End of Days

November 07, 2009

Are you ready for the End of the World? Master of the Apocalyptic Blockbuster Roland Emmerich unveils his latest doomsday disaster on Friday November 13: 2012, starring John Cusack as sci-fi writer Jackson Curtis, a divorced father who occasionally moonlights as a limousine driver. First come the mass suicides in Guatemala in anticipation of the end of the world. Then vast cracks are found in California fault lines; Curtis saves his ex-wife, child and her new boyfriend in the nick of time as Los Angeles crumbles into the sea. Rio, Washington DC, and the Vatican in Rome are all destroyed in short order. Oh, did I mention the sooper sekrit society that is constructing giant arks in the Himalayas to save a small fraction of humanity from impending doom? It's all delivered in Emmerich's trademark cataclysmic style (what io9 has dubbed "disaster porn"). Check it out:

The film's premise derives from a popular doomsday prediction centered on the Mayan calendar. It lasts 5126, at which point the calendar abruptly stops at December 21, 2012. For whatever reason, the Mayans didn't bother to count any further, leading certain highly imaginative, rather hysterical types to conclude this denotes the End of the World.

2012 conspiracy theorists have also bundled in the notion that this global destruction will occur when the legendary Planet X crashes into Earth. Astronomers were intrigued by the possibility in the mid-19th century, shortly after the discovery of Neptune -- they thought it might explain perceived discrepancies in the orbits of the great gas giants. Pluto, discovered in 1930, was initially heralded as Planet X, but it turned out to be too small to effect the orbits of the gas giants. Heck, it's not even technically a planet any more. (There is a dwarf planet called Eris just beyond Pluto, but it's in a stable orbit and isn't going to crash into Earth.)

And because you can never cram too many crazy ideas into a single Disaster Hoax, there are some people who believe Planet X is actually the mythical Nibiru, supposedly known to ancient Sumerians, which has a highly elliptical orbit and passes into our solar system every 3600 years. Earth itself, according to this crackpot theory, was created from a collision between Nibiru and some other object in the asteroid belt. Oh, Nibiru also doubles as a "spaceship" of sorts, in that an alien race supposedly traveled to Earth during one of its passes and founded the human race.

There isn't a shred of evidence for any of this, of course, and any number of articles and blog posts have been written debunking the nonsense -- along with Neil de Grasse Tyson, who does so with typical good humor in the clip below. That doesn't mean we won't thrill to the sight of a cinematic end of the world, because who doesn't love a good disaster flick now and then? But we should really focus our doomsday anxieties to more realistic scenarios.

Silver Streak

October 04, 2008

The new Carnival of Space is up, but that's not the only exciting space-related news this week. The Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle re-entered Earth's atmosphere in a blaze of glory after spending several months docked with the International Space Station. You can see the video here.

The Jules Verne wasn't carrying any passengers; it was basically a 20-ton garbage truck. When it came back down to Earth, it was carrying some 2.5 tons of garbage and waste that had accumulated aboard the ISS. It's not like there are any local sanitation workers orbiting the Earth up there, so the spacecraft was doing a good deed, giving up its life so astronauts don't choke on their own refuse, and it even burned up all that accumulated waste in the process.

Among the lucky few who had ringside seats to the spectacular re-entry were two faculty members of the Clay Center Observatory (CCO) in Brookline, Massachusetts, along with an undergraduate student. The CCO is a special facility: its state-of-the-art equipment makes it popular with NASA researchers looking to study meteor showers and re-entering spacecraft -- they even have a NASA "hotline" -- but it's also part of Dexter and Southfield Schools, a system that provides K-12 education to more than 600 students. Not only do those students have access to the observatory for class purposes, but the CCO holds regular "Public Telescope Nights," among other outreach events. Talk about giving back to the community...

Anyway, the hotline rang when Jules Verne was preparing to make its re-entry, and on September 29th, the teachers (Ronald Dantowitz and Marek Kozubai) hopped onto a "chase plane" (a Gulfstream V, technically a private jet, how cool is that?)  crammed with cutting-edge equipment and recorded the temperature and composition of the superheated fragments as they blazed through the atmosphere. Apparently it first broke into three large chunks before exploding into hundreds of pieces. The collected data, according to Dantowitz, should help NASA and the European Space Agency to better understand the dynamics of spacetime re-entry, leading to better designs for future spacecraft.

Their student (David Sliski) was aboard a second aircraft armed with a camera and spectrograph. That aircraft was a DC-8, but hey -- not everyone can ride in the Gulfstream jet. Those suckers are expensive. But it just so happens there are lots of other student projects with far less need for big-ticket items; sometimes just a few hundred dollars can make a difference.

That's why Twisted Physics is joining Cosmic Variance's Donors Choose pledge drive, part of the organization's Blogger's Challenge to help raise money for deserving classrooms in public schools around the US. Cosmic Variance has already done the heavy lifting and picked several worthy projects. We've got a good start, but are no where near our (admittedly ambitious) goal. So any readers that feel inspired to help, head on over to Cosmic Variance, pick a project, and make some K-12 teachers and students very, very happy.

Photos: Jules Verne ATV disintegrating as it re-enters Earth's atmosphere. Source: NASA/ESA. Public domain.

Palin-Drone

August 30, 2008

Irene Klotz is stirring things up over at Free Space by channeling the spirit of Ayn Rand over John McCain's unlikely pick for VP candidate: Alaska's Sarah Palin. My more thoughtful reaction can be found in the comments over there, but I can flippantly sum it up here in a single sentence: sanity and rationality have pretty much left McCain's building, along with any pretense of sound judgment. (Seriously, dude -- desperate much? There's a difference between being a maverick and just being plain barking mad.)

In the meantime, io9 has highlighted the best analysis so far of the Palin Pick: picking up on an Internet meme detailing the similarities between the McCain/Palin ticket and Colonel Tigh and President Roslin of Battlestar Galactica. The Burn Lab started it, creating the awesome photo montage below, observing, "So far, only one is a confirmed Cylon." When politics so completely loses touch with reality, why not reduce everything to the level of a TV science fiction series?

Photo montage source: The Burn Lab.