You are welcome to copy / paste this material for your own use for debunking Doomsday stories on news sites or on youtube. I get an average of three comments a day on my Science20 articles and often several pm’s a day by scared people asking for help with the many doomsday news stories they read online. I find that I often copy / paste the same reply to many people each day. Now that they are in a blog, I can write the answer once, and can copy / paste part of one of these posts and link to the rest of it. I can’t do Science20 articles for them all - that would overwhelm my science blog. So thought maybe I should start a new “Debunking Doomsday” blog here instead, so here it is.
You are welcome to use these posts in the same way for your own debunking, e.g. on youtube video comments or news site comments - copy / paste or link or both.
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
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
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
- BIOS-3, 30 m², so 225,000 km²
(smaller than the UK, see list of sovereign states and dependencies by area) - Biointensive mini gardening. 325 m² per person, so 2.44 million km²
(smaller than India at 3.288 million km²) - Conventional agriculture, 4000 m² per person, so 30 million km²
(a little under the area of the US, China and Russia combined)
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
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.
DETAILS
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 being full of many enigmatic statements 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. Some think it describes events that happened already in the first century AD. Some think that it is more about how to lead our lives and has no location in time or space. Some think that it does describe future events. If you aren’t a Christian then you don’t need to interpret it at all as it was written for Christians. 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 behind the Sun so won’t be visible. 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.
See also Debunked - The world will end because the Bible (or some other sacred book) says so