Quote Originally Posted by Spartiate View Post
O I think you're approaching this the wrong way. Most of the beliefs concerning 2012 are based on mythology (ancient or modern) rather than science (bad or good). There are no papers on these beliefs or agreed upon facts.

For this reason the origins and sources of these beliefs are very important, they're pretty much all we have to judge them. I'm not exactly sure what direction you want this thread to go, but if I understand Nina's position better we should just examine every 2012 belief in detail.
I'm not judging the origins of the beliefs. To find and post them is fine, but if they are wide-spread beliefs about what will happen, then where the beliefs started is not really all that important. What would be important is how closely the beliefs resemble things that are happening currently. What I'm not trying to do is hear "well there are no facts to support this belief, so apparently it's not true." That's all. If you are going to post information on the foundation of a belief in a way that helps us understand it enough to conclude whether or not something similar to the belief is happening now (or in the near future, if we come back to it later), then fire away. What I don't want to see is "well, such-and-such theory is just a whack job speculation, with no science behind it, so it's obviously not happening right now."

Quote Originally Posted by Spart
I already mentioned the pole shift and Nibiru beliefs so I'll start with those...

Most people who talk about pole shifts are confusing the term with geomagnetic reversal. A pole shift is a change of the geographical poles that the Earth rotates around. Changing this would indeed be very bad, but it's just not going to happen short of the Earth being struck by something the size of the Moon or a Jupiter-sized planet messing up our orbit. A geomagnetic reversal is a reversal of the Earth's north and south magnetic poles. This has happened many times in the past and hasn't been linked to any cataclysmic event. Geomagnetic reversals also aren't instantaneous, and certainly can't be pinned down (or predicted) to a specific date. The last event happened over the course of millennia.
Sloshing Inside Earth Changes Protective Magnetic Field | Space.com
Sometimes ya gotta dig a little deeper, Spart.

Now, I do understand that the geomagnetic reversal is not a cataclysmic event, in and of itself, but what kind of damage could a disabling of critical satellites do? Surely it could be enough for someone to interpret the damage as 'cataclysmic,' no? As far as how soon or far into the future it's going to happen - as the article said - the jury is still out. But sudden shifts - enough to damage satellites, at the least - can apparently happen over the course of a few months. So I think we can keep paying attention to it.

Quote Originally Posted by Spart
Now for the phantom planet Nibiru... it's kinda hard to quote sources disproving something that doesn't exist... It's safe to say that astronomer have found no reason to believe in its existence, either directly or through gravity and orbit anomalies. Anybody in North America, go outside right now (7:30 EST) and look west. The bright object just above the horizon is Jupiter, Jupiter is pretty far and that's how bright it is. With binoculars you can see its moons which are roughly the size of our Moon, anybody can do this from their porch. The idea that a planet-sized object has yet to be discovered in the vicinity of Earth is ridiculous with the number of eyes looking up. Also please, please consider the source. A woman claimed that aliens put an implant in her brain and are communicating with her. She first said that there would be a collision in 2003, and when that didn't happen she changed the date to 2012.
The most important part of the Nibiru thing is that the time-frame for the (obvious) hoax has already come and gone. The original theory didn't even have anything to do with 2012. It wasn't until after the deadline had come and gone that other people ran with the theory and began to attribute it to 2012. For that reason, alone, it's not worth talking about, because the deadline was supposed to have been for 2003.

You see how I did that without relying on the assumption that the woman was a crackpot?

Now. Since we got the obvious out of the way, lets play with the theory a little more, just for shits and giggles.

This was brought to my attention yesterday, as a matter of coincidence, while watching the news:
Giant Stealth Planet May Explain Rain of Comets from Solar System's Edge | Space.com

Not that I have any sort of belief that this is the phantom planet Nibiru, or that this planet is going to rocket further into our solar system and cause the apocalypse (or that it actually exists at all), but I find it interesting that the nickname for Nibiru - which is Planet X - came:

Quote Originally Posted by Wiki
from the hypothetical planet once searched for by astronomers to account for discrepancies in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.[17] In 1894, Bostonian astronomer Percival Lowell became convinced that the planets Uranus and Neptune had slight discrepancies in their orbits. He concluded that they must be being tugged by the gravity of another, more distant planet, which he called "Planet X".[20] However, nearly a century of searching failed to turn up any evidence for such an object (Pluto was initially believed to be Planet X, but was later determined to be too small).[21] In 1992, astronomer Myles Standish showed that the supposed discrepancies in the planets' orbits were illusory; the product of an overestimation of the mass of Neptune.[22] Today astronomers accept that Planet X does not exist.[23]

Nibiru collision - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
And yes, you will find that there are doubts in the scientific community, as to whether or not Tyche exists, which is fine. It's all speculation, at this point. But it's an interesting coincidence, if nothing else.