Astro Fact: The End Of The World

     In the merging of my space activities, astro facts have made the jump into this blog, for those unfamiliar they are little blurbs on basic and cool astronomy information. They are meant to inform and maybe stir some questions of your own all the while increasing your astronomy terminology.
     So here we go, your daily astronomy fact:

     Quite simply the world is not going to end in 2012, I can say this with confidence, nothing like the following picture is going to happen at the end of next year

cool, yes, realistic, hardly

     Doomsday prophecies come along every couple of years and up until now, NONE OF THEM HAVE HAPPENED, look around you, do you see the world, if yes, then doomsday has not happened, recently at least. Every hundred million years or so a large asteroid finds itself on collision course with Earth, but still none of these has ended life entirely.
     So what else do people harp on as a world ender? I have heard several people claim that a magnetic pole reversal will end the world. As a geologist I can say, yes, the poles do reverse, and they might be in the process of doing it now, on the other hand, this happens all the time, around every 700,000 years or so, plus while it may disrupt your compass, we live in an era of GPS and those will hardly be affected.
     Maybe yes, a solar flare coupled with a thinning protective layer could do us some damage, it has been observed that flares can damage electrical infrastructure and that was back in the mid 1800's, one like that could have some serious side effects these days, but nothing we couldn't get over. Same goes for any variety of other sun or magnetic based troubles.
     Finally, there is always talk of such shady names as Nemesis, but these are nothing other than bizarre musings that may be true, but probably aren't.

May The Stars Shine Brightly In Your Skies (well beyond Dec. 21 2012)

thanks to everybody who has pointed these out including my radio team at MIR