The mysterious
Veil on phographs, Lifted
in this episode.
This episode was filmed in front of a live studio audience at this year’s Denver Skepticamp last weekend. The episode is a short version of a workshop that Bryan Bonner and I will be co-leading at TAM this summer. As such, feedback is solicited! (as usual)
I’ve posted the materials (slides and two movies) to the shownotes page for this episode.
Since this was a live talk, the normal other segments were not done.
The Ringmakers of Saturn, a book by Norman R. Bergrun, presents one of the most “out there” ideas I’ve discussed yet on the podcast. But, it’s still a decent teaching tool, worth briefly talking about.
I also have a Q&A, corrections, and Feedback.
This is a quick post about me being a crotchety young man. But, one of the founding ideas of this blog was to point out not only bad astronomy/physics/geology that I see out there on crazy blogs and Coast to Coast, but also what I see in the media, on TV, and in movies.
I’ve been going through and watching old Law & Order: SVU episodes. I enjoy the series and watched it with my mom during part of high school and sometimes when home from college. Now in it’s 14th season, I have a lot of catching up to do.
I was watching season 5 episode 1 last night while doing some other work on the side (you can decide for yourself if that’s an intended or unintended dangling participle). About 31 minutes into the episode, a lab tech makes a big deal about restoring a receipt and the detectives are hoping it can lead them to a woman who had been kidnapped. Only problem is the receipt is saturated with blood and unreadable … under normal lights.
The lab tech makes a big deal about how it’s illegible “to the naked eye, that’s why God invented lasers. Different frequencies reveal different inks.”
This premise is true. In fact, over Thanksgiving, I was back in Ohio visiting with my parents and went to the Cincinnati Museum Center’s special exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls. They had a side room on their digital imaging process for documenting the scrolls and, “using technology developed by NASA” (people who don’t think the space program has any practical applications …), they showed how the fragments are all being imaged with 12 different colors of light: seven visible, five IR. Here’s the video that I had seen on it, and here’s a shorter version that just shows one scroll under the different wavelengths.
What the video pointed out is that several letters were not visible due to burns or dirt. But, under different wavelengths of light, the dirt becomes transparent while the ink remains opaque and you can read them.
This is exactly why astronomers use different wavelengths of light to study different things. Anyway …
Law & Order: SVU — Laser Colors Mistake
In what was obviously done for visual interest for television, the lab tech then goes through and supposedly illuminates the receipt under three different laser colors to try to bring out text. First, she says she’s using 400 nm, which shows up as bright blue, tinging on violet. Then 500 nm, which shows up as a ruddy orange. Finally, 600 nm, which is a brilliant green and they can read it and go and find the girl.
Anyone shaking their head right now?
If not, let me explain the first issue: Those colors are wrong for those wavelengths. I should know — I just purchased four lasers, one each at 405 nm, 460 nm, 532 nm, and 650 nm. The colors for those are deep purple, bluish-violet, green, and deep red.
As in, if those wavelengths she stated were the actual colors, 400 nm would have been a very deep purple, bordering on invisibility to the human eye (edge of human vision is somewhere around 380-400 nm). 500 nm should have been a turquoise blue-green. 600 nm would have been a yellow bordering on red (yellow sodium lights in parking lots are at 589 nm).
A second problem is that lasers are not made at those wavelengths. I guess it’s theoretically possible, and there might be some very rare laser of which I’m not aware, and while there are a large variety of lasers out there, 400, 500, and 600 nm are not among them.
My third of three problems with this is that lasers generally make a dot. You can have spreaders and put in gratings and whatever to make broader patterns, but generally speaking, they’re dots. This was basically like a broad light. What she showed, and what should have been used, and what she should have simply said, are that she was using a diode. Speaking as someone who’s been kept awake by the diode power lights on a computer case, diodes create a broad illumination, not a tiny point of light.
But I guess lasers sound cooler.
Yes, pedantic, nit-picking, etc. Does this have any bearing on broader society? Probably not.
But, then again, there are two issues here. One is that she was simply wrong. Portraying bad science or getting the science wrong is … wrong. It shouldn’t have happened.
The second issue is that someone might pick up on this and think that’s the way things work — that those are the colors that correspond with those wavelengths. And then it could take a long time for them to unlearn it. For example, I had an 8th grade science teacher who claimed a kilometer was longer than a mile (among other things). Three years later, I was in AP music theory class and, as usual, we were doing nothing, so I was complaining with a senior about incompetent teachers at our school. And I brought up the 8th grade teacher and units of length. And she exclaimed that because she had been taught that, too, by the guy the year before I had him, it screwed her up for two whole years. It took 10th grade chemistry and a sit-down with the chemistry teacher before she got everything straightened out such that she now knows a centimeter is shorter than an inch.
Perhaps an extreme example, perhaps an example that further illustrates the tiny effect that this doesn’t have, but it’s stuck in my mind.
And there are a lot less useful blog posts out there, and I’m tired about hearing about 12/12/12 and 12/21/12.
P.S. If I had to guess, I’d say that the “400 nm” was around 470, the “500 nm” around 600 or so, and the “600 nm” right on that classic green laser color of 532 nm.
Quick post to mention that I’ve added a new blog to my fairly short “blogroll” list off to the side of every page, if you scroll down far enough past the monthly archive links. For those who like my Richard C. Hoagland -related posts, this blog’s for you: Interpose Mission.
The blog is different from Expat’s Dork Mission: The Emoluments of Mars, in that (a) Julian gives his real name, (b) it’s less snarky (so far … but we all end up deteriorating after awhile), and (c) it goes into a bit more detail about why ol’ Richard’s yarns are poorly spun and fraying throughout.
So far, he’s only done three posts. The first was an introductory post, similar to most peoples’, and then the next two were about Richard’s long-standing claim that Mars’ moon Phobos is an artificial spaceship and that Curiosity has found the ruins of apartment buildings on Mars.
I’ve added it to my RSS feed, and if you “like” more of Hoagland’s “ideas,” I suggest you do the same.
Well, since this is the Exposing PseudoAstronomy podcast, you can guess what the conclusion is. But, it’s a ~50-minute exploration of the claims and evidence dealing with this claim, and for those of you who like logical fallacies, you’ll really like this episode. I hope. I’ve also written up a document of the statistics I did for this.
Other segments: Q&A, Feedback, Announcements … and TWO puzzlers!!
The two announcements are: (1) I need to drop down to 2 episodes/month, at least for September. We’ll see what happens in October, but likely this will hold at least through November. (2) I’ll be in Flagstaff, AZ (USA) for a conference for September 18-23. If you’re interested in meeting up at all, send me an e-mail.
As Mike Bara suspected, I am listening to his interview right now on American Freedom Radio, and yes Mike, I appreciate the minor plug, but I find it fascinating that you think I’m obsessed with you. I have nearly 300 posts on this blog and a whopping half-dozen have to do with you, and all but one are just related to this ziggurat thing. Unless you were talking about Expat, for whom I can’t speak and don’t pretend to.
Anyway, I expect to get a small handful of folks coming here due to Mike’s radio appearance tonight, and I wanted to put up a quick post that I will respond to his 5-part post within a day or three. But in the meantime, Mike spent several minutes saying that I could not be objective about this because I’m funded by NASA.
I’ll respond to that momentarily. Meanwhile, Mike, where does your money come from? You’re getting paid for your books about this stuff, going to and speaking at conferences about this stuff, getting out there through radio appearances, getting paid to talk about your ideas on the History channel … do you honestly think that makes YOU an objective person with regards to your ideas? This thing works both ways if you really want to play the “follow the money” conspiracy game.
For hundreds of years, science in the western world was made possible by rich folks (usually white men) who could afford to not have to earn a living based on their academic endeavors. Sometimes they were lucky in another way and were able to carry out research on the side of a teaching job at a university or other center of learning.
Later on, some got lucky in a different way and had rich patrons — noblemen, dukes, kings, etc. — who would indulge them and pay for their research and equipment because it increased their own status (“Oh yeah, Harry, well you may have 50 servants but I have my own astronomer!”). Kepler and Brahe are two examples of this case.
It’s really only in the last hundred years or so that governments themselves decided that it was for the collective good of society that they fund research. Thus, they set up institutions and grants and ways of giving public funds to those who presented the most likely chances of both success and adding something significant to our understanding of the universe we live in. And I’m not just talking astronomy here: Health, biology, environment, geology, physics, chemistry, all those other fields fit within our understanding of the universe, some just a little closer to home and of more immediate benefit.
Fast-forward to today in this incredibly abridged history and most governments have a fairly heavy bureaucracy in place to do this. In the United States, the vast majority of research astronomers have one main funding source: U.S. government grants that are mostly awarded through the Science Mission Directorate section of NASA in one of four main areas: Human exploration, astrophysics, Earth science, and solar system / planetary.
Yes, there are some other funding sources such as NSF (National Science Foundation) or individual companies – or universities if you’re teaching faculty – but the vast majority comes from NASA, an official government agency, which of course gives conspiracists all the ammo they need to argue their case fallaciously (see the section below).
Now, I realize this might come as a shock to those who are conspiracy-minded or anti-government, and you probably won’t believe me, but no where do we have to sign some sort of loyalty oath to uphold “NASA’s views” of [insert whatever]. In fact, as an organization, NASA has very few views on, really, anything; NASA is a government agency charged with space flight and funding research, not charged with being a Gateway through which Knowledge Must Pass®. As in, whenever I hear James McCanney’s bio read on Coast to Coast, I cringe whenever I hear the part of, “He’s openly opposed NASA’s view that comets are hunks of ice and rock …” Seriously folks — NASA has “no views” on that sort of thing.
I suppose there are some official positions that have come out of the PR department like global warming, though. And sometimes certain political appointees decide to insert their own censorship (such as the Bush administration did).
Anyway, my point here is that if Mike Bara would like to find some private funding for my research, I’d be more than happy to take it. I have never tried to make it a secret that I’m funded in part by a NASA grant I wrote in 2010 as a graduate student, and before that by a fellowship I wrote in 2007. In fact, I’m quite proud of the fact that I won two very competitive grants (one admittedly FOR graduate students) before I even had my doctorate. I also have some funding directly through NASA’s Lunar Science Institute to fund my lunar crater research through CosmoQuest’s “MoonMappers” project. The only stuff I had to sign was that I had no foreign nationals who would get the money.
Again, not something I’ve ever tried to hide. Yet Mike’s argument against my analysis of his ziggurat seems to be: “His education was funded by NASA, and all his grant $$$$$ comes from NASA. Fact.”
Mike, please find an example of a professional astronomer today whose education and/or current research was/is not funded by a research grant from NASA. They’re as rare as a two-leaf clover. They exist, but they are very rare.
And then of course, again, your money these days sure seems to come from your lunar anomalies and so-called consciousness stuff. That’s supposed to make you more objective than I on this kind of issue?
A non sequitur literally means “doesn’t follow.” I’ve mentioned this briefly before, I’m sure, but discovery of life off-world would be a huge boon to NASA or any other space organization or company that found it. P.R. is written for the next few hundred years, and money would flow. If I were “a NASA shill,” I would be arguing FOR there being life out there. I actually, personally, have written before that I think astrobiology is a bit of a pseudoscience because it is never falsifiable (“oh, we just couldn’t detect it WITH THAT TEST, but it’s still probably there!”). Of course, the conspiracists would dismiss this as me just lying to serve my overlords, but facts never stood in conspiracists’ way.
To those who do not know, an ad hominem attack is when someone attacks the person rather than the claims. The claims may be valid, they may be invalid, but the other person is only attacking the person and not actually addressing the root questions being asked. Mike is doing this.
Finally, the argument from persecution is where someone says, effectively, “If I’m wrong, then these people wouldn’t be arguing against me and hate me, therefore, because they are arguing against me, I must be right!” Like the ad hominem, this particular non sequitur fallacy does not address the claim on its merits but instead tries to bolster the person’s claim based on the perceived reaction of someone else. Sometimes this manifests as the “Galileo complex.”
I was just skimming Mike’s Part 1 before bed and he makes a few accusations which I think need to be addressed here. Mainly (1) that I’m charging time I spend writing these posts to work time, and (2) that I’m using work equipment to do so.
The exact quotes:
In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was able to respond so quickly and extensively to my posts because he was writing on his personal blog using taxpayer or university funded equipment and internet access while he was supposed to be working!
(Note: 8/16/2012; this suspicion was confirmed when Dr. Robbins posted his latest update today at 3:45PM, the middle of the work day. It obviously must have taken him at least a couple of hours to write this up. I’m wondering which government funded project you charged these hours of work on your personal blog to, Stuart)?
Since these are actually very specific things that we must certify we will NOT do with NASA-funded equipment, I think it’s important and it be addressed.
As I’ve written when interviewed before, I’m a postdoc and set my own hours. I can work 8PM-10PM and then 1AM-5AM one “day,” then 10AM-11PM another. I can take a break from what I do and address this stuff if someone sends me an e-mail about it and I want to take a break and address it. And, I work primarily from home, going into the university maybe once a month during the summer and a few times a week during the school year for meetings, seminars, etc.
The fact that I may choose to wake up at 10AM one day, work from 10:30-2:00, take a break for 3 hours to address the latest pseudoscience, and then go back to work from 5PM to 11:30PM is a far cry from “confirmation” that I’m doing anything illegal with NASA funds. In fact, I keep ridiculously thorough records of all time spent working on each grant as well as time spent doing education and public outreach (EPO) stuff (this blog and podcast). As a postdoc, EPO factors in up to 5% of my annual review, which is available via public records request, and so I like to be able to say I spent a fair amount of time working on it. If I get promoted to Research Scientist II or ever get a faculty position, EPO (on our own time) is a significantly larger fraction of our evaluations (up to 40% here at LASP for a level IV).
A retraction from Mike should be in order, but the likelihood of it coming is miniscule.
Episode 42 has been posted — on time, I might add. We’re back to the 30-minute episode length and get back to some good ol’ Coast to Coast AM clips.
I take you on a whirlwind custody case that’s 10 years (or 5 billion years?) in the making, trying to figure out if our solar system is really a member of the Milky Way galaxy, or is it a member of the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy, a galaxy that was only discovered in 1994 and is currently being eaten alive by the Milky Way.
I also have another crater-based Q&A, discuss the solution to episode 40′s puzzler including the feedback that everyone sent in on what the fate of the puzzler should be, and then a few quick announcements.
It’s been a long time since I wrote about “Terry Nazon World Famous Celebrity Astrologer.” I was bored last night when I should have been either weight lifting or going to bed, and I happened across her blog. I was scrolling through to see if there was any “real” astronomy in there and came across her, “Venus Retrograde The Anatomy of a Retrograde” post from May 15, 2012.
Wow.
In the past when I’ve written about Ms. Nazon, I’ve made minor points about her grammar. It’s atrocious. Seriously. Anyone who is a professional (as Ms. Nazon seems to be considering that she now charges $400 to talk with her per hour) should have better grammar than she.
Throughout this post, I’m going to pick apart her three-paragraph “Venus Retrograde…” post. I’m going to be quoting verbatim a lot. Please keep in mind that these are copy-pastes and I’m not trying to make her look more ridiculous than she already is by altering her words.
Literally, the term “retrograde” means “to go against” or “to go backwards.” Throughout the day, objects in the sky appear to move from East to West. Throughout the year, the stars seem to move just a bit faster than the sun. This means that, relative to the stars, the sun appears to travel from West to East over the course of many days.
When planets also appear to move from West to East relative to the stars over many nights, they are traveling with the sun, and so are going “prograde.” When planets move from East to West relative to the stars over many nights, they are moving “retrograde” because it’s against the motion of the sun over many days/nights.
The why of why planets will go from prograde to retrograde and back again after many months is a story that took thousands of years to figure out and was one of the main lines of evidence for heliocentrism and against geocentrism.
I really don’t want to go too much into the “why this happens” part here as I think this is going to be a long post; instead, I’ll refer you to this short animation that I made that shows a line of observation from Earth, through Mars, projected onto the stars, and the path it draws. If you look at that, then keep in mind as a basic explanation, “It’s because we ‘catch up and pass’ a planet in its orbit,” it should make some sense.
“As your horoscope week begins the planet of Love, romance, and wealth, Venus goes retrograde until June 27th. Venus typically retrogrades every about every year or 18 months, depending on its transit.”
The first sentence is surprisingly correct with regards to when Venus returns to prograde motion. The second is generally correct with how often it switches, and I’m assuming that her term “transit” is an astrology term; it doesn’t mean anything astronomically considering that the next Venus transit across the sun isn’t until 2117.
“Everyone who studies astrology tries to understand the movements of the planets and pierce understand their transits through the signs. How we see them from our perspective here on planet Earth, is sometimes quite different from what is actually happening, our perspective is skewed here on earth.”
This is Nazon’s way of setting up for why retrogrades are important, and apparently that importance helps us to “pierce understand” them.
“Retrogrades are special times when the planets appear to us from our vantage point of Earth to be moving backwards. They aren’t really. Mercury will not be transiting backwards, nor will any of the other planets. They will only appear to be moving backwards due to its position in orbit and it’s relation to the Earth …”
So far, we’re still generally okay, though the English language has suffered a bit.
“… as it moves away from the planet Earth in its orbit.”
I thought at this point that she was sort of correct, and I was going to give her the benefit of the doubt. That was until I saw the next three sentences:
“The farther an object is from us the slower it appears to be moving, it’s that simple. An object really far away appears to be moving backwards. Space and time affect our perception.”
Alright, this first sentence is true IF the object is moving at the same speed. Otherwise, all bets are off. An airplane 5 miles above me is going to move faster than the bird 20 feet above me.
The second sentence makes absolutely no sense. No sense whatsoever. It seems as though she’s extrapolating a linear relationship that stuff moves far away so it moves slower, so if it moves really far it will eventually slow down and move backwards? Um, huh!?
“Science has proven that there is a difference in the influence of a planet when moving toward the Earth (or direct) and moving away from the Earth or retrograde.”
No. First off, “science” has never shown any influence whatsoever (astrology-wise) of other planets on Earth regardless of their position or movement in space. Since “science” has not done so, it also cannot show a difference between nothing and nothing for how that planet may be moving.
“This difference is called Red Shift.”
Cue George Takei: “Oh my.”
Ms. Nazon is confusing apparent motion across (as in “back-and-forth”) our sky with a real physical motion towards or away from us, which is red shift and blue shift. Read the link if you don’t know what these are, but suffice to say for the purposes of this post, these are nothing alike. They have nothing to do with each other whatsoever. What she basically said is, “The difference between a flute and a piccolo is tomato bisque.”
“When a planet is receding, or moving away it appears to be retrograde, the color of the light it gives off changes. It does in fact have a different measurable speed and different light spectrum. This is called Red Shift.”
As my animation example shows, Mars was moving prograde until its closest approach with Earth, at which point Earth “passed” it and Mars’ motion became retrograde. Earth was moving away from it for awhile and it was retrograde, and Earth continued to move away and it flipped to prograde. Not possible under Ms. Nazon’s misunderstanding.
I interpret these three sentences as Ms. Nazon’s misunderstanding of what’s going on and using the general astronomy terms in a “word salad,” going into overdrive. Now, she is technically correct when she says that there would be a measurable redshift as the relative velocities between Earth and another planet increase. That difference is minuscule, however, and you get a bigger difference in redshift/blueshift light from opposite limbs of the sun (since the sun rotates, the limb coming towards us is slightly blueshifted, the limb going away is slightly redshifted).
“When a planet is retrograde its influence is subnormal. Retrogrades makes the normal influence of any planet weak.”
This is just astrology-speak mumbo jumbo. I have no other comment.
“Venus retrograde produces red spectrum lines and its influence is the antithesis or the exact opposite of Venus direct, its influence is more like Mars. Normally Venus produces a violet light. When retrograde a red spectrum light like Mars.”
As I already explained above, apparent motion back-and-forth through the sky has nothing to do with its physical motion towards or away from us. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. גאָרנישט. 何も. 没什么. Inget. (Yay Google Translate!)
That said, every object in the solar system radiates every color of light, by definition of how radiation works. Planets radiate more in the infrared because they’re cooler than the sun. Planets also reflect light, and a lot of that is in the visible. Venus’ cloud layers are mostly made of carbon dioxide (CO2).
Being a molecule, carbon dioxide has a complicated emission/absorption spectrum, but it is heavy in the infrared (which is why it’s a greenhouse gas). What makes Venus appear yellow-whitish-orange is a sulfuric acid haze in the atmosphere. If Venus’ relative motion towards/away to/from Earth really caused it to have a significant red/blue shift, then everyone would notice this. ‘Cause, well, it would appear visibly redder or bluer. It doesn’t.
I’m really amazed at how some very basic observations that “everybody” knows or can make somehow manage to get by a “World Famous Celebrity Astrologer” such as Ms. Nazon who charges $100 to talk with her for 15 minutes.
“The give and take of Venus is undermined now and many will feel they have to do more or give more to receive love, recognition, or attention. Nothing comes easy under Venus retrograde and the concept of “what’s in it for me” is always prevalent.”
And we end with more astrology stuff.
I almost didn’t do a blog post about this, then I changed my mind. I haven’t ever really addressed the “word salad” idea with regards to pseudoscience claims on this blog, except perhaps with quantum mechanics.
Ms. Nazon’s blog (and other writings) is a good example of this idea: Take some science-sounding words, add a heaping spoonful of new age, whisk vigorously until foamy, and then pour on baking sheet. Bake at 250°F for 15 minutes until half-done, then chop up and post your half-baked ideas online.
First, this post is a bit of a show-off for my recent photography. That said, it is also a musing on one of the more bizarre claims out there that the sun and/or moon are no longer rising/setting where they’re “supposed” to.
So let’s get the first part over with first …
With two friends, I drove 480 miles south to just outside of Albuquerque, NM (Richard C. Hoagland territory!). We were in the path of full annularity, and we set up in a beautiful spot with no people around us and clear sight to the western horizon.
I took a long sequence of photos and created a few montages and even a movie. I’m only posting three of the montages (I don’t like the third one, but I’m posting it anyway). These are only 6% full size, and you can only get to it by clicking on the image to have it open in a new browser. The full-res versions are suitable for printing at 72″ wide at 300ppi … that’s a lot of pixels and brings my computer to a crawl when I open it.
Annular Solar Eclipse Montage, Type 0, Version 1.3 (click to embiggen)
Annular Solar Eclipse Montage, Type 2c, Version 1.3 (click to embiggen)
Annular Solar Eclipse Montage, Type 4, Version 1.1 (click to embiggen)
And here’s the movie:
I’m not going to go into image processing details here. If you’re interested, I posted a lengthy thread about it here that goes through all the gritty details.
I’ve not addressed this conspiracy before on this blog, but I have in my podcast, Episode #24, “Help! The Sun (or Moon) Is Moving!” The premise is, as I said before, that the sun and/or moon is no longer rising or setting or in the sky where it previously was, or where it’s “supposed” to be.
The answer to this is that it always shifts position though the cycle repeats annually. It shifts because Earth’s axis is constantly pointing towards the North Celestial Pole, so as Earth orbits around the sun over the course of a year, the angle the sun makes with the horizon changes. It rises and sets closer to your hemisphere’s pole during your hemisphere’s summer, and vice versa.
The implication by most conpsiracists that I’ve heard – if they have an implication other than generally “something’s happening that NASA’s covering up!” – is that we are in the midst of a geographic pole shift that THEY don’t want you to know about. Again, I’ve addressed pole shifts before (such as here or here).
“How is this relevant to eclipses?” you may ask.
Folks at NASA, as well as innumerable other people, have provided paths of past and future eclipses out to over 1000 years into the future. Both solar and lunar (1000 for lunar, 100 for solar from NASA).
And, at least since I’ve been using the site for the last decade, they’ve all been 100% accurate! The point is that this would not be possible at all if we were undergoing a pole shift. Even a tiny pole shift, where I’m defining “tiny” by, say, 1° which would not be noticeable to these people claiming the sun/moon is in the wrong place, would shift the path of solar eclipses by a non-trivial amount.
And yet, these eclipses continue to demonstrably and perhaps stubbornly be where they were predicted to be decades ago.
This is something that I like about science and get a great sense of “ah ha!” when I come across it: Conspiracists, pseudoscientists, and others who claim to be re-writing science do so in isolation. They do not realize – or they choose to ignore – what the implications would be for their claims outside of their one phenomenon.
In this case, if Earth were undergoing any sort of geographic pole shift, the annular solar eclipse that we witnessed last weekend would not have taken place where it had been predicted. A shift of 1° of the poles would have shifted the eclipse’s path by around 70 miles (110 km). If we were in a pole shift of more than around 0.5°, I would not have seen the moon completely within the sun’s disk from where I was in Albuquerque.
And it’s really as simple as that. Claims in science do not exist in isolation. You must carry them through and apply them to all other things that rely upon that data.
I just completed another round ’bout the Sun on Monday and spent the day sleeping in, eating doughnuts, and playing computer games. But, to those in the know, birthdays are a time to pause and reflect upon one of the more crazy Planet X ideas out there.
The lifespan of a fruit fly is about 1/12th of a year. The lifespan of a dog or cat is around 15-20ish years. The lifespan of a human is around 75ish years, though that has varied considerably over the past few hundred years and varies today based on gender, socioeconomic status, country, etc. … but we’ll go with 75 as a nice, round number. The lifespan of a bristlecone pine is in the thousands of years.
Implicit in that paragraph is that “year” means “Earth year,” or roughly 365.24219 days. That must mean if we lived on another planet, we’d live for more or less time ’cause the year’s different right?
As I said at the beginning, this is one of the more crazy claims. I can’t recall a guest specifically stating this as fact on Coast to Coast AM except to say specifically that the aliens (Anunaki) who supposedly came to Earth under Zecharia Sitchen’s ideas of Planet X (Nibiru) to make a slave race to mine gold (us!) lived for tens of thousands of years. They state that with fact.
But while a guest may not have gone the next step, I have often heard the host, George Noory, state unequivocally that the reason these aliens lived longer is because Nibiru has a 3600-(Earth)-year-long orbit … so they live 75 of their years, which is 270,000 of our years! So a fruit fly from Nibiru should live, instead of one Earth month, 300 Earth years!
Noory’s said some head-bangers in the past, some real doozies. But this one definitely ranks up there. If there’s a biologist out there, feel free to correct me, but I’m pretty sure that how long it takes Earth to go around the sun has absolutely nothing to do with how long something lives. You can look at the diversity of lifespans of different things on Earth to see that.
From my few biology classes over a decade ago (without saying what birthday I had on Monday …), we die because our cells can no longer maintain themselves and reproduce effectively/successfully. I think this has something to do with telomeres, but I’m sure people like Ray Kurzwell have a few other reasons why things die.
But suffice to say, it’s not because it take a certain length of time for us to go around the sun.
Um … to summarize: No, I would not be celebrating 3600 times as many Earth birthdays if I lived on the mythical planet Nibiru.
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