid, and the story is a hoax or misunderstanding. If you want to investigate in more detail, see the indented paragraph:
For a more thorough check, look up the object's page in the JPL NEO browser and click on "Close approach data". Here is the page for 2000 ET70. The first column shows the date. The fourth column shows the minimum distance in au, where 1 au is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. To convert that to kilometers type0.0369406968466726 au in kilometers into google (or whatever the number is). That particular example gives the distance for the closest approach for 2000 ET70 in kilometers.
For a list of all the flybys for upcoming dates, go to the ESA close approaches table. Or the JPL close approaches page. The JPL page is more comprehensive including even very small minor asteroids, while the ESA one has a longer timeline and includes past asteroids for some time back.
IDEA THAT NASA WOULD DEBUNK STORIES LIKE THIS IF FALSE
NASA rarely comment on doomsday stories. That’s not their mission and it has to be something fairly major for them to say anything. So, no, they won’t issue a debunking statement every time the media mistakenly say that some asteroid is going to hit Earth.
It's important also I think to realize that NASA is a space agency, not an astronomical organization. They do make public statements about results of their space missions, e.g. discoveries from rovers on Mars etc. But they aren't really a mouthpiece for astronomy generally. Their announcements are generally tied in some way to an observation or mission, e.g. Curiosity, or Hubble or whatever.
However they have been known to debunk asteroid impacts. In 2015, they issued a statement about an absurd asteroid impact story that got many people concerned.
In 2012 they issued a statement debunking Nibiru. Why the World Didn't End
Debunking: Daily Mail online ran a news story with the title"'Doomsday' comet set to shower Earth tonight" saying that conspiracy theorists claim that scientists have miscalculated the orbit for Halley's comet and that it will hit Earth this week.
Orbit of Halley's comet. As you see it can never hit Earth or any other major planet for as long as it remains in this orbit, which is stable over timescales of thousands of years
(longer term it will probably evaporate away as many comets do eventually, over a period of a few thousand years. It's orbit is hard to predict long term exactly because it's orbit is sensitive to small scale perturbations. If it doesn't evaporate, the most likely outcome is that it is ejected from our solar system within 10 million years).
It's true that the Oronids meteor shower is associated with Halley's comet, but it comes from the debris from its tail, blown away from the main comet by the sun. See my answer to Can Halley's comet strike a planet in the solar system?
I am often asked this - why should you trust me rather than anyone else? Well the the way forward is to learn to discriminate reliable from unreliable sources and to learn to check your sources.
For instance, on the Obama solar storms story, try to find a link to his actual announcement. It’s an executive order, easy to find with a google search, here it is.
Executive Order -- Coordinating Efforts to Prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events
Although a bit technical, it says
“Space weather events, in the form of solar flares, solar energetic particles, and geomagnetic disturbances, occur regularly, some with measurable effects on critical infrastructure systems and technologies, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), satellite operations and communication, aviation, and the electrical power grid. …”
Now go to the DailyStar which says'Prepare for space weather DOOMSDAY' Barack Obama's stark warning to the world and the subtitle says “US president Barack Obama has warned of an apocalyptic solar storm that could WIPE OUT life as we know it.”
That’s obviously not at all what it is about. He was warning about effects on power supply and satellites and effects on health as a result of power disruptions - e.g. hospitals losing power supply, that sort of thing. He was not warning about a disaster that would wipe out life as we know it.
So you know now that the Daily Star is not a reliable source of information on this topic (it’s a red top tabloid notoriously unreliable and sensationalist in the UK).
Now also, if anyone else repeats this story to you, you know that they do not check their sources either, of course most people don’t. So that way you can learn who is reliable and who is not in this topic area.
(for more on this particular story, see Debunking: Solar Storms to end all life on Earth by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday )
You will find other people who are reliable, who check their sources. The best of all are the ones that actually share their sources, so you don’t have to rely on just trusting that thye remembered what they say correctly, you can click through and check for ourself.
That’s what I call “rational trust” and “rational distrust”.
MORE ABOUT RATIONAL TRUST AND RATIONAL DISTRUST
In the case of Nibiru, many of the things I talk about in my articles are things you can confirm from your own experience. You can go out any starry night and check that what I said about the pole star is true. You can also block out the sun with a finger and check for yourself that there is no other sun next to it. You can follow Jupiter through the night sky with your own eyes and you can also check for yourself that every constellation in the zodiac is visible all night at some point during the year.
Or you can go and check on any reliable astronomical site and confirm that they say those things.
You could try learning a little astronomy and then you'll see for yourself that Jupiter and any other planet can't hide behind the sun.
Then there's also "rational trust" - even with no astronomical knowledge, you can look at how various authors use the sources they cite to see if they are credible - people who it is rational to trust.
You don't have to verify everything someone says once you have shown to your satisfaction that they are reliable - once you have done that for a while you get to realize that they do read their sources. I have rational trust in what Phil Plait says about astronomy - he checks his figures and details and I've confirmed many times that he is an accurate author, and every fact he states that I've checked has been correct.
That doesn't mean that everything he says will always be correct, anyone can make a mistake, but my default assumption is that he is right. Also he gives his sources (as I do also) so if it is very important to me, e.g. I'm writing an article and need to know for sure it's accurate, I just follow up the sources and find out for sure for myself. If anyone is not sure about any of the sources also they just need to ask and I'll give more details. I do make mistakes also sometimes, and when people point them out I fix them.
On the other hand with these Nibiru stories, when you follow up the sources, their sources usually directly contradict what they say. E.g. someone wrote a huge long page about an object in Google Sky which he claimed was Nibiru.
It is easy to check for yourself that this object is in facts the peanut nebula, you can check the co-ordinates for the peanut nebula for yourself, and verify that it is indeed the object on google sky which they picked out which then you can recognize visually to be the same object.. It is a distant object about 400 light years away. Once you find that someone has written a great long article about an object 400 light years away claiming that it is a planet in our solar system and building a big elaborate story around that, you can be pretty sure this is someone who doesn't check their sources well. Maybe they don't even know how to do that - and so it is rational to distrust them. So that's "rational distrust".
So - it's not saying at all that they are untrustworthy as a person. Perhaps they are upstanding citizens that have never stolen, never told a lie, and sincerely believe everything they say. But that what they say on the topic of planets can't be trusted to be accurate as they don't know how to discriminate between an object 400 light years away - so far away that it takes light 400 years to get to our eyes from it, and an object in our own solar system. Perhaps it is because of things they don't understand and that nobody has explained to them. Or it might be that someone tried to explain and they didn't understand what they were saying or they were not listening. Perhaps they have never had any scholarly training and never learnt about the need to check sources.
It doesn't matter what the reason is. For whatever reason, they are then people to cross of your list of reliable sources to read in astronomy :). Unless of course they find out that they have made a mistake, admit it and learn the subject properly. Until then, it is rational to distrust them in matters of astronomy.
I posted these videos to the comment thread in my Imaginary Bullshit Nibiru article, and some found them helpful.
Here is the Ringu Tulku video I mentioned at the end of that last video.
I get this all the time. The conspiracy theorists seem to think that NASA has almost unlimited power, able to shape the news stories and astronomical observations and research world wide and to even hide planets and suns from view so that nobody on Earth can see them.
I have no idea why so many of these conspiracy theorists say we shouldn’t trust NASA in the first place, why they single out NASA in this way. If they said the CIA or something, yes, it might have some credibility, but I don’t know of any instance of NASA doing anything intentionally deceptive.
NASA don’t release classified details of the technology for making rockets, for obvious reasons, because it is the same technology used for making ICBMs. Sometimes the US military use NASA facilities to launch secret missions, mainly military spy satellites and suchlike. But apart from those obvious exceptions, they don’t even keep things secret either.
Amongst space agencies they are actually the most open in terms of rapid release of images - Curiosity and their orbiting images are released immediately - while ESA missions often delay release to let their scientists publish papers about them first.
But anyway NASA is not an astronomical body either. It’s a space agency. There are tens of thousands of professional astronomers in many countries world wide and millions of knowledgeable amateurs. And asterod detection is done as a collaboration between professionals and amateurs.
So there is no way that any government or even a collaboration of several governments could keep anything of any significance secret in astronomy. It’s just not possible.
There are tens of thousands of professional astronomers - including 12,000 individual members of the IAU - and most professional astronomers don't belong to it nowadays though it used to be that they all did, it's less important now. There are 74 national members.

The IAU voting in 2006 International Astronomical Union | IAU in Prague. They meet every three years. International body with 74 national members and over 12,000 individual members. This is a press release photo from International Astronomical Union | IAU
The US member is not NASA which is a space administration The US member of the IAU is the National Academies which has 2000 participating universities in it.
The US has an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 amateur astronomers. Astronomy is one of the largest of the sciences and it has amongst the largest level of amateur involvement too with many amateurs making new discoveries. Asteroids are tracked by amateurs who play equal roles with the professionals in this, since it is much easier to track them with a smaller telescope than to tie up a big telescope like Pan Starrs just to track asteroids. Once you know where they are then a small telescope can track them easily.
Whatever you may think about governements, this is not under the control of governments, even if you could get the US, Russia, China, etc all in agreement to suppress some astronomical news, it wouldn't work, because of this wide network of amateurs and professionals. It could only be suppressed in a totalitarian world government with complete control of news media and blogging and facebook posts etc all vetted by them. That is not our situation thank goodness.
And after all, if there was such suppression, why would the professional and amateur astronomers be suppressed, in their tens of thousands, and millions, respectively, yet anyone can upload a photo taken with a mobile phone or a video to youtube without it being suppressed. It just makes no sense no matter how deeply you are into conspiracy theories on this matter.
The problem with all these amateur "observations" of a second sun etc is that they are not used to astronomy, are not used to camera glitches, and don't do the basic elementary precautions that an amateur or professional astronomer would do before they would count something as an observation.
A real object such as a daytime comet, say, gets observed day after day, you can say "look five degrees East of the sun and you can see it" or "look to the West after sunset with a clear horizon and you will see it just below such and such a star" etc. And everyone then can point their telescopes in that direction and take photos of it.
But the Nibiru enthusiasts just say "snap lots of photos and take lots of videos. If you photograph or video an unexpected bright spot anywhere in the sky, that confirms Nibiru". That is not how science is done.
This story is actually true - but it is not as scary as it might seem from titles such as Planet Nine could be making the solar system WOBBLE: Sun's strange tilt may be caused by mysterious world's orbit By a wobble there they actually refer to a very very slow gradual tilt over billions of years. But as journalists do, they chose a more graphic vivid word than “gradual tilt” to help attract your attention to the article. Then people sharing this story online and talking about it make it seem like it is something new and scary that is going on. It is not scary at all.

Artist’s impression of Planet 9 together with our sun, so far away it looks like a bright star. “Planet 9″ has not been proven to exist yet. If it does exist, it may help explain why the eight major planets of our solar system are in orbits inclined by an average of six degrees to the equator of the sun.
The eight major planets in our solar system are in orbits inclined at an average of six degrees to the equator of the sun. This is a long standing mystery in astronomy.
There are several possible explanations including
Astronomers are interested in this because if they find planet 9 they can check to see if it is heavy enough and in the right orbit to tilt the solar system by the amount observed. The other explanations are very hard to test and verify.
If it's planet 9, it happened over billions of years. Nothing noticeable is happening right now, and it is to explain a long standing puzzle in astronomy that we've known about for ages, it's not a new observation.
Details here Did the Mysterious 'Planet Nine' Tilt the Solar System?
Many Nibiru enthusiasts claim that Planet 9 - a hypothesized planet way beyond Neptune - is the same as Nibiru - a planet that they claim comes into the inner solar system every 3600 years and is currently behind the sun and has been hiding behind it for many years and is about to jump out from behind it and hit Earth.
You can check this for yourself whether these ideas are at all similar.
This is the suggested orbit for Planet 9 if it exists

It’s that big red oval. Now do you see the blue circle in the middle? That’s the orbit for Pluto and Neptune. Our entire solar system is inside that circle. So the proposed orbit does not go anywhere near Earth, it doesn’t even go anywhere near Neptune, the most distant of the gas giants from Earth. Its closest point is around 200 au so over six times the distance to Neptune (of 30 au) and its furthest point is 1200 au or 40 times the distance to Neptune from the Sun.
The zone of search shows the part of its orbit where it could be and still remain hidden to us - if it was closer to Earth we'd have seen it already.
To get an idea of how far away Neptune is see Bill Nye’s video here:
After watching that video, can you see that something that is many times the distance to Neptune is no threat to Earth?
So, the people saying that this is Nibiru are wrong.
The scientists who hypothesized Planet 9 don’t have any proof that it exists. They are currently searching to try to find it. For more about this, see
Why This New "Planet X" Is No Threat To Earth :).
For more debunking see also Debunking Doomsday - Nibiru, Pole Shift, California falling into the sea, Supervolcanoes, black holes, … - idea for new online / kindle book.
To debunk: Story in the Daily Star - red top tabloid so these are notoriously sensationalist and unreliable: 'Prepare for space weather DOOMSDAY' Barack Obama's stark warning to the world with subtitle “US president Barack Obama has warned of an apocalyptic solar storm that could WIPE OUT life as we know it.
This is the executive order they refer to: Executive Order -- Coordinating Efforts to Prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events
Although a bit technical, it says
“Space weather events, in the form of solar flares, solar energetic particles, and geomagnetic disturbances, occur regularly, some with measurable effects on critical infrastructure systems and technologies, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), satellite operations and communication, aviation, and the electrical power grid. Extreme space weather events -- those that could significantly degrade critical infrastructure -- could disable large portions of the electrical power grid, resulting in cascading failures that would affect key services such as water supply, healthcare, and transportation.”
So yes, it is true, This is something experts have warned about for some time. The thing is that the sun sends flares into space quite often but most of them miss Earth, and our magnetic field also protects us. Here is a summary of solar flares
There is no danger from the particles themselves because our atmosphere is equivalent in mass to ten meters thickness of water above us. It’s like swimming ten meters deep, except, that because our bodies are also at the same pressure inside, our lungs, blood, etc, all equalized with it, we don’t notice. A bit like the way fish can manage just fine at great depths because they have the same pressure inside and out.
But the particles are charged and cause fluctuations in magnetic fields. Not enough to damage electronics your laptop, tv etc is just fine. But very long distance cables like electricity cables that span tens and hundreds of kilometers can build up large charges along them which then spark through equipment attached to them and can damage very expensive transformers that cost millions of dollars to replace and are hard to make too.
So, it’s to harden those, as otherwise in the worst case we could get power cuts that last for weeks as they work to replace all the damaged equipment after a storm like that. It’s a sensible measure. These storms are very rare but one did happen in the nineteenth century, and so it can happen and could happen again, so it is sensible to be prepared.
Opinion of experts vary on how much it would damage our power supplies. Certainly can happen as a smaller event of this type caused a blackout in Quebec for several hours some years ago. But whether it would damage the very expensive and hard to replace equipment, on that they vary some think they are sufficiently robustly protected already. So anyway it’s a directive to look into that properly and make sure the power supplies are robust in event of somethign like that. It could also knock GPS satellites out - though probably only temporarily, not physically damage them, but cause glitches that force them to reboot. So - there would be some warning, hours at least, with some days of warning that it could happen, but we’d need to be prepared to deal with that issue, I suppose worst case is that they just ground planes / halt operations of anything that relies on GPS for a few hours during the storm but they’d want to find a better solution than that if possible.
In short not at all apocalyptic. I just added a comment to an article on the Daily Star to summarize it:
“This is not an apocalypse scenario at all. The main danger us from power blackouts as happened to Quebec some years back. It's a risk to long range transmission cables. A power surge due to a solar storm could burn out the transformers attached to the cables, They are very expensive, millions of dollars, and hard to replace. In worst case it could be a blackout for weeks until they fix it. So it is only sensible to prepare for this, which means, hardening the power supplies. The last time this happened was the Carrington Event the middle of the nineteenth century, 1859 when of course they didn't even have long range power cables, and it was just a pretty show of lights, the only people who noticed any other effects back then were telegraph operators who noticed sparks jumping from their apparatus.”
For more debunking see also Debunking Doomsday - Nibiru, Pole Shift, California falling into the sea, Supervolcanoes, black holes, … - idea for new online / kindle book.
See also: Debunked: A Solar Storm Put A Crack In Earth's Magnetic Field
These are some of the main features that have been interpreted as suggesting the presence of life. Any hypothesis about ALH84001 has to explain them.
Most of this summarizes the original paper "Evidence for ancient Martian life" together with the later "After 10 years, few believe life on Mars"
Citations:
I recently added this to the article Allan Hills 84001 in wikipedia. But another editor has removed the material summarizing the results of the workshop on limitations of size for microbes.
So I thought I’d copy it here where I can present everything rather than have it as a list edited to be biused against the possibility of life in the meteorite.
The consensus of many - but not all scientists - is that it could be formed by inorganic processes. They haven't proved that these are not fossils, and the hypothesis of life remains compatible with all the observations.
But the bar is very high for proving existence of past or present day life on Mars, as indeed it should be, and most scientists would say the case has not been proven that this was life as it could be due to inorganic processes.
We might well find more meteorites from Mars of the same age as this meteorite that clarify the situation, or evidence from our rovers from Mars may make it all clearer and prove either way that it is inorganic or that these are fossil microscopic lifeforms. That's common on Earth also, in particular evidence of early microscopic life on Earth is often controversial, with various fossils held to be microbes or stromatolites by some researchers and not by others, and then sometimes the situation is resolved by more data, e.g. presence of organics clearly dated to the time of origin of the structures. Microsocopic fossils of alleged early microbes on Earth are often particularly controversial.
This is something I’ve been writing about for the last year, and maybe it’s time to collect some of my articles and answers together into an online / kindle book. So, this is an early draft / sketch outline for it. Links to many of my articles and answers debunking particular scenarios - so if you want to debunk a Doomsday article, it might help. I have also sketched out answers to ones I haven’t done as separate answers here yet.
It will be free to read online, and I’ll donate any proceeds from the kindle edition to some appropriate charity - perhaps the Samaritans (UK), and Befrienders international - as they help people who are suicidal - or more specific organizations to help those with cosmophobia if I find one.
(THIS POST IS MID EDIT, at a guess a half dozen or so more scenarios to add from questions I get asked by pm / comments on my articles)
UPDATE: I have now made a blog and post there regularly at the moment with various scenarios so add them there rather than here. I have at least a half dozen or so more to add, or could be a dozen, hard to keep track, based on questions people ask me via pm. Debunking Doomsday
See also my petitions:
INTRO
This is not particularly for astronomers or scientists. Many of the scenarios I cover are scientific nonsense and as for the theoretical ideas like false vacuum or big rip, probably most scientists again understand enough to be able to put them in context and realize they are remote distant future ideas or very unlikely theoretical ideas and they understand how theories like that are in flux, and may be changed by next year or next decade, and take it all with a grain of salt.
I do cover a few real scenarios such as the Sun being hit by a black hole, nearby supernova, gamma ray bursts and asteroid impacts, all of which are hugely exaggerated in popular science accounts. None of those could make humans extinct except the black hole scenario which is so vanishingly improbable, probably has never happened to any star in our galaxy outside of the galactic core in its entire history, as we’ll see, and the asteroid scenario is far less likely than even most scientists realize, also can’t make us extinct, and many don’t realize how much progress has been made in the last couple of decades mapping out the asteroids of one kilometer in diameter upwards. You can be around 99.999999% certain we won’t be hit by a ten kilometer sized asteroid before 2100 and if one was headed our way, that 1 in 100 million chance, it would be a comet which we’d detect years before impact with our current generation of very sensitive telescopes that scan every night for asteroids and comets.
However, I'm writing this mainly for readers who are either young - many children as young as ten are terrified of these stories and there's at least one instance of a school girl committing suicide because of them, that's in 2012, and anecdotally the NASA astrobiologist David Morrison said he know of several more. Or they may be adults with learning disabilities. Or generally that they just flunked physics at school,and decided science is not for them, and just are not able to evaluate such stories at all.
I have been getting an average of three comments a day by scared people on my science20 blog posts for the last year, and a similar number of private messages. I spend hours most weeks answering these comments and messages. Some of the people who read my blogs have indeed been suicidal as a result of reading these stories too, they say so. I may even have saved lives by writing them. So, for sure there are many very scared people who are so scared they can't function normally, haven’t see the doctor for treatment for anxiety, are not able to relate to their families in a normal relaxed way because they are so scared all the time and so on.
I am writing this for them. That's why I write these doomsday debunking articles and why I plan this book. I would not bother to write a flat Earth debunking article or book.
he scared people who contact me often say they try to ignore these stories. They tell me that they try not to read the stories but then get caught up in them, see a story in a web search and click through. They often also say that they pray that the stories are false - so a kind of religious response really, trying to pray to some higher entity for the story to be false, but that just makes it more scary to them and doesn't work at all.
It does work for them to take an internet break for a few days or a week, but when they come back on line they get scared all over again. So the media and youtube has a lot to do with it. My two petitions to journalists and to youtube are based on that observation.
David Morrison coined the word cosmophobia for people who are scared of the cosmos. however based on my own discussions with the scared people via pm and on my blogs, I think that it’s rare that it’s an actual phobia like a fear of spiders or a fear of enclosed spaces or heights.
The people who contact me speak over and over of the influence of google search results, youtube videos and journalistic stories. So far none of them have said anything about irrational and uncontrollable fears of the cosmos when they are on their own not reading any story or watching any video.
So I see it as more like a kind of propoganda especially since there are so many doomsday stories, new ones just about every week, and almost no doomsday debunking stories. As you can see from this book and my blog, many of the doomsday stories are so silly they could be debunked in a moment by anyone with a scientific background. And with a bit of research it is easy also to put the more scientific ones in context too. So I see the problem mainly as one of understanding. If we can have more stories and books that just describe our situation accurately, I think a lot of this fear will go away. That’s been my experience talking to these scared people just about every day for the last year. And that’s the motivation for this book.
It will also help us all to focus more on the real issues of our day, such as climate change for instance (and not the doomsday exaggerated ideas of climate change that many have - I will debunk exaggerated doomsday too).
HUMANS SPECIES OF “LEAST CONCERN” FOR EXTINCTION - ABLE TO SURVIVE ALMOST ANYTHING
(Draft for intro) With just stone age tools we can build boats, to travel anywhere in the world, survive almost anywhere from the Arctic to the Kalahari, cultivate any crops that we find edible anywhere in the world, farm animals, birds, fish or shellfish. We can also eat almost anything as we are omnivores. We must be amongst the least likely species to go extinct - even extinction events from the past that lead to 90% or higher levels of extinction would surely not make humans extinct. It’s surely no surprise that humans are listed as one of the species of least concern in the IUCN Red list of threatened species.
So, 90% of all species extinct doesn’t at all mean 90% chance of humans going extinct. Rather I think you can put a strong argument for 0% chance for human extinction, so long as a fraction of a percent of Earth’s species remain. First, we can and do preserve seed banks of valuable crop species. And even if somehow all of those were lost, amongst the surviving species there are bound to be a few that humans can eat, farm, cultivate etc. It doesn’t matter much where they are in the world either as we can build boats, survive cold, heat, drought, and travel great distances with minimal technology to find them.
I cover this a bit in
NIBIRU

Get this as a kindle ebook (127 pages) - note the word "Bullshit" is not a "bad word" in the UK, is used by just about anyone as a mild exclamation. The title here is a quote from Brian Cox.
POLE SHIFT, “GLOBAL EARTHQUAKE”, CALIFORNIA “FALLING INTO THE SEA”
SUPERVOLCANO
This is a real thing but with many “urban legend” type myths associated which I debunk.
What will really happen when the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts?
“BLOOD MOONS”
also available as a kindle booklet

BLACK HOLES
SUPERNOVA, GAMMA RAY BURST ETC
I cover it briefly in Could Anything Make Humans Extinct In The Near Future?
GLOBAL NUCLEAR WAR
In the present situation, it’s more likely to be regional, say India and Pakistan or North Korea. That’s certainly bad enough and must be prevented, it would be an appalling human catastrophe on a giant scale. but not an extinction event.
Pretty much the entire southern hemisphere is a nuclear weapon free zone.

File:Nwfz.svg Blue for nuclear weapon free zones, yellow for non proliferation treaty, orange for weapons sharing with nuclear states, and red for nuclear weapon zones.
Nuclear states target each other and it’s not at all likely that e.g. Australia or New Zealand would be targeted. As for the “nuclear winter” then after an all out exchange with Russia and the US dropping all their weapons - it could lead to a “nuclear winter” due to thick clouds covering the Earth for several years.
This would cool the world down by up to 10 C for a decade. You can still grow crops however - it’s incorrect to say that all vegetation would die. Instead what it means is that you have to grow crops from a part of the world that is about ten degrees cooler for a few years. Devastating for natural vegetation and wild animals of course. But certainly it’s not an end to agriculture. If it happened during the growing season it would disrupt crops for that year, and there would also be a period of experimentation figuring out which crops grow in the temporarily cooler world, so the following year also would be pretty devastating too unless it’s planned for in advance with a year or two of warning of what’s going to happen. At any rate not remotely an extinction event. And though there are concerns about local nuclear wars, especially involving North Korea, right now, it’s not that likely that we have a global nuclear war - not like it was in the “Cold War”.
STORIES WITH THE WORD “DOOMSDAY” IN THEIR TITLE
The word “doomsday” is often used as Hyperbole- a
Sometimes people worry about stories like this one:
It doesn’t mean that they are worried about a literal “apocalypse” or “Doomsday”.
As wikipedia puts it - a reasonable definition:
“Hyperbole … is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. Inpoetry and oratory, it emphasizes, evokes strong feelings, and creates strong impressions. As a figure of speech, it is usually not meant to be taken literally.”
As an example, if you say “I could eat a horse” it doesn’t mean you literally could eat a horse. I could eat a horse. So that’s an example of hyperbole
“DOOMSDAY CLOCK”
I sometimes get asked about this by people who take the name literally as a warning of “doomsday” or the end of all humanity. Again this is a hyperbole. It’s referring to all out nuclear war and other things that could lead to widespread suffering and devastation. It does not mean “Doomsday” as in Revelations taken literally.
Stories like this scare vulnerable people because of the use of the word “Doomsday” in the title. I don’t know what you can do about that, except to touch on that somewhere in the article that it is not a literal doomsday, and not a prophecy of some probability of a literal Revelations? It’s well established as the generally used name for this “clock” and it serves a useful role helping decision makers to keep alert to such things as global nuclear war to prevent it happening. The Doomsday Clock in Fiction and Reality - The Crux
CORONAL HOLE / CORONAL MASS EJECTION
This is an example of “Doomsday” used as hyperbole for a scenario that you might think plausibly could cause doomsday if you don’t know much astronomy. Such articles need especial care if you want to avoid scaring the vulnerable out of their wits.
It’s just a “coronal hole”. They are quite common and no idea why NASA did such a sensationalist article about this one. You can get more aurora, and you just possibly could get a solar storm, but most often won’t get much happen.
In the worst case a solar storm could knock out the power grid and that has happened in the past. Most vulnerable at higher latitudes further from the equator, a solar storm knocked out the electricity grid for Quebec for some time a while back. A really strong solar storm could do much more than that. But it mainly affects long distance cables - especially multiple kilometers long. Doesn’t do anything on a smaller scale. Mainly long range transmission. The particles themselves don’t get through our atmosphere, just its magnetic effects. Most likely effect though, get auroras further south than usual. Often nothing happens because it also depends on the position of Earth relative to any solar storms which often just miss us, head off into space but never come anywhere near Earth.
It can also affect satellites - more through temporary glitches in the memory rather than direct damage - but that could be enough to take a satellite off line temporarily or permanently.
MINI ICE AGE
Doomsday 'looming' as Sun goes blank sparking ice age fears
It is true in a way, that there’s a prediction of a new “mini ice age” except they have rather exaggerated it. It’s a reduction of global temperatures by about 0.1 C for about 30 years. That’s enough so that if they are right, temperatures might stop increasing and maybe even decrease slightly for a while before increasing again due to global warming. But it’s not really an “ice age” in the way you’d think about it, In the Maunder minimum then the Thames froze over. But with all the global warming since then, hardly likely to happen this time around, it’s also a much shorter minimum they are predicting, only 30 years. And it is just a theory, not proven yet, if their prediction is right then it will help establish their theory. If it’s wrong, their theory is wrong or needs to be refined and so far nothing has happened. It’s normal for the sun to have few or no sun spots at times at this time in its cycle.
CLIMATE CHANGE
See Could Anything Make Humans Extinct In The Near Future?
OUR ENTIRE UNIVERSE DYING
See Could Anything Make Humans Extinct In The Near Future?
BIG RIP
This theory got dramatic titles such as "Universe WILL tear itself apart with a 'Big Rip" destroying all life in seconds, scientists say", and The Universe Could Tear Itself Apart Sooner Than Anyone Believed
It’s actually a theory about the way the universe could end billions of years into the future. The new research suggested it could happen as early as 16.7 billion years from now, though the best fit is 103.5 billion years into the future. It is only one theory of many that cosmologists suggest, not especially favoured over the others.
At any rate, it took half a billion years to evolve from the smallest of multicellular creatures to humans. So this billions of years into the future is an immense timescale.
BOOK OF REVELATION?
Same article again: September 24th, 2015 - Just Another Day In Space - Asteroid Flybys, "Blood Moons" And Armageddon Demystified - about how Christians interpret Revelations with the four main interpreetations
and about how it’s a message of hope and can’t possibly be a prediction of meteorite impacts as they didn’t know that asteroids or meteorites existed back then.
MISLEADINGLY DRAMATIC IMAGES
This image is frequently used to illustrate asteroid impact stories.

Planetoid crashing into primordial Earth - it’s the size of a small Moon! We haven’t had impacts like this for well over three billion years and from the cratering evidence, we are not at any risk of such impacts.
One of the most absurd uses of it is in this article about a 100 foot diameter asteroid flyby:Asteroid Threats To Earth Continue Well After 2013 TX68 Passes Our Home Planet
A google image search shows that it is a very commonly used image for asteroid impact or flyby articles. Google
Then what about this image

from How to Survive a Mass Extinction, According to Neal Stephenson
This again is frequently used for asteroid impact stories Google - I’m not sure what it is supposed to depict - the earliest version I can find online is here What Would Hapen If a Comet Hit Earth Picture on VisualizeUs which is cropped so can’t be the original.
Also this video is often shared
Which again is a similar scenario - a planetoid, or an asteroid the size of a small moon. Those just don’t happen any more, not for over three billion years. That was from the “Discovery channel” - it is a good realization, the only thing is, it’s not something that could happen realistically.
Sometimes they even use artist’s impressions of the giant impact of Theia with proto Earth which formed the Moon according to one of the most widely accepted theories for the origin of the Moon:

Asteroid TV135 Q&A: will giant rock destroy Earth in 2032?
Such things did happen in the early solar system. But is totally inappropriate to use them to illustrate stories about present day Earth.
Basically it is a kind of “visual hyperbole”.
Summary of the scientific understanding of origins of the Moon - back then the solar system was very chaotic.
And this is a simulation of what happened
And for a fair while after that, for several hundred million years, the Moon (and Earth, Mercury, Mars, surely Venus too) were hit by numerous big objects that formed the larger craters:
But since then it has settled down. So these images based on events in the very early solar system are misleading - or at least, visual hyperbole.
This is another image used often for articles about asteroid impacts etc

For instance it was used in that awful Daily Telegraph article: End of the world? Doomsday believers predict the apocalypse and again a google image search shows it is frequently used for these stories: Google
It’s actually a fuzzed out version of this image of Cassiopea A by the Chandra X Ray observatory. Nothing at all to do with Earth or our solar system!

There are plenty of accurate dramatic images of asteroid impacts. Such as:

That's the image that was widely used for reporting 2013 TV135 the roughly 450 meters diameter asteroid that we now know will be over three quarters of the distance to the sun away from Earth on that date.
For a larger, 10 km asteroid, this is an accurate artist's impression, from NASA.

About 70 impactors this large or larger have hit Earth since 3.8 billion years ago.
Also another one that’s used a fair bit and is accurate - depiction from ground level:

Artist's impression of the impact at the end of the Cretaceous period - credit Don Davis, painted for NASA
These impact events are also very rare, 99.9999% certain they won’t happen in any particular century (one chance in a million). And you can add a couple of extra nines, one chance in a 100 million for this century as we already know all the 10 km or larger NEOs and none are headed for us. That leaves only the perhaps 1% of impacts from comets, which we’d also have a lot of warning for as well most likely, see my Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them
WORLD ENDING EVENTUALLY ACCORDING TO SCIENTIFIC IDEAS
Same article again:

HUMANS COULD BE WONDERFUL OR AWFUL FOR THE GALAXY
I’ll end by talking about this, about how just filling the galaxy with humans is not an objective “good” - we could be harmful as well as beneficial. So it’s important not just to focus on preserving humans and our civilization, but also making sure we are “good citizens” in our galaxy. Based on my section in “Case for Moon”
(THIS POST IS MID EDIT) - I get asked about numerous “Doomsday” scenarios via pm or comments on my articles, and there are probably half a dozen more still left to add here.
PETITION
Quote in title caused problems for linking from the petition, so moved to:
Oh this is an old blog, had forgotten about it. My posts are here: Robert Walker's blog and I have a facebook page, also reposts to twitter for alerts for new posts Robert Walker - Science20 Blog Alerts
Occasionally I put draft posts on tumblr here, though I haven’t for some time: Robert Inventor's Blog
As a recently banned wikipedia editor, I think maybe I can offer suggestions for ways to keep out of trouble there, things that would have been helpful if someone had said them to me in the past.
FIRST - WHY IT IS GOOD TO EDIT WIKIPEDIA
It is well worth editing wikipedia. It’s articles often go to the top of google search results, and may be the first thing someone sees on a particular topic. And usually it’s pretty easy to fix issues in the articles.
You can edit wikipedia for years and only encounter minor issues. Even major edits, you can have long polite discussions with other experts and everything works just fine. I hope nobody will get put off editing it from my own experiences. It can be enjoyable and productive and useful in many ways
.You may never encounter any problems on wikipedia. I edited wikipedia for several years and did several major edits and some entire new articles, with not much by way of problems.
BUT YOU CAN’T GUARANTEE THAT YOU WILL AVOID DRAMA THERE FOR EVER
But there is no way to guarantee that you will avoid any possibility of drama ever.
In my case, both of the topics that I got into trouble for were controversial. Buddhism because there are many popular misconceptions about Buddhism, it’s no surprise if edits there are controversial and people get worked up about such things easily. The other one was planetary protection where I ran against Mars colonization enthusiasts who don’t want Mars to have planetary protection issues because that would get in the way of colonization, so again it’s not too surprising that the edits were controversial.
So those weren’t too surprising. You may well never encounter it but it can flare up over the tiniest of things. I know of someone who got banned from wikipedia because of their views on punctuation style there! Some people get worked up over the most minor things. You can get an idea of the drama you get on wikipedia sometimes on the smallest things from the list of Lamest edit wars.
For instance the long running edit war about whether the page about Aluminium should have ium or um in its title. There’s an entire talk page with three archives just devoted the topic. Talk:Aluminium/Spelling
So, even if you stay away from the more controversial topic areas, then you may still encounter this sort of issue.
SO HOW TO AVOID GETTING INTO TROUBLE WHEN THINGS GO PEAR SHAPED?
This page is about how to respond if you do find yourself in one of those dramas, as well as things you can do to reduce the chance of this happening to you, and also to reduce the personal impact on you if it does happen.
This advice would have helped me to avoid being banned I think. It was a minor ban as these things go in my case. I’m only banned for six months, and after that I can talk about the topic again if I want, but probably there’s no point as the others in the dispute weren’t listening to me anyway :). But tt was quite stressful and these tips could have saved a lot of stress.

See Robert Walker's answer to What are you banned from? Why?
SUMMARY
The main suggestions here are
I think that in all the cases I was involved in, that if I had been doing it with two or three other editors, or even better, half a dozen or so, it wouldn’t have been a problem. A lone editor who adds a lot of content can be very vulnerable in wikipedia, though you may go for years with nothing happening.
If you do it like this I think you are much less likely to run into trouble than I was.
MINOR EDITS
I think the way to start is to do clear and obvious changes first, to get a feel for the situation. And the smaller edits are the easiest to begin with. I continue to do many minor edits in astronomy, science, and many other areas. Minor edits are usually no problem.
As an example, adding "pitch class" to the article on musical notes I think would be thought of as a minor edit, even though it's important. Minor because it's not introducing anything new,but just linking to a concept that's already covered elsewhere in wikipedia. While if wikipedia had no treatment of pitch class at all, so you had to explain the concept there first before you add it in, that's more of a major edit.
Another example of a minor edit would be an edit that just corrects a number,e..g the number of cents in a step of 31 equal, say. Or if you add citations to an article to support a statement that doesn't have citations, and the citation is to a peer reviewed paper or some other source that counts as a "reliable source" in the topic area..
It's a good way to get started and get a feel for how things are done there.
MAJOR EDITS - MENTION ON TALK PAGE FIRST
For major edits, then discuss them on the talk page first. Even for minor edits, it does no harm to do it this way if you think there is any chance at all that someone might question it.
Say what it is you want to do and then if nobody replies just do it. I usually post about a suggested edit and if no-one replies, do it a week later or when I remember.
If they do reply hopefully they agree, or say some sensible reason you understand for not doing it or doing things differently.
If they say some lame thing that makes no sense at all to you, then see LAME OPPOSING EDITORS below
If other editors agree to your suggestion on the talk page or nobody comments, it is not a guarantee that it is okay. But it’s generally a good start. For more on supporting major edits see GETTING COLLABORATORS FOR MAJOR EDITS below
WHAT IF SOMEONE REVERTS MY EDIT?
Then - if you make your edit, major or minor, someone might revert your edit. Even if you posted to the talk page first, still someone might revert it who never noticed your talk page post/
If that happens, that shows they feel strongly that the article shouldn't mention pitch class (say), unlikely here but a "for instance". If you just stop when that happens and do nothing, no drama will follow at all. But you'll of course think the article is inadequate. Still it's no worse than when you started as an editor.
This is the point where it's good to be calm and not get upset that someone has reverted your edit. If you do feel really upset, just take a break for a day or two before returning to the situation.
So the next step then is to discuss it on the talk page. But briefly. And listen to their reasoning. Most of the time when this happens, they have good reason for the revert which becomes clear as you talk to them. Or else they come to understand your reason for the edit and agree to reinstate it. So nearly always, after a bit of discussion first, the issue gets resolved, often quite quickly.
LAME OPPOSING EDITORS
But this is where it can sometimes go pear shaped. They may come up with reasons that show they have no understanding of an entire field of study. Maybe they have never heard of a pitch class (again unlikely for an editor of an article on music theory, but running with this example) or somehow they have got a completely wrong headed idea about what a pitch class is,and no matter what you say, they bring up citations that to their mind prove their wrong headed idea.
"VALID" SOURCES
Or maybe they won't accept a source that most people would regard as highly reputable in your topic area.
In my case the opposing editors said that sources by Buddhists like the Dalai Lama and Walpola Rahula and Bhikkhu Bodhi (former President of the Buddhist Publication Society), were not suitable sources to use unless interpreted through the lens of Western academic commentators. Even the Western academics who they favour ed in their place accept the Buddhist scholars as amongst the most authoritative and accurate sources on how Buddhists understand Buddhism. So it was quite a strange view, and not something written into the wikipedia guidelines.
Might be the same in music theory. Something that everyone knows to be true but they haven't bothered to write an academic paper about, and you end up trawling through the academic literature trying to find a paper that says this thing. When finally you find something, the opposing editors still manage somehow to misinterpret it to mean the opposite of what you know the author intended. And meanwhile you've got an article in the xenharmonic wiki,say, explaining it clearly, but they don't accept that as a valid source. Could happen. Wikis are particularly problematical, they are normally not regarded as acceptable sources unless they are closed wikis only authored by accredited experts.
Or it’s about Indian music and they won’t accept publications by famous Indian musicians about how they understand their music as valid sources. That sort of thing.
The requirement to check your sources is a good thing of course. But it can get tedious in wikipedia when you are required to give sources for something that everyone in your field accepts to be true, and you get wikipedia editors challenging you to prove it because of some popular misconception.
NO ACADEMIC REVIEW OR PROFESSORS OR OTHER ACCREDITED EXPERTS TO TURN TO
This then is where it gets tricky. This is what tripped me up. There is no academic review of wikipedia. You can't go to an overall experienced editor of the topic area, a professor at a university say, and ask them "please back me up in this lame edit war on page xxx". That's called canvassing and is strictly forbidden and can get you into deep trouble.
It's a positive as well as a negative,it means it won't get entrenched into prejudiced approaches to a field, and can change rapidly. But it also means that you can get popular misconceptions creeping in rather easily. The requirement to back everything up with good sources helps a lot with that, but still there's room for misinterpreting sources or editors not knowing things that everyone in the field knows but they don't bother to write down.
This is where wikipedia is very counter intuitive for anyone used to academic processes, e.g. studied for a doctorate or whatever.
Instead of going to an expert in the topic area,any request for comments has to be done in such a way that it will attract editors randomly, without any hint of selection of ones likely to back up what you say. Then you just have to hope that there are enough editors who know about the topic to support your case. You can do a "Request for Comments" but if this is a common misunderstanding that many people have, you may be overwhelmed by oppose comments by people who have the same wrong headed idea as the editor who opposed you. This is what derailed me and why I was eventually banned, though only for six months.
All you have in wikipedia are admins who are experienced in discipline. They can't judge the topic. They won't even read any of the citations and they judge swiftly, will spend only a few minutes reviewing your case. It works great for disciplinary issues such as vandals and trolls but is no good for this sort of content based issue.
That's why those lame edit wars go on and on and on. They have dispute resolution processes, but in those, the admins just basically chair a discussion in a topic area they know nothing about. It's just a more formal way to try to get the editors to talk to each other. It can't fix this issue of editors that have a fundamental misunderstanding of basic concepts in a particular area.
TAKE A LONGER BREAK
At this point, I think the best thing is to just take an even longer break from editing. At least a week, probably a month. There's a tendency to think "surely they will see it if I can but explain it clearly" but - in a situaton like that editors tend to settle into opposing entrenched positions and if that is happening, really it's best to take a break, maybe someone else, not you, can take it further.
And to recognize that this is just the way wikipedia is at present.
CHANCES ARE IT WON'T HAPPEN FOR A LONG TIME
I edited wikipedia for many years before this happened to me. It is most frustrating if you have spent ages editing in a topic area and then someone comes along and reverts all your edits for the last year, as can happen. This happened once to me in the area of planetary protection, and once to another editor in those Buddhist topics - he also had been editing those articles for over a year and I got into trouble from supporting him after another editor rewrote the articles, removing all his work for the previous year and adding in his own misconceptions of the topic in their place
GETTING COLLABORATORS FOR MAJOR EDITS
Even with all those precautions of mentioning it on the talk page first, even if someone else asks you to do the edit, it’s no guarantee that it will be okay through to the future. For me the big storm over my edits on planetary protection were about edits that I did originally in response to someone who added a request for other editors to expand one of the sections on wikipedia in that topic area, and I checked on the talk pages first before writing the article on Mars sample return protection issues and still got into trouble because of it. And Dorje108 did his edits of the articles on central topics in Buddhism, over a period of a year, with many discussions on the talk page about what he planned to do with the article etc, yet he got reverted in just a few days by an opposing editor with a different vision for the article.
So, based on those experiences, if you do major edits in wikipedia like writing new articles or introducing a major new topic to an article, I think it's important to engage with other editors there and make sure you have quite a few who are in support of what you re doing. Not just discuss it with any passing editors on the talk page and make sure nobody is opposed, but try to get other editors actively involved in editing the article so it becomes “their article” (in the sense of involvement, not ownership of course) and not just “your article”.
Ideally try to get two or three other editors involved in doing the edits. Which can be current wikipedia editors or off wiki friends.
It's not a canvassing issue to recruit friends to help you edit wikipedia in a particular topic area if you do it BEFORE ANY ISSUES ARISE - if there is no ongoing dispute there to recruit them to. So, it’s a case of, anticipate problems before they arise.
Also they don't need to be doing much work. If they just fix typos, or correct numbers or add citations, if you have enough like minded people dong that, then they are all there to help back you up in case of a dispute.
That's how I got defeated in wikipedia, in both cases by an editor who had lots of friends or managed to recruit lots of editors to his views. With the Four Noble Truths article, only Joshua Jonathan did major edits, the others all did minor edits, and mostly short one sentence comments in talk page discussions, but supported him in any debates he had with Dorje108, the previous editor, and then with me when I tried to support Dorje109. It doesn’t take many to do that. It was like four or five editors opposing 2, and that was enough for him to push through very major total rewrites of the articles. We got occasional other editors come in on the debate to support our side, but in face of so much opposition, they soon left..
So idea is to do the same thing, but in a positive way. Prepare the ground by making sure you have lots of expert friends who do minor edits of the article.
If they just add a citation, correct a date or figure, add a single sentence, they are still collaborators.Then if there is a Request for Comments, they can all supply their comments and support your edits, and it's not canvassing as they are already involved in editing the page.
They don't need to say much. Just a single line comment saying "I think the musical note article should mention pitch classes because ..." and that helps back you up in case of some lame edit war like that.
If I'd done that it would have made a huge difference. If you have two or three collaborators that's enough to make a difference. Half a dozen and it would be very hard for any editor to oppose your edits there with lame reasons, except in a very high profile article where you may have large numbers of editors eventually come in on both sides of a debate as in some of those lame edit wars..
So, when your friends are experts who really know what they are talking about, I think recruiting them to wikipedia at the start of a major edit project there is a legitimate way to make sure your edits are protected as much as they can be, in event of some future lame edit war.
So, that's my main tip for major edits, get lots of people involved in some way or another, however minor, who support what you are doing. Of course that approach can also be done in a bad way, but it's just the way wikipedia is set up and part of the reason it can be so frustrating to try to fix issues, that it's already working like that.
RECRUITING EXPERT COLLABORATORS WITH A DIVERSITY OF VIEWS
So it’s using that same process, but in a positive way, encouraging more expert editors into wikipedia to join you in your edits there. Of course not just people who agree with your views, that would be biasing. But recruiting people who you recognize as reasonably expert in your topic area. For instance for articles in the area of xentonality, it’s surely reasonable to post to the xenharmonic alliance on facebook, as a forum where experts on xentonality congregate, and to talk about your edits to xenharmonic friends, e.g. encourage them to join in on your facebook timeline etc.
So long as there is no dispute in progress, I think there is nothing in the wikipedia guidelines to prevent you recruiting just people who support your own views, and that’s bound to happen to some extent naturally. But academically, I think it’s good to encourage editors with a wide diversity of views if you can. That helps the articles to be NPOV - not written from a particular point of view but reflecting the diversity of views and presenting them all if necessary.
PROPOSAL FOR DELETION
Also to mention something else that can happen, which may seem alarming, but isn’t.
If you make a new article, then you may get surprised when someone slaps a big notice at the top called a “proposal for deletion” It looks like this.

This can be very alarming for a newbie editor doing one of your first articles on wikipedia.
But it’s no big deal. Normally all it means is that some editor has read your article and you didn’t ‘include any citations, or the citations didn’t seem to support what you said. You can normally fix it by adding citations.
Also - alarming though it seems, anyone can remove it. Even you can. You don’t need to make any changes to the article though you are advised to improve it. Just remove this notice and nobody can put it back again. But the next stage after this is an “Article for Deletion” discussion, so if you do remove it, you are advised to do some work to fix the article first.
I was recently involved in a dispute on the talk page for the wikipedia Four Noble Truths article. (This post was written spring 2016, some editing Nov 2016)
In my view the latest version of this article gets several things completely wrong. Particularly, it is completely wrong to say that the aim of a Buddhist following the four truths is to end rebirth. It’s true that all the sutras (collection of texts recording the teachings of the Buddha) say that after he become enlightened, Buddha never took rebirth again, that it's his last rebirth. Everyone agrees, that's his paranirvana.
But it doesn't follow at all from that, that when he became enlightened, that his main aim was to end rebirth. Cessation in the sense of the four truths is the cessation of the suffering of birth, old age, sickness, death, and all forms of unsatisfactoriness. This, Buddha himself said, he realized when he became enlightened. Buddha reached cessation, nirvana, as a young man under the Boddhi tree. Not when he died.
And yet, he still got old, and experienced sickness, and died after he became enlightened. That’s something you need to contemplate when you try to understand what he meant by cessation here. How can you reach cessation of suffering, and at the same time continue to live in this world, teach others, get sick, die? What does it mean? That’s one of the central points to contemplate as a Buddhist. It’s like a Zen koan.
The editor of the current version of the article I think just couldn't make sense of that. He assumed that it must mean that all that happened to Buddha when he got enlightened is that he had an insight that after he died, he would never take rebirth, and that his suffering would be at an end when he died. This editor made it clear that this was his understanding of the material in discussions on the talk page.
In addition to that he has the idea that Buddha reached nirvana by ending karma, which would mean ending all cause and effect connections with his previous lives and his earlier self in his then current life (because positive, negative and neutral karma all binds you to samsara in Buddhist teachings, they don’t “balance each other out”).
This is his current statement of the third truth in the article - an unusual way of stating it written by a wikipedia editor which has never been subject to peer review.
“Niroda, the cessation of dukkha. By stopping this craving and clinging nirvana is attained, no more karma is produced, and rebirth and dissatisfaction will no longer arise again”
I can’t stress enough how very wrong this idea is. It suggests some kind of heaven state, which is a kind of melding of views of other religions with Buddhism. It suggests that the idea is to stop karma in order to reach a “karma free state”. In Buddhist teaching we have countless karmic effects from previous life, and it would hardly make any difference to stop producing new karma. It’s hard to know even what he can mean by this in a Buddhist context. How could you “stop producing karma”?
Perhaps some Hindus think like this? But it’s not at all how Buddha taught. And when you go to his sources, they don’t present it like this either, even the Buddhist scholars he said supported his views don’t present the third truth like this. He gets these statements by smashing together statements about paranirvana with statements about nirvana to make a new version of the four truths.
If that was what Buddha meant to say, why did he always teach the four noble truths as a path to cessation of suffering. Why didn’t he teach it as a path to end karma and to stop rebirth if that was what he really meant?
According to Buddha’s teachings that couldn’t work anyway. If Nirvana was an effect, produced by a cause, such as ending karma and stopping rebirth - then it is a conditioned produced thing, dependent on conditions, ending when whatever is maintaining it ceases. If it is due to stopping rebirth, what happens if after a few trillion or quadrillion years you are no longer able to stop rebirth any more?
Rebirth is not mentioned anywhere in the Pali text for the wheel turning sutra itself, where the four truths are first presented. The canon itself is vast, a whole encyclopedia of books and most Buddhists never read it in its entirety, just because there is too much to read. You might wonder if perhaps somewhere else he gives different teachings on this. But Buddhist scholars expert on the Pali canon who have read it in its entirety are clear about it, that nirvana, cessation, is something you can realize in this very life. There may be some sects that have other views but this is the central teaching of the main branches of Buddhism.
Walpola Rahula puts it clearly (this is perhaps the most highly regarded of all books on Therevadhan Buddhism in English)
"It is incorrect to think that Nirvāṇa is the natural result of the extinction of craving. Nirvāṇa is not the result of anything. If it would be a result, then it would be an effect produced by a cause. It would be saṃkhata ‘produced’ and ‘conditioned’. Nirvāṇa is neither cause nor effect. It is beyond cause and effect. Truth is not a result nor an effect. It is not produced like a mystic, spiritual, mental state, such as dhyāna or samādhi. TRUTH IS. NIRVĀṆA IS. The only thing you can do is to see it, to realize it. There is a path leading to the realization of Nirvāṇa. But Nirvāṇa is not the result of this path.[106] You may get to the mountain along a path, but the mountain is not the result, not an effect of the path. You may see a light, but the light not the result of your eyesight.
...
In almost all religions the summum bonum can be attained only after death. But Nirvāṇa can be realized in this very life; it is not necessary to wait till you die to ‘attain’ it."
PATH OF SEEING THINGS FOR YOURSELF
There is another major problem with this idea that the aim of Buddhists is to end rebirth.
If he had taught in this way, it would require practitioners to believe in rebirth before we can become a Buddhist. But Buddha taught:
“'Don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, "This contemplative is our teacher." When you know for yourselves that, "These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering" — then you should abandon them.' Thus was it said. And in reference to this was it said.
"Now, Kalamas, don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, 'This contemplative is our teacher.' When you know for yourselves that, 'These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness' — then you should enter & remain in them.”
Now this is a much misunderstood passage. The translator notes :
“Although this discourse is often cited as the Buddha's carte blanche for following one's own sense of right and wrong, it actually says something much more rigorous than that. Traditions are not to be followed simply because they are traditions. Reports (such as historical accounts or news) are not to be followed simply because the source seems reliable. One's own preferences are not to be followed simply because they seem logical or resonate with one's feelings. Instead, any view or belief must be tested by the results it yields when put into practice; and — to guard against the possibility of any bias or limitations in one's understanding of those results — they must further be checked against the experience of people who are wise. “
So, he isn’t saying - go ahead and believe anything you like just on a whim. It’s after observation and careful analysis and Buddha gave many specific and detailed teachings and other teachers also after him, through to the present day. Even in Zen. Though they have such a different way of teaching, there are Zen scholars, and it's a sutra tradition. Ordinary practitioners don't need to learn this at all to be a Buddhist but it is there for those that need it. Those of a scholarly bent will spend many years learning the detailed teachings.
Buddha is not saying here that you can just make up anything, spin it out of your own imagination, follow your own made up path, and call it Buddhism :). Westerners so often misinterpret it like that.
But on the other hand, Buddhists consider that there is no virtue at all in believing in these detailed teachings for their own sake either.
For instance we can all see the truth of suffering and unsatisfactoriness. Also one can come to see for oneself that we have no permanent state of satisfaction and permanent worldly happiness in this life, everything is subject to change. That's the basic starting point of the Buddhist teachings, and it is something you come to see for yourself. If you can imagine somehow someone had never experienced suffering and had no idea what pain or unsatisfactriness was - there wouldn't be any value in them saying "I believe in suffering". But seeing it for yourself is of great benefit. Understanding that yourself and others suffer is a basis for compassion for others and for yourself too and that's the starting point of the path.
So all the teachings are understood in this sense. Things that you can come to see for yourself just as you see the truth of suffering and can come to see that you can’t establish a state of permanent worldly happiness in this life. That much as you may enjoy chocolate for instance, that you can’t keep yourself permanently happy by continually eating chocolate :). And one can come to see that there is nothing else either that can lead to permanent worldly happiness. Many things like that which we can see for ourselves.
So if the central teaching, the Four Noble Truths were understood as a teaching about ending rebirth, then that would be a major block for most practitioners right at the get go, because most of us can’t even see that we are reborn from our own experience. In fact Buddha never mentions rebirth anywhere in this central wheel turning sutra. In many other places yes, but not in this central teaching at all.
Indeed not only are we not required to believe in rebirth - it’s also important to keep an open mind about it. I do believe that I have been reborn many times and will do so again in the future. But I don’t know that from my own experience and with Buddha’s teachings, if you follow his path, it is very very important to be clear about what you know for sure, such as the truth of suffering ,and what you believe but haven’t established, e.g in my case whether I am reborn. And to keep an open mind about the things one can’t see for oneself. So to make the aim to end rebirth would be to close the minds of practitioners about rebirth, as they would have to have specific ideas there that they have to believe without being able to see them for themselves before they could become a Buddhist and follow the path. This would make it hard to impossible for them to approach the subject of rebirth with an open mind, which is so important along the Buddhist path. That goes right against the central thrust of Buddhism.
So the aim can’t be to end rebirth and it isn’t. That’s just a Western misconception about Buddhism. It may be an aim in Hinduism, I’m not sure, but it can’t be in Buddhism. Not in the central sutra based traditions at least since the sutras are clear on this point.
Sometimes Buddhism may be taught in ways that seem to suggest that the aim is to acquire beliefs, but it's not really and at some point it gets challenged. In some traditions of Tibetan Buddhism they build up whole elaborate systems of belief,only to demolisth them and then build up another. The sand mandala and the way it gets washed away by the water at the end is to do with that.
There are many ways to teach. Some very elaborate, some very simple. In the Indian traditions the teachings given to the great Indian mahasiddhas were often very simple, just a few words. The same is also true of Zen Buddhism. They may not teach the four noble truths in so many words. But even Zen Buddhism does have the four noble truths as a central teaching. Even if for some practitioners they just need to look at a flower to see the truth, with no words at all.
GOOD SOURCES ON THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS
So that leads to the question, if the present version of the wikipedia article is not to be trusted, what are good sources on the Four Noble Truths?
Well, even the Western academics will say that the best sources, if you want to learn how contemporary Buddhists understand the sutras, are the Buddhist scholars themselves.
Buddhism has always been a religion with many scholars. Back in the sixth century through to 1200, the Buddhist Nalanda University was one of the centers of learning in the world with scholars coming to it from far and wide..


These are the remains of the library of Nalanda University - reported to have had hundreds of thousands of books, and reportedly burnt for three months when it was destroyed around 1200, after flourishing for around six centuries. (That's according to Persian historian Minhaj-i-Siraj - see History of Libraries entry on Nalanda)
And there is and was a fine scholarly tradition in all the main Buddhist countries, such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, Japan, Tibet etc.
The old version of the four noble truths article relied extensively on these Buddhist scholars. Four Noble Truths
Where the new version goes wrong I think, is that it relies over much on the Western academics, often obscure ones. Their articles are often dense and technical, and though many of them are excellent and there are some really good Western scholars, others sometimes contain misunderstandings, and even if accurate, they are so technical that they are often easy for readers who are not fully involved in the complex debates to misunderstand or to interpret as meaning almost anything.
So, if you accept that the Buddhist scholars are the best sources for understanding how Buddhists themselves understand the four truths, then which are the best ones to go for?
Well it’s a vast literature and I am not a scholar myself, not widely versed at all. But I can make a few suggestions to get started.
I think many would say that the best source on the Four Noble Truths in English is the book "What the Buddha Taught" by Walpola Rahula. He straddled both worlds as a one of the top Sri Lankan scholar monks, and also the first bikkhu to become a professor in an American university.
He writes very well, in plain English, but don’t let that mislead you. He is an expert on this, with a thorough understanding of the Pali Canon - the earliest teachings we have from the Buddha. These teachings are central to all the Buddhist sutra traditions - there are some variations but he touches on that also briefly. Here is the link again: "What the Buddha Taught"
For a Zen perspective, try The Four Noble Truths - International Zen Association United Kingdom
And for an idea of how they are understood in Tibetan Buddhism, you could read the Dalai Lama's talk about the four truths. He's not just the Dalai Lama, he's also a scholar monk too, completed his training as a young man, and astonished his peers with his erudite understanding of Tibetan Buddhism, so he is a good source for Tibetan Buddhism. So, at least for those who think that the best way to find out how Buddhists understand the sutras is to ask the scholar monks, then the Dalai Lama, as one of the top scholar monks in the Tibetan tradition, is one of the best to go to to find out about Tibetan Buddhism :). One of his talks on the subject is here: Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archives
Another good source in the Therevadhan path is this article by Venerable Sumedho from the Amaravati monastery in Southern England. I've heard him talk in Oxford. And we actually meditated in their place too, the Tibetan Buddhist group I belonged to in Oxford, when they had nowhere else to go.
Anyway they are authentic good Therevadhan monks that follow the traditional approach even setting out with begging bowls to beg for food every morning in the English countryside. And he's a good teacher. So, this gives an idea of how a Therevadhan teacher would teach the subject.
There are many other sources, but those should get you off to a decent start.
For an overview, and more cites to follow up, the previous version of the wikipedia article was good, with many quotes from Buddhist scholars: Four Noble Truths
The sutra where Buddha first taught the four truths, according to the sutras, is the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta - the “wheel turning” sutra where Buddha set in motion the wheel of the teachings. There are several alternative translations of it here: the Four True Realities for the Spiritually Ennobled Ones
Oh, and though all the traditions agree that Buddha entered paranirvana so can never take rebirth again, the later Mahayana traditions especially say that other Buddhas don’t necessarily enter paranirvana when they die. They are able to continue to interact, even can “emanate” as new rebirths, young babies born like everyone else that somehow carry the inspiration of a Buddha from birth, whatever that means. Even can “emanate” as inanimate things like rivers, bridges, flowers, plants.
Well in a way the whole world carries the inspiration of the historical Buddha for a Buddhist following the path. I’ve heard it described by my main teacher for many years as his “impure land” because it was blessed by him taking birth here, though it is not a “pure land” where everything carries the inspiration of the teachings.
However, in the Mahayana teachings, there’s the idea that there’s some sense in which this inspiration can be more direct for emanations of Buddhas. I’m not sure how it works, so just mentioning it. This is a Mahayana idea, I don’t think you have it in Therevadhan Buddhism, the idea of an emanation of a Buddha??
See An Interivew with Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
STANDARD WARNING - PLEASE DON’T EDIT THE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE TO TRY TO “FIX” THESE ISSUES
This is a warning I give whenever I talk about the wikipedia disputes to my friends and colleagues or when I post about them online. Please don't intervene in any way in the wikipedia disputes I get involved in as a result of reading about them in my posts or articles. This would go against the wikipedia guidelines on “meat puppetry” and canvassing.
The rules are particularly to stop you from attracting people to support your side in a dispute, or likely to be inclined to agree with you or who you can influence in ways other editors can not. I’m talking here about "recruiting allies" to the dispute, rather than the narrower idea of meat puppetry as a kind of choreographed dialog between you and your friends to turn the dispute your way.
You can do posts to attract more people to a debate but you have to do it in a way that means they are unbiased, a random selection of views. If you come to it as a result of following my Buddhism blog and reading the reasons I gave above, I don’t think anyone could call that “unbiased” or a random selection.
I can understand the wish to do it. It's awkward. I've often wanted to encourage people who I know are knowledgeable, buddhist scholars, exobiologists or whatever to contribute to discussions or articles, but this is just not permitted. Not when there is any kind of a dispute that you are involved in.
Of course any editor who comes across the dispute in the natural course of browsing wikipedia can join in because that's not meat puppetry. See the distinction?
Also this policy is particularly for disputes and to stop editors from swaying the disputes in their favour by recruiting friends. For general editing with no dispute or controversy in progress, it is of course good to attract other knowledgeable editors to the articles.
UPDATE
The ANI came to a conclusion and the admins decided to ban me from editing wikipedia on the topic of the Four Noble Truths for six months. That includes editing talk pages of articles on the topic or mentioning it on talk pages.
The only editing I did was talk page posts, except adding a single “citations needed” tag to the article, which was quickly removed. So effectively they banned me from talking about this topic on the wikipedia talk pages as I was not an editor of the Buddhism articles and had no wish to be one.
It's a kind of a relief really I must say. A clear position, and I did what I could, and it is now over.
This is an argument I often come across when discussing galactic colonization on the internet. The argument is that since life expands to fill all possible niches on Earth, it has to do the same in space also. So, the argument goes, humans have to colonize the galaxy. It's our "manifest destiny" to explore, expand and evolve.
This is what microbes do and animals do. Just expand into any habitat that is available to them. But why as humans do we have to behave like blind microbes or animals? Yes animals would do that but why as intelligent beings should we do this?
Especially if we find that colonizing the galaxy is not such a great future as we thought, for us, or for whatever beings come after us?
HUMAN BEINGS HAVE A CHOICE
The difference is, we have a choice, we aren't blind. We have intelligence and can reason about the future and avoid harmful consequences through collective decision making. And what's more we often do this. And humans can make mistakes, often have.
WHY IT'S NOT ALWAYS GREAT TO GO EXTINCT
Evolution often has lead to new forms of life making old ones extinct. Trilobites and many other species went extinct which was great for us, but not so great for trilobites.
We can still explore, expand and evolve in other ways, or just delay filling the galaxy if we can't see how to do it safely yet.
THE FUTURE EVOLUTION COULD PAINT ACROSS THE GALAXY
When you look to the far future, millions of years into the future, or even thousands of years or centuries, if evolution is accelerated by genetic manipulation, then you are talking about new forms of life here that could make us extinct just as the trilobites went extinct, but also would be intelligent and able to create machines and destroy planets and reform them into anything they like probably.
Including also the ability to make self replicating machines, but not made by us, but by creatures only distantly related via gene manipulation, or cause and effect uplifting other creatures, or half machine half human.
WHY RUSH FORWARD BLINDLY?
Why is that something we should rush towards blindly without stopping to think about the consequences? And how can we be so sure this future is a good one, even for the beings that would make us extinct?
I'm just saying that faced with that future, and the impossibility of putting the genie back in the bottle once colonies escape beyond the light speed communications horizon - that we, and I think all sensible ETs would stop and think carefully about whether this is something they want to set off, just as you would stop and think carefully before letting off a chain reaction in a block of uranium or plutonium. And either find a different way of doing things, or just not do it while they evaluate the situation.
This is just a rational argument that I think all ETs would have to face.
THERE MAY BE WAYS TO COLONIZE THAT ARE NOT HAZARDOUS
There may be ways of doing this that are not hazardous to us or the galaxy. But I'd want to be very sure before starting on a program of intergalactic colonization.
I know this is far future, but it's interesting philosophically and also of interest for trying to understand the Fermi paradox. Because I think ETs would have to solve this - the ones that are keen on colonizing like us .
MINIMAL IMPACT ON THE GALAXY
If so, then whatever solution they come to - it would likely involve minimal effect on the galaxy at least - I think they'd take care to avoid the solutions that would end up with all the planets in the entire galaxy mined and colonists everywhere because of the potential for chaos resulting in that case. If that's true, it could explain how they could be there, and yet not easy for us to see.
The thing is that ETIs would by definition be intelligent. So for instance we wouldn't assume that any ET that gets the capability to kill blue whales for food and oil and other products will automatically kill all the whales in its oceans. We didn't; we stopped, so they might likewise. So you have to take account of their intelligence modifying their conduct.
NOBODY HAS YET SUGGESTED A SOLUTION
I've shared this idea with many people, and so far, nobody has ever given an answer to this,.
The ones who say I'm wrong just say, as you do, to ignore the problem and press forward blindly, and trust to evolution to sort it out, and everything will be okay.
I do understand that they find that reasoning convincing.
I don't find that reasoning convincing myself however. So continue to raise this issue as I think it needs to be thought about carefully.
MIGHT WORK JUST FINE, TRUE
Yes, it could be that it works just fine. It could be that somehow humans manage to transcend our issues and become new kinds of beings as we explore the galaxy. It could also be that this future is of beings that are much better than us in some sense and that we feel that humans should go extinct to make way for them.
BUT THIS FUTURE ALSO INCLUDES NIGHTMARE SCENARIOS FOR US AND FOR ALL THE BEINGS IN THE GALAXY
But it could be much worse, or it could be that we don't think humans should go extinct, or could be lots of issues with the idea. I mentioned one of these issues in my article on exponential growth into the galaxy - that the process because it is expansion into an initially almost unlimited space might favour the most rapidly growing space colonies, which might be unable to stop exponential growth once they fill the galaxy, leading to a future where half the population of the galaxy dies every few decades or even more often through starvation, wars and so on. Which is fine for microbes, is indeed one of several ways exponential growth can stop, with a boom / bust cycle with half or more of the population dying every few years. Not just for microbes - this is one of the most common situations for higher lifeforms also (e.g. the lemming booms and busts). That often happens in nature, but is not ideal for intelligent beings.
THERE MAY BE MANY WAYS TO DO IT, AND FUTURE MAY DEPEND ON WHAT WE DO
And it could be that many such futures are possible, and it depends at least partly, on how we do it. Surely we should avoid futures that lead to boom / bust cycles of exponential growth then deaths through starvation, war or whatever, throughout the galaxy if that is a potential future?
WHAT ABOUT OTHER INTELLIGENT SPECIES IN THE GALAXY, IN SIMILAR POSITION TO OURSELVES?
And what about all other lifeforms in the galaxy? If they exist. Would we think it right for another ETI to set off a future like this and make us extinct by filling the galaxy with their kind, around every star, mining every planet, as we probably would do if it was us? Whether or not it leads them to endless boom/ bust cycles and warfare and starvation.
If that's not right for them, how is it right for us?
There are so many ethical layers and issues to think about here.
NOT A SIMPLE OPEN / SHUT CASE
I don't myself think it is a simple case that it has to be okay for humans to colonize a galaxy.
I think it needs to be thought about and discussed, whether this is an okay thing to do and what its consequences could be.
Why Didn't ETs, Or Self Replicating Machines, Colonize Our Solar System Millions Of Years Ago?
End Of All Life On Earth - A Billion Years From Now - Can It Be Avoided - And Who Will Be Here Then?
Why ET Populations Can't Continue To Expand For More Than A Few Millennia



















Dissolving of nature into abstract concepts in Mondrian's art:In art, music, writing, then we look at various ways of abstracting from things. Lots of particular abstractions.
- The Flowering Apple Tree
- Pier and Ocean
- Tableau No. IV
See Piet Mondrian

Comparison of truncated icosahedron and soccer ball
Amongst all the many sets of mathematics, you can describe a truncated icosahedron as a set of edges, faces and vertices

This is something I'm interested to explore. Many Buddhists find it is inspiring to read the life of the Buddha in the traditional account - complete with the stories about his life in the palace, seeing the four sights, asceticism, meeting meditation teachers before he became enlightened, the enlightenment itself, first sermon, death and paranirvana.
There are many online lives of the Buddha, also videos. Here are a few links if you need them:
However we also recognize that - though Buddha surely was a historical figure - much of that traditional life story is surely not describing what actually happened. For instance, it is surely not credible that he reached the age of 35 without ever seeing an old person or someone who was sick, however secluded and insulated a life he lead.
It is inspiring all the same. It's teaching us something that connects to us in a way different from intellectual study, also from meditation. It speaks to the heart somehow. And generations of practitioners have found inspiration from reading his life in this traditional account.
I'm not so interested here in finding out what we know about the historical Buddha. He surely came from N. India, and taught extensively and so on. But the details of his early life - by the time the monks came to memorize them, would already be events from decades earlier.
If you accept the "theory of authenticity" about the Pali Canon that it does describe the teachings of the Buddha - still, you are talking about events that happened well over 40 years before the monks began to memorize the sutras. Also, their main focus was on preserving the teachings not historical accuracy of accounts of his early life. And we are talking about a time there also when people believed things that we would now consider miraculous. So, I think that probably we will never know much in the modern sense of historical fact, especially about the first 35 years of his life.
But - I'm interested instead to explore what the traditional accounts say. Just treat them as literature, like Lord of the Rings, or like traditional folk stories.
In that sense, then the traditional account went through many transformations. The earliest accounts have hardly any of the events from the later stories.
So let's start with the earliest of all, the story of the life of the Buddha as presented in the Pali Canon.
Bikkhu Bodhi's: Readings from the Pali Canon
and Bikkhu Nanamoli's book The Life of the Buddha
The surprising thing there is that there seems to be nothing in the Pali Canon at all about the four sights, about his life in the palace, his charioteer and so on.
It has an obviously mythological in flavour account of is birth in the Acchariya Abbhuta Sutta
As soon as the Bodhisattva was born, he stood firmly with his feet on the ground; then he took seven steps north, and with a white parasol held over him, he surveyed each quarter and uttered the words of the Leader of the Herd: "I am the highest in the world; I am the best in the world; I am the foremost in the world. This is my last birth; now there is no renewal of being for me.
Discussion of it here By Bhikkhu Sujato:
In some of these miracles we can discern dhammatā in a meaningful sense. For example, the superhuman prodigies displayed by the baby Bodhisatta prefigure his future career as a Buddha. Standing on his own feet he demonstrates his own self-Awakening; facing the North (uttara) he signifies his orientation to the ‘beyond’ (uttara); seven ‘mighty strides’ indicate his crossing over the cycles of creation (and, in doing so, usurp the three great strides of Viṣṇu116); the umbrella is the purity of liberation; surveying the quarters shows his unobstructed knowledge of the spiritual capacities of beings; and his bull’s roar of supremacy presages the future rolling forth of the Wheel of Dhamma. This symbolic biography in miniature describes the essential qualities of all Buddhas. It is impossible to imagine a Buddha who does not have these qualities, and so this ‘miracle’ is readily comprehensible as a mythic expression of a natural principle, albeit a supernatural natural principle.
Then it has Asita's prophecy.
The Pali Canon does refer to the incident under the rose-apple tree:
"I thought of a time when my Sakyan father was working and I
was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree: quite secluded from
sensual desires, secluded from unwholesome things I had entered
upon and abode in the first meditation, which is accompanied by
thinking and exploring, with happiness and pleasure born of seclusion.
I thought: `Might that be the way to enlightenment?' Then, following
up that memory, there came the recognition that this was the
way to enlightenment.
And it talks about his three palaces.
'I was delicate, most delicate, supremely delicate. Lily pools were made for me at my father's house solely for my benefit. Blue lilies flowered in one, white lilies in another, red lilies in a third. I used no sandalwood that was not from Benares. My turban, tunic, lower garments and cloak were all made of Benares cloth. A white sunshade was held over me day and night so that no cold or heat or dust or grit or dew might inconvenience me. I had three palaces, one for the winter, one for the summer and one for the rains. In the rains palace I was entertained by minstrels with no men among them. For the four months of the rains, I never went down to the lower palaces.'
But has only three of the four sights - and these presented as reflections on his previous experience not as new sights that bring the matter home to him.
"Whilst I had such power and good fortune, yet I thought: `When
an untaught ordinary man, who is subject to ageing, not safe from
ageing, sees another who is aged, he is shocked, humiliated and disgusted;
for he forgets that he himself is no exception. But I too am
subject to ageing, not safe from ageing, and so it cannot befit me to
be shocked, humiliated and disgusted on seeing another who is aged.'
When I considered this, the vanity of youth entirely left me."I thought: `When an untaught ordinary man, who is subject
to sickness, not safe from sickness, sees another who is sick, he is
shocked, humiliated and disgusted; for he forgets that he himself is
no exception. But I too am subject to sickness, not safe from sickness,
and so it cannot befit me to be shocked, humiliated and disgusted
on seeing another who is sick.' When I considered this, the vanity of
health entirely left me."I thought: `When an untaught ordinary man, who is subject to
death, not safe from death, sees another who is dead, he is shocked,
humiliated and disgusted, for he forgets that he himself is no exception.
But I too am subject to death, not safe from death, and so it
cannot befit me to be shocked, humiliated and disgusted on seeing
another who is dead.' When I considered this, the vanity of life
entirely left me."
The four sights are from a later 2nd century long poem, the Buddhacharita by Asvaghosha. ratnaghosha: The Four Sights
All the Pali Canon says about the setting forth is:
“Before my Enlightenment, while I was still only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, I thought: house life is crowded and dusty; life gone forth is wide open. It is not easy, living in a household, to lead a holy life as utterly perfect and pure as a polished shell. Suppose I shaved off my hair and beard, put on the yellow cloth, and went forth from the house life into homelessness?“
”Later, while still young, a black haired boy blessed with youth, in the first phase of life I shaved off my hair and beard – though my mother and father wished otherwise and grieved with tearful faces –, and I put on the yellow cloth and went forth from the house life into homelessness.”
Or as Bikkhu Boddhi translates it
"Before my Awakening, when I was still an unawakened Bodhisatta, the thought occurred to me: 'Household life is confining, a dusty path. Life gone forth is the open air. It isn't easy, living in a home, to practice the holy life totally perfect, totally pure, a polished shell. What if I, having shaved off my hair & beard and putting on the ochre robe, were to go forth from the household life into homelessness?'
"So at a later time, when I was still young, black-haired, endowed with the blessings of youth in the first stage of life, having shaved off my hair & beard — though my parents wished otherwise and were grieving with tears on their faces — I put on the ochre robe and went forth from the home life into homelessness."
BTW it is interesting there also that he says both his mother and father wished otherwise. While in the fully developed traditional story, his mother dies soon after he is born.
In the Pali Canon we do get much of the traditional account of the life of the Buddha, with the four sights charioteer, etc - but not presented as the life of Buddha himself, but rather as the life of Vipassa - the first of all the Buddhas in our world system who lived in the far distant past and whose teaching has completely died out.
In this sutra, we do have the examples of the four "divine messengers" - an old person, a sick person, dead person and "one who has gone forth" shaven headed and wearing robes. But all attributed to the long distant past Buddha Vipassa. And with the difference that 100,000 years pass by between each of those encounters - obviously the idea is that people had much longer lifespans back then.
Mahāpadāna Sutta: The Great Discourse on the Lineage
WORK IN PROGRESS
(to be continued, likely to take a fair while to write this)
LATER VERSION
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' 5
"A flower is always happy because it is beautiful."
(Poem at Shambala publishing).
With water from the stream Galadriel filled the basin to the brim, and breathed on it, and when the water was still again she spoke. 'Here is the Mirror of Galadriel,' she said. 'I have brought you here so that you may look in it, if you will.'
...
'And you? ' she said, turning to Sam. 'For this is what your folk would call magic. I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic? '
When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. 12For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. 13But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
A flower is always happy because it is beautiful.
Bees sing their song of loneliness and weep.
A waterfall is busy hurrying to the ocean.
A poet is blown by the wind.
A friend without inside or outside
And a rock that is not happy or sad
Are watching the winter crescent moon
Suffering from the bitter wind.
Trungpa Rinpoche's poem - from shambhala.com
You see this phrase used so often by people who want to save the forests. And it is easy to get the impression that it means that if we cut down the forests we would no longer be able to breath.
But - there is NO SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR THIS AT ALL It would take thousands of years for the oxygen levels to go down noticeably, even if all the trees and algae and all photosynthetic life on Earth was destroyed - and that ain’t going to happen, as there is no plausible manmade or natural disaster that can do that.
I'm all in favour of keeping forests and planting new trees - but let's not argue for this on the basis of the need for trees to provide oxygen - as that is just not true as far as I can see. I think it confuses people to use invalid arguments even for a good conclusion.

First of all the metaphor is a bit back to front as the jungles continually produce oxygen, and they do not produce CO2 (except when destroyed). Our lungs of course absorb oxygen and exhale CO2. So, in that trivial way, they are not really much like lungs at all. But I'm talking here about the way the metaphor is often used in news stories and popular accounts, to say that we depend on the jungles for oxygen. Is that true?
Here are the facts:

There are many other reasons we need forests. And on the very long term, yes we need them for oxygen to breath, along with the green algae in the sea.
But we are not going to run out of oxygen or die of CO2 poisoning due to cutting down trees, or indeed, even through burning fossil fuels. We may get global warming due to increase greenhouse gases and many other major effects but not lack of oxygen to breath.
Actually 70 to 80% of our oxygen comes from green algae The Most Important Organism? | Ecology Global Network
But even if we destroyed all those too in some unimaginable eco-catastrophe we'd still be able to breath the air due to the oxygen that is still in it, leaving centuries for the Earth to recover and start creating oxygen again.
REASONS TO KEEP TREES - WHY FORESTS MATTER
Though we don’t need them for oxygen, there are plenty of excellent reasons to keep trees:
For more about this see Why forests matter

Dwellings of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon rain forest - the place is their home. Tropical forests are home to about a million indigenous people, and about a hundred million people around the edges of the forests depend on their products.
And the news is good here, that many countries are taking action to stop and even reverse deforestation. For instance Brazil has cut down the rate of deforestation of the Amazon by 82% already and aims to stop it altogether and reverse it How to stop deforestation? Make 'good stuff' cheaper
But let's make it clear that we will not have any problem at all breathing as a result of cutting down trees.
Let's focus on the many very real things that can go wrong and that we can do something about. And lets not get people worrying about nonexistent issues that can never happen.
We have thousands of pages of Buddhist texts in sutra collections. Many of them say that they report the words of the Buddha. Often the texts open by saying that the Buddha was teaching in such and such a place, on such and such an occasion - and then continue to say that what he said. As actual quoted speeches by the Buddha.
But - are these really the original words of the Buddha? Or if not, who was it who taught in this way?
Let's focus on the earliest Buddhist texts, some of the texts in the Pali canon for now . The later Mahayana and Vajrayana texts, all scholars agree, were composed many centuries after the Buddha - some of them written well over a thousand years after his death.
You might well think - let's just look for ancient texts themselves. Surely there must be at least a few fragments of the ancient Buddhist texts? Somewhere preserved in a cave or some such, equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls of Christianity?
It's not as though he had a short life. The sutras say that he taught for 50 years, from his enlightenment, until he died at the age of 80. Surely at some point in this long lifetime, some of his keen disciples would have written down his teachings? Surely there are texts that survive from those his lifetime - rock carvings - or clay tablets - or even paper?
After all there are ancient Sumerian texts far older than this.

Cunieform text from around 2600 BC
If there were, just a few pages, or fragments of pages from any of the sutras, reliably dated from the time of the Buddha, this could give us many clues about how the texts have changed between the Buddha's time and the present day.
If only!
Yes, it's true, the Buddha was born thousands of years after the first writing systems were developed. However, writing developed in India at a far later date than elsewhere.
That is - unless you count the Indus Valley script as a writing system. This is the last major undeciphered script in the world, and also one of the older scripts in the world.
This is a typical script:
Indus Script - undeciphered so nobody knows what it says or what it was for - whatever it was - was only used for short inscriptions of a few symbols
Nobody knows if it was a writing system or not. It could alternatively be a kind of signage a bit like a pub sign, or road crossing symbols or heraldic signs. All the inscriptions are short, just a few symbols each. Analysis suggests that it seems to have many of the characteristics of a writing system, see: A Rosetta Stone for a lost language (TED talk video). Also, How come we can't decipher the Indus script?
At any rate - whether it is a writing system, or just a system of signs of some kind - all the texts are very short, and undeciphered - and in any case, it had fallen out of use about 1400 years before the time of the Buddha.
After that, there doesn't seem to be any evidence of writing in India until the Brahmi script. This was used for the Edicts of King Asoka, a great Buddhist King who ruled much of India a century or so after the Buddha:

It seems that the Buddha just missed the introduction of writing to India. If he had been born just a century later...
So - as far as we know - the Buddha and his disciples hadn't got any way of writing down his teachings. The internal evidence also suggests this - there is no mention of writing in any of the earliest Buddhist sutras. And the internal evidence of the sutras themselves also reports that they were recorded using memorization techniques.
So the question here all depends on how reliable these methods of memorization were, and how accurately the teachings were preserved during the five centuries or more that elapsed between the time of the Buddha and the earliest known written texts.
Well - remember this is a culture without writing. So memorization would have been of supreme importance. And - it's possible for humans to achieve rather astonishing feats of memorization. Buddhist monks particularly.
The Guinness Book of Records of 1985 records the feat of a Buddhist monk who was first to memorize the entire Pali Canon in modern times:

He was able to memorize the entire canon - thousands of pages, millions of words. He was first in modern times to win the titles Tipitakadhara Dhammabhandagarika (Bearer of the Three Pitakas and Keeper of the Dhamma Treasure).
To do this he had to be able to recite any of the sutras, starting anywhere in the sutra - and to do it with understanding, not just reading by rote but reading the words with meaning. And indeed he not only did that but he could also give comparative readings from different texts of each sutra also. Word for word accurate all the way through. It's a stringent 33 day exam, with little margin allowed for errors.
So - it seems at least possible that some of the monks, disciples of the Buddha could have memorized all the teachings in the same way.
Now there are different traditions of memorization. In the case of the Indian Vedas, then they are thought to have been memorized with great accuracy for centuries. It's different in the folk traditions of oral story telling, where there is virtue in vivid portrayal of the story and elaboration of the details.
So the main question here is - were the Buddhist monks word for word memorizers as for the ancient Vedic texts - or were they improvisers and elaborators who changed the texts as in the oral folk traditions of the world?
TEXTUAL LAYERING
As with most texts, the Pali Canon has many "layers", and there's general agreement that some of the texts are far earlier than others. But the big question here is - over what timescale did this layering happen?
It's not at all unusual to get textual layering like this within the works of a single author. As an example, we can trace this process in the works of Tolkien as he has left many manuscripts collated by his son Christopher. In the earliest drafts of the Lord of the Rings, then the ring was a simple invisibility ring just as it was in the first edition of the Hobbit. There was no hint at all of a "Dark Lord" and no dark riders. The hobbits met Gandalf in the shire, before they had got far along their journey, slightly delayed. He had a cold, and the eerie sniffling of the black riders in the Lord of the Rings, it's clear, originated in Gandalf's cold! And then when they meet farmer Maggot, then Frodo plays tricks on him and his family with his invisibility ring. It was shaping up to be another light hearted quest like the Hobbit.
If this was an oral tradition, only written down many centuries after his death, you can imagine scholars deciding that this is the work of several authors adn then putting forward the hypothesis that only the Hobbit and the first draft of the Lord of the Rings was by Tolkein. They might decide that everything else was by later authors - perhaps his children.
The same happens with Buddhist teaching to this day. In some of the Mahayana traditions you also have the idea that new teachings can arise, such as the Zen koans, and new teachings in the Tibetan traditions, that are directly from the awakened mind, and then this process can be particularly clear. You also have the idea of ancient teachings discovered before their time, "termas" that are then rediscovered in the present day that again carry this message of the awakened mind in the form of new teachings, never taught before.
You get a paritcularly clear example of this, I think, in the teachings of Trungpa Rinpoche. When he first came to the West with Akong Rimpoche he wore the robes of a Tibetan monk and taught in a traditional fashion like many other of the Tibetan teachers do to this day.He helped to found Samye Ling in Scotland which is almost like a little patch of Tibet transplanted into Scotland.

Akong Rinpoche continues to teach there to this day. But Trungpa Rinpoche, he gave up his monks robes (which you can do) and became a lay practioner. A very controversial figure, but generally recognized as practicing in an authentic way within his lineage. He then moved to the US, and taught in innovative ways, adapting the teachings to his students far more than most of the Tibetan lamas. For an example of his innovative style of teaching see Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Shambhala Classics) Chogyam
Trungpa: Books
He also wrote spontaneous poems, or "dohas", similar to the Zen kohans
Simplicity, free from conceptual mind,
Dawns as one taste, fresh relaxed.
Seeing nothing but That
Is the ordinary mind.
The Vidyadhara's Poetry | Nālandā Translation CommitteeSTRAY DOG
Chogyam is merely a stray dog.
He wanders around the world,
Ocean or snow-peak mountain pass.
Chogyam will tread along as a stray dog
Without even thinking of his next meal.
He will seek friendship with birds and jackals
And any wild animals."For more of his poems: First Thought, Best Thought, 108 Poems, by Chogyam Trungpa at American Buddha Online Library
Then towards the end of his short life, his main teaching was the path of Shambala, which is not even Buddhist particularly. It's a warrior tradition to do with a basic confidence, accepting ones own vulnerability. Connected with the ideas of Arthur's knights of the round table - probably the closest we have to it.
See
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior: Chogyam Trungpa:
(I link to the amazon page because you can "look inside" and read the start of it).
So - imagine that this was an oral tradition, that we didn't have writing - and that Trungpa Rimpoche's teachings were memorized, and finally written down 500 years after he died. Scholars might well argue that these were teachings that developed over a period of several centuries by many different authors.
But instead, they are the work of a single author, who gave all these teachings in a brief period of just over 20 years (he came to England first in 1963, to study English, helped set up Samye Ling in 1965, gave up his monks robes and moved to the US in 1970, began teaching the Shambala teachitngs in 1976, and died, aged 48 in 1987)
(Incidentally Trungpa Rimpoche was a fan of the Lord of the Rings as he wanted to get it translated into Tibetan, a project that never happened).
So the textual layering of the Pali Canon doesn't tell us much. With 50 years of teaching, there was plenty of time for layering to happen during the Buddha's own lifetime, and it's also generally agreed that the sutras must incorporate texts that predate the Buddha
So the big question is - did this layering happen over this short period of, say, 50 years (together with some earlier texts from before the Buddha), or a much longer period of, perhaps, five centuries? Or something in between?
Sadly there isn't much to go on by way of external sources. Even the edicts of Asoka don't tell us much as they are short and rarely go into details of the Buddha's teachings.
So, mainly this depends on internal evidence in the sutras themselves.
SPECTRUM OF VIEWS ON THE MATTER
Scholars are divided between those who think the earliest sutras in the Pali Canon preserve the teachings of the Buddha, those who think that only a few fragments of his teaching survive, and those who are agnostic about it.
But those in favour of the "theory of authenticity" have a fair bit going for them I think. The internal evidence is quite strong, I believe, indicating that they probably were all composed in a short time period.
ARE TRADITIONAL BUDDHISTS BIASED TOWARDS THE THEORY OF AUTHENTICITY?
Many of those who put forward this view are Pali scholars and many of those are Therevadhan Buddhists. But then on the other hand - thse are also the scholars who are most familiar with the Pali sources and who are able to read them in Pali - the original language of the earliest sutras, and thought to be closely related to the language the Buddha himself taught in.
I think myself, that by analogy with the Mahayana sutras, that being a Buddhist practitioner doesn't bias you hugely towards the theory of authenticity.
All the Buddhist scholars mahayana texts are all composed at a later date, many of them a thousand years after the Buddha died. Nobody seriously questions that AFAIK, practitioners included, for those interested in such things.
In the same way, Christian theologians also are - many of them - perfectly okay with examining the gospels and trying to figure out the ur texts, that Jesus himself taught, and which of the texts were later additions. For instance, apparently the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery is thought by many to be a much later addition to St John's gospel. But - that doesn't make the story any less powerful or valuable in the Christian teachings, and Christian theologians have no problem assigning it to a later date, if that is what turns out to be the truth of the matter.
So, is the same with Buddhist scholarship. And also Buddhism itself, its not a creed, and the Buddha himself taught us to examine the truth of everything for ourselves. If we accept that they are the teachings of the Buddha, well the teachings themselves advise us not to accept anything like this on the basis of blind faith. And if they turned out to be teachings of later teachers, that doesn't in any way invalidate the value of what is taught in the canon.
Perhaps there is a natural tendency for Buddhist practitioners to prefer the Theory of Authenticity. As a Buddhist practitioner myself, it's naturally quite an appealing idea, to think that in the Pali Canon we might have, preserved, many of the original teachings of the Buddha himself.
But just as for Christian theologians - Buddhist practitioners of a scholarly bent want to know the truth here as much as anyone.
And I think myself, that there is pretty good evidence that they are the teachings of a single historical figure, who probably was the Buddha himself, around 500 BC or earlier. So anyway let's examine the evidence, and see what it says.
Here I'm relying extensively on The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts (supplement to Volume 5 of the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies) by Bhikkhu Sujato and Bhikkhu Brahmali
This doesn't mean of course that the sutras, word for word, record the teachings of the Buddha exactly as he spoke them. They were of course adapted for memorization. And there are small differences between different versions of the canon - and also there are some sections that are, apparently, quite evidently of a far later date. So again - no serious scholar doubts that there are some later additions to the sutras also, changes of wording, extra passages and some entire sutras quite probably.
Also another thing to say here. The Pali canon is vast, thousands of pages. So it is unlike the situation for the bible, gospels or koran where many devout practitioners have read the entire body of scriptures. It is a rare Buddhist who has read the entire canon as it is too vast. Only the most dedicated scholars do this. I certainly haven't read it, and am reporting here what the Pali scholars say about it.
INTERNAL EVIDENCE THAT THE EARLIEST BUDDHIST SUTRAS WERE COMPOSED AT THE TIME OF THE BUDDHA
Well one line of evidence that I think is quite strong, we have already touched on. The Pali scholars tell us that the sutras never mention writing at all (except a few mentions in later strata of the Vinaya). Surely if they were composed after the introduction of writing to India, then there would be some mention, somewhere, of someone writing something down? Writing gets mentioned in the Mahayana sutras.
That then would seem to put them at least some time before the time of Pillars of Ashoka, around the third century BC. So - at most a century or two after the Buddha died.
PLEASE NOTE In this I'm mainly just summarizing some of the things that Bikkhu Sujato says in his thesis. I haven't studied the Pali canon myself. Few Buddhists have apart from scholars because they are so vast. But putting it in my own words because I find his arguments persuasive.
Other internal evidence like this - the sutras describe a time when India was split up into many smaller kingdoms. What's more it describes this period in a consistent way, so you can actually map out where those kingdoms were in ancient India. And - also this has lead to archaeological discoveries.
It also has a consistent picture also of society and the various trades, which adds up to what seems like a snapshot of a particular time in history.
Also, South India and the island of Sri Lanka are unknown in the early Buddhist texts, while at the time of Asoka these regions were of course well known to everyone.
This also would seem to suggest that the early sutras as a whole - all the textual layers of them - must date back to well before the time of king Asoka. Apparently also the society depicted is consistent with what you'd expect at the time of the Buddha.
The sutras also talk about the very beginnings of the developments that lead to the kingdom ofo Asoka later on. One of the many small kingdoms, the Nanda empire, had begun to expand, but so far was not much bigger than the others. Other evidence suggests that this empire swallowed up most of the other smaller kingdoms within a few decades of the death of the Buddha, and it surely must have taken some time for this to happen. So this also seems fairly strong evidence that the sutras describe India as it was at the time of the Buddha or at most a few years after he died.
All this suggests that the texts were preserved in a conservative way. If they were improvised as in folk traditions of story telling and legends - surely they would have mentioned writing as a profession, somewhere, if even just a passing mention in one of the many lists in the sutras. Also surely the sutras, at some point in the five hundred year period before they were written down - would have had occasional passages inserted that depicted society as it was at the time of King Asoka?
But as well as that, the later monks when retelling the sutras, if they did it in this improvisational fashion - would surely have interpolated statements about Asoka's kingdom and the King himself into the sutras. They would probably have inserted teachings predicting the rise of his empire into the speeches of the Buddha. But none of that happens. There is no mention in the sutras of a future ruler of an empire covering much of India - either as a historical figure or a predicted future figure. Some of the Mahayana sutras do both, describe him historically, and attribute predictions of Asoka to the Buddha.
There is the general idea of a "wheel turning monarch" in the early sutras - a king who governs a large area far larger than any of the kingdoms of the Buddha's time - indeed an entire world system - but this could easily be due to memories of earlier large scale civilizations in India. There's nothing there, apparently, the Pali scholars say, that could be taken as foreshadowing King Asoka, in the way that some of the later Mahayana sutras do.
Extent of Asoka's empire which covered much of India in the 3rd Century BC. (See Maps of India)T
The sutras have no suggestion of this, and don't predict it either, but instead consistently describe an India made of many little kingdoms, which matches the political situation as it was at the time of the Buddha to the best of our knowledtge.
Also there is no mention of either South India or Sri Lanka in the early Buddhist texts. Though not part of Asoka's empire, ordinary people of his time would have been well aware of the existence of these places.
Indeed by the time of King Asoka there was sea going trade as well, and commerce,with trade connections extending as far afield as the Mediterranean. While in the early texts, only local trade within North India is mentioned., The furthest known trade in the early sutras is sandalwood that we now know came from S. India but was known as Kasi sandalwood as that is where it was processed. Sea trade has only has one mention in the early sutras, with no mention of what they traded or where they traded. This matches well with what is known about India at the time of the Buddha.
BRAHMANICAL TEXTS
The early sutras mention many Brahmanical texts but show no awareness of texts composed after the time of the Buddha, or later Hindu deities, which helps to locate them vsia vi the Brahmanical traditions.
OVERALL STYLE
This is something that we have to take partly on trust, as non Pali readers (unless you happen to be fluent in Pali) - but the Pali scholars tell us that the teachings have a distinctive style. A love of humour and irony for instance, which marks them out as the work of a single teacher, and distinguishes them from works of other teachers of his time and later on.
"This can be seen in a number of aspects of the Early Buddhist Texts, such as the large number of similes, analogies and metaphors that are vivid, precise in application, realistic and local, and formal in presentation the analytical approach to language, which was unknown before the Buddha; use of irony and humour. and internal consistency and coherence
"Moreover, many of the ideas presented in the EBTs are revolutionary for
the time. This distinctive personal style is quite different from anything
found in other Buddhist literature, or even in the Upaniṣads."The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts, by Bhikkhu Sujato and Bhikkhu Brahmali
The authors then go on to describe how there is a similarity also of vocabulary, grammar and meter that marks off the early Buddhist texts from teachings of other teachers at the time and later Buddhist sutras.
Similarly if you read the Lord of the Rings, and the earlier drafts of it, and the Hobbit - you can detect a similar style throughout. If someone said that the LOR was the work of a later author, say, J. K. Rowling or whatever - it would be hard to credit this, when you compare the styles. The LOR and the Hobbit are clearly much more similar to each other in style of writing than works by different authors are with each other..
CONSISTENCY BETWEEN DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE PALI CANON
There isn't just one Pali Canon but several different versions, including a version in China that was separate from the Indian version for a long time. At an early stage of Buddhist scholarship when these versions were not yet well known, one of the scholars predicted that the different versions of the canon would turn out to have all the same basic teachings and sutras. And indeed, with minor variations, this is exactly what happened. So this suggests conservative transmission of the sutras - at least since the time of common origin of those different versions of the canon.
Bikkhu Sujato mentions several examples, including a textual analysis of the Majjhima Nikaya or the "middle length discourses of the Buddha" which exists in complete state in both the Indian and the Chinese traditions. The Chinese and the Indian versions of the Pali Canon were probably separated from each other soon after King Asoka - so these traditions have transmitted the Pali Canon independently for around 2300 years, including about 300 years of oral transmission.
A textual analysis showed that the Chinese and Indian versions of the Majjhima Nikaya were doctrinally identical. So that again testifies to the conservative processes by which the canon was preserved.
PRESERVATION OF AWKWARD PASSAGES AND MINOR INCONSIDTENCIES
Though there is an overall unity of the teachings, there are several minor discrepancies between the sutras - things that just don't fit with each other. In an improvised oral tradition you'd expect these inconsistencies to be ironed out - that the narrator, remembering another sutra, would interpolate what was said there instead of this awkward passage that doesn't fit the rest of the sutras. But this didn't happen. This is a characteristic of word for word conservative transmission of a text.
INTERNAL EVIDENCE OF THE MEMORIZATION PROCESES
The sutras tell us that the leader of the Jains, Mahavira, died while the Buddha was still alive, six years before the Buddha. After he died, his disciples came into disagreement about what were his core teachings.
Buddha's disciples, seeing this, decided that they needed to memorize the teachings of the Buddha. So they started this process while he was still alive, and while they could ask the Buddha himself to clarify their understanding of his teachings.
Also the Buddha himself stressed the importance of preserving the teachings. He told them not to take on anyone else as the leader of the community when he died, but instead to take the sutras themselves as their teacher. And repeatedly asked them to confirm that they had understood the teachings and when he died, just before he died, he encouraged any of his disciples who had the slightest question about his teachings to take this opportunity to clarify them. And nobody did, so the sutras said..
The sutras also tell us that after the Buddha died, his disciples gathered together in the first of the great Buddhist councils to work on a final version of all his teachings. They went through each of the memorized sutras in turn, and decided on a final version - and then once they were all agreed on it, word for word - then they recited the sutra in unison. They did this with all his sutras and the process took about seven months to complete.
A similar council was held roughly every century from then on until the sutras were written down.
For the details see The Pali Canon - What a Buddhist must know by Prayudh Payutto
Also, Recovering the Buddha’s Message by Richard Gombrich where he also talks about the challenges faced by the Buddhist monks to memorize the sutras without the background of the Brahmans who from birth were brought up to memorize the Vedic texts.
THE PUZZLE OF THE START OF THE SRAMANA PERIOD AND THE THEORY OF INAUTHENTICITY
Buddha was born near the start of the Sramana period in Indian history. This was a time when many things that had been taken for granted for centuries were being questioned - and spiritual seekers roamed the country, mostly in the form of beggars with no worldly possessions apart from their robes, sleeping rough, and asking for alms on their quests.
If you accept what is said in the sutras, then the change happened quickly. Previously you had the Vedic rituals and deities.Ancient stories about the Gods and rituals that had been remembered word for word for centuries, perhaps thousands of years. With no idea of rebirth, or a cycle of existence.
Then within a short period of time, during the life of the Buddha, and just before, many new ideas were introduced - of rebirth and the cycle of existence. The idea of liberation from the cycle of existence - of nirvana, of non self, the four noble truths, and ideas of karma. None of those were present before.
Sometimes you hear it said that Hinduism is more ancient than Buddhism. But Hinduism in its present form, with ideas of rebirth and freedom from the cycle of rebirth (for Hindus this is called Moksha) - is no more ancient than Buddhism or Jainism. The all evolved at around the same time.
The Vedas and the Hindu deities are ancient and long predate the Buddha. So strictly speaking it is Vedantic religion that is ancient, and beliefs in some of the Hindu deities - not really modern Hinduism as such.
So - nobody says that the Buddha himself invented all of this. When he set out to find the answer to the cycle of existence, that was in a culture that already accepted the idea of rebirth, of a cycle of existence, of Samsara, and of the need to find a path to freedom from Samsara. And meditation was commonplace and advanced also.
Indeed he went to many teachers of his time who were teaching various meditations to use to deal with the problems of existence.
But - these were new ideas. If we accept the sutras - then all of that must have developed in an astonishingly short time, of just a century or so.
So - the main thing those who are in favour of the "theory of inauthenticity" have in favour of their thesis, I think, is the idea that this must have taken longer than the time period set out in the sutras, and that it is more natural for such a process to have taken the full five centuries until the teachings were written down.
Both sides of the debate agree on the layering of the sutras, that some of the teachings were older, that they incorporate elements from much older teachings, and that some sutras are undoubtedly much more recent and that there is a complex layering process in between.
But those in favour of the theory of authenticity think that just about all the layering except the obviously later ones happened within the life of the Buddha, combined with earlier incorporated teachings, and the time period after his death leading up to the first great Buddhist council. I.e. over a period of less than a century.
Those in favour of the theory of inauthenticity think that this same layering happened over a period of half a millenium.
As Bikkhu Sujato points out, this theory of inauthenticity is unrefutable. The theory of authenticity is refuted by a single statement in an earlier sutra referring to writing for instance. It is hard to think of anything that could refute the theory of inauthenticity. And it doesn't make any testable predictions about things that could be found out in the future. And doesn't have any strong internal evidence correlating the sutras to known historical events - indeed the evidence of that nature seems to be all against it.
Another issue with it is - if these ideas are not the work of the Buddha and other teachers of his time - then who did originate them? They don't have an alternative hypothesis. If they had a named figure, for instance, that lived a couple of centuries after the Buddha to attribute these teachings to, I'd find them more plausible. But instead they just say the ideas gradually evolved.
So, I don't find this plausible. But - please bear in mind, this is just my own personal viewpoint. Here in Quora we are permitted to post our own views on things - it is not an encyclopedia.
I encourage you to read the material on all sides of the debate and decide for yourself.
Carol Anderson is a strong advocate of the theory of inauthenticity and her book is a scholarly work which mainly focuses on the textual evidence for layering in the sutras. Sadly I haven't been able to read the complete book yet, but you can read much of it online here: Pain and Its Ending
You can read a critical review of her work by Lance Cousins - a respected Buddhist scholar - here: Pain and its Ending: The Four Noble Truths in the Therav!da Buddhist Canon - review by Lance Cousins in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 2001
INTERMEDIATE VIEWS
Many Buddhist scholars have intermediate views. They would not go so far as Payudh Payutto and Bikkhu Sujato and say that a large part of the Pali canon has been passed down almost verbatim like the Vedas, pretty much exactly as memorized during the first great Buddhist council.
But they do accept that all the main ideas in the Pali canon such as the ideas of rebirth, karma, four noble truths, non self (or anatta), liberation from Samsara, nirvana, paranirvana, were all already present at the time of the Buddha. And they also accept that many of these ideas such as the idea of anatta and the four noble truths were the work of a single remarkable teacher. And many think that at least some of the sutras in the Pali canon do record some of the actual words of the Buddha pretty much as he taught them. Where they are talking there about the historical Buddha.
(WORK IN PROGRESS)
So far we've been talking about the ancient Therevadhan Pali sutras, These sutras are perhaps best thought of as non sectarian - as they record teachings that are common to all the Buddhist schools.
LATER BUDDHIST TEXTS.
The scholars all agree that the later Mahayana sutras were composed at a far later date, with some of them probably first written down well over a thousand years after the Buddha was born. For instance the famous Heart Sutra - one of the most famous of all the sutras - may well have been composed in China as late as the seventh century, though it could have had an earlier origin.

Chinese text of the Heart sutra: Prajnyaapaaramitaa Hridaya - calligraphy by Zhao Meng Fu
Hardly any educated modern Buddhist would suggest that the Heart Sutra has been memorized, word for word, since the time of the Buddha in the manner of the Pali canon. Yes, the Sutra itself says that it reports the words of one of the disciples of the Buddha, and briefly, of the Buddha himself.
There is a sense in which you can still take them as the words of the Buddha. But certainly in any ordinary sense they are later compositions.
(WORK IN PROGRESS)
Sources include:
The Buddha says "Bhikshus, intention is kamma, I say! Having intended, one creates karma through body, through speech, and through the mind"
"Bhikshus, intention is kamma, I say! Having intended, one creates karma through body, through speech, and through the mind"
This famous statement is often misunderstood. "The Buddha's utterance does not establish a mathematical equivalence between cetanaa and kamma, such that every instance of volition must be considered kamma. As the second part of his statement shows, his words mean that cetanaa [volition] is the decisive factor in action, that which motivates action and confers upon action the ethical significance intrinsic to the idea of kamma. This implies that the ethical evaluation of a deed is to be based on the cetanaa from which it springs, so that a deed has no kammic efficacy apart from the cetanaa to which it gives expression. The statement does not imply that cetanaa [volition] (in the non-arahant) is always and invariably kamma."
Bodhi Bihikku, 1998, "A critical examination of Nanavira Thera's "A note on paticcasumuppada", Budhist studies review, 1998.
For Piya Tan's translation of the entire sutra, with notes on each page, see: Nibbedhika (Pariyaya) Sutta
Now, the Pali word kamma or the Sankrit word karma (from the root kr to do) literally means 'action', 'doing'. But in the Buddhist theory of karma it has a specific meaning: it means only 'volitional action', not all action. Nor does it mean the result of karma as many people wrongly and loosely use it. In Buddhist terminology karma never means its effect; its effect is known as the 'fruit' or the 'result' or karma (kamma-phala or kamma-vipāka).
Volition may relatively be good or bad, just as a desire may relatively be good or bad. So karma may be good or bad relatively. Good karma (kusala) produces good effects, and bad karma (akusala) produces bad effects. 'Thirst', volition, karma, whether good or bad, has one force as its effect: force to continue-to continue in a good or bad direction. Whether good or bad it is relative, and is within the cycle of continuity (samsāra). An Arahant, though he acts, does not accumulate karma, because he is free from the false idea of self, free from the 'thirst' for continuity and becoming, free from all other defilements and impurities (kilesā, sāsavā dhammā). For him there is no rebirth.Chapter III of "What the Buddha Taught"

Bio Mingun who recited the entire 16,000 pages of the Pali canon by memory in 1954. One of those who have memorized the entire canon

Tripitaka Koreana stored at Haeinsa (해인사, Temple of Reflection on a Smooth Sea) is one of the foremost Chogye Buddhist temples in South Korea. It is most notable for being the home of the Tripitaka Koreana, the whole of the Buddhist Scriptures carved onto 81,258 wooden printing blocks, which it has housed since 1398.
"I have discussed in this book almost everything which is commonly accepted as the essential and fundamental teaching of Buddha. These are the doctrines of the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, the Five Aggregates, Karma, Rebirth, Conditioned Genesis (Paticcasamuppāda), the doctrine of No-Soul (Anatta), Satipatthāna (the Setting-up of Mindfulness)....
The term Theravāda-Hinayāna or 'Small Vehicle' is no longer used in informed circles- could be translated as 'the School of the Elders' (theras), and Mahāyāna as 'Great Vehicle'. They are used of the two main forms of Buddhism known in the world today. Theravāda, which is regarded as the original orthodox Buddhism, is followed in Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Chittagong in East Pakistan. Mahāyāna, which developed relatively later, is followed in other Buddhist countries like China, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia, etc. There are certain differences, mainly with regard to some beliefs, practices and observances between these two schools, but on the most important teachings of the Buddha, such as those discussed here, Theravāda and Mahāyāna are unanimously agreed."
Interesting talk by Her Eminence Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, one of the very few recognized reincarnation of a female Tibetan Lamas, on issues arising from introduction of Buddhism into the West. Many more videos by her on youtube.
On intention:
Those are extracts from this talk:
The Heart of Enlightened Action, Talk 1/5
In general, it is perfectly acceptable to notify other editors of ongoing discussions, provided that it is done with the intent to improve the quality of the discussion by broadening participation to more fully achieve consensus.
However, canvassing which is done with the intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way is considered inappropriate. This is because it compromises the normal consensus decision-making process, and therefore is generally considered disruptive behavior.
int i==4 yield an error in this C program?


These are the remains of the library of Nalanda University - reported to have had hundreds of thousands of books, and reportedly burnt for three months when it was destroyed around 1200, after flourishing for around six centuries. (That's according to Persian historian Minhaj-i-Siraj - see History of Libraries entry on Nalanda)
And here is a video of its ruins:
the Chinese Buddhist monk and pilgrim Xuanzang (602-664) who traveled to Nalanda university in the seventh century to copy their scriptures and take them back to China.

Tai Situpa - who made a rather memorable remark about a mosquito and Karma in one talk I remember watching on video (didn't hear him speak live).

During lunar eclipses, you can plainly see the curved shadow of the Earth. The ancient Greeks observed this and concluded that the Earth is round, and even attempted to deduce how large the Earth was. But the Tibetans - they weren't interested in science, for some reason, and don't seem to have made the same deduction. From: File:Lunar eclipse oct 8 2014 Minneapolis 4 46am.png
They are way behind us in the West in the area of science. But arguably way ahead in some ways, in the area of understanding the mind and mind training
Therefore, o monks, do not brood over the world as to whether it is eternal or temporal, limited or endless .... Such brooding, O monks, is senseless, has nothing to do with genuine pure conduct (s. ādibrahmacariyaka-sīla), does not lead to aversion, detachment, extinction, nor to peace, to full comprehension, enlightenment and Nibbāna, etc."
"Speculation about [the first moment, purpose, etc., of] the cosmos is an imponderable that is not to be speculated about. Whoever speculates about these things would go mad & experience vexation."
"I believe that the Buddha could remember countless previous lives, and that they were as described in the Jataka tales.
"And further more, I believe that the Tibetan "Reincarnate Lamas" can also remember their previous lives, and that the process of finding a new Dalai Lama is infallible, and that the present 14th Dalai Lama is indeed the reincarnation of the 13th and so on back and back to the first. And that the Panchen Lama also reincarnates in the same way and that this is true of all the Tibetan Lamas.
"And I believe that all beings reincarnate in the same way. And that I also took many different forms in previous lives. And that just about any creature or state of life, good fortune or bad, I've been born like that also in a previous life."
Ascetic Buddha, late Ming period (1368-1644) Blanc-de-Chine, Danish National Museum
"Like the sages of the Upanishads, Siddartha practiced yoga and meditation. He went to Vaishali to learn meditative concentration and studied with Alara Kalama, who was said to have had hundreds of disciples. Siddartha soon learned how to reach the formless world, but still having mental anxieties he decided not to become a disciple of Alara Kalama. Nor did he become a disciple of his second teacher, Uddaka Ramaputra, after he attained the higher state of consciousness beyond thought and non-thought.
"Still not satisfied, Siddartha decided to practice the path of extreme austerities, and in this quest he was joined by the sage Kaundinya and four others. He pressed his tongue against his palate to try to restrain his mind until the perspiration poured from his armpits. He restrained his breath and heard the violent sounds of wind in his ears and head. He went into trances, and some thought he was dead. He fasted for long periods of time and then decided to try limiting his food to the juice of beans and peas. As his flesh shrank, the bones almost stuck out of his skin so that he could touch his spine from the front; after sitting on the ground his imprint looked like a camel's footprint.
"For six years Siddartha practiced such austerities; but instead of achieving superhuman knowledge and wisdom, he only seemed to get weaker and weaker. Finally he thought that there might be a better way to attain enlightenment. He remembered how, while his father was working, he would sit in the shade of an apple tree free of sensual desires. Perhaps in concentrating his mind without evil ideas and sensual desires, he should not be afraid of a happy state of mind. However, to gain the strength he felt he needed for this concentration he decided to start eating again. When he gave up practicing the extreme austerities, the five mendicants who were with him became disillusioned and left him, saying that Gautama lives in abundance and has given up striving.
"Siddartha reasoned that a life of penance and pain was no better than a life of luxury and pleasure, because if penance on Earth is religion, then the heavenly reward for penance must be irreligion. If merit comes from purity of food, then deer should have the most merit. Those who practice asceticism without calming their passions are like a man trying to kindle fire by rubbing a stick on green wood in water, but those who have no desires or worldly attachments are like a man using a dry stick that ignites.
"Regaining his strength from normal eating of the food he begged, Siddartha once again practiced meditation. Now he easily attained the first stage of joy and pleasure, then a joyful trance arising from concentration with serenity and the mind fixed on one point without reasoning and investigation. The third stage produced equanimity to joy and aversion in a mindful, happy state. In the fourth stage pleasure and pain were left behind in a mindful purity. With his mind thus concentrated and cleansed, he directed it to the remembrance of former existences from previous births, perceiving cycles of evolution and dissolution of the universe.
"Then he directed his mind to the passing away and rebirth of beings, perceiving how the karma of evil actions, words, and thoughts leads to rebirth in miserable conditions and suffering in hell. But those beings leading good lives are reborn in a happy state in a heavenly world. Finally directing his mind to the means of ultimate release, Siddartha realized that there is pain, a cause of pain, the cessation of pain, and a way that leads to that cessation of pain. Thus his mind was emancipated from sensual desires, the desire for existence, and ignorance.
"According to legend this whole process occurred in one night after he had decided to sit under a tree until he became enlightened or died. It was also said that he was tested by Mara, the tempter, but Siddartha could not be swayed from his purpose. Thus darkness and ignorance were dispelled by the light as Siddartha Gautama became enlightened and was henceforth known as the Buddha, Shakyamuni, or the Tathagata."
http://www.san.beck.org/GPJ3-Mah...





"Deep in Western culture, especially in America, is a tendency to look for perfection in our teachers. Tibetans don’t see their teachers the same way. I was at a conference with a number of Asian and Western teachers, and one of the Tibetan teachers said simply, “My teacher is Buddha.” It was very clear that he had no expectation that his ‘teacher’ was a perfect being but this was how he regarded the relationship, this was the source for his spiritual guidance and inspiration. It was a subtle point, not said with the usual rhetoric, and I found it very helpful."
Wake Up Call: Relationship with the Teacher

Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior:
"There is a basic human wisdom that can help solve the world’s problems. It doesn’t belong to any one culture or region or religious tradition—though it can be found in many of them throughout history. It’s what Chögyam Trungpa called the sacred path of the warrior. The sacred warrior conquers the world not through violence or aggression, but through gentleness, courage, and self-knowledge. The warrior discovers the basic goodness of human life and radiates that goodness out into the world for the peace and sanity of others. That’s what the Shambhala teachings are all about, and this is the book that has been presenting them to a wide and appreciative audience for more than twenty years."
"Legend tells us that King Arthur and his Knights lie sleeping in Caerleon, awaiting the call to arms for their beloved country. And what better place to lie undisturbed than beneath the green mound, now surrounded by a turreted wall. But there was not always a wall there and the present wall was built by Mr. John Jenkins, owner of the Caerleon Tin Plate Works in 1820. It was prior to this that a Caerleon man experienced an unusual adventure."
"Wending his way down Mill Street, after a night out at the Red Lion, he was amazed to hear sounds of music and revelry coming from the direction of the Mound. Being curious, he went to investigate only to be arrested by a soldier in an ancient type of uniform. He was led to where a great iron doorway led into the Mound. He was welcomed by men in armour and bidden to partake of the excellent food and wine with which the tables were laden. On the tables were also heaps of gold and silver. To his amazement he discovered that he was sitting at table with King Arthur and his Knights and was made to feel quite at home. When he had had enough he decided to leave and he was given a bag of gold coins and bade "God speed" when he left. In the morning he was found lying dead drunk by the roadside near to the Mynde. Although he had no gold on him, he insisted that his story was true. He became teetotal and to the day of his death persisted in telling his story."
See: King Arthur and the Sleeping Knights
There are three philosophies which are considered by Buddhism to be wrong view and which must be carefully distinguished from the teaching of kamma:
- Pubbekatahetuvada: The belief that all happiness and suffering arise from previous kamma (Past-action determinism).
- Issaranimmanahetuvada: The belief that all happiness and suffering are caused by the directives of a Supreme Being (Theistic determinism).
- Ahetu-apaccayavada: The belief that all happiness and suffering are random, having no cause (Indeterminism or Accidentalism)
See Misunderstandings of the Law of Kamma

When you climb to the top of these stairs you may be tired. Your tiredness is the result of your karma of climbing the stairs. Also you can't touch the ground or drive a car because you are on another level.
All that is the result of karma. And this can influence your decisions, for instance you might turn back because you are tired. But you could also rest, or keep going to a higher level.
And those decisions are decisions you make in the present. They are influenced by karma sure. Your options limited by past karma also, for instance not able to touch the ground or drive a car because of your past karma of climbing these stairs.
But the decisions themselves are not results of karma.

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though we pass them by today,
Tomorrow we may come this way
And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun.
Tolkein's The Road Goes Ever On (song) from Lord of the Rings
Tit Porng went to visit the Venerable Abbot of the nearby monastery. At one point, he asked:
"Eh, Luang Por, the Buddha taught that everything is not-self, and is without an owner -- there is no-one who commits kamma and no-one who receives its results. If that's the case, then I can go out and hit somebody over the head or even kill them, or do anything I like, because there is no-one committing kamma and no-one receiving its results."
"Seeking but not finding the house builder, I traveled through the round of countless births. Oh, painful is birth ever and again! House builder you have now been seen. You shall not build the house again. Your rafters have been broken down; your ridge-pole is demolished too. My mind has now attained the unformed nibbana and reached the end of every kind of craving."
Diagram showing how you can "count" ratios
Notice that this also includes all finite decimals like 1.251 etc. Those are just ratios - in that case 1251/1000
See also: A quick way of recognising countable sets
Proof is quite easy. If you try to count the decimals, you can list them. But any such list must leave some numbers out.
It turns out to be easy to find an unending decimal that is not in your list, no matter how you try to arrange the decimals.
Just choose any number that differs from the first number in your list in the first place, the second number in the second place and so on. Avoid using 0 or 9 in your new decimal. (to avoid confusions such as 0.0999999... = 0.1)
The result is a new decimal not in your list.
If you are mathematically inclined, for details, check out Cantor's diagonal argument
Once you've shown that you need "uncountable" sets - you can also show that you get many more types of infinity after that, many different orders of uncountability.
Indeed some mathematicians devote their entire working life to studying the different sizes of uncountable sets.


HaloBacterium Salinarum - isolated from Lake Zuf in Wadi Natrun, Egypt - recently genetically sequenced - Microbes like this could exist on Mars.
Mars could be an exoplanet in our own solar system - for biologists.
Microbes on Mars, in the more interesting case, would be more like a microbial version of ET than a tiger
Vestibular system
". In all rotation experiments aloft, the five astronauts tested (astronaut 1 did not participate) were virtually symptom free, thus demonstrating lower susceptibility aloft than in preflight and postflight tests on the ground when symptoms were always elicited. Inasmuch as the eyes were covered and the canalicular stimuli were the same aloft as on the ground, it would appear that lifting the stimulus to the otolith organs due to gravity was an important factor in reducing susceptibility to motion sickness even though the transient stimuli generated under the test conditions were substantial and abnormal in pattern. "
Individual differences in susceptibil... [Acta Astronaut. 1975 Jan-Feb]
Otolith
" An early otolith-spinal reflex, measured by electromyography from the gastrocnemius-soleus muscles during sudden footward acceleration, was inhibited immediately upon entering weightlessness and declined further during the flight, but was unchanged from pre-flight when measured shortly after return to earth. Dynamic visual-vestibular interaction was studied by measuring subjective roll self-motion created by looking into a spinning drum. Results suggest increased weighting of visual cues and reduced weighting of graviceptor signals in weightlessness"
M.I.T./Canadian vestibular experiments on the Spacelab-1 mission: 1. Sensory adaptation to weightlessness and readaptation to one-g: an overview

Shows Soyuz immediately after separation from its final stage (screenshot from Orbiter simulation). Both are in orbit at this point. The idea is to use a pre-attached tether which unfurls as the spacecraft separate - a method tested in many missions now - though only twice before used to generate artificial gravity, microgravity only - in the Gemini missions.

Here they are after the solar panels unfurl.



Here it is over the vastness of the Pacific ocean - final stage not shown (I haven't yet found a way to tether them to each other in Orbiter used for this simulation). This is where most of the boosting would happen.

This shows the tether for Gemini 12 see Space Tethers
Why the final stage orbit has the same energy at the end of the experiment:
The final stage after release has sum of perigee + apogee of 353 + 68, or 421 km, and it originally had 193 + 225, or 418 km.
This means, the longest diameter of the ellipse has hardly changed at all, so (since its total energy, KE + PE, is inversely proporitional to the semi-maor axis) it's energy is pretty much exactly the same as it had originally.

Shows the Soyuz solar arrays after deployment
You want solar power for the duration if at all possible, so the experiment can last for a couple of days, not limited to battery power.

This video shows the Skylab astronauts on their jogging track. Jogging starts at 3.30 into the movie. It was just done for fun, not as a scientific study. They certainly don't seem to be under any distress jogging around at about 12 rpm, and generating 0.5 g approximately. The Coriolis effect probably makes them more clumsy than they would be otherwise, but you'd adjust to that if you were spinning all the time.

Skylab litter chair was identical to this (in Smithsonian museum) - tested astronauts in various turning and rocking motions. Sadly - not used to test tolerance of constant spin motions of artificial gravity - but showed that humans were more tolerant of the movements than previously expected

"At about this same time (1960), Ashton Graybiel and colleagues began their long series of experiments in the 15-foot-diameter "slow rotation room" at the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory (Pensacola, Florida). Graybiel summarized their findings in a paper for the 1975 Princeton Conference [75]. Slow rotation rooms offer several advantages over typical centrifuges, particularly in their habitability and in the freedom of movement they afford. Subjects have remained in the rotating room for over a month - not strapped into a seat, but moving about, eating, sleeping, and performing various tasks. Graybiel confirmed that, in general, higher rotation rates resulted in more severe symptoms and slower adaptation, though individuals varied in their ability to adapt.
In brief, at 1.0 rpm even highly susceptible subjects were symptom-free, or nearly so. At 3.0 rpm subjects experienced symptoms but were not significantly handicapped. At 5.4 rpm, only subjects with low susceptibility performed well and by the second day were almost free from symptoms. At 10 rpm, however, adaptation presented a challenging but interesting problem. Even pilots without a history of air sickness did not fully adapt in a period of twelve days.
At 10 rpm, subjects had to restrict their head movements for several days to avoid severe nausea. Even after the nausea subsided, drowsiness and fatigue persisted throughout the twelve days. Biochemical measurements revealed an increase in the plasma level of the enzyme lactic dehydrogenase."
From: The Architecture of Artificial-Gravity Environments for Long-Duration Space Habitation

One of the few objects to survive re-entry. Spherical fuel tank from a Delta 2 rocket second stage, a similar spherical fuel tank was found in Namibia recently.
Soyuz TMA docked to the ISS. The astronauts use it as a safe shelter if there is a risk of debris hitting the ISS.

NASA - Current ISS Configuration - it can change orbit to avoid a hazard if it has at least 20 hours of warming.


Carl Sagan with a model of the Viking Lander
This photo is by Viking 1 and was taken in 1975
See: Catalog Page for PIA16800 - most images of Mars we see are colour adjusted as in the right-most image. The central image gives an idea of what the landscape would be like to a human eye.
James Lovelock in 2005
ESA's Mars Express radar gives strong evidence for former Mars oceanAncient northern ocean on Mars - the ocean in this artistic rendering was from 3 billion years ago and probably remained liquid for only a million years. An earlier ocean is thought to have formed 4 billion years ago when the atmosphere was thicker, and lasted for several hundred million years during the Noachian period on Mars.
Kevin Gill's re-imagining of an ancient Mars with early life
A Living Mars A conception of an ancient and/or future…Ancient Mars: Covered with life, oceans, clouds, and imagination
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_page...
Image from: Can People Go to Mars? Credit: OBPR.
Deinococcus radiodurans
Dense mass of anomuran crab Kiwa around deep-sea hydrothermal vent
Duane Moser (l) and South African ventilation engineer Cosolomon Kuhmalo (Photo by Brett Baker)
Endoliths two miles underground in a South Africal Gold mine
Hellas basinHellas Planitia impact crater, floor is 7.000 m below the surface of Mars and atmospheric pressure at base is below triple point of water so liquid water can briefly form but would soon evaporate.

Wind and Water on Mars
"They were first seen in 1998; they don’t look like anything we have here on Earth. To this day, no one is sure what they are, but we now know this: They come, then they go. Every Martian spring, they appear out of nowhere, showing up—70 percent of the time—where they were the year before. They pop up suddenly, sometimes overnight. When winter comes, they vanish. "
- journalist Robert Krulwich in his blog - Are Those Spidery Black Things On Mars Dangerous? (Maybe)