Its prime time for doomsday debate But astronomers say planetary alignment poses no threat
By David Ropeik MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
May 2 You may have heard that on Friday, the planets will all be lined up on one side of the earth, along with the sun and the moon. You may also have heard predictions that this will mean, as the rock group R.E.M. sang, The End of the World As We Know It. Well, relax. You dont have to go to the survivalist supply store just yet.
IN FACT, only the five visible planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will be on the same side of the earth, along with the sun and moon, in a kind of crooked line out into space. Neptune, Uranus and Pluto arent part of the alignment. Not that it matters. Even with those three planets added in, the cumulative gravitational pull of every planet in our solar system isnt enough to add to the tug of the sun and moon in any significant way.
Its certainly not enough to lead to any of the catastrophic events some have predicted: winds beyond 500 miles per hour, sea level rise of up to 300 feet, earthquakes up to magnitude 13 on the Richter scale. (Get your extra flashlight batteries now!)
One prediction, made in the book 5/5/2000, suggests that the tug of all those lined-up planets will cause the earth to shift on its axis, relocating the polar ice caps and generally leading to awfully bad things. Kansas could become oceanfront property.
The truth is that the tug of all those lined up planets wont be enough to lift a hair on Marv Alberts toupee. (They wont actually be all that lined up. Theyll come closest at 4:08 a.m. ET, but theyll still be spread across more than 20 degrees of the sky.)
The reason is simple: The planets are just too far away.
DOWN-TO-EARTH FACTS
The strength of gravity depends on two things: the mass of an object and its distance. Planets sure have mass. Jupiter is humongous, more than 300 times as massive as Earth. But the planets are hundreds of millions of miles away, and the strength of their gravitational pull drops by the square of their distance. Something thats five miles away has 25 times less gravitational pull, 10 times away equals 100 times less pull, and so on. So Jupiter, 390 million miles or so away from Earth, is not exactly strong enough to pull the olive out of your martini.
The moon exerts more gravitational effect on the earth than any other body in the solar system. If you give the moons effect a value of 1, the sun has an effect of just 0.2 that is, 20 percent as much.
The effect from the planets would be far smaller: .00008 for Mercury, .006 for Venus, .0002 for Mars, .01 for Jupiter and .0007 for Saturn. The cumulative extra tug from the lined-up planets comes to .01698. Hardly the stuff of cataclysm, eh?
If youre still worried, you can look to history for reassurance. Such alignments, while unusual, have happened numerous times before 28 times in the last 2,000 years, according to astronomer Jean Meeus, who first calculated the 5/5/2000 event back in 1961. Computer programs can give us the exact dates of these alignments, and those dates are free of earthquakes, floods or flopping polar ice caps. POTENTIAL OMENS
Still, we have long been fascinated by the possible omens in things astronomical. Yale astrophysicist Bradley Schaefer wrote in Sky and Telescope of the ancient Chinese Mandate of Heaven, in which power shifted between rulers around planetary alignments.
Genghis Khan, Schaefer says, put a halt to a planned genocide campaign against 100,000 Tanguts in 1227 because of a planetary alignment. In 1524 the entire ruling court of Germany fled to a mountaintop well-supplied with food and drink, there to survive the predicted great flood that was to come because of a planetary alignment. Two dry weeks later, after the mountaintop party was over, they came back down. And Rudolf Hess, adviser to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, tried to rescue his sinking prestige with a nighttime solo parachute mission into England to propose a truce. He picked the date based on a planetary alignment in 1941. He made it to England, and spent the rest of his life in prison.
This time around, theres someone using what they call an alphabetic code, based on the number 55 (Get it? May 5th equals 5-5?) to come up with these portentous words from the Bible: celestial, harmonics, foretold, darkness, smoke, blackness, tempest, gloom, chaff, tares, winnowing, smoke which lifts itself up in dense volume, mother earth, changes.
The astronomers say that if the end is near, its not from the upcoming alignment. They say we should just relax and finish out the quote from the R.E.M. song: Its the End of the World As We Know It, and I Feel Fine.
David Ropeik is a longtime science journalist and currently serves as Director of Risk Communication at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Send David Ropeik your suggestions for future columns via mysteries@msnbc.com.
-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), May 04, 2000