Struck up a conversation with my son at dinner this evening, asked him if he heard they found water on the moon today. He said it didn't surprise him at all. He said there is ice all over in space. He said he has been following all the hype and theories about the coming of 2012. Of course we all know the movie 2012 is mostly "Hollywood", but there is actual scientific proof that things are changing all around us and the earths axis are moving. Fear is setting in, some people are trying to prepare by building shelters underground. He bought up one of the theories was our government was going to set up station on the moon to prepare for 2012. I told him it is strange to me that we are now going back to the moon after all these years. He agreed. Back in the late 90's we went to space camp with his "Young Astronaut's" group. While we were there, NASA's, Marshall Space Flight Center was having an open house. We were told by employees that the USA would never travel to the moon again. I guess none of us know what tomorrow will actually bring.
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11 years ago
First, 2012 is ALL Hollywood. The "polar shift" nonsense is based on a confusion of two interesting facts: first, the axis of rotation of the earth DOES wobble a bit, and second, the MAGNETIC poles do periodically reverse over geologic time (that is a main bit of evidence for plate tectonics, measuring the spread of the Atlantic Ocean floor by measuring the magnetic "stripes" locked into the rock). However, a magnetic shift has nothing to do with the axis of rotation "reversing." It would require enormous catastrophic energies to change the axis (or direction) of rotation (and not movie catastrophic - I mean the entire planet melts into goo, splashes into space and then recombines into a different planet over the next 300 million years). The impact that did this the last time, the one that tilted the Earth's axis of rotation by its current 23.5 degrees, was an impact so devastating that the remains of it can be seen today - the Moon! That impact occurred very early in the Earth's history - maybe just a few hundred million years into the solar system's organization - and the body that struck the Earth was the size of Mars. There are no potential impactors of near that size left in the solar system; they have all been "eaten up" by the big planets, captured as moons, or been flung away by unstable orbits.
ReplyDeleteThis is just one area where superstitious nonsense such as 2012 captures the popular imagination, but the real science is way cooler, if less scary. Your son should take the claims being made about 2012 as a challenge, and he can research each one for its scientific underpinnings, and he'll learn a lot about how the universe is put together in the process.
No, worrying about the end of the world in 2012 is literally like being afraid that the world will end at midnight Dec 31, because your wall calendar doesn't have any days after that.
Relax, get some popcorn, watch the movie if you want, but don't lose any sleep.
Oh, yeah. Forgot to mention that the main reason we are interested in water on the Moon is that if we want to send manned missions to Mars, it makes a lot more sense to launch them from a staging area on the Moon, especially if we can extract water and other supplies there rather than have to lift them out of Earth's gravity well.
ReplyDeleteAgain, the science is cool.The superstition is goofy.