We've had world ending prophecies for centuries. But now we have various exaggerated scientific scenarios to add to the list, such as the ones based on asteroid impacts or nuclear war. They are mixed with pseudoscience, and out and out hoaxes, to the extent that it's often hard to figure out what is fake, what is exaggerated, and what is the sober truth. This feeling of a doomsday helplessness distracts us from the real issues that face us; things which we can actually do something about. Meanwhile, many vulnerable people get terrified and sometimes even suicidal, scared that the world is going to end any minute. I wrote my new kindle book to try to help with this. It is also available to read for free online. There is indeed a lot we can do to help with the situation in one way or another.
Doomsday Debunked also available to read online on my website (free). The idea is to look at the sober truth behind these many doomsday stories, scientific, pseudoscience as well as just plain old fashioned prophecy. All proceeds go to international suicide prevention charities..
First, let's look at the problem of scientific exaggeration and hyperbole. If you say "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse" then the listener knows that you don't mean you literally could eat an entire horse or even would want to.
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.
That is easy for most of us to detect. But it's much harder when scientists use hyperbole to try to get decision makers to do something. As they stress the issues of nuclear warfare, they may say that the nuclear weapons could "blow up the world" or "turn the States to radioactive dust". A scientist will know that this is not true and you aren't expected to take it literally. It is just hyperbole, or exaggeration for emotional effect. But a young listener or a non scientist may not pick up on the hyperbole so easily sometimes. Those examples come from the Doomsday Clock announcements by respected atomic scientists. The name of the clock itself is hyperbole as it is not about a literal doomsday.
Actually I think it would be more effective if anything, if scientists said that nuclear weapons are basically ways to carpet bomb entire cities in a moment. It's like the carpet bombing of Dresden in the second world war, scaled up, and with horrible radiation side effects. The worst fallout from a nuclear bomb is so short lived that the most lethal radiation is already gone within half an hour. If you can get into shelter from the radioactive dust quickly, you will probably survive like the many survivors of Hiroshima. Within weeks, you would only need to watch out for a few hot spots of radioactivity. You might perhaps carry a Geiger counter with you.
You'd lose a season of food if it happened in the growing season, and for several decades you would risk cancer if you ate meat from animals that graze on pasture dusted by cesium. But that would be it by way of long term effects. We don't risk a nuclear winter either. Many scientists won't know this, unless you are up to date on the effects of a nuclear bomb, but that is a now discredited scientific theory. It was the consensus up to around the time of the Kuwait oil fires in 1991 when the way the smoke behaved caused the scientists to question their models of what would happen after a global nuclear war. Also, the entire southern hemisphere is a nuclear free zone, and 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 radiation sickness side effects, that 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 hyperbolo through natural speech, well there is another 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. But in popular imagination they think of movies and books of a few survivors picking their way through radioactive debris and risking death centuries later from exploring the cities where the bombs landed. That is a staple of science fiction, but scientifically it is nonsense. After all Hiroshima is a thriving modern city.
Another scenario that often leads scientists to hyperbole or exaggeration is the asteroid impact myth. First, it is true that we could be hit by an asteroid. But in their eagerness to influence decision makers, astronomers will focus on the most dramatic and deadly of impacts, such as the one that lead to the extinction of dinosaurs. They may spend much of their precious screen time talking about how huge the largest impacts are, and maybe suggest the end of civilization or even extinction of humans or destruction of all life on the planet. And then of course, movie makers make these scenarios into dramatic films such as the Armageddon movie.
In actual fact we can't be hit by an asteroid the size of Texas. Never mind surprised by such an asteroid at the last minute. 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 half way down this page: 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.
However no need to worry about how many years of warning we'd get as this scenario can't happen at all. We can tell this from solar system modeling backed up by the cratering record. Yes there are huge impact craters like the Aitken basin 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.
But all the craters of this size on Mars, Mercury, the Moon and what we have of the history of Earth date from well over three billion years ago. (The crust of Venus is recent, only hundreds of millions of years old, but it has no meteorite craters this large either).
Since then the solar system has settled down and Jupiter protects us from them. 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.
Jupiter isn't quite so good at protecting us from the smaller 10 km scale asteroids and comets, but even for those it takes a lot of them "for the team". The larger 100 km ones simply can't get to us any more because sooner or later they get deflected by the gravitational field of Jupiter which extends over a large part of the solar system. This draws them in to a sequence of events that ends up with them getting torn to pieces, hit the Sun or Jupiter, or ejected from the solar system before their orbit can be flattened into the ecliptic enough to endanger the inner planets.
As for the largest asteroids that could hit us, about the size of New York or London, well the astronomers have had great success in the last couple of decades. They have made good use of the funding they got to detect these asteroids after the wake up call of Shoemaker Levy galvanized decision makers into action. Now they know the orbit precisely for every single major city sized asteroid that does a regular flyby of Earth. As a result, they now know for sure that none of them can hit us before 2100.
As for comets, then they could be spotted years in advance. If any were headed our way the odds would be hundreds to one against an actual impact and they'd be expected to miss just like comet Siding Spring which missed Mars by more than a third of the distance to the Moon from Earth. But for the larger 10 km comets, they are so rare that you are talking about a 1 in 100 million chance per century probably, so you can be 99.999999% certain it won't happen. If you aren't used to probabilities - well that means for all intents and purposes we can forget about them.
So I think myself that though this hyperbole and focus on extremely huge asteroids is a natural human thing to do, it would be much more effective for scientists to approach it in a completely different direction, to present a sober and measured assessment of the situation. Instead I think a far more effective message would be something like this:
"Look how we have already made great use of the funding so far and eliminated the threat of 10 km asteroids and proven that 100 km ones can't happen. We still risk smaller asteroids of 20 meters upwards, especially 45 meters upwards.
These can't destroy a civilization or make species extinct world wide, but they could kill millions if they landed on a city. The chance of this is tiny but it's not impossible, and its the one natural disaster we can predict to the minute, and if predicted long enough in advance, prevent also. For just $50 million to launch eight cubesats equipped with synthetic tracking, we could discover most of the ones down to 45 meters within six and a half years
With a decade or two of warning just the gentlest of nudges of millimeters per second of delta v can mean that it changes from a hit to a miss. So the first priority is to find them".
It's not such a dramatic message, it might not hit the news in quite the same way, but it would be a significant news story all the same, and effective. There are decision makers who would respond to this. Hillary Clinton for one has said that she thinks the threat from asteroid impacts is of great importance. Someone like that might even be able to find the $50 million through wealthy friends. Who knows, maybe Donald Trump also could be convinced of the value of this. Or any advanced country, the UK, India, Norway, Switzerland, or a wealthy individual. Even a major lottery winner could surprise us and use their winnings to protect the Earth by eliminating most of the remaining threat from asteroid impacts. This of course does not mean that we should ignore other major issues. But it's a tiny sum. The UK could find the funding with a one off payment of $0.78 per inhabitant (£0.62) and for the US it would be 16 cents per inhabitant, one off cost, to help protect the whole world from this threat. The chance is that we don't need to do anything more, but if we do find something headed our way as a result of the search, it would be easy to find the funding to deflect it at that point so there would be no need to budget for deflection.
So, those are some of the scientific scenarios. There are many more. For instance the "Age of Stupid" greatly exaggerates the effects of global warming in order to galvanize decision makers into action. It's mainly based on the book "six degrees" by the journalist and environmental activist Mark Lynas, whose degree is in history and politics. He explains his slant on the science behind the film here: The Science. The met office says that the events it describes could happen, although not on the timeline of the film - and the film also exaggerates the scale for dramatic effect, much as Armageddon exaggerates the size of the asteroid hugely, for the sake of drama. I think that these exaggerations and hyperbole actually deflect attention from the real issues we do face, of global warming, extinction of species, nuclear proliferation and so on, Especially so, if it is not made clear to the viewer that it is hyperbole.
However in my experience and the experience of others such as David Morrison, a very distinguished NASA astrobiologist and meteorite impact specialist, who first drew our attention to the issue, the stories that scare most people are pseudoscience. Perhaps many of us first became aware of this in 2012. I had the experience perhaps many of you had of conversations with highly intelligent non scientists who said things to me like "I'm not worried that we all may die on December 21st because I could die at any time anyway and it's not like there is anything we could do to stop it". I mean, seriously, did you actually believe that pile of stinking bullshit?
First it was based on an alleged prophecy by Mayans. A small amount of research would show that the Mayans didn't actually prophecy anything. It was just the end of a cycle. And as it turns out, it wasn't even the end of the "Long count". Their mythological pre-history count ends after 13 baktuns. But for some reason the current one ends after 20 cycles in 4772 so completing one piktun. Their calendar is not exactly very logical in this way.
But why should any of that matter anyway. We are not Mayans. They were pretty good at astronomy yes, though not a patch on us. But it wasn't an astronomical prediction anyway. Why should a date on a Mayan calender mean anything to us? Yet according to one poll, an estimated 10% or the world population, and as much as 20% of the Chinese agreed with the statement that
"the Mayan calendar, which some say 'ends' in 2012, marks the end of the world."
2% of the world population, according to this poll, strongly agreed with this statement. 8% somewhat agreed.
I think a lot of this is due to repetition on the news, in an effect similar to war time propaganda and ad campaigns. Repeat anything often enough and people start to believe it. Even the ones who think they are not vulnerable to suggestion may succumb after enough repetition. It was in the news a lot at the time, often with very little by way of debunking. Also the makers of the movie 2012 promoted the idea heavily in order to drum up interest in their movie.
That was just pure "prophecy" - well except it wasn't a prophecy at all as it happens - but there wasn't any suggestion that the ancient Mayans based this alleged prophecy on science. However, they reinforced this with pseudoscience as well.
They combined the alleged "prophecy" with a claim that we would die through deadly radiation from the core of our galaxy somehow focused on Earth by the Sun because the Sun they claimed was between us and the galactic core on winter solstice. Actually this very rough alignment happens two days earlier on the 19th December and actually the Sun passes a long way to one side of the galactic core in the night sky - it's just nearest to it on that date. And it is just a line of sight effect and is no danger at all. And happens every year at that time. For more on this see Phil Platt's article which he published just before the event was supposed to happen.
But many people bought into that pseudoscience, hook, line and sinker, as they say. To this day the winter solstice is a time of worry for them, that somehow the Earth may get blasted by deadly radiation from the core of our galaxy. To put this into perspective - the core of our galaxy is so far away that the light we see now left it during the last ice age when there was ice kilometers thick over New York and London.
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:
It is of absolutely no consequence at all that once a year Earth is roughly at the opposite side of the sun from the galactic core, as explained in the video.
So that is bad enough, but then the "Nibiru" people got in on the act. If you are an astronomer or scientists you have probably never heard of it. Astronomers never discuss it, it never appears in astronomy magazines, or journals. For my readers who have come to believe in this "Nibiru", try searching any online forum where amateur and professional astronomers gather. For instance the Star Gazers Lounge in the UK which becomes very active each year after the Star Gazers Live show on TV. Search for any planet, say Neptune, you find 2,581 results (as of searching today). Search for Nibiru and you get 0 results.
But now search on google for Nibiru and you may be astonished at how much there is on the topic. And just as with 2012, if you get hooked on this and start watching these videos - you may come to believe the most extraordinary things. I get contacted by people who think we have two suns, and even a second entire solar system which is about to hit the Earth.
You may wonder how that is possible. I did when I first started to get comments about it. But this is the top question I get asked - do we have a second sun or an extra planet in the solar system that nobody knows about? David Morrison first drew everyone's attention to this back in 2012. He used to answer questions from the public for NASA's "Ask an Astrobiologist" column.
We need to remember that readers of these stories include young teenagers, adults with learning difficulties, and many who flunked physics at school, and decided that this was not for them. They are not able to judge these stories scientifically.
He talks about how he got emails from suicidal people and anectodally was told of several actual suicides. And at least one suicide is confirmed. Back in 2012 a sixteen year old schoolgirl Isobel killed herself, because she was so scared the world was going to end in 2012.
I get many emails and comments here from scared people, terrified, including children as young as 14, quite commonly. Sometimes they say they are suicidal or that they used to be until they read my articles. Sometimes parents talk about even younger children. Perhaps I can quote one of my comments from my petition, a plea to journalists for responsible reporting of these stories:
"I have a 10 year old daughter who has been affected by these kinds of videos, asking such this as " can we build a bomb shelter" and having nightmares about the world ending . No 10 year old child should have those kinds of worries"
Many of my conversations are public here on Science20 so you can take a look at them yourself. My article with most comments is
The one with most comments is "Imaginary Bullshit Planet Nibiru" with over 1000 comments That includes replies so that's about 500 posts from scared people.So what can we do about this? Well I have tried many things, but surprisingly, one of the most effective is just to give them a list of things to look out for to test to see if a site is bullshit. The main problem, it turns out, is that they just don't know how to evaluate these sites.
So, if you are one of those scared of Nibiru, my BS check list may help:
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 Wimbledon 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 propagate falsehoods
And for why astronomers are sure that Nibiru is just nuts, see
Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]
2012 wasn't an isolated case. Doomsday prophecies are very common, several so far this year. They don't claim any scientific basis at all. It just needs someone to claim that Nostradamus or Baba Vanga or the Bible predicts the end of the world - and without a shred of science, just ideas spun out of paper then that's enough to scare people. Indeed it doesn't even need to be anyone famous. Not even anyone with a name, just an anonymous youtube uploader which nobody knows anything about, can be enough to scare people.
One of the worst incidents came this last summer when the Telegraph, a respectable online news site in the UK, chose to run a story that the world was going to end on July 29th. This scared many people. I got comments from them on my articles here asking things such as when the world would end in their timezone. The comments built up to a crescendo on the day that the world was supposed to end.
The only basis for this was a youtube video that was itself an unauthorized copy of someone else's video, which used amateur graphics to illustrate events such as stars falling from the sky, the whole Earth shaking, and images from Biblical stories in the sky. There is no way to know who it was, hidden behind their youtube channel name. This unauthorized uploader added a title "Why the World will End Surely on 29th July 2016? Shocking Facts" and a custom thumbnail. So that was it, the sole basis of all the fear, a date made up by an anonymous uploader and typed into the title edit field of a youtube video.
That was all that was needed for the Telegraph to run a doomsdaystory with a count down timer to the end of the world. They illustrated it with a fuzzed out image of the Cassiopea A supernova remnant (which had nothing to do with the story, just looks dramatic).
A blurred out image of the Casssiopea A supernova remnant. It's 11,000 light years away and is of not the slightest risk to Earth. For some reason this blurred photo is often used as illustrations for journalist's doomsday stories like the one the Telegraph ran in July 2016 with a count down timer to the end of the world which scared many people.
This story in the Telegraph was I think meant as a silly season joke. But it was written in a restrained humorous fashion that scared people just didn't get, a bit like an April Fools joke. If you looked carefully some of the fake tweets by famous people were humorous in tone - and that was all there was to show that it was meant to be humourous. Other papers then ran this story, though without the drama of a count down timer, including the Independent, the Mirror, and Metro magazine (who published the denouncement of the re-uploaded video by it's original author).
The channel was eventually taken down by youtube, but not before it earned its creator an estimated £945- £15.1K of ad revenue with over 9 million views, for a channel that consisted entirely of multiple copies of the same video. After July 29th they changed the date in the title and got some more coverage. There is no way to know who the anonymous uploader was or anything about them. Except that there are now many youtube channels that churn out "Nibiru" videos one after another. They earn their owners thousands of dollars a month. It is an easy living for them - just upload a video or two every week, more or less identical to all the others, and then holiday in the Bahamas or whatever they do with their ill gotten gains - well I think it's ill gotten anyway!.See Social Blade search for Nibiru and Planet X. There are some astronomers who make videos debunking them, Dave Greg (dazzathecameraman) and Scott Fergusson.
So those are amongst the worst perpetrators here. The astronomers who try to debunk them dub them "Nibtards". They are not using that word to describe the people who are taken in, but rather, these folk who make these doomsday youtube videos just for the ad revenue from the few percent who clicks on their ads. There are genuine video channels as well by uploaders who beleive this stuff, without ads. For instance Pastor Paul Begley seems genuine enough, doesn't run any ads on his videos, but just seems to believe just about every doomsday hoax story that he reads on the internet or that anyone sends to him. He then describes them at great length in his video channel.
It's because so many people get scared about these pseudoscience and prophecy stories that I have large sections of the book about them. I also found that many of those who contact me have no idea how to set about identifying reliable sources and haven't been taught how to do this by anyone else. The basic idea that everyone learns at college, of treating a source as unreliable if it publishes false information, and checking the sources, just doesn't occur to them. Instead they try to evaluate trustworthiness of sources by how much publicity they get, how much "buzz there is", how many people seem to be talking about them, and by personality. So I have a large section about WHO TO TRUST to try to help with this issue.
There is much we can do to help. First, if you are a scientist:
If you are a journalist:
For youtube:
Those who worry about these things often tell me that they can't find any doomsday debunking stories apart from mine, since 2012. If you are a journalist, 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.
For scientists writing about asteroids, global warming, nuclear war and so on, 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. You might then notice hyperbole such as saying that nuclear bombs would turn the States to radioactive dust more easily.
If you agree on these points, do sign and share the petitions which I started on Change.org. They are:
For lots more about asteroid impacts, climate change exaggerations ,
The kindle book may be useful if you want it formatted as a book, which you can read on your kindle, and also on most major smartphones, tablets and computers, using the free kindle reading app.
All proceeds from the book will go to suicide prevention charities. At present the plan is to donate them to Befrienders Worldwide. If you buy it on kindle, then it also helps to put it into the best sellers lists there so others may find it too. Of the price of $3.99 for US customers, then $1.86 or 47% will go to charity, and the rest goes to Amazon. It's 70% royalties, but they reduce the royalties if you include graphics as a "delivery charge", and I felt it was important to have plenty of graphics.
You will find these also in the contents table in the kindle book. These links take you to the online book. You'll find many scenarios there already
(go to detailed contents for online book)
I've made a new facebook group which you can join to discuss this and other doomsday stories that you find scary. also astronomers and scientists, do join if you want to help reassure scared people and help with the debunking.
Please feel free to post any story you find scary, however silly it may seem. Also for astronomers and scientists - when commenting please bear in mind that some here may have decided long ago that astronomy and maths are not for them and others may be young children - children as young as 10 can get scared of Nibiru. Please treat any questions with respect. Ideas that seem LOL silly to astronomers can be truly scary to those without that background.
Also you can check out my Debunking Doomsday blog which is where I first post articles like this.
Here are some more facebook groups to join, whether you are scared, or want to help doing the reassuring and debunking, see
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.
And on Science20
's posts on Science20And I have many other booklets on my kindle bookshelf
My kindle books author's page on amazon
If you have any comments or questions do say. Also, if you notice anything that needs to be corrected in this article, however small, even a typo, be sure to say in the comments area, thanks!
