Yes this is on a par with the famous prank that Patrick Moore once carried out on April fools day. He claimed that because of an alignment of the planets that if you jumped in the air you'd feel lighter at 9.47 am on a particular day when Pluto passed behind Jupiter.
Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity
Many of his audience did jump in the air and contacted him excitedly saying they did feel lighter at that very moment.
He was doing that to poke fun at the "Jupiter Effect" - a very popular but not hugely scientifically accurate book back in the 1970s.
That's very like this story, so it sounds to me like he's taken the ideas of that book and transplanted it to the 28th - on no scientific basis at all.
What Phil Platt says about it in that story is what any astronomer would say.
The Moon is 50 times stronger than all the other planets put together, in its tidal effects on the Earth. And does the Moon create earthquakes? When aligned with the sun even?
But his alignments aren't even alignments. Not like the 1970s Jupiter effect where the science was poor, but at least the alignments were real alignments. This time, the planets aren't even aligned. Why do such scientifically impossible ideas get so widely accepted and shared?
And he gets it by manipulating a model with hugely enlarged panets, with the planets nearly as big as the sun, and the Moon almost touching the Earth and with the distance between Earth and the Moon on the model not far off the distance from the sun to Mercury. As Phil Platt he doesn't even remark on this.
Screenshot from Phil Platt's article. Notice the hugely enlarged Earth and moon, getting on for the size of the sun, and the distance from Earth to the moon in a sizeable fraction of the distance from sun to mercury - the narrator doesn't seem to realize this, drawing lines through this orrery program. The Earth and moon combined would take up a single pixel on this scale presumably, located around the center of the place where the giant sized Earth is located in this screenshot.
But anyway it is nonsense, gravity isn't beamed from planet to planet like laser beams along lines of alignment :).
The main tidal effects are the tides of the Moon and of the Sun. All the other planets combined, have only a tiny fraction of the effect of the Moon.
To be affected by Jupiter's gravity tidally, we would need to be in a close orbit around it, like its moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
Gravity drops off very quickly, inverse square law, double the distance then a quarter of the gravity, four times the distance then a sixteenth of the gravity and so on. But tidal effects drop off even more rapidly, they vary according to the inverse cube - so for instance four times the distance, then 1/64 of the effect. A hundred times the distance and it is a millionth of the effect.
Even the mighty Jupiter has a tiny effect on Earth, both gravitationally and tidally. Phil Platt's article: No, a Planetary Alignment on May 28 Won’t Cause an Earthquake
You can understand this happening though. I think he is sincere, from the video.
You have lots of people who think they are contacted by spirits, and who then combine various strands of information to come up with particular dates etc.
So with probably millions of people doing these predictions, and dozens of disastrous events happening on the Earth - then at some point then one of those predictions will align with one of those events.
So whenever you get a disaster like the Nepal earthquake, then amongst, say, tens of thousands of people predicting these things, most haven't predicted anything for that date.
But just by chance perhaps a few hundred, different ones each time, find the event exactly fits their prediction. So then those people will become suddenly very convinced that they are onto something, and start predicting other things and posting youtube videos and so on. It's a natural human reaction. We aren't very good at taking an objective view of improbable things that happen to us.
I expect it is something like that.
There is a risk of a big Earthquake in California at some point, yes. May happen some time in the next 30 years or so.
Magnitude 8 or larger. New Long-Term Earthquake Forecast for California (3/10/2015 12:30:00 PM)
They are talking about something like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
That really did happen and was hugely devastating. But remember the skyscrapers then weren't as well built to withstand earthquakes in the way modern California skyscrapers are, though they had already designed buildings to be earthquake resistance.
Also 90% of the damage to the structures was due to fires.
"One of the reasons that fatalities in the earthquake were a fraction of one percent of the population and complete collapses were so few is that well before 1906 engineers and architects attempted to build structures with earthquake-resistant features.
"The 1906 fire caused at least ninety percent of the damage to the city and perhaps more. City officials and citizens emphasized the fire in order to receive insurance payments. Ironically, they couldn't over-emphasize the consequences of the fire because a majority of damage was due to the fire. But engineers and architects did learn from the earthquake. They quietly continued to build earthquake-resistant buildings, and put into effect a strong \building code that addressed earthquake danger. After the earthquake, the citizens responded by voting to build a huge water system dedicated to fighting fires, which was earthquake-resistant as well."
Nowadays houses and skyscrapers are much better built than they were then. So that would be a mitigating factor but still it would be devastating and surely many would die.
As for the idea that California would fall into the sea - that's impossible.
One geologist worked out that to have an earthquake that big, you'd need a fault line 6,000 miles long all the way from the pole to the equator, and you would need the entire fault line to slip at once (with all the energy of the slip focused on California). Apart from the improbability of such a vast fault line slipping simultaneously - such a long fault line doesn't exist in our world.
California Geological Survey - EarthquakeDOC
Even major earthquakes like the Nepal one shift the land by meters at most. The Nepal earthquake moved the land upwards by between 1 and 2 meters.
Nepal earthquake may have raised all of Kathmandu by 3 to 6 feet - and moved Katmandu about 3 meters southward Nepal earthquake moves Kathmandu but Everest height unchanged – experts
An interferogram showing vertical displacement of land a result of the April 25 earthquake. Here red = vertical displacement of 2 meters - so a few spots were raised by 2 meters. There were horizontal movements also of a few meters.
He says this about these types of movies in the introduction:
"Whether we view movies as an educational experience or simply entertainment, we all value the ability of movies to help us escape reality for a little while. Sometimes, however, because a movie uses science and technology as a backdrop, the story will be more believable to its viewers, helping them form opinions that might affect their view of reality and, ultimately, the way they live their lives."
"Some moviemakers have relied on a perception of reality that has been fostered over the years by, in many cases, watching other movies. They do this instead of developing equally interesting story lines based on the truth."
California Geological Survey - EarthquakeDOC
I.e. movie makers watching movies that their audience are familiar with so building up a movie based mythology that the audience will go along with because they have been prepared for it by previous movies.
It's a California Collapse - TV Trope
And now we have amateur prophets who have watched movies made by movie makers who have watched other movies who maybe started with some scientific basis which they exaggerated for dramatic effect. And sincerely thinking that something like this might happen. The science behind this and the actual observations and experience we have of earthquakes to back it up has got lost many steps removed.
I’ve now worked this answer up into my post here: Debunked - California could fall into the sea or the Earth split open through earthquakes or continental drift by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
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