Apophis Asteroid: Russia Wants to Avoid the End of the World in 2036

The belief of the end of the world would occur in 2012 isn't based on any solid argument, but a real, however improbable threat could come from space. Apophis, a near-Earth asteroid could indeed collide with Earth in 2036. Is this catastrophe inevitable? Maybe not, because Russian scientists report that the crash of Apophis could be avoided, and they even want to start a program to save the world from this asteroid.

Without saying that the world would come to an end, a collision with Apophis, an 850-foot asteroid discovered in 2004, would surely be devastating. Apophis is about three times larger than the meteorite that hit near the Tunguska, on June 30, 1908, causing a tremendous explosion (5 to 30 megatons of TNT).

Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, takes this threat very seriously. He recently told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti that a scientist had shown him calculations indicating that Apophis would "surely collide with Earth in the 2030s."

However, these data contradict the most recent calculations of NASA scientists, who announced in October 2009 that the risk of collision with Apophis had been scaled down to one chance in 250,000, for the fly-by of the asteroid that is scheduled to happen on April 13, 2036. Previously, NASA estimated that the risk of an impact with Apophis to a chance in 45,000.

Anatoly Perminov also said he wanted to quickly create a program designed to avoid the collision with Apophis, but without it having to destroy the near-Earth asteroid.

"No nuclear explosions [will be carried out], everything [will be done] on the basis of the laws of physics."

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Planetary Alignment in 2012?

We often hear that the planets of the solar system will be aligned on December 21, 2012, the date of the end of the Long Count of the Mayan calendar (according to the most widely accepted interpretation: the GMT correlation).

Since we know very accurately the locations and the orbits of the solar system planets, we can very easily calculate their configurations years (and even centuries) in advance. Let's have a look.

On the NASA website, we can use an online tool called the Solar System Simulator, which gives us the location of the planets for a given date and time, and from different points of view. For December 21, 2012, there is no planetary alignment in the solar system.

We can also double-check this result with this sky map generator at Fourmilab.

We can see that a minor alignment of Jupiter, the Earth and Mercury will occur on December 17, 2012, and that Jupiter, the Earth and Venus will be aligned on December 23, 2012. However, these minor planetary alignments are quite frequent, and they don't have any impact on the Earth because their gravitational attraction is extremely small.

While you're at it, you could see some past major planetary alignments, like the one that happened on May 5, 2000 (the Sun, Mercury, Venus, The Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were aligned) or the one that occurred on February 4, 1962. During these two major planetary alignments, absolutely no impact (and even less catastrophes) was measured.

The next major planetary alignment will happen on September 8, 2040, while Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and the Moon will be located in a small portion of the sky.

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2012: End of the World - A Summary of 2012 Theories and Prophecies

On the website Information is Beautiful, David McCandless published an image summarizing and explaining some of the theories and predictions about the year 2012.

Titled "2012: End of the World?", this poster lists the arguments presented by skeptics (on the right hand side) and believers (on the left hand side) about theories and prophecies that would allegedly happen in 2012.

This interesting poster covers topics related to 2012, such as the Mayan prophecy, the Mayan calendar, the galactic alignment, the return of Nibiru, the pole shift, and a consciousness shift.

This image (size: 960 by 6263 pixels) can be downloaded here on the site Information is Beautiful.

(Note: there might be other posters related to 2012, since this image is numbered "No 1".)

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Nibiru Pictures by NASA?

The pictures shown on the left were respectively taken in May and September 2002 by Lisa Crause (University of Cape Town) and Warrick Lawson (Australian Defence Force Academy), with the 1-meter telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory. Numerous websites and popular videos claim that these pictures show the planet Nibiru (also called sometimes Planet X) approaching Earth. What should we think about these so-called "Nibiru pictures"?

After some researches, I found out that this photo was showed on October 3, 2002, as the "Picture of the Day" on the NASA website. Yes, it is perfectly true that the NASA published theses photos. However (and websites created by so-called psychics, or 2012 predictions on the Web, won't tell you that), these pictures do not show Nibiru (a planet that could not exist if our laws of physics and our astronomical data are right), but a very distant star located at 8000 light-years from our solar system, in the constellation of Monocerotis. To give an idea of the scale of these vast distances, let's note that the closest star (which is already far beyond the solar system limits, by several orders of magnitude) is a little more than 4 light-years away from us.

Called V838 Monocerotis, this star has astonished astronomers with its very rapid transformation, which was incompatible with what they knew of stellar life cycle. But for the cult leaders and other quacks who were predicting the return of Nibiru in 2003, this mysterious star was exploited as an evidence of the existence of Nibiru, especially since the legend says that this imaginary planet is reddish (like Mars, for example). However, theses quacks lied by not mentioning that these pictures were not showing Nibiru, but a very distant star far beyond the solar system... and that NASA scientists always claimed that Nibiru was a hoax.

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