We've had prophecies of the world ending for centuries. But now we face countless fake and exaggerated end of world stories based on science and pseudoscience, which are spread, together with out and out hoaxes through fake news sites and youtube. Journalists wouldn't dream of publishing an obituary without checking with a reliable source that the person has died. Yet they run a story that we risk all dying next week from an asteroid impact, without doing basic fact checking which they could have done in a minute. It's so easy to do. Just go here: Current Impact Risk. If the first entry is blue or white, the story is a false or exaggerated. If it is yellow (or extremely unlikely, orange or red) then it should be easy to get an astronomer to explain it to you. All the asteroid impact stories published in the last year would have been prevented, as easily as a fake obituary, if the journalists had done that basic fact checking. There is much that scientists can do too.There is a great tendency for them to exaggerate and use hyperbole, especially when they try to influence decision makers.
These stories distract us from the real issues that we face and can actually do something about. Also they cause most people to switch off and ignore the issues rather than get more engaged, while a few people become terrified by these stories, and even suicidal, especially young teenagers. There is a lot we can do to help with this situation. I will look at what scientists can do first, then look at what journalists can do then a few other ideas.
First, is 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, for instance to eliminate nuclear weapons. When they say nuclear weapons could "blow up the world" or "turn the States to radioactive dust", a very young or non scientist reader or listener may nor realize that this is just similar hyperbole. It's not true and you aren't expected to think that it is true, so it's not a lie either, just exaggeration for emotional effect. Those examples come from the Doomsday Clock announcements by highly respected atomic scientists. The name itself is also hyperbole as it is not about a literal doomsday.
Actually I think it would be more effective if anything, to say that nuclear weapons are basically ways to carpet bomb entire cities in a moment like the carpet bombing of Dresden in the second world war, but with horrible radiation side effects. Most scientists probably know that the radioactivity is very short lived after a nuclear bomb falls, and that most of it is gone within hours. If you remain in shelterfor that long you will probably survive like the many survivors of Hiroshima, and 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 eat meat from animals that graze on pasture dusted by cesium. But that would be it by way of long term effects. Also we don't risk a nuclear winter either. Many scientists won't know this but that is a now discredited scientific theory though it was the consensus at the end of the last century. Also, the entire southern hemisphere is a nuclear free zone, and would experience almost no effects at all from a global nuclear war. 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 example of hyperbole actually doesn't help, though it's a natural thing to do. If you feel you must use hyperbole as a scientist, or come out with one just through natural speech, well another solution is to flag it. Say "nuclear weapons could turn the States to radioactive dust - not literally". It may be a bit lame to do, but 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 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. And scientists even praised the movie, saying that the events it describes could happen, although not on the timeline of the film - and the film also exaggerates the scale of them 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.
At any rate surely the way ahead is to keep to the truth of the situation and not exaggerate 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 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]
If you agree on this point, do sign and share the petitions which I started on The world's platform for change. They are:
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.
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.
highly respected atomic scientists who compile the yearly Doomsday Clock report are amongst the worst here, the very name is hyperbole as it is not a literal doomsday in any sense of the word. Then they talk about
We have had fake doomsday news for centuries. We now know of various astronomical scenarios that could be devastating, and we can make movies that depict them with great realism, But are they possible? Is the impact in the movie Armageddon scientifically possible for instance? The answer actually is no. The cratering record shows that Jupiter has protected us from asteroids as large as that for over three billion years. It doesn't do such a great job of shielding us from the smaller ones of around the size of London or New York but it certainly protects us from asteroids as large as Texas. Also we have made great strides with the asteroid detection programs over the last couple of decades and can now rule out a 10 kilometer asteroid too for the next century up to 2100, leaving only the exceedingly unlikely possibility of a comet, so unlikely you can forget about it. For more on this see the section ASTEROID IMPACTS in my new book.
Right now just before Christmas is the worst time of year for these stories. People get easily scared that the world might end before or just after their celebrations. Most of the questions I get from them are about asteroid impacts or, bizarrely, the most common of all, impacts by a supposedly previously unknown or hidden planet which they call "Nibiru", or an entire solar system+. Other times they are scared of apparently plausible scientific doomsday scenarios, such as nuclear war, runaway global warming, or the Big Rip tearing the universe apart. Other are prophecies with no attempt at science, such as the many stories that claim that Nostradamus predicted the end of the world, or prophecies extracted from enigmatic biblical passages. They don't say how this happens, it's just described as a miracle or magic, or an act of God. Others are pseudoscience, such as the idea that every winter solstice we risk being destroyed by deadly rays from the galactic center because of a rough alignment of the sun with the black hole there.
Some of the stories are scientifically plausible. Could an asteroid wipe out most life on Earth? You can't settle that by pure thought but need to do the research. Others are so absurd that a scientist would LOL. But the stories are widely circulated and republished and shared, and you have to remember that many of those who read them are children, I get contacted by scared and sometimes suicidal children as young as 14. Parents also write about their younger children, with one comment on my petition from a parent of a child of 10 who is terrified of doomsday.
With this book I hope to help do something about this. First I can debunk the stories for those who are scared of them. And perhaps just as importantly, raise awareness amongst journalists and others responsible for getting the stories published of how much this does scare people. Many don't realize this. As far as I know, the first to draw attention to this amongst scientists was David Morrison, a distinguished astrobiologist and expert on asteroid impacts, and former head of the Sagan institute. He used to field the NASA "Ask an astrobiologist" column, before he retired. He had this same experience that I'm describing here, that the most common questions he got from the general public were from people who were scared the world was about to end, to the extent that some were suicidal. And in his case, he was told of several actual suicides, anecdotally. There is at least one confirmed suicide from 2012 due to pseudoscience doomsday stories, which was reported in the UK papers.
Journalist even of the red top tabloids in the UK, amongst the most sensationalist of papers, would not even think of writing an obituary of anyone without first checking with reliable sources to make sure the person has in fact died. Yet, over and over, they write stories in which they claim that there is a risk that we will all, or most of us, die in the next week or month from an asteroid impact. It's no excuse, or shouldn't be, to say that they don't know how to check the stories. It is so easy to check. Just go here: Current Impact Risks. If the first entry is coloured blue or white in that table then there are no currently predicted impact risks, so the story is a hoax or inaccurate. I've lost count of how many news stories there have been about asteroid impact predictions in the last year, and none of them could have been published if the journalists had done this basic fact checking. The first entry in the table remained blue or white throughout.
These false asteroid impact stories could actually kill young children who become suicidal. The journalists often run stories with no basis in science at all. For instance there have been many stories over the last year about this idea of "Nibiru", that we are about to be hit by a a planet in a second solar system that they believe is somehow "hiding behind the sun" and about to jump out at us and kill us all. It's an idea that would lead any astronomer to glance at them askance and in disbelief. At first I was incredulous - could it be some strange form of trolling? But no, it soon became abundantly clear that they are genuine people and they often tell me how grateful they are to have the stories debunked. And some are even suicidal when they first contact me or say that they were feeling suicidal before they read my articles.
One of the worst incidents came this last summer when the Telegraph chose to run a story that the world was going to end on July 29th. 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. ~This unauthorized uploader added a title "Why the World will End Surely on 29th July 2016? Shocking Facts". And then the Telegraph ran the story with a count down timer to the end of the world along with a fuzzed out image of the Cassiopea A supernova remnant (which had nothing to do with the story, just looks dramatic). It was written in a restrained humorous fashion that scared people just didn't get, a bit like an April Fools joke. 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 earning their owners thousands of dollars a month. 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" - not the people who are taken in, but these folk who make these doomsday youtube videos just for the ad revenue of the one person in a few thousand who clicks on their ads. There are genuine video channels as well. For instance Pastor Paul Begley who seems genuine enough but just seems to believe just about every doomsday hoax story that he reads on the internet or that anyone sends to him, and describes them at great length in his video channel.
I wrote my book "Doomsday Debunked" particularly with these scared people in mind but I also debunk many other scientific stories.
ome of these are about scientific doomsday stories like global warming, warnings about effects of nuclear war, and most common of all, asteroid impact warnings. Others are just pure prophecy, that someone reads an ancient text, such as the Bible, and then deduces by numerology or whatever means that the world is about to end. Many are just made up hoaxes. And I was astonished to find that by far the majority are about a supposed planet "Nibiru" which most astronomers will never have heard of.
These are from children as young as 14 and then sometimes also I hear from parents - one of the comments on one of the petitions is from a parent who says their child of ten is terrified of the end of the world.
We get new doomsday stories just about every week. Some are scientific doomsdays - warnings of a runaway greenhouse, or scientists saying that we risk all being killed by a giant asteroid impact, or that the universe will tear itself apart in a big rip or that we will be invaded by extra terrestrials. Some are just pure prophecy, someone reinterprets an ancient texts written centuries ago and claims that their interpretation of this text proves that the world is about to end. Some are pseudoscience, that we are about to be hit by a giant planet or star or pr
Fake news is nothing new. We've had fake doomsday stories for centuries. To add to that, humans have a great tendency towards hyperbole - vivid exaggeration to get a message across, or to make a story more vivid. Scientists are prone to do this as much as anyone.
We get bombarded by so many doomsday scenarios in the press and in YouTube videos. Some are scientifically valid but exaggerated. Some are hyperbole - exaggerated to such an extent they are not meant to be taken literally. 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 and examine them closely. The aim is to find the truth behind the stories, unexaggerated, just present them as is. The plain sober truth with no exaggeration or dramatization. I think there is plenty that we do need to be concerned about, such as climate change, extinction of species, environmental 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 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. Since I started writing doomsday debunking stories I get an average of a three comments a day to my Science20 articles and a similar number of private messages or emails per day asking me to debunk doomsday stories. We seem to get a new doomsday story almost every week, and at least, every month or so. I also post frequently to the debunking doomsday blog with new posts - see the List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date - which will also include any new posts since I last updated this book. Also, do join our lively Doomsday Debunked Facebook group.
You are welcome to use this material in the same way I do. Copy and paste it in answer to comments or emails, or link to the answer, or both. Released under CC by SC NA - so non commercial share alike attribution. You can modify this material and use it as you please, but not commercially and you have to attribute me. However, if you are just answering a comment on a news site or a YouTube video, don't feel you have to attribute me in a situation like that :). Just copy and paste as much of the material as you need for your response. It's more like, e.g. if you copy one of these posts into a blog, then you need to attribute me as the author and link back. The main reason for releasing it under this license is so that I can publish it on kindle.
You will find a small amount of repetition in this book. That's because I don't expect most readers to read this sequentially from start to end but rather to jump to the story that interests them most at any time. To make that easier, I have kept each post self contained as much as possible -just as they are on the blog,with only minor editing. To make this work, sometimes the posts need to repeat a little of the material from other posts, but anything substantial tends to have its own separate post so there is less repetition than you might expect.
All proceeds from the book will go to suicide prevention charities. At present the plan is to donate them to Befrienders Worldwide.
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.
The main sections in this book are
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.
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!
