Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

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PPPPPP
The Disaster That Wasn’t:
The Great Planetary
Alignment of 2000
O
n May 5, 2000, the Earth was not destroyed.
Perhaps you missed this, since you were busy living, eating,
going to work, brushing your teeth, etc. However, in the months
before May 5, 2000, a lot of people actually thought the Earth
would be destroyed. Instead of the usual culprits of nuclear war,
environmental disaster, or the Y2K bug, this particular brand of
global destruction was to have been wrought by the universe itself,
or, at least, our small part of it.
On that date, at 8:08 Greenwich Mean Time, an “alignment of
the planets” was supposed to have caused the Final Reckoning.
This Grand Alignment—also called the “Grand Conjunction” by
the prophesiers of doom to make it sound more mysterious and
somehow more millennial—would throw all manner of forces out
of balance, causing huge earthquakes, a possible shift in the Earth’s
poles, death, destruction, higher taxes, and so forth. Some even
thought it would cause the total annihilation of the Earth itself.
The tool of this disaster was to have been the combined gravity of
the planets in the solar system.
These people, obviously, were wrong. Some of them were honest
and simply mistaken, others were quacks and didn’t know any
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