I'm getting numerous pm's from very scared and sometimes suicidal people who think the world will end tomorrow. To those who are scared and suicidal - what do you do if you are scared like this? I've written this article to help you.
If you are feeling suicidal right now, of course contact any of us, via pm and post to the group.
See also this List of suicide crisis lines - many phone lines staffed by volunteers that specialize in talking to people who are in the middle of a suicide crisis. They won't know about this stuff of course, but you will have a friendly listening ear,and someone who won't judge you for being suicidal and who is used to listening to suicidal people and helping them.
So, first, our group is there to help. Do join it - follow the link Doomsday Debunked. or if that doesn't work for you, search for "Doomsday Debunked" in facebook. Tthere are a fair number of us there answering your questions and reassuring you that the world won't end, but we could do with more. You will find astronomers, and other scientists there to respond to your questions, though more debunkers will certainly help if anyone wants to join to help us reassure these scared people.
You will also find a great support group there of people going through the same things as you. They all report how they are still scared even once they know it is all BS. I'm not sure if brainwashing is real (see How Brainwashing Works), but it is very similar anyway - after watching hours of these videos and reading dozens of articles all saying we are about to be buzzed by a planet or that we have two suns and that the Earth's poles have shifted and all this nonsense,- they start believing this stuff.
Some of you may enjoy this, it’s a paraody of many of the Nibiru videos, by Dave Greg aka “Dazzathecameraman” - shows how easy it is to make a hoax video like the ones they share.
You have been hoaxed by clowns that are saying things as daft as that. He runs a debunking group called Dazzathecameraman - talented amateur astronomer and photographer.
So, the main tips for dealing with this, that actually worked, based on the experiences of these people:
All of that is based on first seeing that it is BS. So how can you see that?
Well to get you started - if someone knocked on your door and said
"Good news, my friend, you are saved! Just join the Lord and you will be uplifted to heaven on Saturday. You must buy my book which will tell you all about it. If you don't you will be in great trouble. The world as you know it is about to end. I have deciphered the book of Revelation and the Egyptian pyramids and they all point towards tomorrow as the day the world will end. The book of Revelation is actually an account of a giant planet that God knew would fly past Earth 2000 years later and cause all the events in Revelation"
What would your reaction be? If they go on to say
"Here is a photo I took with my mobile phone. Do you see, that we have two suns? That extra bright object that looks like the sun is actually a giant planet Nibiru which is about to buzz past Earth. Only good Christians will be saved from the disaster. You have to read my book to find out more about it. It will tell you everything you need to know about exactly when it will happen, and how to be one of the saved. Please hand over your cash, I have a copy of it with me right here."
Would you believe them? Would you even listen? I think most people would just LOL at such absurd and extravagant claims and shut the door on them, hopefully politely, and talk to their friends about this nutter who tried to convince them that the world would end.
Well this is just the same. It's a nobody. David Meade, who says all those things I put in the words of that nutter in that imagined conversation, he is just a guy who has written a book and sells it on Amazon. For reasons obscure, the Daily Express has been promoting his book heavily all summer. Running two or three stories on it every single day for the last week or two. The kindle version of his book is ranked 3rd best seller in both Eschatology and Astronomy on Amazon and has been for some time. It's in the 20th to 40th page for paperbacks in both those topics and also, bizarrely, in Astrophysics and Space Science. They don't give sales figures there but he must be earning a lot from this. And the Daily Express is a paper struggling to keep its subscribers, like nearly all printed newspapers and these stories presumably are a part of an attempt to retain them. They probably look really good on its audience engagement and revisits etc. The scared people tell me they read these stories not just once but over and over.
So, basically, it's all about money. It's not the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury saying these things. David Meade says he was brought up as a Catholic but he is certainly not presenting any Catholic interpretation of the Bible. The Catholics don't believe in a rapture - the idea of Christians at some future time being levitated into the clouds by Jesus who appears in the sky. That's what it's all about. And the Eastern Orthodox also totally repudiate that idea and so do nearly all Protestant churches too.
So, this is not Christian either. He is not speaking for any group of Christians. He is just a nobody speaking for himself.
The main churches that think in terms of Jesus appearing to save us in the near future are the Jehovah's witnesses - who put forward several dates last century including 1925, 1975 and 2000 but now no longer give a date when they think it will happen. The others are the Mormons and the Seventh Day Adventists. But he isn't speaking for any of these. None of them now give dates and the Bible warns against anyone giving a date as a false prophet.
They repudiate it also. The only Christians who fall for this are ordinary guys and gals in evangelical branches of Christianity who are just like the ones who have become suicidal except for them it is something they have been waiting for all their lives. So instead of becoming suicidal, they start rejoicing and looking forward to being uplifted to the clouds by Jesus tomorrow. Here is an example ( don't watch it if you think you will find it scary to hear someone says he believes the world will end tomorrow).
They have no support in this by the leaders of their church. They are just latching onto it as they do on any end of the world prediction.
He is just a nobody - who wrote books about the world ending, many of them. For instance he wrote a book in 2015 on a similar topic. It’s no longer available for sale, withdrawn from amazon, and just its title on google books, can’t “look inside”
His summary is here: Rapture 2015 and Planet X and google books here: Rapture 2015 and Planet X and though the book is not on Amazon the customer reviews are, here: Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Rapture 2015 and Planet X
And here is Tiffany Wilson talking about it - she told us about it on Doomsday Debunked
For some obscure reason the Daily Express, a sensationalist and often hoax paper in the UK, has been promoting his latest book very heavily all summer. The pace has built up to two or three stories a day for the last week or two.
The Daily Express is a sensationalist paper in the UK that publishes sport, celebrity gossip, and often out and out fake news. The top selling paper is the Sun, and the Daily Express ranks a fair bit down the list of papers but still has hundreds of thousands of subscribers. This is accepted as permissible in our country, it's part of our culture and I think most people here know that many of their stories are fake / sensationalist. Yet even knowing that, they fall for this sort of story.
And people reading the stories from the States don't have that background and are surprised that a mainstream UK paper can publish nonsense and out and out fake news. Well they can. They sometimes publish stories based only on a couple of facebook comments by unnamed people, or an anonymous YouTube video, or even based on a story published in a known fake news website.
The Sun which tops the list here at well over a million is similar sensationalist / hoaxes / celebrity gossip / sport. The Daily Express also has a large following - 391,626 in Dec 2016.
Like many other print newspapers the red top tabloids are losing sales to the internet generation who don’t buy papers so much - and at 10% a year which is a lot. See Print ABCs: Seven UK national newspapers losing print sales at more than 10 per cent year on year
They are doing everything they can to keep their customers. This David Meade boosting campaign is surely part of it.
I am sure they are not trying to scare people. But that's the effect of them promoting this book so heavily - presumably to help boost sales. And David Meade must be doing very well out of it financially too, with all those sales. And in his articles, he constantly says "you must buy my book for the full story" so he is promoting it heavily. As some have said in the group - why does he want the money so much if he believes what he says ...
So basically it's all about money.
Indeed, there’s a funny tweet here, Robyn Flynn, Montreal based radio personality when she tried to book him for an interview about the end of the world this Saturday. Answers that he isn’t available for interviews until next week!
Just tried to book an interview w/ a researcher who says the world ends Saturday. Told me he's not available for interviews until next week.
— Robyn Flynn (@robynlisaflynn) September 19, 2017
He has a disclaimer at the bottom of this page
Disclaimer:
Ideas in their essential form as concepts are only wrong or dangerous to those who have a vested interest in not wanting people to be free to entertain ideas.
If it causes you harm, emotional distress, anger, frustration, fear, or any other emotional or mental states to watch and listen to online videos about theories of potential cataclysms, then don’t watch or listen to it and evacuate this thread immediately to your safe space.
There isn’t much known about him as a person, at least the Washington Post couldn’t unearth much.
This is their summary of what they found out:
When asked where he lives, he said only that he’s in “the heart of a major disaster zone” after Hurricane Irma. When asked where he went to college, he said only that he studied astronomy at a university in Kentucky and declined to say which campus, citing safety concerns.
His website says he worked in forensic investigations and spent the past 10 years “writing special reports for management” for Fortune 1000 companies, but he ignored questions about which companies those were and what he currently does for a living.
A short biography on a website called Planet X News says he studied “astronomy, among other subjects” at the University of Louisville. (The university said it cannot verify whether a person was a student there.)
There is another author called David Meade who wrote a book about Pinewood Derby cars
Design and Build the Ultimate Car: Amazon.co.uk: David Meade, Troy Thorne: 9780756627331: Books Also Tips&Tricks for Building Winning Cars: Amazon.co.uk: David Meade, Troy Thorne: 9781565239043: Books These get good customer reviews and are well received David Meade’s Pinewood Derby Speed Secrets
His biography gets attached to David Meade’s books: Planet X - The 2017 Arrival
David Meade is an acknowledged leader in building pinewood derby cars that win. He is the owner of a web-site, http://Pinewoodderbychamp.com. Responding to the desire of parents and their children to win, David created and sold a manual, Ultimate Derby Speed Secrets - selling more than 4,000 copies last year. Quoted in an article, "Driving Under the Influence --of Dad" in the Wall Street Journal (March 4, 2005), David said, "My sons have an entire wall full of First Place Trophies!" David is part of a pinewood car building tradition that goes back generations. Now he's willing to help others build winning cars as well, and have a fun time doing it. David says that even though he spends a lot of time talking about principles that will help you win the Pinewood Derby, the derby experience is only a success if you enjoy the ride. David lives in Appleton, WI.
The website is now gone but is archived here: Car Tips&Supply Store
I don’t think he is the same person though, on checking it up. I think that is just a glitch - you’d expect a biography of an author attached to a book about Nibiru to at least mention Nibiru. I can’t find anything linking the two apart from biographies that seem to be attached to the wrong book.
If anyone has evidence that they are the same person do say.
There is another David Meade, mentalist (a bit like Derren Brown), i.e. a kind of conjurer / magician for entertainment not claiming to be a real mind reader - young with ginger hair, obviously not the same chap: Homepage - David Meade
David Meade is not his real name. He says here it is his pen-name. That explains why it is hard to find any information about him such as his education, job, or any other background.
Well he has taken a passage in the Bible, Revelations 12, a passage of dramatic poetic visions which most Christians say is about the birth of Jesus.
He has taken this and told everyone that it is actually a prophesy that Earth will be buzzed by a giant planet in September 23 2017.
Several people have been saying they know that Nibiru is BS but that they are still worried about Saturday because of the passages from the Bible. But if you take away Nibiru from the story, there’s nothing left. It’s daft anyway. So let’s look at the story.
First, short summary. The normal accepted interpretation of this passage is that it has already happened and the woman is Mary and the baby in this story is Jesus. The more evangelical churches think that it is about events in the future. But none of them say it describes Earth being buzzed by a planet. David Meade's entire case is based on the idea that this passage describes a flyby of a giant planet.
So what is it that David Meade says (not supported by any religious group)?
Warning. This will not make any sense. Many people are wracking their brains to try to make sense of what he said. That is a futile exercise. He himself doesn't even bother to put together a coherent story at all. His book bundles together all the BS he found on the internet without any checking of them. He then adds some more steaming bullshit himself.
It's all this, excuse the image if you are not used to the countryside, but if you react "phew" that's exactly the reaction I intend you to have. That's how you should react to his pronouncements.
Brian Cox referred to Nibiru as “this imaginary bullshit planet” - and those are well chosen words. It means their speech is like what comes out of the rear end of a Bull:
This is basically what David Meade has done. Gathered together a big pile of steaming dung from websites on the internet, added some more of his own, packaged it as a book and then sold it to the public and talks about it on radio shows. Why It Is Absolutely Fine Not to Listen to Bullshitters
So what does he actually say? Can you see for yourself that it is bullshit?
The story is that when Jupiter is in Virgo then Nibiru will appear in the sky as the red dragon of the book of Revelation (which should be Satan, the passage says so explicitly, but he doesn't explain why Nibiru is Satan).
If you substitute Virgo for the woman in the story and Nibiru for the red dragon then it continues like this:
Virgo (the constellation) will give birth to a child. Nibiru (the planet) will try to eat it but God will snatch it away and Virgo (the constellation) will then wander in a desert on Earth for three years looked after by God.
That's what the passage says if you substitute Virgo for the woman and Nibiru for the dragon (The original is here) (and with substitution - see comment)
How does that make sense?
Now, if you are able to see that Nibiru is BS, you have to take away Nibiru from that story.
The whole thing makes no astronomical sense. A pattern of distant stars that to humans looked like a woman, can't give birth [that’s only to some humans as the ancient Chinese saw it differently]. Could the “big dipper” or the constellation Orion give birth? It’s just another pattern of stars like them.
Then, Jupiter passing in front of it has no astronomical significance.
Even symbolically, if Jupiter is supposed to symbolize the baby then Jupiter is just returning to close to its position last February.
Jupiter in its twelve year long orbit moves only very slowly through Virgo and has been there since 2016 and will remain in it until nearly the end of this year. The Position of Jupiter in the Night Sky: 2014 to 2018
How is that giving birth? And it eventually exists from Virgo's side in November.
The word Virgo doesn’t occur anywhere in the Bible. As for all these links to “Nibiru”, the Bible has only one mention of the word planet:
“And he put down the idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah, and in the places round about Jerusalem; them also that burned incense unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven. “
As for any individual planets by name, the only mentions of the word Jupiter refer to the Roman deity.
Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn don’t occur at all in the Bible.
It is just not a book that is strong on astronomy. It barely mentions anything to do with it. It doesn’t even touch on the astronomical knowledge they had back then - when they
And a planet in such an orbit is an astronomical impossibility - not just that you'd see it in telescopes decades in advance, it can't be in that orbit anyway.
There is nothing here that makes sense.
Alex (parrot) - by some measures the most intelligent non human being that has ever had its intelligence tested. If we were a civilization of parrots, then we’d see parrots everywhere in the sky and make up totally different stories based on the same patterns of stars.
If we were parrots we'd see constellations of parrots everywhere in the sky. Instead of Orion being a hunter he'd be a parrot, Virgo also. would be a female parrot. There would be no humans in the sky, unless they were dangerous / dramatic / mythological animals for them like dragons or lions etc. This is just to show that the patterns are ones we made up because we are human.
It’s usually read as an allegory of the birth of Jesus and his life, with the woman as his mother Mary.
Quoting from Wikipedia (which is good on theology)
“The Woman of the Apocalypse is widely identified as the Virgin Mary. This interpretation is held by the ancient Church as well as in the medieval and modern Roman Catholic Church. This view does not negate the alternative interpretation of the Woman representing the Church,[1] as in modern Catholic dogma, Mary is herself considered both the Mother of God and the Mother of the Church (while in Reformed theology and traditions that are averse to Marian veneration, the interpretation of the Woman represents the naturally predominate church).”
… “The woman's "male child" is a reference to Jesus (Revelation 12:5), since he is destined to "rule all nations with a rod of iron" (Revelation 12:5). The dragon trying to devour the woman's child at the moment of his birth (Revelation 12:4) is a reference to Herod the Great's attempt to kill the infant Jesus (Matthew 2:16). Through his death and resurrection, Jesus "was snatched up to God and to his throne" (Revelation 12:5).”
The idea of it as referring to future events is under Woman of the Apocalypse - Other Interpretations
This is all being linked to hurricanes and earthquakes which are supposed to be "signs" of the end of the world.
This doesn’t really add up at all. After all, how is a hurricane or earthquake supposed to end the world?
Yes this is an unusually bad year for hurricanes. Two level 5 hurricanes in the same year back to back. That’s happened only once before in 2007 with hurricanes Dean and Felix. See List of Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes - Wikipedia
Even if you have a dozen hurricanes back to back it’s not going to end the world.
BTW if you wonder how these hurricane names are decided - it’s a stock list of names decided in advance. We already know the next one (if there is one) after Maria is Nate then Ophilia, etc. It’s a ten year long list so you re-use names from ten years previously. See How do hurricanes get their names? | EarthSky.org
He makes a big thing about pyramids. Well, there is no mention of the word pyramid either. Egypt is mentioned of course but the ancient Jews even when in Egypt had no interest in pyramids, at least not as recorded in the Bible.
You can check all this using the King James Version of the Bible online search
And he is not accredited by anyone, and claims to be expert in a made up profession of “Christian numerologist” not recognized even as a topic by theologians.
He also links all this to the numbering system used for verses in the Bible. This was introduced in the sixteenth century and the original authors would have no way to know that their texts would end up numbered like that. How can that be part of a prophesy? It is easy to find patterns of numbers like that.
He is just a nobody who hit it big time with his book sales when the Daily Express decided, for whatever obscure reason to promote it heavily over the summer. And the Daily Express is a very low quality sensationalist rag. It’s “specialties” are gossip, sport, and hoax news.
It really DOES NOT HANG TOGETHER AT ALL.
All you have here is someone who speaks very confidently telling everyone that it hangs together when it doesn’t. There is no substance behind this.
The Daily Star has claimed that this is a “Red Dragon formation” whatever that means - but something threatening to Earth. Presumably yet another "image of Nibiru" as that is what David Meade says the Red Dragon is in Revelation 12.
It’s actually a smeared out image of Saturn by the IRAS satellite.
NASA ‘hiding Red Dragon formation in space that PROVES planet Nibiru will destroy Earth’
Thanks to astronomy geek sleuths on Doomsday Debunked, Adam Martin found this page, comment here
It’s a multiple exposure of Saturn taken by IRAS. IRAS image of Saturn
And that’s why they removed it. Not hiding anything:
“It turns out that this image is a sum of observation images taken by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) at times when the planet Saturn was in its field of view. The smearing affect is due to the timing of the different observations that make up the final image.
“This artifact was removed in the subsequent IRIS 100: Improved Reprocessing of the IRAS Survey: 100.”
Here are some other examples of the same image colour processed in other ways (I think just for fun as it has no astronomical significance, just a glitch):
More here Gallery for 2014-06-15
Other IRAS plates were also affected by planets, see bottom of this page: C. Image Production - field 150 was marred by the presence of Uranus and fields 152 and 153 by the presence of Neptune.
IRAS avoided Jupiter because of the strength of its infrared radiation, didn’t view Mars just by coincidence, and Venus and Mercury were too close to the sun, and Pluto was too faint.
Short summary: It's an impossible orbit for a planet. Our planets would have been scattered about like confetti into strange elliptical orbits or most likely all gone after a few orbits. And anyway amateur astronomers with an eight inch telescope would find it in their telescopes well beyond Pluto, and it would have been tracked for well over a decade. Naked eye object for months. It would be top astronomy news and its discoverer would be the most famous person in solar system observation since Clyde Tombaugh who spotted Pluto. Obviously hasn't happened.
This is something the Nibiru people say - that it is in an orbit of 3600 years, which takes it beyond Neptune. The thing is, they say it would do a very tight loop around the sun - that's the idea.
Well if something is looping behind the sun and we are the opposite side of the sun from it, obviously we can’t see it at that point. We can't see in the direction of the sun except with our space observatories such as SOHO which would probably see it. Here is a video about how SOHO observes comets close to the sun. It often sees the planets too when they pass the sun.
Here it shows Venus passing close to the sun in 2013.
SOHO can watch them at this time in their transit when nothing else can.
Then, if something did loop around the sun and then headed straight for us after that loop it’s lit up from behind and just as you can’t see the new moon in the daytime sky - so you couldn’t see it either.
But that's only after it loops around the sun. Before it can loop around the sun, it has to approach the sun.
Also this is supposing a very close flyby of the sun like a sun grazing comet. I don’t know if David Meade has any sketches of his orbit, not seen one. But this is an example of one of the sketches for another Nibiru end of days prediction in March 2016:
Diagram from a “prophesy” of Nibiru hitting Earth in March 2016. Planet 7X aka Nibiru: Timeline of Events .
The(diagram is magnified too much to show distant Jupiter
In an orbit like that, it would be hard to spot for the last month on the way from the sun to Earth. But it would be an easy naked eye object on the way in from about the distance of Jupiter, six months earlier, and easy for astronomers to track for decades earlier, and any amateur with an eight inch telescope would be following it a decade earlier as easy to spot as Pluto.
This is n Sitchin’s original diagram
Very sketchy from Sitchin’s book - all the planets shown equally spaced which of course they aren’t and again it would have to be a much narrower orbit. In this diagram it doesn’t cross Earth’s orbit and so would be naked eye visible all the way to Earth.
They say it has come from beyond Neptune, heads for the sun, loops around it, then hits Earth which according to them just happens to be in the right place for it to hit it. No matter which side of the sun Earth is, where it is in its orbit, always Nibiru is predicted to make a beeline for it.
Anyway - it’s when it comes in from beyond Neptune, all the way in to the Sun - that’s when we'd see it easily. Amateurs can see Pluto, which is much much smaller than any of their descriptions of “Nibiru”, easily with even an eight inch telescope - not very big. As only a faint star but changes position from night to night.
This is a video of Pluto through an eight inch telescope.
“This video was taken from my back garden using an 8-inch LX90 telescope connected to an astronomical CCD camera. It shows the motion of dwarf planet Pluto over a 24-hour period against the background stars in the constellation Sagittarius. It's set up in a similar way to the original Pluto discovery - by comparing two photographs - the motion can be seen. Most of the motion is actually caused by the movement of planet Earth as it overtakes Pluto in its orbit, rather than the motion of Pluto itself. Pluto was appearing to move retrograde (right) at the time, but its normal motion is very slowly to the left (prograde). “
This is the telescope he used to view it - with a different astronomer explaining how it works but it’s the same model of telescope:
This setup would be all you would need to see Pluto. For more details, see: See Pluto in 2015 - Sky&Telescope
They give various numbers for its diameter but generally say it is very large, minimum four times the diameter of Earth. At four times the diameter of our Earth, it would be 4*12,742/2,374 = 21.47 times the visual diameter of Pluto. That would make it 460 (21.47^2) times brighter than Pluto. This depends a lot on the brightness of the surface materials and Pluto is quite bright, albedo about 0.5.
They sometimes say we wouldn’t see it because it is so dark. If it was as dark as charcoal (albedo 0.04) it would still be far brighter than Pluto at the distance of Pluto, around 460*0.04/0.5 = 36.8 times brighter than Pluto. Even as dark as the darkest asteroids, it would be around ten times brighter than Pluto at that distance, easy to spot.
A decade before “Nibiru” the impossible mythical planet could get to the inner solar system, it would be much brighter than Pluto and easy to spot by an amateur with an 8″ telescope like this.
It has to be because it takes a minimum of a decade to get from Pluto to Earth at the fastest any object can go in an orbit around the sun.
And it can’t “hide behind the sun”. If it is a real object, it has to be in one of the constellations in the sky and if it is in a 3600 year orbit, it spends most of the entire decade on its way into Earth in just one constellation or at most, slowly moving to the next. Each constellation can be hidden by the glare of the sun for at most one month of the year, and it is in the sky all night for one month of the year six months later.
If it approaches from north or south it’s much worse. It’s then visible all night all year round to anyone in the relevant hemisphere. You don’t have to be at the north pole to see the pole star. You see it all year round anywhere in the northern hemisphere any night, all night long.
So amateur astronomers would be following it for well over a decade as it is a decade of travel from Pluto to Earth for any object in orbit around the sun.
Professionals would be following it for even longer, decades in advance. They could follow it using telescopes like this, the national observatory of Japan and one of the worlds largest telescopes:
They can spot tiny objects. One of the smallest is 58534 Logos, only 80 km in diameter with a tiny moon Zoe 60 km in diameter. At its closet to the sun it’s just under 40 au away. It was discovered back in 1997.
So I hope you can understand they would see it long before the amateurs.
It would be naked eye years in advance.
You would see it every year for 11 months of the year - whichever constellation it is in then it's blocked only one month of the year at most. If it is from due north or due south in the relevant hemisphere ,you see it all year round and it is never blocked.
Faint object just visible in dark skies - long in advance. How about as bright as Mars?
Well Mars is an easy naked eye object. It’s albedo is 0.25. Diameter 6779 km so an object four times the diameter of Earth would be 4*12,742/6779 = 7.5 times the diameter of Mars and (4*12,742/6779)^2 = 56.5 times brighter. Even if it was four times darker than charcoal, it would be brighter than Mars at the distance of Mars. This image shows Mars at it’s closest, at a distance of 46.8 million miles (75.3 million kilometers)
Image from Mars Close Approaches | Mars Exploration Program
It’s apparent magnitude was -2.0 Mars Oppositions from 2012 to 2027 and its distance 0.5101 au
Jupiter is about 5 au from Earth. At that distance it would be about 100 times fainter, or about 5 magnitudes, so it would be magnitude 3 at the distance of Jupiter. That’s quite faint, fainter than Polaris. It would be one of the faintest stars visible from smaller cities and inner suburbs. So I think that’s about when it would be naked eye visible for the first time for most people. Easy to see if you can travel a little way to a darker site. The astronomical magnitude scale
A dark brown dwarf would be much brighter, because it is so much larger, about as bright as Betelgeuse the star at top left of Orion, very obvious.
Then if it made a beeline for Earth - well the distance is around 5 au, and - it travels faster as it approaches the sun, so take that 51 km / sec (I can do a more precise calculation but to get started) that’s probably faster than it would be. 5 au is 748 million kilometers. At 51 km / sec that’s 748 million/(51*24*60*60) = 169 days.
Actually it would take more like a year - that's how long it took New Horizons to reach Jupiter on its way to Pluto. It already had solar system escape velocity when it left Earth and it used Jupiter to speed it up a bit more to get to Pluto sooner.
So it would probably take well over a year to get from when it first crosses Jupiter's orbit to when it first crosses Earth's orbit before its loop around the sun. If there was a planet in that BS orbit which of course there isn't.
So you’d spot it as a naked eye object at least six months before it buzzes Earth. But bear in mind they say it goes around the sun first. So much more than that.
As I said you can’t see anything if it approaches from the direction of the sun, think the new moon which because it is lit from behind can’t be seen in the daytime sky.
But they sometimes say it comes in another direction, for instance from the south, or the north, etc. And they do share what they claim to be photographs of it, visually very large in the sky.
So when would you see an object that large approaching Earth?
Calculation indented:
Suppose it didn’t approach from the direction of the sun and was visible in the night sky. Then - if it was four times the diameter of the Earth, as they say, then at the distance of the Moon it would be 4*12,742/3,474 = 14.67 times the diameter of the Moon in the sky. That’s at a distance of 384,400 km. So it would be visibly the diameter of the Moon at a distance of 384,400*(4*12,742/3,474 = 5.64 million km.
At a typical speed of an approaching comet of 51 km / sec it would traverse that distance in 5.64 million / (51*60*60) = 30 hours. Then you can work back from that. From when it was visibly half the diameter of the Moon it would take 60 hours, from a quarter of the diameter of the Moon, 120 hours and so on.
A week earlier it would be 7*24/30 = 5.6 times smaller than the Moon in visual diameter
So you’d see it as visually the size of the Moon 30 hours in advance and a week earlier it would be visually more than a sixth of the diameter of the Moon.
And everyone would see it. It wouldn’t be able to play peek-a-bo and show up for a few minutes at sunrise or sunset or dart around the sky from one night to the next.
Keen eyed astronomers can see Venus as a tiny crescent with naked eye, even at a visual diameter of 60 arc seconds, or one arc minute. Phases of Venus and the Moon is 31 arc minutes in diameter. So in crescent phase, as you’d expect, you’d see it as a very tiny crescent to naked eye 30* 3x1/24 = 38.75 days before impact.
It is a totally absurd orbit anyway. Astronomers would never hypothesize a planet in such an orbit.
Here is what happens if you add a brown dwarf in a Nibiru like orbit to our solar system, notice how it scatters the other planets like confetti:
Can you see - we just wouldn’t be here. Last time it entered the solar system (which they say happened 3600 years ago), it would scatter the planets like confetti. Continue that for a few more orbits and there would be no planets left at all all the way from Mercury to Neptune, they’d all be gone.
Even a small planet would put everything into strange elliptical orbits and the effects would be obvious indeed Earth probably wouldn’t be very habitable with wild swings of temperature through its year.
That obviously hasn’t happened.
They knew of the same naked eye planets as the other ancient astronomers and they called the brighter ones Jupiter and Venus Nibiru if they happened to be bright during the equinoxes. So I guess they would have called Venus Nibiru right now as it is quite bright. This is to debunk: End of the World September 23: Did the Babylonians know about Nibiru?
This is being shared as a photograph of Nibiru. It’s probably Venus. Get up early and if it is a clear sky you will see it low to the East.
So in a way that photo of Venus labeled as Nibiru is right. The ancient Sumerians would have called Venus Nibiru right now. Venus of course is no threat to Earth.
They saw it as the seat of Marduk who shepherds the stars like sheep
Marduk. Iraq's heritage in Musée du Louvre Apadana winged man - according to the ancient Sumerians Nibiru is his seat - which refers to any bright object during Equinox - which varies from year to year typically Jupiter or Venus or a bright star. Since Venus is bright right now I think they would probably have said that Marduk is sitting on Venus which they would have called Nibiru - but only this time around.
Venus of course is no threat to Earth.
Zecharia Sitchin claimed to decipher the Sumerian tablets long before everyone else had - and he claimed that they were talking instead about an extra planet inhabited by extra terrestrials that flew past the inner solar system 3600 years ago - and that they genetically engineered us from apes to work as slaves in gold mines in Africa.
None of that is in the Sumerian tablets as they are now deciphered. Just a work of his own imagination. Much of it is from extrapolation of details such as a tiny dot on a tablet, not even text, that he reads entire stories from.
See September guide to the bright planets | EarthSky.org
Short summary: there is no way NASA can hide the night sky from amateur or professional astronomers. There isn’t anything to suggest they would want to or have ever tried to do this. It is all done in the open and there is no way anyone could do it. And there is no reason why they would. Though it is an often used movie plot scenario, governments in practice never hide news of upcoming disasters from their citizens but rather keep them fully informed of all developments as we saw with Irma and Maria hurricanes. I think the main reason people fall for this is as a result of watching many movies that use it as a plot twist. I also talk here about the real searches for asteroids and comets that could hit Earth.
I get asked this often
For a planet to get here from beyond Neptune, it would take a decade, and how could NASA or anyone else stop an amateur astronomer from buying a telescope like this and following it for themselves for that entire decade? They can’t even stop us doing that for a single day.
As we've seen, you just need a small portable scope like this one:
You could spot Pluto easily with that and it would be much brighter than Pluto at the distance of Pluto - beyond Neptune, a decade of travel away at the fastest a planet can travel and still be in orbit around the sun.
The night sky is open to everyone, nobody can hide the stars from you, nobody can stop you buying a telescope or looking through a friend’s scope.
Here is a forest lake in Virginia with the stars reflected in it. How is NASA going to stop you from looking at this night sky, with naked eye or with a telescope. Is there any evidence at all that they try?
Do you get a chap with a hat and teeshirt with NASA’s log on it, come up and say “Look here, you aren’t allowed to look up at the sky, keep your eyes facing towards the ground, and don’t think about unpacking that telescope”? Of course not. They don’t try. It is not even anything anyone has ever thought of doing or proposed ever.
And do you know of any example of a natural disaster where the governments know it is going to happen and hide this knowledge from their citizens? Did anyone try to hide the forecasts of Irma and Maria from the inhabitants of the Caribbean and of Florida?
Not at all. They had continually updating tracks of the projected hurricane paths. This is an example from a while back.
Did they try to hide their knowledge in order to stop people panicking as the wind tore the roofs off their houses?
AFAIK nobody has ever done such a thing ever.
It’s the opposite. Even if they have only seconds of warning, they will give it. With the Mexican earthquakes many lives were saved because of their early warning system, even though it didn’t work as well as it could.
This idea of governments hiding information from us about upcoming disasters is just a movie trope - it’s a way to increase dramatic tension in a movie, and makes a good plot line, but it’s not realistic. There are many movie tropes like that.
Did you know that when horses gallop on grass in movies, they often add a “coconut” effect because we expect them to sound as if they are galloping on cobbles.
They don’t at all of course. This is what a real horse sounds like galloping on grass. Just a light shuffly sound and some snorts
The Coconut Effect - TV Tropes
But if movie makers showed galloping horses making almost no sound, then the audience would think something is wrong. So even when galloping on grass, they add an effect like the effect of horses galloping on cobbles.
It’s the same with many bird sounds too. Birds don’t make much sound when they fly, but we are used to the sound of noisy flapping wings so nature films often add flapping sounds to nature films. There are many things like that in films. Noisy Nature - TV Tropes
In the same way with an asteroid impact or disaster movie we expect the government to hide news of the disaster from us. In the real world they never do. But the audience find it easy to believe in a movie, accustomed to this from many previous movies. If they stop to think, the ONLY EXAMPLES OF THIS that they have are from movies.
The first person to spot a new planet in our solar system would be famous, like Clyde Tombaugh, the most famous in the recent history of discoveries in our solar system. That obviously hasn’t happened.
NASA is not even remotely into the business of hiding things. They make it sound like the CIA. They are not even an astronomical body but rather a space agency, one of many including ESA, Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ISRO (India), CNSA (China), etc. NASA is also always short of money for its space programs, ever since the days of Apollo which is the only time it has had almost unlimited budgets.
It is also one of the most open in terms of sharing data. It doesn't match this conspiracy image at all. And they never give any evidence to explain why they think NASA is like this.
The international astronomical body is the IAU. And everything is done in the open via email and the bulletins are posted on the internet as they are sent, so you don’t even need to subscribe but can just go online to see the observations.
They are available here - you will see several most days: Recent MPECs
The observations are done by astronomers internationally. The IAU just helps co-ordinate them. There is no possibility for anyone to hide anything.
Some claim NASA is hiding the sky with giant mirrors - how could that work? Thousands of launches to get those mirrors into orbit, think that nobody would notice? To cover the whole sky, millions. And how are they supposed to work? Just reflect the Earth back at us so we see a reflection of the Earth? Or reflection of a different part of the sky?
There are ideas to build large thin film mirrors in space for solar power, Japan especially is keen on this. But there is no way they could hide anything. Instead you’d see a big obvious bright mirror in space and everyone would wonder why they did it and what it is for.
Others think they hide the sky with contrails. Have you never seen a clear night sky? Obviously they are very ineffective at it if this is what they do.
NASA can't stop people in another country from publishing anything and indeed no evidence at all that NASA is involved in preventing people writing news stories about astronomy in the US either.
Have you heard of any suggestion that astronomical news in the US is censored? Any government department that is involved in censoring US astronomy news?
But this goes further, they allege that NASA is involved in censoring all astronomical news worldwide. At least they don’t out and say it quite like that, but it’s the only possible conclusion if you follow the implications. Bizarre when you stop to think about it.
We don’t need to guess here. There was a dry run with Apophis By december 2014, there was a 2.7% chance of Apophis in 2009, hitting Earth in 2036. That meant a 97.3% chance it would miss and so nobody was surprised in the astronomical community when later calculations showed it would miss. What happened is they found some more observations of Apophis which they didn’t know about before which let them refine its orbit. For more about this, also see Apophis' Odds of Earth Impact Downgraded - Universe Today
Then for a while there was a chance of a hit in 2036. Now that chance is pretty much gone too.
This was all played out in the open. Nothing hidden from anyone.
They have actually successfully predicted impacts of two very small asteroids - one in north east africa one landing in the Atlantic. Both were reported as soon as they knew about them. They were so small as to be harmless and broke up in the atmosphere as fireballs but it was a good "dress rehearsal" for what might happen if they spotted something larger.
For anything larger the priority would be to evacuate the impact zone. Even with only hours or seconds of warning they could warn people to stay away from windows and protect themselves from broken glass. That could have saved many injuries with the Chelyabinsk meteorite.
There is just no way that any government could know of an impending disaster, like Irene or Maria but much worse, and not tell everyone about it.
And there is no way it could be hidden anyway.
This was shared all over the internet as a big story, that Telmário Mota made a big reveal of Nibiru, disclosing details from an alleged secret NASA report. But it is fake news. He did talk about Nibiru - but it was a joke! A pointed joke directed towards his political rival.
Here is an example: End of The World: Brazilian senator claims Nasa told him Planet X WILL crash into Earth
Here is the clip that everyone shared:
It is all in Portuguese, but someone there has provided a translation. So according to that translation anyway, what he actually says is that a voter asked him about Nibiru and about a story about a NASA report she had heard. He said that he passed the question on to his advisors. That's it.
------------------------------
Translation: A voter she says the following: Senator was this information NASA namely to NASA states that the planet Nibiru is coming toward the Earth and the current cycle will be finished soon. She speaks, second report NASA planet switches the gravitational field of the Earth and with that two-thirds of humanity and extensive died of starvation and disease. I passed it to promote advisors a study to see if this planet. It speaks of nibiru is really approaching land.
That’s enough to quash the story already.
However, it’s more than that. Antônio Augusto Jr. in our Doomsday Debunked facebook group, who speaks Portuguese, says that he wanted to make a joke, comparing the disastrous rule of a political enemy with the supposed cataclysm of a planet Nibiru.
This is the full version of the video (usually gets cut short), from a speech he made on May 25, 2017:
And this is a clarification notice that this politician shared after the false claims about him and Nibiru got shared around on the internet
His clarification notice is here: Em discurso no plenário senador alerta para a colisão de planeta com a Terra - TNOnline.com.br, and this is a google auto translate of the last section:
I hereby make it clear to my voters and the people of Roraima that the clear intention of the speech where I compare the supposed planet Nibiru, on which an elector wrote me, and the senator known by the codename Caju (Cashew), was to mock the concern of some with unsupported assumptions while a real evil rages Roraima and Brazil, corruption.
Some pages on facebook, led by the senator of evil, used this speech to try to tarnish my image of public man, serious and honest, but despite the negative repercussion based on the irresponsible edition of the video I do not take the words spoken in the Plenary because in that moment of national life in which we live the greatest political and institutional crisis of recent times, I have the duty to reaffirm my question: "What will be more devastating to Roraima, the supposed Nibiru or the corruption commanded by the parliamentarian that meets the codename of Caju (Cashew) ? "
Senator Telmário Mota (PTB / RR)
There Caju (Cashew), a Brazilian fruit is his nickname for his political enemy.
Planet X is a hypothetical planet or rather several different hypotheses - it's the standard name astronomers use for any planet they hypothesize but haven't found yet. Pluto was the first "planet X" until it was discovered when they called it Pluto. There have been many searches since then for different planets, but none found yet. There are two or three of these searches on going right now.
To be missed for so long it has to be very very faint and something you need big telescopes skyscraper tall often, with mirrors as big as a house to see at all. Or telescopes in space above the atmosphere searching in infrared. This would make a planet like that at least tens and probably hundreds, even thousands of times the distance from the sun of Earth.
This would mean it is decades of travel away from Earth even heading towards us directly. But - I hope you know that Pluto, also Neptune and Uranus which are other planets too faint to see with their naked eye- are in orbits that never take them anywhere near Earth? So why should these new planets be on a beeline for Earth?
Also, the orbit has to be one that orbits permanently at that great distance for another reason. Any orbit that takes it into the inner solar system will be unstable like a comet's orbit, couldn't stay in it for as long as a million years, so how could a planet get into such an orbit?
Also if it was a planet, then it would mess up the orbits of the other planets like ourselves, we wouldn't be here, we'd be in some weird elliptical orbit too, getting freezing cold alternately with boiling hot every year. We'd probably lose our Moon too.
It's obvious therefore to astronomers that there can't be any such planet. If it's a brown dwarf that's worse, then, no planets would be left in the solar system at all from Mercury all the way to Neptune.
Planet 9 is real astronomical news. However it is often misreported as a discovery. It is indirect evidence. It is like spotting what might be smoke but might be cloud in the distance and deducing a fire.
"Clouds look like smoke" by Leonora (Ellie) Enking - it’s an active volcano, Arenal Volcano, in Spanish Volcán Arenal, an active andesitic stratovolcano in north-western Costa Rica around 90 km northwest of San José, in the province of Alajuela, canton of San Carlos, and district of La Fortuna.
However these are just clouds that by coincidence look like smoke or ash.
So, you might see something ambiguous like that and you don't now for sure it is a fire.
So in the same way they don't yet know if there is a planet there. They have just spotted an intriguing pattern in the orbits of some much smaller objects which might mean they are being perturbed by a very distant planet.
If it exists it is in an orbit that takes it to 200 au from the sun at its closest. There 1 au is the distance of the Earth form the sun so I hope you can see how it can't ever come anywhere close to Earth. Also, if it was that close, in the nearer part of its orbit, we'd have found it some years ago. To still be hidden, it would have to be at the furthest point in its orbit, 1200 au away or close to it around 1000 au or more roughly. The astronomers have a particular area of the sky to look for it in and have been searching for it ever since but haven't yet found it.
So - it may or may not exist. Planet X is the general name for any hypothesized planet. If they call it X that means "unknown" and it means they don't know if it exists. It's not one object. Pluto was the first "planet X" before it was discovered and proved to exist.
It is nothing at all to do with Nibiru. Astronomers who work on this sort of thing are fed up of people messaging them asking about Nibiru.
Mike Brown, perhaps the one involved in the discovery of the dwarf planets like Eris, Haumea etc - he posted an article to his science blog where he blogs about his discoveries and discoveries by others of the same type saying he likes to answer questions from the public but he will not answer any email that talks about Nibiru because it is just nonsense and he hasn't got time with his work to spend his days answering nonsense and BS like that.
You can read his article here. I do not ♥ pseudo-science
The Nibiru idea is an orbit sketched on a piece of paper or nowadays, an orbit added to a software program like Celestia in a random direction.
Nobody can deduce from it where it is in the sky at any time of the year, or anything at all it's not defined as anything you could use a telescope to search for. It’s not even a region of the sky to search. They never say which constellation it is in. That is, unless they give “co-ordinates in google sky” which invariably point to some distant nebula hundreds of light years away. You can point a telescope at that and see it, but it is not moving in the sky and is not a planet.
If they did say where it is in the sky, they’d get caught out because any constellation is visible in the night sky for all except at most one month of the year, and anyone could just look at that constellation and see that it isn’t there.
It's also an impossible orbit because it crosses the paths of all the major planets - that would mean it would perturb their orbits and they would not be nice regular orbits like they are now, and its own orbit would also be perturbed and it would not last more than a million years in such an orbit. If it was a big object like a brown dwarf, even worse. In that case none of the planets would survive, all the way from Mercury to Neptune, they would all get ejected from the solar system or hit the Sun or Nibiru within a fairly short period of time.
The astronomer planet X's are in very distant orbits generally way way beyond Neptune. That is a place where
1. they are far enough away so they could be too faint to see yet.
2. they are in stable orbits, which also are consistent with us still being here.
Here is the last of my articles debunking the idea that Nibiru is "Planet 9"
Debunked: Planet 9 is Nibiru (Again)
David Meade has always given a range of dates. I started debunking him in January which is when people first started to message me about him. He said it would be September or October or November. So when nothing happens on Sept 23 he can just say "I told you it could be any of those three months" and go on saying dates until the end of the year, and when it doesn't happen in November he can probably then say "Oh it was a bit later than I thought" and say December.
Meanwhile astronomers predict asteroid flybys to the minute. Earth is traveling around the sun at 30 km / second. Let’s work out how long it takes to travel a distance along its orbit, the same as the travel distance from New York to Los Angeles in
Google makes the distance from New York to Los Angeles in km a little under 4,500 km. Earth travels that distance in 2.5 minutes.
It travels as far as Earth’s diameter in a little over 7 minutes. It travels the distance to the Moon in under three hours forty minutes.
If you know the orbit of an asteroid exactly, and the orbit of the Earth exactly, but you don’t know the position of the asteroid in its orbit exactly, then an asteroid that flies past Earth just three and a half minutes later than expected will miss when you thought it would hit, or hit when you thought it would miss.
If it flies past Earth four minutes earlier or later than expected, that shifts its position relative to us by more than the distance to the Moon.
It’s like driving over a railway bridge in a car, at the same time that an express train is traveling at, say, 200 km / hour. Suppose one day you drive over the bridge at the same time it passes by underneath. Now the next day you are five minutes late. You are on the same road, the train is on the same track, the train is in time but you are five minutes late. This will mean it is 16 ⅔ km away from you when you cross over the bridge.
So the idea that you know for sure that some mythical planet is going to fly past Earth but don't know if it is going to fly past in September or November, when Earth is a sixth of the way around the sun from where it is now, is of course very absurd.
The whole idea is BS anyway, no such planet is possible. These people just don’t give any thought at all to details like that. They just make up dates and say that “Nibiru is going to hit Earth on that date” and that’s their “job done”.
They are like script writers rather than journalists. Script writers for a movie don’t need to work out an orbit or make the story scientifically plausible, because hardly anyone in the audience will be an astronomer or know anything about astronomy. They can just say anything and the movie will work for most viewers as a plausible scenario.
That’s how they work.
I get people who worry about seeing red clouds or about seeing the Moon in the daytime sky - all of these are totally normal. It's just that it is amazingly easy not to notice the sky especially if you live in a city. These things have been going on all your life and you have just never seen them, even when right in front of your eyes. Or at least paid no attention. This is nothing to do with a mythical non existent bullshit planet.
At sunrise then the entire sky can light up red. If you have a gap in the lower clouds to the west or clouds to the west, it's often red to the west. If you think about it the red light from the rising sun is going to shine right across the sky and not just stop in mid air above you. So if there is anything for it to light up in the west, it will colour that red. Including mountains too. It works the same way at sunset. When the sun sets in the west it often lights up the sky in the east.
Caption: “Mount Rainier towers over all surrounding mountains, lit by the sunset and wreathed in clouds.” from Photogallery (U.S. National Park Service)
I could continue to write all day about this steaming BS that David Meade is serving up for your delectation with the support of the Daily Express.
If you want to find out more and debunk any particular story - well see my Debunking Doomsday blog. And many more get shared on the Doomsday Debunked facebook group and debunked there.
Some "news sites" have added timers counting down to the end of the world which makes them even more scared. If any journalists from the Sun, Daily Express, Daily Star, etc are reading this - I'm sure you have no idea how your stories are affecting people.
Children as young as 12 are terrified. It is entirely possible that some children and vulnerable young parents with young babies may well have killed themselves. I've been contacted by children who said they have thought of suicide and some say they don't think they would still be here if they hadn't read my debunking articles or joined our group Doomsday Debunked. I know that many suicide attempts are not successful but from what these people tell me about how they have felt suicidal - and the ones who find us are surely just a small fraction of those affected by these stories - it is very likely that there have been some attempts at least. Some may have succeeded and if they didn't leave a note, nobody might know why they did it.
So to journalists - for those of you who write these fake stories about the world about to end, please just stop doing it, and debunk them instead. I know that there are many who enjoy sensational and even fake news. But when you readers are becoming suicidal as a result, this is taking sensationalism too far by a mile. You can see my articles for examples of how to write entertainingly debunking them, and there are several others online, for instance a couple by the Washington Post (this one and this one). Also the astronomer Phil Plait in his post Will the Earth be destroyed this Saturday? hint: NO.
Once again, if anyone reading this is a journalist for a sensationalist paper, or knows journalists - do try to use your influence to raise awareness of the effects of these stories on vulnerable people, especially very young children. Children as young as 12 are reading these stories and getting scared out of their wits! No children should have to go through this, over this pile of stinking BS.
Young parents with babies are the other ones most vulnerable. They are scared and protective of their babies and are afraid they won't grow up to be adults because the world is about to end. Again they shouldn't have to go through this either.
As I said in the intro, and to repeat again:
Many of you are likely to find it difficult to sleep tonight. Even though you (hopefully) can see it is BS by now.
You might find it helps to sleep to some relaxing music. Or relaxing sounds of nature. So I end this article with some examples.
If you have trouble relaxing because of anxiety and fear, startled by the slightest noise from outside, there are many long tracks on YouTube which you can play as you sleep which might help.
I haven’t listened to these all the way through. What I did is search for ambient sound videos then looked at the comments. If the comments all were from people saying they slept to it and found it relaxing then I assumed the video is a good one. If you know of more good ones do say and I’ll add them.
Tranquil Birdsong, 11 hours - Birds Chirping, nature sounds, natural sound of birds singing
10 Hours - Waterfall into a stream - Ambient Sounds for meditation/sleep/relaxation
Relaxing Rainforest Sounds, Birds Chirping, No Music (10 Hours)
10 Hours Rainfall w/Distant Thunder- Ambient Sounds la lluvia del sueño Thunderstorm tormenta
You can also right click and choose Loop to make sure it continues through your sleep for the shorter videos.
Any questions, comments, anything do say in the comments here. And do join our facebook group. Doomsday Debunked. Great group of people there who will help you if you are scared. Also do join if you are a scientist or astronomer and want to help these scared and sometimes suicidal people. Thanks!
