Mauna Kea telescope protest

SUBHEAD: Native Hawaiians stop groundbreaking ceremony with protest closing of access road on Big Island. 

By Jennifer Sinco Kelleher on 8 October 2014 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/08/mauna-kea-telescope-protest_n_5954894.html)


Image above: Protesters block vehicles from getting to the Thirty Meter Telescope groundbreaking ceremony site at Mauna Kea, Hawaii on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2014. From ABC-TV News.

A groundbreaking and Hawaiian blessing ceremony came to an abrupt end before it could really get underway Tuesday because of protesters who oppose plans to build one of the world's largest telescopes near the summit of a mountain held sacred by Native Hawaiians.

More than an hour after the event was scheduled to begin near the top of the Big Island's Mauna Kea, the host of the ceremony's live webcast said the caravan carrying attendees up the mountain "hit a snag" and would be delayed. He later said the delay was due to a group of people blocking access to the site.

The groundbreaking for the $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope was being shown via webcast because of limited access to the construction site, which is at an elevation of 14,000 feet with arctic-like conditions.

Stephanie Nagata, director of the Office of Mauna Kea Management, said several dozen protesters standing, sitting and chanting on the road prevented the caravan of vans from reaching the summit, but some passengers were able to walk the rest of the way to the ceremony.

The webcast later showed protesters yelling during attempts to start the blessing.

"We do hope we'll be able to find a common ground and proceed with this in the future," the webcast's host said before the broadcast was shut down.

The ceremony was interrupted by protesters holding signs and yelling, said Sandra Dawson, a spokeswoman for the telescope project.

"It was a ceremonial thing, and I don't know whether that will be repeated," she said. "We listened to the views of the people who were there. Everybody's in good spirits."

The disruption doesn't affect construction from moving forward, Dawson said.

Kealoha Pisciotta said her group, Mauna Kea Anaina Hou, planned to protest nonviolently by holding prayer ceremonies on the road at the bottom of the mountain. She said there were no plans to be disruptive or block people from attending the event.

Some in her group headed up the mountain to make an offering but encountered police blocking the road, Pisciotta said.

"They laid down on the road right there. That's what stopped the caravan," she said. "They were reacting to the police blocking the road."

Nagata said authorities did not block the road. A police spokeswoman didn't immediately return a call seeking information.

The groundbreaking was to culminate years of permit applications and approvals from the University of Hawaii and the state land board. The university leases land from the state where the telescope will be built. The Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources approved the sublease in June and then later denied requests to contest the approval.


Image above: A computer model of the Thirty Meter Telescope, which just began construction after more than a decade of planning. From (http://www.outsideonline.com/news-from-the-field/Hawaiian-Telescope-Construction-Begins-Amid-Controversy.html).

Opponents raised questions about whether land appraisals were done appropriately and whether Native Hawaiians were properly consulted.

Some protesters who yelled during the blessing attempt later apologized to event organizers and helped put away chairs, Pisciotta said. "We said aloha to each other and we hugged."

She said her group's leaders didn't intend to stop the ceremony.

"That wasn't anyone's goal," she said. "The organizers were very clear that we weren't trying to do that."

But, Pisciotta added, "We can't control everybody." She said no one was arrested.

The project was initiated by the University of California, California Institute of Technology and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy. Universities and institutions in China, India and Japan later signed on as partners.

The telescope should help scientists see some 13 billion light years away for a glimpse into the early years of the universe. Mauna Kea is the ideal location for observing the most distant and difficult to understand mysteries of the universe, astronomers said.

Its primary mirror promises to be 100 feet, or 30 meters, in diameter, made up of 492 smaller mirrors.
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Mapping what you can't see

SUBHEAD: Looking at this, I'm reminded that we have been imagining spaces we cannot see for thousands of years.

By Robert Krulwich on 7 September 2014 for NPR -
(http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2014/09/05/346125416/mapping-what-you-cannot-see-cannot-know-cannot-visit)


Image above: Still frame of our own Laniakea Supercluster from video in original article. For video see below.

When I was a boy I had a globe. I could take it in my hands, rest it on my lap, give it a spin and look down on Africa, Europe, North America and Asia spinning by.

In 1961 (I was 13), cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin left the planet and got high enough to look down on the real Earth spinning beneath him. He was the first (followed by Alan Shepard and later John Glenn) to gaze with his own eyes on what we had over the centuries so carefully mapped, drawn and imagined.

From 160 miles up, you can take in the whole boot of Italy, the Red Sea narrowing to Suez, North America tapering down to the isthmus at Panama, and the amazing thing — amazing to me, anyway — is that what we'd spent 2,000 years drawing in our heads was actually there. We'd gotten it pretty much right!

Of course, you say. Cartography is a science. What it describes should be there. And yet, I find myself a little surprised by our ability to measure, to extrapolate, to conjoin, to build a true whole from a gazillion little parts. It's an enormous intellectual feat. And now, I'm happy to report, it's been done again — on a scale that boggles my mind.


Video above: Laniakea Supercluster that includes the Milky Way. From (http://youtu.be/rENyyRwxpHo).

R. Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and his team have mapped a hunk of the universe that is 500 million light-years across. It contains 100 million billion suns — including our own little star. Their new map, like our early Earth maps, is built from detailed observations, intense data crunching and, when assembled, it pictures a galactic neighborhood he calls "Laniakea" — that's a Hawaiian name that the video below translates as (oddly) "immeasurable heaven."



Image above: Laniakea Supercluster and its closest neighbor Perseus-Pisces Supercluster that touch on another. Another still from video above. From (http://youtu.be/rENyyRwxpHo).

But they measured it. What you will see in this video is the first coherent map, not of our Milky Way but of the Milky Way's larger neighborhood, a branching "supercluster" of galaxies, being pulled, pushed and splayed over what I thought would be an unimaginable, unmappable distance — but here it is. As the video will show you, we are at the far, far edge of a long branch of swirling stars, an impossibly small seed dangling from an immense tree of light.

A Postscript: We Have Done This Before
Looking at this, I'm reminded that we have been imagining spaces we cannot see for thousands of years.

Back in 240 B.C., in ancient Alexandria, an astronomer named Eratosthenes got a letter from southern Egypt. The letter writer commented that where he lived there's a day — the longest day of the year (what we would call the summer solstice) — when a person casts no shadow. None at all. At exactly noon where I live, the southerner wrote, the sun is directly over my head, not a single degree north, south, east or west. For that moment, I am shadowless.

Me And My Shadow
Hmm, thought Eratosthenes, that doesn't happen where I live. Here in Alexandria on the longest day of the year at noon, the sun still casts a slight shadow. That got him thinking: What if the Earth is curved? Maybe sunshine is falling straight to Earth, but the shadow I see in Alexandria is telling me that I'm at a different angle to the sun than my friend down south? Maybe these shadow differences are telling us we are living on a giant sphere.

He measured the distance between Alexandria and Syene, Egypt, where his friend lived. Then, on the next solstice, he put a stick in the Alexandrian ground, measured the shadow at noon and was able to calculate (using trigonometry, based on the different lengths of shadow) how big the Earth might be.

What's amazing is he got very close. He imagined an Earth bigger than the one we live on, but since we don't know how Eratosthenes measured distances exactly, his calculations were either 16 percent too big or just 2 percent too big.

Either way, he was conjuring up an immense ball, hundreds of millions of times bigger than he was, and when Yuri Gagarin got to see what Eratosthenes had imagined, it turns out, Eratosthenes was pretty much right. Go figure.

(Come to think of it, that's what Eratosthenes did. Using a stick, a shadow and his head, he figured out what he was standing on. On our good days, we humans are very, very good.)

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Martian surface at night

SUBHEAD: Night on Mars under the Milky Way. You can even see the moon Phobos in the night sky.

By Cory Doctorow on 16 December 2013 for Boing Boing -
(http://boingboing.net/2013/12/16/panoramic-image-of-curiosity-r.html)


Image above: Still image from panaorama below. View looking north to Milky Way. 

Jeffrey sez, "360Cities' intrepid member Andrew Bodrov, stitching master of interplanetary awesomeness, has constructed this composite image (i.e. 'fake view') of the Curiosity Rover at night under the Milky Way. You can even see Phobos, Mars' own moon in the night sky."


Panorama above: View of mars at night taken by the NASA rover Curiosity. Assembled by Andrew Bodrov.  From (http://www.360cities.net/image/mars-panorama-curiosity-night)

See also:
360 City: Daytime view of Mars
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China soft lands on Moon

SUBHEAD:  A Chinese planetary rover has successfully landed on the moon. The first soft landing in forty years.

By Elizabeth Barber on 16 December 2013 for Christian Science Monitor -
(http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/1216/China-s-Jade-Rabbit-lands-on-the-moon-but-will-it-play-nice-there-video)


Image above: Photo of the lander Jade Rabbit wrapped in gold foil on Moon as taken from rover after coming down ramp. From original article.

China landed its rover, Jade Rabbit, on the moon over the weekend, becoming the third country to make a soft landing on lunar real estate and the first state to visit the lunar surface in almost 40 years. The landing, in highlighting both China’s technological capabilities and its lofty ambitions in the cosmos, now raises questions about what China will do next as it flexes its wings in the final frontier.

Chang’e-3, the lunar lander, and Jade Rabbit, its rover, landed on the moon’s Bay of Rainbows on Saturday, after about 13 days of space travel. State television showed the refrigerator-sized package – shiny and gold, like a wrapped candy – hovering over a blue plume as it beamed itself down. Back on Earth, China’s control room staff were shown applauding as the craft came to a gentle rest on the moon.

“Now as Jade Rabbit has made its touchdown on the moon surface, the whole world again marvels at China's remarkable space capabilities,” said Xinhua, China’s state news agency, in an article following the landing.

It’s been almost four decades since a state has made a soft landing on the moon (in a soft landing, the lander or rover alights intact on the ground). The last state to visit the lunar surface was the Soviet Union, in 1976. The US, the second country to make a soft moon landing, has not done so since 1972.As the Soviet Union was leaving the moon for the last time, China’s space program was just a fledgling one, limited to satellite and missile development.

Its space exploration program was nonexistent: the anxious, repeated attempts of Mao Zedong (who would die just a month later) to match the US and the Soviet Union in achievement and cobble together a crewed space program had disintegrated amidst political unrest. For years to follow, China was much too mired in economic duress to compete with spacefaring powers on the cosmic scale.

It was not until 2004, following China’s successful launch of a manned Earth orbiter, that the state announced its long-term series of lunar missions, all to be titled “Chang’e.” Chang'e, in Chinese myth, was an archer’s wife who swallowed a magic elixir that lifted her to the moon. She took with her a pet rabbit, "Yu Tu,” or Jade Rabbit. There, the pair has stayed, a lunar goddess and her rabbit.

It’s a romantic myth, and its dreamy tropes have burnished Chang’e lunar missions since the launch of the first mission, orbiter Chang’e-1, six years ago: “Flying to the moon is the nation's long cherished dream,” said Xinhua, after the launch of Chang’e-1.

Following Chang’e-3’s landing, China state media reiterated that the mission is a preamble to the state’s even grander, national ambitions, including a manned mission to Earth’s natural satellite and, in the long term, a trip to Mars. In the meantime, Chang’e-3, along with its companion “rabbit,” is charged with exploring a basaltic lava plain on the moon, as well as with setting up the first telescope there.

 

Video above: From (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/10519813/Footage-released-of-China-Jade-Rabbit-moon-landing.html).

“It’s an impressive achievement,” says John M. Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, of Chang’e-3. “With this mission, China is demonstrating a high level of space technology and operational capability.”

Though China is still decades behind the US and Russia in spacefaring capabilities, the state could “within 10-20 years be one of the top three space powers,” surpassing the European Union, Japan, and India, says Dr. Logsdon.

“It is close to that level now,” he says.

But while there is little doubt that China has developed advanced space technologies, there is some doubt if it will be “a responsible steward of space,” as it exercises its capabilities there, says Michael Krepon, director of South Asia and Space Security programs at The Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.

China, along with Russia and India, which recently launched a probe to Mars, has yet to endorse the European Union’s international code of conduct for the use of space. The code is designed to set standards for managing the congestion in Earth’s skies, in hopes of avoiding scenarios like the one in 2007, in which China, in a booming display of its missile might, shot down its own weather satellite and sent space debris coursing through the cosmos.

The latest version of the EU’s code, now in its third iteration, was released in September.

“We are still waiting to see how China will behave in global commons,” says Dr. Krepon. “Will China cooperate to protect the commons, or will it throw its weight around and act in a way that’s troubling to other stakeholders?”

"Space exploration is a common benefit for all human kind, but space weapons are a very different story," he says.

China and Russia have signed their own bilateral version of a code of conduct, but the document uses language that appears to exempt missile use from the ban on space weapons, says Krepon. The treaty, called the “Treaty on Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space” (PPWT), was signed in 2008.

“Their treaty is not serious. The European Union code of conduct is serious,” he says. “China will need to decide whether it is serious about developing rules of the road in space.”

Under a 2011 law, NASA is banned from using its funds to collaborate with China on bilateral space activities. The US executive branch and state department, though, are not prohibited from engaging with Beijing, nor is NASA prohibited from engaging in multilateral collaboration with the Chinese space program.

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Billions of "Earths" in galaxy

SUBHEAD: Our Milky Way Galaxy may support billions of Earth size planets with liquid surface water.

[IB Publisher's note: Fortunately for them we humans cannot get to another Earth before we learn how to save ourselves from ourselves.]


By Tanya Lewis on 4 November 2013 for Huffington Post-
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/earth-like-habitable-planets-kepler-space-video_n_4214758.html)


Image above: An artist's representation of the 'habitable zone,' the range of orbits around a star where liquid water may exist on the surface of a planet. From original article.

Habitable alien planets similar to Earth may not be that rare in the universe, a new study suggests.

About one in five sunlike stars observed by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has an Earth-size planet in the so-called habitable zone, where liquid water — and, potentially life — could exist, according to the new study. If these results apply elsewhere in the galaxy, the nearest such planet could be just 12 light-years away.

"Human beings have been looking at the stars for thousands of years," said study researcher Erik Petigura, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). "How many of those stars have planets that are in some way like Earth? We're very excited today to start to answer that question," Petigura told SPACE.com. [9 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]

The findings, detailed today (Nov. 4) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in a video describing the frequency of Earth-like planets, say nothing about whether these planets actually support life — only that they meet some of the known criteria for habitability.

Petigura also presented the results today in a briefing at the second Kepler Science Conference at NASA Research Park in Moffett Field, Calif, in which the Kepler team also announced the discovery of hundreds of new exoplanets, including many in the habitable zone.

"I think it's by far the most trustable estimate available, but I don't think it's final," said Francois Fressin, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved with the study.
Taking a planet census
Petigura and his colleagues painstakingly developed software to sift through Kepler's mammoth data set. The spacecraft's field of view includes about 150,000 stars, but most of these fluctuate in brightness too much for a planet to be detectable. The team examined 42,000 of the "quietest" stars, finding 603 planet candidates around these stars, 10 of which were Earth-size and lay in the habitable zone.

The team defined Earth-size planets as ones having a radius one to two times that of Earth. Planets were considered to be in the habitable zone if they received about as much light as the Earth does from the sun (within a factor of four). [7 Ways to Discover Alien Planets]

They used the Keck I telescope in Hawaii to take spectra of the stars, in order to pin down the radii of the planets.

But this wasn't the end of the story. Just as taking a census requires some statistical corrections for the people the survey misses, the researchers had to make corrections for planets Kepler missed.


The transit method of finding planets, by definition, only detects planets orbiting in the same plane of view as their host star, which includes just a fraction of the total number of planets. Study researcher Geoff Marcy of UC Berkeley compared planetary orbits to papers fluttering through the air. Very few are going to be edge-on, he said.

Secondly, the analysis misses some planets simply because the tiny amount of starlight they block makes them tricky to detect. To correct for this, the researchers inserted "fake planets" into the data so they could see how many their software would miss.

The analysis was a "Herculean task," Marcy said.

After making these corrections, the researchers had their result: About 22 percent of sunlike stars observed by Kepler have Earth-size, potentially habitable planets.

Chances for life
The researchers were quick to point out that the fact that these planets are Earth-size and lie in the habitable zone does not mean they could support life. The planets might have scorching-hot atmospheres, or no atmospheres at all, they said. Even if the planets have all the basic ingredients for life, scientists don't know the probability that life would ever get started.

The definition of Earth-size planets in this study was pretty broad, Fressin said. For instance, a planet that has a radius twice the size of Earth's might not even be rocky, he said.

Kepler mission scientist Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center who was not involved with the study, agrees it's a generous definition. Rocky planets with a radius about 1 to 1.5 times the size of Earth's have been found, but the fraction of larger planets that are rocky is probably much lower, Batalha told SPACE.com. Still, it's a fair start, she said.

"Kepler's prime objective was to understand the prevalence of habitable planets in the galaxy," Batalha said at a news conference. "This is the first time a team has offered such a number for stars like the sun."

The researchers had to extrapolate the number of planets with orbits longer than 200 days, because these haven't been detected in the Kepler data. "Ideally, we won't rely on extrapolations," Batalha said. "But as a first cut, this is a valid thing to do."

Last week, Marcy and his colleagues reported the discovery of the alien planet Kepler-78b, a rocky world nearly the same size and density as the Earth. But Kepler-78b hugs its star at a distance far too close and hot to be habitable, with surface temperatures of about 3,680 degrees Fahrenheit (2,027 degrees Celsius).

Kepler went out of commission in May, after the loss of a wheel used for pointing the spacecraft. Nevertheless, scientists will mine Kepler data for decades to look for potentially habitable planets.

"Maybe with future instruments, we could actually image these planets," Petigura said.

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Space near Earth

SUBHEAD: Breathtaking animation of the Moon's rotation and a Space Station view of Earth time lapse.

By David Pescovitz on 17 September 2013 for Boing Boing  -
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG0fTKAqZ5g)


Image above: A Forever full moon. From (http://boingboing.net/2013/09/17/breathtaking-video-of-the-moon.html).

This stunning animation of the Moon's rotation was made from images captured by NASA's Lunar Reconissance Orbiter's Wide Angle Camera (WAC). "A Unique View of the Moon" (Arizona State University)


Video above: An otherwise unavailable view of moon rotating. From (http://youtu.be/sNUNB6CMnE8).

From (http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/790-A-Unique-View-Of-The-Moon.html)

A huge payoff from the longevity of the LRO mission is the repeat coverage obtained by the LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC). The WAC has a very wide field-of-view (FOV), 90° in monochrome mode and 60° in multispectral mode, hence its name. On the one hand, the wide FOV enables orbit-to-orbit stereo, which allowed LROC team members at the DLR to create the unprecedented 100 meter scale near-global (0° to 360° longitude and 80°S to 80°N latitude) topographic map of the Moon (the GLD100)!

However, the wide FOV also poses challenges for mosaicking and reconstructing lunar colors because the perspective changes plus- and minus-30° from the center to the edges of each frame. The problem lies in the fact that the perceived reflectance of the Moon changes as the view angle changes.

So for the WAC, the surface appears to be most reflective in the center of the image and less so at the edges, which is quite distracting! This effect results in a pole-to-pole striped image when making a "not-corrected" mosaic.

What to do? Easy - simply take 36 nearly complete global mosaics (110,000 WAC images) and determine an equation that describes how changes in Sun angle and view angle result in reflectance changes. Next step, for each pixel in those 110,000 WAC images compute the Solar angle and the viewpoint angle (using the GLD100 to correct for local slopes), and adjust the measured brightness to common angles everywhere on the Moon.

For this mosaic the LROC Team used the 643 nm band, a Solar angle 10° from vertical (nearly noon), and a viewing angle straight down. Well, perhaps easy is a bit of an exaggeration!

Imagine the number of pixels to consider! To reduce the computational load we use only a subset of the pixels to fit. The most challenging aspect is determining the best photometric model for this huge dataset. Using existing knowledge of lunar reflectance, many iterations, and a variety of classes of mathematical solutions, we ended up using a combination of output from a least-squares fit on a linear model as starting parameters to a minimum search algorithm on a non-linear model. This technique adds robustness to the non-linear model and enables us to more quickly converge on a solution.

Or in other words, there were a lot of calculations over many starts and restarts. So perhaps the process was not that easy in practice, but in the end, it was successful! This type of study is known as photometry, and has a rich history going back to the first half of the 20th century.

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Space Station Time Lapse

By David Peterson on 6 October 2011 for YouTube -
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG0fTKAqZ5g)

Inspired by a version of the opening sequence of this clip called 'What does it feel like to fly over planet Earth?', I tracked down the original time-lapse sequence taken on the International Space Station (ISS) via NASA, found some additional ones there, including the spectacular Aurora Australis sequences, and set it to a soundtrack that almost matches the awe and wonder I feel when I see our home from above.

[IB Publisher's note: The white flashes in the clouds are lightning flashes.]


Video above: From (http://youtu.be/FG0fTKAqZ5g).
 

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Not Written in the Stars

SUBHEAD: It might still be possible to maintain scientific research as a living tradition in the centuries immediately ahead of us.

By John Michael Greer on 8 August 2013 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/08/not-written-in-stars.html)


Image above: Astrological signs arranged around the wheel of the stars in the heavens. From (http://www.thelivingmoon.com/44cosmic_wisdom/02files/Astrology_Articles_by_Radu.html).

When Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God—in less metaphorical terms, the collapse of the Christian faith that had provided the foundations for European social life since the Dark Ages—he saw that event as a turning point in human history, a shattering and liberating transformation that would open the road to the Overman. That hope turned out to be misplaced, and it’s worth keeping in mind that any equally grandiose claims that might be made about the consequences of the death of progress will likely face disappointment along the same lines.

Even so, the collapse of the civil religion of progress marks a significant shift, as important in our time as was the event that Nietzsche announced turned out to be in his. Like its forerunner, the death of progress promises to kick the props out from under a great deal of today’s conventional wisdom, and pose serious challenges to some of the industrial world’s most central institutions.

The case I have particularly in mind here is modern science, and in particular the impressively large institutional forms that have been built up around the scientific project over the last century or so. Those forms were achievable only because a widely shared faith in progress made resources and funding available for them, and their continued existence depends just as directly on the survival of that same faith.

A specific example may be helpful here, so let’s consider the future of astronomical observatories. An observatory big and high-tech enough to contribute significantly to the advance of astronomy can be a very expensive proposition—the Palomar observatory outside San Diego, for example, costs over US$10,000 a night to operate—and the ebbing tide of prosperity in the industrial world is starting to make those costs hard to cover.

Here in the US, the National Science Foundation has proposed to delete the funding for six government-funded observatories, while many observatories owned by universities are facing funding cuts or closure as a result of similar pressures.

Observatories are particularly vulnerable in this context because they don’t make a profit for anybody. At a time when computer science and molecular biology departments at many universities increasingly operate as commercial enterprises, churning out patentable products to line the pockets of professors and university administrators alike, astronomers have got to be feeling like the red-headed stepchildren of academe; no matter how excited they and their colleagues may be about discovering a new type of quasar or what have you, the discovery’s not going to make them or their university any money, and the university administration is just as aware of this difference as the astronomers are.

These days, the sciences are being sorted out into two camps, those that produce technologies useful to government and business and those that don’t; I’m sure my readers need no help figuring out which of those camps is getting the lion’s share of research dollars these days, and which is being left to twist in the wind.

At this point I’d like to take the discussion in a deliberately improbable, even whimsical direction. It so happens that astronomers do have another potential source of income available to them—a funding source that could probably support many if not most of the existing observatories in the style to which they’ve become accustomed, and would be completely independent of government grants and the whims of university administrations alike.

It would require a certain number of grad students to get some additional training, but it could be done with equipment that can be found in any observatory. What’s more, it was the funding source for several of history’s most important astronomical projects.

It’s as simple as it is elegant, really. All that would be required is that observatory staff would have to learn how to cast and interpret horoscopes.

Yes, I’m well aware that that’s not going to happen, and in a moment we’ll talk about the reasons why, but let’s set that aside for now and consider the thing in the abstract. Despite the fulminations and wishful thinking of the rationalists among us, astrology’s not going to go away any time soon. It’s been a living tradition for well over two millennia in close to its current form, and is as lively now as it’s ever been.

The rationalist crusade against it has been a resounding flop, having failed to make the least dent in its popularity; today astrology supports its own economic sector of publishers, computer firms, annual conferences, correspondence schools, and many other businesses, not to mention thousands of professional astrologers who make a living casting birth charts, annual progressions, horary charts, and other astrological readings for a large and enthusiastic clientele.

Not only could astronomers tap into this market, it actually takes a continuing effort on their part to avoid doing so. I’ve been told by astronomer friends that observatories in the US routinely field calls from people who are a little confused about the difference between astronomy and astrology, and want someone to cast their horoscopes. Put a new message on the answering machine, teach the receptionist how to take down birth data, and that’s fixed.

The biggest and most prestigious observatories would have the most to gain—what Hollywood hunk or celebutante, for example, could resist the temptation to drop five figures on a genuine horoscope from the Palomar Observatory, complete with a glossy star field photo of the second or so of arc that was rising on the ecliptic when he or she was born?

Nor would this be anything new in the history of astronomy. Johannes Kepler paid the bills while he was working out the laws of planetary motion by casting horoscopes; Claudius Ptolemy did the same thing more than a millennium earlier while he was writing the Almagest.

Granted, neither man was in it just for the money; Ptolemy also wrote the most influential treatise on astrology ever penned, the Tetrabiblos, while Kepler was a brilliant innovator in astrology. The Keplerian aspects are very nearly as important in the history of modern astrology as the laws of planetary motion are in that of astronomy.

For that matter, the roots of modern astronomy reach deep into the traditions of the astronomer-priests of Sumeria and Babylonia, who made the first known systematic records of planetary movements and, not coincidentally, cast the first known horoscopes.

Much more could be said along these lines, but it’s probably better to stop here, so that my rationalist readers don’t fling themselves at their computer screens in a purely reflexive attempt to leap through cyberspace and wring my neck. Of course the modest proposal I’ve just offered has about as much chance of being taken seriously as Jonathan Swift’s famous suggestion that the Irish ought to support themselves by selling their infants for meat, and it was made in much the same spirit.

We can take it as given that in today’s America, astronomers will embrace astrology on the same day that Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins fall on their knees together and accept Jesus as their lord and savior. Nor, for that matter, am I interested in rehashing the weary debates over the validity of astrology. The issue I want to raise here is why the suggestion that astronomers might consider taking up astrology summons up so violent and visceral a reaction on the part of so many people these days.

It’s important to get past the standard rhetoric that surrounds the subject—the insistence on the part of rationalists that astrology is unacceptable because it’s irrational, medieval, and just plain wrong.

Sports fandom is well up there on the scale of irrationality, and yet it’s perfectly acceptable for astronomers to be rabid fans of the local baseball team; reenactment groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism are about as medieval as you can get, and yet an astronomer who belongs to such a group faces no criticism; as for just plain wrong, your average economist has astrologers beat three falls out of three

You’ll never catch an astrologer claiming that the sun will rise in the west tomorrow morning and then never set again, while it’s par for the course for economists to insist that the speculative bubble du jour will never pop, that the laws of economics can trump the laws of physics and geology, and so on. Yet you’ll never hear scientists denouncing economics as the crackpot pseudoscience that it arguably is.

What puts astrology outside the pale for today’s astronomers and the rest of the scientific community, rather, is that the collective imagination of the modern world assigns it to the dismal past from which the surrogate messiah of progress is forever saving us.

Like the Christianity from which it drew a great many of its central metaphors, the civil religion of progress has a very wide streak of moral dualism; there’s the side of the angels in white—or, rather, the researchers in white lab coats—and then there’s the side of the devils in some infernal equivalent of Madras plaid, and in contemporary culture, there’s no question about the side of the border on which astrology belongs. It’s part of the kingdom of anti-progress, the exact equivalent of the Christian notion of the kingdom of Antichrist.

The white-hot passion with which so many scientists condemn astrology and other systems of rejected knowledge thus has its roots in the identity that scientists are taught to assume by their education and their professional culture.

From the time of Francis Bacon right down to the present, scientists have been encouraged to think of themselves as laborers in the great cause of progress, leading humanity forward out of the superstitious past toward a brighter and better future of ever-increasing reason, knowledge and power. From the 19th century onward, in turn, this is the image of themselves that scientists have by and large tried to project into the wider society, with varying degrees of success.

That kind of acting out of an ideal can be a dangerous thing to do, and civil religions rarely have much sense of the risks involved. Theist faiths with at least a few centuries of experience under their belts tend to be a good deal more cautious; Buddhist monks who visualize themselves as bodhisattvas and Christians practicing the imitatio Christi have traditional protections to keep the identification of the self with an ideal figure from spinning out of control into psychological imbalance.

Those of my readers who, as I did, had the chance to spend some time around old-fashioned Communists will have seen some of what happens when those protections are neglected; the leader of the proletariat who goes to great lengths to avoid noticing that the proletariat is not following him, and melts down completely when this latter detail becomes too evident to ignore, was once a tolerably common type.

That type became much more common in the second half of the 20th century, when it started to take effort not to notice the fact that the American proletariat wasn’t going to follow a Marxist lead. In the same way, I don’t think it’s accidental that the current rationalist crusade against religion, astrology, and everything else it likes to label irrational, medieval, wrong, etc., shifted into overdrive in the final decades of the 20th century, right about the time that it first became really difficult to justify the blanket claim that progress was always as inevitable as it was beneficent.

Like their theist cousins, civil religions fairly often respond to challenges to their core beliefs by moving toward the extremes and looking for somebody to blame, and the cultural politics that assigned the label of “anti-progress” to certain traditional practices such as astrology gave the civil religion of progress an assortment of easy targets once the onward march of progress began to lose its appeal.

The difficulty with such exercises in scapegoat-hunting is that they do nothing to solve the problem that drives them, and may actually get in the way of addressing serious challenges. The status of science in contemporary American society is a case in point. Not long ago, when a qualified scientist got up in front of the public and spoke about some matter of scientific fact, most Americans took him at his word. Nowadays?

One of the core reasons for the failure of climate activism in the US is that a great many Americans know that an expert opinion from a distinguished researcher can be bought for the price of a research grant, and have seen scare tactics used to push political agendas so many times that another round of dire warnings from experts doesn’t impress them any more.

When climate activists chose to rely on the prestige of science to back up a standard-issue scare campaign, in other words, they were making a serious strategic mistake, on which their opponents were not slow to capitalize.

To some extent the collapse in the prestige of science has unfolded from the way that scientific opinion has whirled around like a weathervane on certain very public issues in recent decades. Plenty of people alive today still recall when continental drift was crackpot pseudoscience, polyunsaturated fats were good for you, and ionizing radiation was measured in “sunshine units.”

It’s important to the workings of science that scientists should be permitted to change their minds on the arrival of new evidence, but that necessary openness clashes with the efforts of the scientific community to claim a privileged place in the wider conversations of our time—for example, by insisting that claims by scientific authorities should not be challenged from outside the discipline no matter how many times these same authorities have changed their minds.

Add to that clash the increasingly visible corruption of science by financial interests—the articles in medical journals that are bought and paid for by pharmaceutical firms eager to promote their products, the studies whose conclusions reliably parrot the propaganda of their funding sources, and so on—and you’ve got the makings of a really serious public relations disaster.

That disaster is not going to be prevented, or even delayed, by denouncing astrologers and their ilk. Mind you, it may succeed in making astrology more popular than it otherwise would be, for the same reason that the Republican Party’s bizarre habit of defining anything it doesn’t like as Communism may yet convince a good many Americans to give Marx a second chance.

Given the very real pressures being brought to bear on scientists and scientific institutions in the current environment of economic contraction and violent political partisanship, it’s unlikely that anything more constructive will be on anyone’s agenda until well after the damage is done—and it’s the bad luck of astronomy, along with a great many other sciences not currently participating in the worst of the abuses, that it’s likely to be tarred with the same brush as those who richly deserve it.

Factor in the twilight of the civil religion of progress, though, and the ethical and political crisis of contemporary science becomes something considerably larger. In a world of the sort we’re most likely to encounter in the decades ahead, in which sustained economic growth is a subject for history books, a growing fraction of Americans live in gritty suburban slums with only the most intermittent access to electricity and running water, internet service costs more than the median monthly income, and let’s not even talk about how many people can afford basic modern medical care, faith in the inevitability and beneficence of progress will make roughly as much sense to most Americans as faith in the worker’s paradise of true Communism did to most citizens of the Soviet Union in 1980 or so.

In such a future, government funding for scientific research will be at the mercy of the first demagogue who realizes that gutting the National Science Foundation, and every other scientific program that doesn’t further the immediate needs of the Pentagon, is a ticket to a landslide victory in the next election.

So long as scientists keep on thinking of themselves as heroic workers in the grand cause of progress, furthermore, any attempt on their part to counter such efforts will labor under brutal limits. The vision of futurity central to their identity is already becoming the subject of bitter jokes of the “I believe I was promised a jetpack” variety.

As the shift in the collective imagination implied by those jokes continues to spread, like the old-fashioned Communists mentioned earlier in this essay, scientists won’t be able to respond to their critics without jettisoning their traditional rhetoric, and they won’t be able to jettison the rhetoric without abandoning the heart of their public identity. That’s a trap from which very few organizations and social movements ever manage to escape.

Thus it’s uncomfortably easy to imagine a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2070 or so, say, that resembles nothing so much as the national convention of one of the old-line American Communist parties eighty or ninety years earlier—a small group of old men going through the motions of an earlier time, repeating decades-old slogans, voting on resolutions that matter to no one else on the planet, and grimly trying to pretend that history hasn’t left them sitting in the dust.

In such a future, those astronomical observatories that haven’t been stripped of metal by looters and left to the wind and rain might find a second life as homes for the very rich—it’s just as easy to imagine the attendees at the convention I’ve just described muttering bitterly about the Chinese trillionaire who’s just had the former Palomar Observatory remodeled into a mansion, and boasting to reporters from 2070’s mass media about the spectacular view from his new home.

The point that needs to be grasped here is that the institutional structure of science in America and other industrial nations—the archipelago of university departments, institutes, and specialized facilities for research that provide the economic and practical framework for science as it’s practiced today—faces massive challenges as we move forward into the deindustrial world.

On the one hand, the raw fiscal burden of supporting that structure in an age of economic contraction and environmental payback will become increasingly difficult for any nation to meet, and especially challenging for the United States, as it descends from its age of imperial extravagance into a far more tightly constrained future.

On the other, the emotional commitment of scientists to the civil religion of progress, and to an understanding of the purpose and goals of science that only makes sense in the context of that religion, places harsh burdens on any attempt to preserve that structure once popular faith in progress dissolves.

It might still be possible to maintain scientific research as a living tradition in the centuries immediately ahead of us. In future posts, I plan on talking about ways in which that might be done, and the reasons why I think a project of that sort is worth pursuing. Still, it’s crucial to realize that nothing guarantees the success of such a project; to borrow a phrase from the astrologers, the survival of science as a living practice is not written in the stars.

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Tatooino is not alone

SUBHEAD: We are discovering more double stars. Some have planetary systems as in Skywalker's home Tatooini.  

By Jan TenBruggencate on 2 September 2012 for Raising Islands - 
  (http://raisingislands.blogspot.com/2012/09/tatooine-prime-is-not-alone-binary.html)

 
Image above: Jabba the Hut's palace on the desert planet Tatooini during a double star sunset. From (http://www.moddb.com/games/star-wars-jedi-academy/addons/jabbas-palace-tatooine-jedi-academy-mp).
 

The University of Hawaii managed to write about the discovery of planets around a binary star system without once mentioning the iconic planet, Tatooine.

Partly, that might be because there is far more about the new discovery than just the fact that a planet exists around two stars spinning in their own tight orbit. In this case, two planets (maybe three) around the two stars.

Tatooine, of course, is the desert planet in the Star Wars film series, which is the home planet to both Anakin and Luke Skywalker. In many of its scenes, Tatooine’s twin suns are displayed above the horizon.

University of Hawaii astronomer Nader Haghighipour was part of a team that discovered what they called Kepler-47, naming it after the Kepler space observatory, which was launched in 2009. The funding for the team’s work came from NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The team announced the finding at the triennial International Astronomical Union meeting in Beijing, and published it in Science—under the daunting title: “Kepler-47: A Transiting Circumbinary Multiplanet System.” The abstract is here.

What’s cool about this?

Binary star systems are cool, although this is not the first one that’s been found.

That this binary star system has a complement of planets is cool—first time that’s been seen. It proves that it’s possible for a solar system to exist around twin suns. The stars of Kepler-47 orbit each other roughly weekly—every 7.5 days.

And ultimate cool for science fiction fans and astronomers is one of the planets is within the stars’ habitable zone, meaning liquid water could exist on their surfaces. The question still unanswered is whether this planet even has a surface on which to have liquid water. It could be a gas giant like Jupiter—but maybe not.

The inner planet is smaller, three times Earth’s radius, and spins a full orbit around its suns in 49 days. The other—the one in the habitable zone—is Jupiter-sized at 4.6 times Earth’s radius and orbits every 303 days—not far from Earth’s 365.

And there may be a third planet, although the evidence isn’t yet strong enough to say for sure.

Here is the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomyrelease, with links and images.

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One size fits all

SUBHEAD: Scientists find billions of habitable planets we can use to replace Earth once we're done with her. By Brian Merchant on 28 March 2012 for TreeHugger - (http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/scientists-find-billions-inhabitable-planets-we-can-use-replace-one.html) Image above: Fat chance! The smaller planets of our solar system are not even close to habitable, the bigger ones less so - and we can't even get back to our own moon. From (http://www.dragon-ball-z.eu/these/Delires-Cosmiques.en.html).

Beware, any blueish loincloth-clad denizens of earth-like planets! We have discovered that your homes exist, and it is only a matter of time before we set out to exploit them for resources, once ours is satisfactorily ground into a smoldering dystopia.

You see, primitive alien race X, our scientists have just discovered that there are likely tens of billions of rocky, potentially life-supporting planets in the Milky Way alone. Space.com reports:

There should be billions of habitable, rocky planets around the faint red stars of our Milky Way galaxy, a new study suggests.

Though these alien planets are difficult to detect, and only a few have been discovered so far, they should be ubiquitous, scientists say. And some of them could be good candidates to host extraterrestrial life.

Which is good news for us, since we're on the verge of royally and permanently ruining the presently hospitable climate of the one we live on.

Also, we're cutting down all of our trees and blowing the tops off of all of our mountains at the moment. And in the future, our global elite will surely want a private planet with all of its mountains and trees intact to vacation on, or to sell to other global elites to establish an intergalactic minerals trading hub.

So what good news that there are potentially tens of billions of unspoiled, inhabitable new ones! Totally takes the pressure off of preventing this one from going to shit, you know? See you soon, aliens!

P.S. Just a heads up: Might want to heed the words of Stephen Hawking,

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet"

... and/or rent some of our better sci-fi films for reference. Cheers!

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Where's my Elenin Doomsday?

SUBHEAD: Remnants of comet Elenin (aka Planet X or Niribu) pass by Earth without incident. By Susan Atkinson on 17 October 2011 for University Today - (http://www.universetoday.com/89973/wheres-my-doomsday-remnants-of-comet-elenin-pass-by-earth-without-incident/)

Image above: Where Comet Elenin should have been in the sky on October 16, 2011 shows nothing left of the the disintegrated comet, and all that is visible are star trails. From original article.

If you were waiting for Comet Elenin to wreak havoc on Earth so that you didn’t have to pay off your credit card debt or go into work today, I’m sorry to inform you that doomsday didn’t happen. All that remained of Comet Elenin, — which wasn’t much — made its closest pass by Earth yesterday (Oct. 16, 2011) without causing any earthquakes, tsunamis, or high tides and it didn’t collide with Earth, either. Moreover, there was no brown dwarf or Mothership hidden in the comet’s coma. And in case you didn’t notice, this comet did not cause three days of darkness around September 26, 2011.

“I don’t know why fearmongers chose my comet,” the comet’s discoverer Leonid Elenin told Universe Today. “I received many letters from scared people. But if they believe in conspiracy theories I can’t help them.”

For some reason, conspiracy and doomsday theorists chose this small little comet — one that was to come no closer than 34 million km (21 million miles) during its closest approach on October 16th – to be the harbinger of doom.

But here we are, just fine.

Well, except for wars, terrorism, global warming and other things that the human race inflicts on itself. There are enough bad things going on here on planet Earth that conspiracy theorists shouldn’t fabricate doomsday predictions just to needlessly scare people for fun and profit.

So why didn’t Comet Elenin cause doomsday? 1. It couldn’t have hit Earth, or affected Earth’s orbit. The comet was predicted to come 34 million km (21 million miles) away at its closest approach. Just in case you can’t figure that out, one object can’t hit another at that distance. Plus, the gravity exerted by a small object won’t affect Earth either. To put this in perspective, this distance is only a little closer than the closest approach of Venus to Earth, and roughly 100 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Nothing happens to Earth when Venus is at closest approach, and Venus is 12,000 kilometers in diameter, while Elenin was 3-5 kilometers across. When the comet was intact it had less than a billionth of the tidal force of the Moon.

2. Comet Elenin fell apart. Sometimes, long period comets that originate from the outer parts of our solar system begin to dissipate as they get closer to the Sun. But Elenin was hit by solar flares from the Sun on August 19 and began disintegrating. When it reached its closest point to the Sun on September 10, it basically was toast. Just recently the location of where the comet should be has become visible in the night sky, out of the Sun’s glare. Several images from different amateur astronomers show absolutely nothing. The comet has completely disintegrated and fallen apart.

Earlier today, astronomer Nick Howes and his colleagues using the 2 meter Faulkes telescope took 30 minutes worth of exposures and saw nothing of Comet Elenin in the sky (top image). “We observed objects at magnitude 20.5, but saw no trace at all of Comet Elenin,” Howes told Universe Today. “If it had stayed together, it should have been almost visible with the naked eye now.”

3. What is left of the comet won’t cause problems, either. The average density of a comet’s coma is about the same as the density of the atmosphere on the Moon, and any rocks or debris that might be left over from the comet are small enough that they would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere if Earth does go through the wake of the coma or debris from the comet. And remember, several times a year Earth goes through the debris from comets and all that happens is we get beautiful meteor showers to enjoy.

And after this, don’t worry about Comet Elenin or its leftovers. Earth won’t pass through it again for another 12,000 years.

So move along, folks, nothing here. Comet Elenin is just another doomsday that didn’t happen, just like NASA, Leonid Elenin, and many other people said.

And if you proudly claim you aren’t a sheeple and are now just waiting and searching for the next doomsday theory to hang your every hope upon, why don’t you try expending your energy on this: Enjoy every day on this beautiful planet and live your life in its fullest. And perhaps you could be a person who could help come up with solutions to some of the real problems on planet Earth.

(And by the way, don’t worry about Dec. 21, 2012 either.)

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: NASA spots comet Elenin 8/11/11 Ea O Ka Aina: Time for a Sanity Check 7/12/11 Ea O Ka Aina: Comet Elenin is Coming 5/19/11

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Solar storms, wild markets & riots

SUBHEAD: Evidence geomagnetic storms can affect human biochemistry, altering moods and leading to negative behavior. By Rosalba O'Brian on 12 August 2011 for Reuters - (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/12/us-britain-solar-idUSTRE77B3OX20110812) Image above: Luckily, this storm of hot plasma, headed towards us at 1,000 kilometers per second, has to contend with the Earth's magnetic field. From (http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/08/from_the_sun_to_your_sky_in_ju.php).

Rollercoaster financial markets and the worst riots Britain has seen in decades have made it quite a week for a time of year that is usually so dead the newspapers are filled with "silly season" tales of amusing pet antics.

Everyone is pointing fingers -- at blundering politicians, hooded thugs, disaffected youths, bumbling police and greedy bankers -- but could the cause for all the madness really be the star at the center of our solar system?

There isn't a lot of evidence pointing to little green men involving themselves in Earthly affairs, but the sun has been throwing bursts of highly charged particles into space in a phenomenon known as coronal mass ejections or CMEs.

Three large CMEs prompted U.S. government scientists to warn of solar storms that can cause power blackouts and the aurora borealis, or northern lights, caused by disturbances in the Earth's atmosphere, have been spotted as far south as England and Colorado, NASA said.

"Earth's magnetic field is still reverberating from a CME strike on August 5th that sparked one of the strongest geomagnetic storms in years", website SpaceWeather said.

Some academics have claimed that such geomagnetic storms can affect humans, altering moods and leading people into negative behavior through effects on their biochemistry.

Some studies have found evidence that hospital admissions for depression rise during geomagnetic storms and that incidents of suicide increase.

A 2003 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that such storms could affect the stock market, as traders were more likely to make pessimistic choices.

"Unusually high levels of geomagnetic activity have a negative, statistically and economically significant effect on the following week's stock returns for all US stock market indices," the authors found in their report.

It could of course be mere coincidence that this has been a rollercoaster week on the markets, and that Britain was rocked by a wave of ferocious rioting and looting.

But market watchers may take comfort from the fact that the space weather forecast for Friday has gone quiet again.

They shouldn't be too complacent though. The solar cycle is on an upswing due to peak in 2013 and there are likely to be more geomagnetic storms heading Earth's way in the months to come.

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Massive solar flares affect Earth 8/6/11 .

Massive solar flare affects Earth

SUBHEAD: Solar flare is interfering with satellite and radio signals. On a scale of 1 to 5 it is probably a 2 or 3.  

By Randolph Schmid on 5 August 2011 for Huffington Post - 
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/05/solar-flares-effects-earth_n_919935.html)

 
Image above: Computer generated fractal portrait of our Sun's solar storm. From site monitoring solar activity (http://www.nicolyachristi.com/current-emf-and-solar-activity-monitor).

The impact of a series of eruptions on the sun began arriving at Earth on Friday and could affect some communications for a day or so.

Operators of electrical grids are working to avoid outages, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says some satellite communications and Global Positioning Systems could face problems.

Three solar flares erupted on the sun starting Tuesday, and the strongest electromagnetic shocks were being felt Friday by the ACE spacecraft, a satellite that measures radiation bursts a few minutes before they strike Earth, said Joseph Kunches, a scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.

Tom Bogdan, director of the center, said the sun is going from a quiet period into a busier cycle for solar flares and an increase in the number of such blasts is expected over the next three to five years.

Solar flares send out bursts of electromagnetic energy that strike the Earth's magnetic field. The most common impacts for the average person are the glowing auroras around the north and south poles, and the researchers said those could be visible this weekend.

The magnetic blasts, which Bogdan likened to a tsunami in space, can also affect electronic communications and electrical systems. A 1989 solar flare knocked out the electrical systems in Quebec, Canada, but the current solar storm is not expected to be that powerful. On a scale of 1 to 5, he said, it is probably a 2 or 3.

But more significant solar storms are expected in the next few years, he said.

The most powerful known solar storm occurred in 1859, Bogdan said. There were not as many vulnerable electrical items then, but it did knock out telegraph services, even burning down some telegraph stations, he said.

Other serious solar blasts occurred in 1921 and 1940, he noted, and Kunches recalled one on Halloween in 2003.

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Time for a Sanity Check

SUBHEAD: Elenin, Nibiru, or Planet-X - It's coming but is it an ice ball, planet, sun, or alien spacecraft?  

By Ryan X on 10 July 2011 for Sign of The Times - 
(http://www.sott.net/articles/show/231434-Elenin-Nibiru-Planet-X-Time-for-a-Sanity-Check)

 
Image above: Illustration of Elenin passing in front of Earth this October. From original article.  

Oy! Where to start?
It seems there is a veritable fever going around at the moment, all centered on Comet C/2010 X1 (Elenin) and the possible connection it may have to Nibiru - or Planet-X as it's known in some circles. This is the supposed "12th planet" that's been prophesied to come plowing through the Solar System causing a doomsday scenario for us earth-dwellers. Right now, YouTube is awash with videos on Comet Elenin, making this and that claim.

Last I checked, a search for "Comet Elenin" returned over 5,000 results on YouTube alone (and that says nothing about what's going on in the blogosphere). As we've noted here on SOTT over the years, when the noise starts to overpower the signal, that's when there's usually something brewing behind the scenes. The Powers That Be don't just put resources into obscuring certain topics for nothing; and it seems that their disinfo machine is cranked into high gear for this one.

Due to all this noise surrounding these topics many questions abound: Is there something special about Comet Elenin? Does Elenin have anything to do with Nibiru/Planet-X? Is Elenin related to the chaotic weather we've experienced lately? Is Comet Elenin really a spaceship from another galaxy?

Is all of this somehow related to the end of the Mayan Calendar and the 2012 doomsday prophecies? These questions are understandable given all the lies we're swimming in and the frantic nature of the material we're dealing with. Hopefully a lot of these questions will clear up towards the end of this article. To summarize the situation, it seems that we have certain folks claiming that Comet Elenin is everything from an elaborate hoax, to a piloted alien spacecraft, to a stray neutron star, to Planet-X itself, and on and on...

All the while, NASA and friends seem to be sitting back comfortably in their chairs saying, "nothing to see here, folks!" So who's figured it out? Or hasn't anyone really put all the pieces together yet? Clearly, there's a lot of truth being mixed with lies - that is for certain. The hope here is to dissect some of the noise and inject a little sanity into what is otherwise an insane discussion. Let's go back to when this all started earlier this year and see if we can make some sense out of these claims about Elenin, Nibiru and Planet-X.  

Opening a Can of Worms 
Earlier this year SOTT published Laura Knight-Jadczyk's article on Comet Elenin titled "Comet Elenin is Coming!" There she discussed some of James McCanney's theories and made some rough predictions about Earth Changes due to certain alignments between the Earth, Comet Elenin and the Sun. The key to understanding this process is that these alignments have the ability to 'discharge' the solar capacitor (an area which encompasses the entire Solar System), using McCanney's terminology. When this happens, there's a much greater potential for geomagnetic effects on Earth which, as we're beginning to see, are also tied to earthquakes, volcanoes, large storms and other atmospheric anomalies.

And we sure have seen a lot of this these types of events this year! However, correlation does not imply causation and there may be other factors to consider too. But it was shortly after we published Laura's article that the disinfo machine began to kick into high gear. Now around this same time there was a lot of buzz surrounding the potential for a magnetic pole shift. I discussed how James McCanney's theories related to the possibility of magnetic field changes in the article "Pole Shift? Look to the Skies!". In this piece, I noted a huge spike in Google searches for the phrase "pole shift" in early January, likely tied to the increase in stories about mass animal deaths (which, by the way, haven't stopped).

So this was either on a lot of people's minds or at the very least the minds of those in alphabet agencies trying to steer public attention. Whatever the case, the 'pole shift' craze continued for the next few months. Given these trends, we began to see random folks on YouTube taking the video Laura used in her Comet Elenin article and making wild speculations about an impending 'pole shift' due to happen in the middle of March, right around the first Earth-Elenin-Sun alignment.

This was mentioned in Laura's article "Pole Shift in March? Not Likely!" I thought I made it pretty clear in my "Pole Shift?..." article that the only way we'd have a magnetic pole shift is if a very large (planet-size) comet passes close to the Earth. But apparently these folks didn't get the message. Alignments with planets and even comets are not uncommon and a magnetic pole shift would seem to be a highly unlikely possibility. As Laura stated in her article, "it's just plain nuts to go around predicting a pole shift in March based on the approach of Comet Elenin!" So what actually happened? Well, we're pretty sure the poles didn't shift in March (although the North Pole has been steadily drifting towards Siberia for some time now).

However, we did get an M9 earthquake in Japan causing a devastating tsunami around this time. We suspect that the alignment with Comet Elenin may have had something to do with this. There was a massive spike in geomagnetic activity around March 11th as noted by the planetary k-index (see image below.) As SpaceWeather.com reported for March 9th:

A coronal mass ejection (CME) exploded from the vicinity of sunspot 1164 during the late hours of March 7th. It leapt away from the sun traveling ~2200 km/s, making it the fastest CME since Sept. 2005. A movie of the cloud prepared by Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab shows a possibly substantial Earth-directed component. This CME and at least one other could brush against Earth's magnetic field on March 9th or 10th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.

Was this massive CME and the resulting geomagnetic activity around March 11th, as well as the devastating Tsunami in Japan, all related to an Elenin-Earth-Sun alignment? I mentioned in my recent "Planetary Alignments..." article the work of John Nelson and the relationship he discovered between planetary alignments and geomagnetic activity. But is there a similar correlation between geomagnetic activity and earthquakes? In fact, there does appear to be one. One such theory is the Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling (LAIC) theory used to explain the phenomenon of ionospheric heating over a region prior to a major earthquake. This article describes how the ionosphere heated up just prior to the Japanese M9 quake.

Similar ionospheric heating over a region before a major earthquake has been detected in other instances as well. It seems that scientists have a difficult time explaining the cause of these ionospheric and atmospheric changes that precede major earthquakes. Most scientists still believe that the source of an earthquake must begin within the Earth itself, arising from forces generated by shifting tectonic plates. They suspect that radiation due to radon released before and during an earthquake causes the anomalous ionospheric heating and atmospheric changes observed. However, there are other schools of thought that posit that ionospheric changes due to solar activity is actually the driver behind major earthquakes.

Another good summary of this concept can be found here. Right now the jury is still out on how the process works, but given what we've observed between planetary alignments and Earth Changes, we suspect that the forces that trigger an earthquake likely originate from outside of the ionosphere. But it would take a whole other article to explain this reasoning fully. For the moment, let's explore some of what's being said about Comet Elenin and see if we can make some sense out of this madness.  

The Good
On April 11th, Dr. Mensur Omerbashich, a Bosnian scientist, submitted the paper "Astronomical alignments as the cause of ~M6+ seismicity" to the arXiv.org database, hosted by Cornell University. On the one hand, this paper was interesting because he drew a strong correlation between planetary alignments and earthquakes, something we've been keeping an eye on here at SOTT. But on the other hand, he attributes the mechanism behind this to his own "georesonator concept", which involves gravitational forces, while we rather suspect that electrical forces are primarily responsible for this correlation. The paper itself has been much discussed on the web since its release and many have tried to offer alternative interpretations to Omerbashich's data.

Much of his paper focuses on Comet Elenin as a big part of its dataset, which has caused some folks to raise an eyebrow or two. In an interview conducted by Marshall Masters of Yowusa.com, Masters questions Omerbashich on why he chose to focus on Comet Elenin for his paper:

The Elenin was suitable for testing of my concept because its trajectory, with inclination of around 1º, is virtually coplanar to our solar system. It also approaches the Sun relatively slowly, traveling along the legs of a hyperbola. These characteristics are enabling long alignments amongst the Elenin, the Earth and a third body. The Elenin also drags gravitationally locked particles spanning 30k+ km, but neither its relatively small mass nor relatively low density constitute forbidding factors for causing strong earthquakes in the georesonator. No other object with similar properties has been noticed in our solar system in the past few decades, to the best of my knowledge.

He's right. Most comets have some large amount of inclination in their orbit about the Sun. By "inclination", I mean that their orbit is offset by some degree from the plane of the ecliptic, which is where all the planets are.

For example, Comet Hale-Bopp is inclined a whopping 90 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic - pretty much perpendicular to the planets. A body having a small inclination (like Comet Elenin) is apparently an important feature for Omerbashich's georesonator concept. He also predicts that as Comet Elenin approaches the Earth, the earthquake activity will actually decrease. The reason for this, he explains, is that Elenin will pick up speed as it makes its slingshot around the Sun, so any alignments will be too short-lived to cause any major earthquake activity.

Now that Elenin is still on its approach, the Earth alignments should be of longer duration, leading to greater "resonance," and thus more high-magnitude earthquakes, he claims.

Omerbashich predicts that as Elenin heads on its way out of the Solar System, the earthquake activity should intensify for a period of time as the longer duration alignments increase again. This appears to be one feature of his theory that is falsifiable. While Omerbashich's paper focuses exclusively on explaining the peaks in earthquake activity, how do we make sense of the record number of tornadoes we've experienced this spring, along with other electrical anomalies including transformer fires? It seems that there is an electrical component to this whole process that Omerbashich has overlooked. However, when asked in the interview about his opinion of the popular Electric Universe Theory, he states:

I am not familiar with the details of that theory. Bear in mind though, that electromagnetism can also be a byproduct and a feature of a closed mechanical oscillator.

So maybe we have a chicken and egg problem? Does Omerbashich's georesonator cause the electromagnetic effects, or do the electromagnetic effects stand on their own? Remember the Ionosphere-Atmosphere-Lithosphere Coupling theory mentioned above? Omerbashich's paper also mentions the observed ionospheric heating before major earthquakes, yet his georesonator concept seems to fall short in explaining this phenomenon fully. James McCanney also spoke of planetary alignments as the cause of electrical disturbances in the solar system, possibly leading to Earth Changes. In his book Planet-X, Comets & Earth Changes, he cites Comet C/1999 H1 and Comet C/2001 A2 as examples of comets that supposedly caused such mischief. Neither of these comets have orbital inclinations even close to the plane of the ecliptic.

However, he does note that their strongest effects were during perihelion when they were closest to the plane of the ecliptic. These alignments, he mentions, did not set up in a perfectly straight line, so it appears that there's some leeway when it comes to alignments with comets. Since Omerbashich argues that alignments of long duration are a center-piece of his georesonator concept, this seems in contradiction to McCanney's findings, since the alignments McCanney cites were all short-lived. However, McCanney's correlations are mostly with hurricanes and not earthquakes, so perhaps each sort of alignment has a different 'flavor'? It would be nice to have more research dedicated to solving these problems, but for now we're left to piece together the clues we're given.  

The Bad
In any event, Omerbashich's paper has spread like wildfire throughout the alternative media. Some folks don't buy Omerbashich's georesonator concept and instead believe that the only way Elenin could exert forces at a distance strong enough to cause earthquakes would be if astronomers have grossly underestimated its mass. Some of these folks suspect a conspiracy at NASA to hide the real data on Elenin. Now there likely is a conspiracy at NASA, but in this case no conspiracy is apparently needed to explain the conundrum. It seems more likely that these folks still haven't figured out the role that electrical forces play in our solar system - the real force behind these correlations between Elenin and earthquakes. This appears to be the reasoning behind the speculation that Elenin is actually a brown dwarf, neutron star or some other hypothetical large body like the mythical Nibiru/Planet-X, instead of just a lowly comet. It's unfortunate to see how one layer of disinformation plays off another. As NASA and professional astronomers have neglected electrical forces in their models of the Solar System over the decades, this has left the door wide open for wild speculations of this sort - where mass and gravitation have to explain everything. You'd almost think some devious time-traveler in the future was cunning enough to set up such a sorry situation, but I digress...

There are other folks on YouTube who attempt to show that there is no comet in the location of the sky where Elenin is supposed to be and instead point to a brown dwarf in its place. It seems unlikely that so many astronomers (both professional and amateur) would fail to understand what they're seeing. Just a couple notes here: Mark Sircus, whose health articles we've featured on SOTT, is one such person to join the fray of individuals proclaiming that Elenin is actually some absurdly massive body (actually a neutron star in his case). While this is unfortunate, and does call into question his objectivity, it may just be a case of Mark getting too involved in topics he hasn't fully researched.

Hopefully Mark, like a lot of other folks, will come to their senses come October when Elenin gets up close and personal with the Earth. Another note I have to mention here is that while it seems extremely unlikely Elenin is anything other than a small comet, that doesn't invalidate the idea that there is some brown dwarf star sitting in a binary orbit with the Sun. There's actually more to this theory than most people realize, and a close approach of this companion star may be responsible for some of the anomalous events observed in the solar system recently. Unlike what the Nibiru/Planet-X crowd speculates, the research doesn't point to this companion star coming anywhere near the inner solar system.

We have surmised that the precession of the equinoxes is somewhat indicative of its orbital parameters, so we have a pretty good idea where it might reach perihelion. Most likely the closest it would come to us would be somewhere around the Kuiper belt region. According to Kepler's laws, two massive bodies should rotate around an imaginary center of gravity. If Nibiru/Planet-X is really a brown dwarf on the same size scale as the Sun, this imaginary center of gravity should always keep the two bodies from getting too close for comfort.

However, this doesn't mean that just because the Sun's hypothetical companion doesn't come into the solar system that it wouldn't have any notable impact. We've made the point elsewhere that if this hypothetical companion star passes through the Oort cloud, there would also be a tendency for it to dislodge comets towards the inner solar system too. We've mentioned McCanney and his theories quite a bit here, but what is James McCanney actually saying about all of this Elenin business? One would think that he might be saying similar things about Elenin as we are. As he notes on his website recently:

[Edited for readability] Comet Elenin IS NOT A THREAT to earth ... my name and work regarding the electrical nature of comets and the solar system are being hijacked by a government backed misinformation crew making all kinds of wild claims about Comet Elenin ... These postings are on web pages and blogs and many professionally made youtube videos disguised as coming from "average people" like you and me ... many times claiming to have resources to un-named "professional astronomers" who "verify" their baloney stories ... Some claim that they talk to aliens who "confirm McCanney's work" along with completely distorted ramblings ... some claim Comet Elenin will cause all sorts of disaster with time lines and dates with some claiming you should move to certain "safe sites" on a given timeline ...

These sites and people we have found are all coming from the same place ... let me make it perfectly clear that Comet Elenin is a small comet that will likely not be even seen by most people since it is so small and far away ... someone (group) is spending a lot of time and money to make a major issue out of a complete non-issue ... the curious issue is why all the misinformation and other "date" correlations being propagated on the internet and now on the major media ... It is clear that an extensive group of people are behind this and they are getting major press and air time ... then in clear disinformation style the NASA owned press has the "white hats" (the NASA "good-guys") riding in to save the day telling you not to listen to all those quacks on the internet (pointing directly to these many sites which distort my name and work which as i said is being completely mis-represented by the same disinformation crew in what we have come to learn over the years is a well orchestrated dog and pony show ... with the same disinformation crew controlling both sides of the "debate") [...] Others are associating this false reporting with possible NASA and leadership (NWO and other) groups to create false alien invasion scenarios (emphasis on FALSE) to create fear with the public ... i have NOTHING to do with any of these reports and let me repeat and make it perfectly clear ... my work regarding cometary alignments and the electrical nature of the solar system shows that Comet Elenin IS NOT ANY KIND OF THREAT TO EARTH ... emphasis on NOT [...]

While he's right - there does seem to be a big disinfo campaign afoot - his writing here seems utterly paranoid. Given the topics he's dealing with, some amount of paranoia is to be expected, but this does seem over the top. Perhaps he's caught a slightly different form of the Elenin fever than the hystericized YouTubers out there? In all seriousness though, it appears that McCanney is unwilling to join in a healthy discussion of these topics and network with other like-minded individuals.

This is unfortunate. It also seems like he's thrown up his hands and labeled everyone as some form of quack distorting his work without due consideration. As the saying goes, sometimes there is only a fine line between genius and insanity. It should be stated that SOTT does not endorse anything other than McCanney's older astronomy work, which was quite good for the time. He appears to be going off in his own direction which is very much different from ours.

 The Ugly
Recently Kerry Cassidy of Project Camelot completed filming a "roundtable video conference" on Comet Elenin which included the likes of Richard Hoagland, Dr Joseph Farrell, Keith Hunter, Dr Carl Johan Calleman, and Andy Lloyd. At this moment, the conference in its entirety has not been released. However, selected portions have been released to the public. Most notable in this roundtable group is Richard Hoagland, of Cydonia fame (the 'face' on Mars) and his thesis that Elenin is actually a "controlled spacecraft" which is beaming Earth with gravitational torsion waves causing this increase in earthquakes. As Michael Salla of the Exopolitics Examiner reports:

The main conference organizer, Kerry Cassidy, revealed that a number of anonymous whistleblowers had revealed that Elenin is a piloted spacecraft, and in fact was being trailed by a fleet of spacecraft. Hoagland claims that he has been confidentially told similarly by other whistleblowers of the artificial nature of Elenin. Dr Joseph Farrell agreed and claimed that Elenin was either an artificial object (controlled spacecraft) or a natural object placed in an artificial orbit. In probably the most significant observation of the conference, Hoagland claimed that Elenin was likely an active torsion field generator.

Anonymous whistleblowers, huh? Professor Nikolai Kozyrev, a Russian scientist was the originator of the idea of torsion waves. He developed an extremely sensitive apparatus to detect these waves, which he found occurred from any irreversible process. Due to this, his torsion waves were also denoted as "time waves" by some. He was certainly involved in some exotic physics, but the main point to understand here is that these torsion waves supposedly interact with matter in such a weak way that only the most sensitive devices could detect them.

 This has caused many scientists to wonder if what Kozyrev observed was even a real phenomenon at all. In any event, Hoagland doesn't appear to have grasped this concept (along with many others) if he truly believes that Elenin is emitting torsion waves which are somehow strong enough to cause earthquakes. But really?... Elenin?... a piloted spacecraft?.. As in, UFO or 'alien' spacecraft? Forgive me for stating the obvious, but UFOs tend to be extremely elusive objects, popping in and out of reality with uncanny, synchronistic timing.

We've been tracking the more notable sightings for years here on SOTT, so we have a pretty good idea what to expect from the UFO phenomenon overall. If UFOs are such slippery entities, why would they suddenly choose the form of a plainly visible comet to zip past the planets, when they typically can't even stay in our reality long enough for people to photograph them? Frankly, the assertion that Elenin is a "controlled spacecraft" isn't falsifiable, so there's little we can say about the matter.

 In other words, like much of what Hoagland claims, it's not even wrong.

What's unfortunate about relating Elenin to UFOs is that Kerry Cassidy, Richard Hoagland and the other folks involved with this Project Camelot "roundtable video conference" are setting up another scenario similar to what occurred with Comet Hale-Bopp in the late 90's. Back then some astronomers photographed a body trailing Comet Hale-Bopp, causing many to openly speculate that it might be a UFO. This ultimately led to the Heaven's Gate mass suicide. According to the Hale-Bopp entry on Wikipedia:

In November 1996 amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek of Houston, Texas took a CCD image of the comet, which showed a fuzzy, slightly elongated object nearby. When his computer sky-viewing program did not identify the star, Shramek called the Art Bell radio program Coast to Coast AM to announce that he had discovered a "Saturn-like object" following Hale - Bopp. UFO enthusiasts, such as remote viewing proponent Courtney Brown, soon concluded that there was an alien spacecraft following the comet.[51] Several astronomers, including Alan Hale,[52] claimed the object was simply an 8.5-magnitude star, SAO141894, which did not appear on Shramek's computer program because the user preferences were set incorrectly.[53] Later, Art Bell even claimed to have obtained an image of the object from an anonymous astrophysicist who was about to confirm its discovery. However, astronomers Olivier Hainaut and David J. Tholen of the University of Hawaii stated that the alleged photo was an altered copy of one of their own comet images.[54] A few months later, in March 1997, the Heaven's Gate cult chose the appearance of the comet as a signal for their mass cult suicide. They claimed they were leaving their earthly bodies to travel to the spaceship following the comet.[55]

It should be noted that Art Bell and Richard Hoagland had a long-standing relationship for many years. It seems awfully fishy that Hoagland is now promoting a similar story about Comet Elenin given what transpired with Heaven's Gate over a decade ago. What Cassidy, Hoagland and others have started here is most shameful. Presenting Comet Elenin as a spacecraft sent to "usher in a New Age" is just plain irresponsible considering the recent history of such claims.

The UFO and contactee community tends to house some of the more mentally unstable individuals. These claims by Hoagland as promoted by Cassidy seemingly amount to shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. But you can't really count something as a total disinfo job until Sorcha Faal (a.k.a. David Booth) gets in on the action. In a recent article titled "Top US Space Expert Issues Catastrophic Warning On Comet Elenin" published on the whatdoesitmean.com website, Booth highlights Hoagland's claim by emphasizing this so-called "secret code" which agents unknown have apparently embedded in the JPL data on Comet Elenin. (Just a note, it should be obvious by now that Richard Hoagland should never be considered an "expert" on anything other than COINTELPRO activities.)

The 'secret coding' referred to by Hoagland contained on the JPL website falls under the "Orbit Determination Parameters" statistics information block that lists the producer of the data as being "Otto Matic." According to Hoagland's report, the significance of the name "Otto Matic" being associated with Comet Elenin lies with it only being able to be associated with a video game developed by Pangea Software, published by Aspyr Media and then released to the public on 11 September 2001, the same day the United States suffered a crippling attack. Hoagland further asserts in his report that is "beyond coincidence" that Comet Elenin is scheduled make its closest approach to the Sun on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, 11 September 2011, and that on 11 November 2011 (11-11-11) its orbit will carry it into a "grand alignment" between itself, the Earth and other planets in our Solar System.

Seriously?!? Keep in mind this is whatdoesitmean.com, which tends to take the looniest of the loony claims, then wrap them up in a nice package with a few credible side stories. I mean, I'd like to think that most people can see right though this stuff for the lies, half-truths and psuedo-logic that it is, but I'm afraid that there are probably some people that will fall for stuff like this. Hoagland, by way of David Booth and Kerry Cassidy, appears to be leading a bunch of folks along on a wild goose chase! Needless to say, the disinfo machine appears to be running on all four-cylinders at this point! Getting back to this comparison of Elenin with Hale-Bopp... Despite all these claims about spaceships trailing comets and such nonsense, observing multiple objects circling or trailing a comet might not be that unusual. It's often noted by astronomers that comets come in pairs. Comets often drag a large amount of disintegrating material in their tail too, some of which could be larger asteroid-like bodies. Another more controversial claim is that comets, if they are large enough, may even have natural satellites just like planets have moons. According to McCanney, this appears to have been the case with Comet Hale-Bopp:

The list of lies from NASA was nearly endless. Almost no sooner than photos from the Hubble Space Telescope had been placed on the official NASA internet site, than they were as quickly removed. NASA time lapse movies showed clearly a large companion or satellite orbiting the parent very massive and huge main nucleus. I called my contacts at Goddard Space Flight Center and the inside story was that H-B was HUGE. The ensuing story of the companion (which NASA officially admitted later WAS THERE at the Canary Island H-B conference) is so bizarre that it will take a separate book to describe it. NASA scientists accused individuals including some of their own professional scientists of "faking photos" and causing the death of 39 unsuspecting Heavens Gates Cult members, when in fact it is now proven that NASA scientists at the University of Hawaii were the ones who doctored the photos.

In other words, according to McCanney, Comet Hale-Bopp's nucleus was likely somewhere around the size of our Moon. This orbiting or trailing object that UFO enthusiasts claimed to be a spacecraft was perhaps just a natural satellite of Comet Hale-Bopp, tagging along for the ride. Again, we can see how one layer of disinformation propagated by NASA about the nature of comets leads others to accept more bizarre explanations such as comet-trailing spacecraft, etc. It's the same as with the claims about Comet Elenin being the size of a brown dwarf star. Lies feed upon lies and in the end only careful research can shed any light on the situation. ...and Authoritarian Science

It appears that NASA has not changed its ways since the days of the Hale-Bopp controversy either. Their stance on Comet Elenin is basically the polar opposite of those folks running around making unfounded, extraordinary claims. According to NASA, Elenin is just a tiny snowball comet that isn't going to impact the Earth in any significant way come this fall. What's more, all these claims about Nibiru/Planet-X are just an elaborate hoax so others can sell more books. In other words, "Nothing to see here, folks! Move right along..." A recent article on Space.com titled "Believers In Mysterious Planet Nibiru Await Earth's End" is an exemplary form of this whole attitude NASA harbors. It sets up its straw man argument by putting "Nibiru", "conspiracy theorists", "2012" and "YouTube" all in the same sentence:

The waxing obsession with Nibiru, which conspiracy theorists say is a planet swinging in from the outskirts of our solar system that is going to crash into Earth and wipe out humanity in 2012 - or, in some opinions, 2011 - shows that an astonishing number of people "are watching YouTube videos and visiting slick websites with nothing in their skeptical toolkit," in the words of David Morrison, a planetary astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center and senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

The folks inciting doomsday scenarios and making extreme claims about Elenin, Nibiru/Planet-X on YouTube are certainly acting irresponsibly. But NASA is no better it seems when it comes to engaging in rational discussion about these topics. In fact, NASA's outright denial of the danger posed by comets creates such an environment where irrational claims - such as the ones they rail against - can easily thrive. This outright denial only drives more people to irrational positions on these topics. True 'skepticism' is not a stubborn denial of the facts.

Morrison estimates that there are 2 million websites discussing the impending Nibiru-Earth collision. He receives, on average, five email inquiries about Nibiru every day. "At least once a week I get a message from a young person - as young as 11 - who says they are ill and/or contemplating suicide because of the coming doomsday," Morrison told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com.

This isn't the first time that David Morrison has claimed that he is hearing from young folks who are contemplating suicide over what they read and hear on the net.

(Which, by the way, if true, is extremely tragic! This should give pause to all those who make such doomsday claims and hopefully reflect on what drives them to do so.)

He mentions the same thing in a video released at the beginning of this year by NASA where he also attempts to debunk any claims about 2012, Nibiru/Planet-X, planetary alignments, magnetic pole shifts, etc. in a heavy-handed, authoritarian manner. Again, no rational discussion, just outright denial and basic authoritarian tactics. And Morrison wonders why so many young people are inclined to take their own lives in a world so devoid of truth? It's the irrational loonies on both sides of the spectrum setting up this sorry state of affairs.

Later on, the article discusses some of the history behind the Nibiru/Planet-X claims which were popularized by Nancy Lieder back in the late 90's. Nancy made a big hoopla over a rendezvous with this Planet-X sometime around 2003, which obviously never transpired. Since then her focus has been to ramp up a similar program focused on the 2012 timeframe. The article discusses some of the history of where the name "Nibiru" comes from:

Lieder originally called the bringer of doom "Planet X," and later connected it to a planet that was hypothesized to exist by a writer named Zecharia Sitchin in his book "The 12th Planet" (Harper 1976). According to Sitchin (1920-2010), the ancient Sumerians wrote about a giant planet called Nibiru - the "twelfth planet" in the solar system, after the other planets (including Pluto), the sun and moon - which has an oblong orbit that swings near Earth every 3,600 years. Humans actually evolved on Nibiru, he said, and colonized this planet during a previous flyby. Historians and language scholars say that Stitchin grossly mistranslated ancient texts. The Sumerians did indeed believe in a cosmology involving planets; however they thought there were five planets, not 12, and they did not believe that humans hopped to Earth from a place called Nibiru. Furthermore, astronomers have pointed out that a planetary orbit like the one Sitchin proposed for Nibiru is impossible: No celestial body could maintain a stable orbit that swings it through the inner solar system every 3,600 years and keeps it beyond Pluto the rest of the time. The body would quickly get sucked in or pushed out.

First of all, let me just say a few words about Sumerian astronomy since this author is really confusing the matter. According to astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier, these ancient astronomers were not particularly interested in the planets as we know them today, but rather in observing the orbits of cometary debris coming from different parts of the sky. Their "five planets" were not actually 'planets' as we understand them, but meteor streams left behind by some larger progenitor comet.  

In what few records the Chaldean astronomers left behind, they described these "five planets" as having fixed zodiacal positions in the sky, just like meteor showers do, whereas for the actual planets that we know today, their position in the zodiac varies over time. [Bailey, Clube, Napier; The Origin of Comets; 1990, p26] These ancient astronomers associated increased meteor and fireball sightings with ill omens, either of an environmental or social nature. Land would be laid to waste, crops would fail, armies would clash, cities would rise and fall, all due to the signs from the mighty sky gods (i.e. progenitor comets). Given this, the confusion about Nibiru being a planet is understandable.

 What the ancients were really describing with this name "Nibiru" and the other five planetary names were actually comets, or clusters of comets and their attendant meteor streams. It's also not unusual for long-period comets to have orbits which span thousands of years. So the claim that, "no celestial body could maintain a stable orbit..." is a bit of a distortion if the implication is that such a 3,600 year orbit could not exist. Many celestial bodies have been tracked having orbits of this period or greater. What's impossible is for a LARGE body to maintain a stable orbit while traveling through the inner solar system because making such a passage ultimately changes the orbit of said body.

A cluster of smaller comets with a 3,600 year period would not be out of the question here. Even if one or two of them get sucked into or kicked out of the solar system, there would likely be others that stay close to their original orbit. The Space.com article goes on to discuss this supposed association people have made between Elenin and Nibiru:

The biggest missing link in the doomsday prophecy is Nibiru itself. Because no giant, rogue planet has been found in the outer solar system to play the role of Nibiru, some conspiracy theorists have decided that a small comet called Elenin, which will pass nearest Earth in October 2011, is actually Nibiru. Even then, though, scientists say Elenin will come no closer than 100 times farther than the distance from Earth to the moon...

Again, as noted above, the association of Elenin to some massive body is due to the incorrect assumptions attached to Omerbashich's work that we discussed above. Part of this is, again, the fault of NASA for not being straightforward about the electrical nature of the solar system.

"The fact is that these folks are constantly changing their story," Morrison wrote in an email. "For some, Nibiru is no longer the Sumerian god or planet that is supposed to be returning to Earth in late 2012. It has become a catchword for almost any cosmic catastrophe."

If Morrison actually understood the real meaning behind "Nibiru" as described above, he might see how its status as a "catchword for almost any cosmic catastrophe" might be warranted. That isn't to say that Comet Elenin is Nibiru, however. I think we still need to draw a distinction between these two things until we have more data. From all appearances, Elenin is still a relatively small, long-period comet. It should be noted that comets are not so easy to detect until they've 'electrified'. Comets, despite the myth about them being 'dirty snowballs', are actually some of the blackest objects in all of space.

For all we know there may be a large cluster of comets already knocking at the door of the inner solar system. This is a very real possibility given the sudden increase of 'moons' detected around Jupiter and all the outer planets since the year 2000 [Knight-Jadczyk; Almost Human; 2009, p25] Moving on, the article attempts to debunk claims of Elenin's mysterious action-at-a-distance on Earth:

Internet rumors about Elenin began spreading earlier this year. Its approach to Earth was blamed for shifting the Earth's axis by 3 degrees in February, precipitating the Chile earthquake, then shifting the pole even more to trigger the Japan quake in March. "Ignoring plate tectonics as the cause of earthquakes, they suggest that the comet exerted strong gravitational or electromagnetic effects on our planet," Morrison wrote. When scientists pointed out that the comet is a mere 3-mile-wide glob of ice with no magnetic field and that it won't even pass very near Earth - and that plate tectonics, not comets, cause earthquakes - rumors began to circulate that NASA was withholding information about Elenin.

Some of these claims, specifically about Elenin and the March 11th M9 earthquake in Japan, seem to have some basis in fact, as we've explored. Electromagnetic effects from planetary alignments, resulting in seismic activity, is a definite possibility given what we've pieced together. To say simply that plate tectonics causes earthquakes is not so different than saying that electricity causes a lightbulb to brighten. There still has to be some event to trigger the earthquake, just as there has to be some switch to send current to the lightbulb. Morrison appears to be confusing a common theory with a mechanism of causation.

 If we actually knew what caused earthquakes, we'd already be able to predict when and where they would occur. 

 So far there is no known earthquake prediction system available to us. A little further down, Morrison debunks the claim that Elenin is actually some massive body like a brown-dwarf star in disguise:

If it were a brown dwarf, "it would not have a coma or tail, because the gas cannot escape from an object with substantial gravity. In addition, if it were massive we would be seeing its gravitational influence on the orbits of the planets, especially Mars and Earth, but there is no change in these orbits," Morrison wrote. "Finally, if it were a brown dwarf it would have been easily detected in various previous astronomical surveys, including the recent WISE infrared mission, even when it was still in the outer solar system," he wrote.

Again, we're not arguing that Elenin is actually a brown dwarf star, but we don't discount the possibility that such a brown dwarf star may be in a binary orbit with our Sun. In other words, the two objects, Elenin and a hypothetical brown-dwarf companion star, are independent of one another. Unfortunately, the folks out there on YouTube and other blogs just haven't accomplished the depth of research needed to see this and are muddying the waters with their claims - perhaps in some cases intentionally.

What Morrison says here about WISE is interesting, however. It is true that if such a body existed, WISE would have likely photographed it by now. However, that doesn't mean that anybody recognizes it for what it is at this point. In fact, astronomers like John Matese and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette admit that they are actually searching for such a dark body. They suspect that this body (which they've euphemistically named "Tyche") is on the size-scale of a Jovian planet. At the moment there is still much debate over what its orbital parameters or mass might be, but they suspect such a body does exist due to the irregular distribution of long-period comet orbits.

The process of testing potential candidates that turn up in the WISE surveys takes a long time, since each body must be tracked for some amount of time in order to compute its orbit. But that doesn't seem to concern Morrison here since it seems he's mostly concerned about pulling the wool over your eyes. In conclusion the article states:

Morrison offered some advice to those who are interested in astronomy or are worried about impending collisions. "If it [a story] is real, it is likely to be in regular news media, not just posted on some website," he told us. Furthermore, "not everyone who claims on YouTube to be a scientist or an employee of NASA is. But there is no simple way to distinguish truth from lies."

Indeed. There is no simple way to distinguish truth from lies. It takes true perspicacity, and even then nothing is for certain. From this brief article it appears that truth - for Morrison, as well as the author presumably - is only a matter of faith in those scientific authorities ordained by the Establishment.

There's a distinct us-vs-them attitude that pervades his comments; and this same attitude appears to have infected most of NASA and other professional astronomers as well. It's as if for them science was a matter of picking the right sports team in a championship. It's 'scientists' versus the rest of us unenlightened quacks. In any case, between NASA and the Nibiru folks, there is little middle ground for discussion on these topics of Comet Elenin, a hypothetical companion star, or any connection these might have to the Earth Changes going on right now. Hopefully some of this discussion serves to bridge this gap. (Even though I've probably only touched on a small percentage of the claims that have been made out there!)  

What's Next?
So if Comet Elenin is just an ordinary comet, what can or should we expect this fall when it passes by the Earth? We know that Elenin will probably not come close enough to impact the Earth directly, but what are some of the possibilities as the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Elenin? We know that comet tails do contain a large amount of dust and smaller asteroids. We also know that bacteria and other microbes can survive in the tail region while attached to this dust.

Since Elenin has traveled quite a distance to make it here, it might have picked up some distinct alien microbes somewhere along the way. Is it possible that we might experience a rash of new diseases, or some pandemic disease sometime in the late fall or early winter (northern hemisphere)? Or not until next year perhaps?

It can take time for the material picked up by the upper layers of the atmosphere (as Earth passes through debris fields of varying density) to precipitate down through the lower layers. Some scientists have linked past pandemics to comet passages before, such as the case with Comet 2P/Encke and the so-called Spanish Flu.

In the paper "Comets and Contagion: Evolution and Diseases From Space", R. Joseph and C. Wickramasinghe hypothesize that the flu pandemic of 1918 was due to the Earth passing through the tail of Comet Encke - the comet related to the Taurid meteor showers which occur every year at the end of June (this being the same time as the anniversary of the Tunguska Explosion over Siberia). Perhaps something similar could happen when the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Elenin this fall? But even if pandemic disease is in our future, there's still no reason to panic.

Despite what the medical authorities would have you believe, there is a lot a person can do on their own to project themselves from new diseases. There's a wealth of information in our Health & Wellness section and our very own Dr. Gabriela Segura M.D. has written several articles on the topic of detoxification. Such information could become vital in the event of a pandemic, but I think it's best if people were already in the habit of detoxing and supplying their bodies with optimal fuel beforehand (as there are many other benefits besides just preventing disease). The motivated reader might want to check out these links for starters:

New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection Detoxify or Die: Natural Radiation Protection Therapies for Coping With the Fallout of the Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown The Day the Water Died: Detoxing after the Gulf Oil Spill

Of course, at the very least, if what we've seen so far this year is any indication, we may expect more of the same: earthquakes, volcanoes, violent storms and unstable weather. For all we know, many of these Earth Changes might be related to a hypothetical brown dwarf star making its perihelion approach; Comet Elenin might only be a smaller contributing factor. Remember the early Greenland sunrise this year? Perhaps there is something 'big' on the horizon causing slight changes in the configuration of the entire solar system? Such a possibility was discussed in a recent Cornell study which attempted to explain changes in the Moon's orbital eccentricity. Although no definite conclusions were reached in this study, we believe the possibility of a "massive distant body" remains open.  

Currently the Sun is behaving mighty quiet for a time when it is supposed to be at a maximum for solar activity. We've seen visible changes on both Jupiter and Saturn taking place within the last year. Astronomers are witnessing events they've never before seen in the short history of modern astronomy. There are a lot of mysteries to consider here. There is so much more to discover; new mysteries and new horizons are appearing and the imperative of keeping eyes open to objective reality left and right grows stronger with the dangers they bring. Try to keep in mind that all this noise about Comet Elenin being radiated across the Net from the Cosmic COINTELPRO sector is intended to DISTRACT you and vector your thinking.

There appear to be a number of actors on this scene with varying motivations. In a spooky way, it may be that Comet Elenin itself could be the source of some of this hysteria among the general public. Clube and Napier noted the distinct historical fact that when comet and fireball sightings were on the increase, social instability was often at a peak. Many times this would lead to the collapse of one empire and its replacement with another.

Mass social movements and religions would either dissolve or spring up from the upheaval. Perhaps relating comets to the 'gods', as the ancients did, is not such a stretch after all? At this point, considering the pace of these changes in our cosmic and social landscape, a sanity check is definitely overdue. .