<3 the internet and ease of access to misinformation
of course something will happen, as something happens every day. Earth calendars are also based on relative positions of the earth, the moon, the planets and the sun, but geocentricism and heliocentricism are theories that were abandoned years ago.

i'm going to seem like the pedant i am now...


It marks the end of one era and the beginning of another. the calender simply continues.
our week runs on a similar idea - every sunday our week 'runs out'.


i don't know where to start on this one lol

the sun will be where it has been for the last 6 billion years - occupying its position about 2 thirds of the way out on a spiral arm of the milky way. it, together with about 200 billion other stars, are slowly revolving around its centre (it takes 226 million years to make one revolution around the galaxy).

for the sun to be between the milky way and anything else it would have to make a very loooooong journey to leave the milky way first. to give you a sense of the distances, the milky way is estimated to be a mind boggling 6,000 billion miles, or 100,000 light-years in diameter!



this also means that it would take a very looooong time for it to get to the centre of the milky way.
this, as well as the fact that the centre is occupied by a super massive black hole which would consume our sun like a whale wolfs down plankton, leads me to to question the knowledge of the 'astronomers' you mention!

i really recommend you watch the episode of the latest steven hawkings' documentary series 'into the univese' called 'the story of everything' - i have a feeling you'll like it. it's clear, and has the best graphics i've ever seen to illustrate the theories of the formation of the universe.
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5528824 ... y.of.Every
or hd version
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5531198 ... y.of.Every

oh, and there's no 'galactic equinox' by the way - this was an idea dreamt up by astrologers, but there is a galactic plane, which the sun intersects with quite happily, with no ill effects.


solar flares are produced by the sun all the time!
i think you mean sunspots - as you rightly say, these are more numerous every 11-14 years


scarily, there are loads of asteroids bigger than the ones that have impacted on the earth in its history.
the one responsible for the Cretaceaous-Tertiary boundary mass extinction (which is what led to the disappearance of half of all life forms on Earth, including the dinosaurs) is estimated to have been only 10 km across.
interestingly, there have been 5 mass extinctions in the history of life on earth - the dinosaur one just seems to grab all the headlines.
more info here:
http://www.lhup.edu/smarvel/Seminar/FAL ... ebpage.htm

it's actually not as simple as 'an asteroid hit earth - the dinosaurs died'. there was a long gradual dying out, due to lack of food, competition for resources, changes in the atmosphere, etc...


not my quote, but it summarizes what i want to say - "There is a tremendous amount of trash on the internet. If you seek it you will find it. If a person is going to surf, it would be wise to display a healthy dose of reason, common sense, and skepticism. It would be foolish to believe everything you see or read without first attempting to research and verify the claims."


me too!

please don't take my comments in the wrong way. i'm not trying to rip into you personally - it's just you've been lead up the garden path a bit by some misinformed people on your internet wanderings.
i've been reading and discussing this stuff with people for years now. it just annoys me how much downright nonsense there is in the internet connected with all this.

the reality of the universe is is far more wondrous than the fantasies and bullshit invented by the new agers!
every atom in your body was once once part of a star for instance...
the nearer you are to a massive object, the slower time runs....

there are also probably more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe, which represent only a minuscule fraction of the galaxies in the entire Universe. each one contains hundreds of billions of stars. for this reason cosmologists think it's very likely that life exists in many places in the universe - it's just that the distances between stars are so immense it makes communication a bit problematic. what we see of distant stars is light that has taken hundreds of thousands of years to reach us!

the fact that the universe exists, that life evolved, and that we can comprehend it all is what i find truly remarkable.




now THESE are 2 things i'd like to see!

Nice reply jugo, I've pushed the reply button quite often on this topic, starting to type and then decide not to reply cos it would take me a while and not sure I would get the wanted result.

What you posted there, is pretty the much the same I would have typed ^^

I haven't seen the stephen hawking's documentary, but I've read his book 'the universe' which I would recommend to anyone who wants to know more about our universe.

And yes the internet is full of bullshit. If you'd wish to improve your ways of dealing with it: http://www.skepdic.com/ is a very good website, dealing with a great variation of this crap.

cheers man - i was exactly the same, but the 'sun moving to the centre of the galaxy' bit got me going.
once i'd started it just all kinda flooded out

i have a feeling there'd be nothing new for you in the hawking documentary (it's aimed at the uninitiated), but the graphics used for showing the cosmos, and the formation of our solar system are really well done.
plus you get a great visualisation of a super massive black hole, and a 'zoom shot' from the earth out to the cosmos. oh, and another one of the creation of the universe for good measure lol

here's the first 10 minutes to give you the idea

still not sure about the narrator, and getting hawking to say 'check it out' seems a bit cheesy, but hey - they've done a great job!
because it's youtube the quality's crappy, it really is worth downing the hd version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8fI8wdvteU

excellent video jugo!

i like the science part of anything really, but not such a huge fan of the religious background; they often conflict too much, and if you were to compare them both, they contradict each other.

didnt really understand bout the whole Doppler Shifting idea, but i'll look into it

well I'm an ancient maya. would you trust me if I offered you milk?

Damn, i hope the milk aint as old as you then!

It's just the end of the calendar they made like others have said. I love watching shows about the universe but I have to remind my son what we're seeing are just computer graphics based on pictures and what we're hearing are just theories. The "facts" I read and marveled at in books when I was a kid have all changed. Just as these will change. Our understanding of the universe will continue to grow but we will never know the full extent of everything.