Curious about Planet X and alternative history

I am finding out about some very intriguing theories. They seem to circulate among people exploring or believing in the existence of the so called “Planet X” for which some believe is in a 3600 years long eliptical orbit around sun and which is actually coming to fly by Earth around year 2012. Now, whenever I hear that year I am immediately thrown into a skeptic mode. It reminds me of the whole Year 2000 craze and all of the doomsayers whose predictions somehow never seem to come to pass. Besides, how can anyone be so absolutely sure about whatever supposedly correct  prediction to actually pin it down so precisely into a single year?

That said, I’ll get to the point. I am still pretty new to the whole Planet X talk, but some of the things I found out tonight are still intriguing. For instance the idea that historical events described in the bible describe events which were at the same time viewed by other civilizations which did not include the authors of the bible, but their own observers and their own authors who described those same events from their own perspective. Furthermore, many of the supposedly magical and supernatural events are by them being described from a much more secular viewpoint, not always attributing them to a single christian god, but to.. technology and extra-terrestial phenomena.

These texts include those written by ancient egyptians, celts, sumerians etc. Somehow taking into account a much wider array of historical accounts without giving supremacy to any single one of them (like christians do with the bible) rings like a more rational way of exploring our ancient past.

That said, what some people end up concluding from these texts is quite fantastic and I do remain a skeptic by default, mind you. They are theorizing, for example, that Moses used alien technology to part the red sea or that according to sumerians, humans may have been genetically engineered by another advanced civilization.

Here is the thing now. While I find it hard to just believe in those incredible conclusions they seem much LESS incredible than the conclusion that god created everything, including us. I personally do not believe in that, but I do not necessarily leave out the possibility either (which is what makes me an agnostic or a weak atheist). I don’t even fully believe in the theory of evolution, especially the part about how it all begun (the big bang stuff). It’s about as incredible as saying god did it. Instead my point of view was always that we simply don’t know, or I simply don’t know how it happened, how we came to be and what is out there, so why go and jump to conclusions and then call them definite, whether your conclusion is the evolution or creationism?

So from that perspective, I am essentially putting myself in a position of an explorer who says “OK now, let’s see what is out there, are there any alternative explanations?”. And this is why I find these theories mentioned above so curious, especially considering they are so much closer to the secular and scientifically minded approach than most religious theories tend to be.

So I’ll probably continue gradually exploring them. I could rant on about what I think about the whole doomsday scenario some of these people are propagating, but maybe I’ll save it for another entry. Let’s just say that I am not prepared to accept it lightly, but AM at least curious enough to watch out for the news of that mysterious big planet beyond Pluto and whether it’s really coming our way. ;)

That much wont hurt. I do have a liking to astronomy and space exploration anyway.

Cheers

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11 Responses to “Curious about Planet X and alternative history”

  1. Dennis Wronka Says:

    July 20th, 2008 at 6:38 am

    I’ve heard about Planet X before, I think it even already has a name.
    Interesting is that the ancient civilizations did know one more planet than we do (leaving aside the mini-planets discovered over the recent years). It’s obvious from different documents from ancient times. I don’t remember if it was Egyptian and Sumerian, but Planet X was known before. But with so much of the ancient knowledge this must have been lost, probably when the library of Alexandria burned down. ;-)

    By the way, I do believe in the Big Bang. I think it’s a logic consequence when thinking about space.
    Our universe is expanding, which has been proven by Hubble early in the last century.
    If you go back in time this means a contraction. Some scientists used to believe that the universe contracted, matter avoid collision and know it’s expanding again.
    I think there is a big logic mistake. According to Einstein matter bends the space-time, which is the cause of the gravitational force.
    If now the universe contracts with all it’s matter in it the density of that matter gets higher, as the amount of matter stays the same, but the place where it can be distributed gets smaller.
    Thus, I am pretty convinced, the “gravitational dent in space-time” must be bigger. If “collections of matter” form these must attract each other in order to form a bigger heap of matter, which in turn then has bigger gravity through bigger mass.
    Continuing from here this means that all matter has to be existant in a spot with infinite mass density and gravity, a singularity.

  2. Hi, just having a look what you’re doing these days.

    So many different (and contradicting) events are supposed to happen in 2012 that it becomes reasonable again to guess nothing special will happen. Which is good, cause I wouldn’t want to miss the summer Olympics in London :) .

    2000 vs 2012 – 2000 actually made sense, and there indeed were a few computer bugs. Those were fixed in time, though, or at least failed to take civilization down

    A funny thing about claims made in old texts written by Celts, Egyptians and Sumerians is that said texts only seem to exist in the imagination of the people who write popular books about them – ’nuff said.

    Oh, and the big bang isn’t part of evolution theory. Evolution theory is about life, which obviously didn’t exist at the time of the big bang.

    Is the big bang incredible? Well, we know there is entropy, so it’s reasonable to assume the universe as a whole is moving from order to chaos. Then the question is, did the universe start in complete or partial order, or did it never start and does entropy sometimes reverse itself?
    Complete order would be the big bang.
    Partial order seems rather arbitrary to me.
    Reversing entropy is just weird, but what do we simple humans know?

    As for the credibility of “God did it”: that completely depends on the definitions of “God” and “it”.

  3. Hi Dennis,

    > I’ve heard about Planet X before, I think it even already has a name.

    Yep, they call it Nibiru.

    > But with so much of the ancient knowledge this must have been lost, probably when the library of Alexandria burned down.

    Indeed. That’s why it made sense to me when someone said we’re missing a rather big chunk of our history. So much of what was originally written is lost which could provide valuable context to what we do know. All the more reason to be skeptical about especially fantastic conclusions. This is also partly a reason I’ve never really been too interested in ancient history. It’s too easy to go wrong and too hard to prove just about anything. I’m more in favor of observing the modern recorded history, present and future.

    What makes what little we do have of ancient history more curious is when it starts (seemingly) fitting into a context of what we know about modern times, like modern understanding of the universe.

    > Continuing from here this means that all matter has to be existant in a spot with infinite mass density and gravity, a singularity.

    I see. Well, I wouldn’t write it off, but like many things of the kind we still don’t know quite enough to make definite conclusions. I mean, it is exactly big questions like these where not jumping to definite conclusions matters most. This theory may seem plausible at this time, but it may only take a few further discoveries to shake its foundations. What if space always was as is, infinite in both space and time, and what we think is expansion is actually something else? Even if there was a big bang, where did it happen? What is outside of our own universe then and how did that came to be?

    Hi Taco, :)

    > So many different (and contradicting) events are supposed to happen in 2012 that it becomes reasonable again to guess nothing special will happen.

    Indeed. The thing is.. when it comes to doom theories there usually isn’t all that much one can do about it. I mean, it’s almost a game of random luck. No matter how much you prepare yourself you still can’t guarantee anything. Besides, if the theory is that everyone or almost everyone will be eradicated.. yet there are many conflicting theories and at the same time many who believe nothing will happen at all that it becomes pointless to do anything you wouldn’t do anyway.

    Bottom line is. Just being yourself, doing what you love, working for what you believe in you can’t go wrong either way.

    > A funny thing about claims made in old texts written by Celts, Egyptians and Sumerians is that said texts only seem to exist in the imagination of the people who write popular books about them – ’nuff said.

    You mean there’s no evidence of them existing? Hmm.. what about bible? If it exists and has survived wouldn’t it make sense to assume that other ancient texts exist too? I don’t know..

    > Oh, and the big bang isn’t part of evolution theory. Evolution theory is about life, which obviously didn’t exist at the time of the big bang.

    Well, right. I guess it depends on ones definition (as in evolution could mean the evolution of galaxies, star systems etc… not just life). But if that’s a prevalent definition, I’m ok with it.

    > As for the credibility of “God did it”: that completely depends on the definitions of “God” and “it”.

    by “God” I usually refer to the christian one and by “it” I mean the whole universe including Earth and all original life on it, including us. Basically, the classic biblical story of creation.

    Cheers

  4. > A funny thing about claims made in old texts written by Celts, Egyptians and Sumerians is that said texts only seem to exist in the imagination of the people who write popular books about them – ’nuff said.

    Hi Taco, I agree partially. Of course there’s a lot of made up stuff. But I am talking about prints of glyphs that I have seen several times in different places that actually do show the sun with 10 planets around it. Of course that may also be some really elaborate joke, as with the Hitler-diaries some years back (although that was a bad joke, but well constructed). So, this is not totally lost from the worlds surface, it is just that not much is known.
    And I think it pretty much can be taken as a hard fact that over the course of the centuries and millenia a lot of information has been lost.
    What about the Pyramids? The Sphinx? The methods how these have been built have never made it to modern times. And from what I remember (architecture isn’t my big field, I’m also more into space) they still didn’t really figure out how they did it (although I think I recall one quite reasonably explained way about the Pyramids, but not sure if that hasn’t been revoked or outdated again).
    What about Stonehenge? We are not even sure of its purpose…

    So, fact is that information has been lost along the way. That lots of people make up information and say it’s a couple of thousand years old doesn’t change anything about that.

    > Well, we know there is entropy, so it’s reasonable to assume the universe as a whole is moving from order to chaos. Then the question is, did the universe start in complete or partial order, or did it never start and does entropy sometimes reverse itself?

    Well, the second sentence of thermo-dynamics states that the overall amount of entropy can only grow. (Which lead me to explaining to my wife that her telling of me cleaning up the area about my PC is telling me to break the laws of Physics…)
    Thinking about this while writing it gives me the idea that something like a big crunch should be impossible, as this would return the universe to a state of uniformity, without any entropy.

    > Reversing entropy is just weird, but what do we simple humans know?Reversing entropy is just weird, but what do we simple humans know?

    As said, my wife wants me to reverse entropy all the time…

    > What if space always was as is, infinite in both space and time, and what we think is expansion is actually something else?
    What else should it be? I don’t think that stuff is just moving around in circles. The experiments Hubble did suggest that more or less everything is moving away from everything else, with a few exceptions, for example the Andromeda galaxy seems to be heading our way.

    > Even if there was a big bang, where did it happen? What is outside of our own universe then and how did that came to be?
    That’s a good question. And it is one question I also fail to answer. But maybe this is due to the limitation of the human mind, or maybe more because of what we are used to.
    Leaving aside, but just quickly mentioning it here, a theory about a multiverse which I have recently read about, I see the following problem:
    We are used to that something (whatever this may be, it can be you and me, it can be Earth or actually anything else) has to be contained in something (we are on Earth, which is in our solar-system, which is in the Milky Way, which is in the universe).
    Now we can trace this from the tinyest thing (maybe a particle of dirt in the water that is inside a fish that has just been eaten by another fish [and so on]) to the universe. But there we fail.
    What is outside the universe?
    Now let’s come back to the multi-verse, which might exist and then would be the “container” for our universe, along with others.
    Wouldn’t the question then simply just go to the next bigger scale? What is outside the multi-verse? And what is outside of that and so on and on and on.

    But maybe nothing needs to be outside. Sure, this is the point where we people have a big problem, as the way we know it is that there’s always something on the outside.

    And then again, when there is nothing outside, how can the universe grow? Shouldn’t there be some “empty space” which could be filled by the expanding universe?

    I guess these are questions which will never be answered, or at least not within our lifetime. But these are interesting questions, and I like to think about this kind of stuff, which I guess you can see from what I am writing here. ;-)

    By the way, getting back to the original topic (and btw, thanks for reminding me of the name of Planet X, when I read it I remembered reading about it), a really cool movie referencing the fact that our solar-system does not only contain 9 planets is K-Pax. The movie itself isn’t really what you would call scientifically interesting, but it is somehow funny and it’s a really good and interesting movie. (I should watch it again some time.)

  5. > What else should it be? I don’t think that stuff is just moving around in circles. The experiments Hubble did suggest that more or less everything is moving away from everything else, with a few exceptions, for example the Andromeda galaxy seems to be heading our way.

    Well, that’s one interesting exception. :P Maybe the stuff is moving apart in our own solar system or our own galaxy whereas something entirely else is happening elsewhere. It may be just a local phenomenon. Not any one single thing necessarily happens everywhere. The universe might be much more chaotic than that. But we can, of course, only speculate.

    > But maybe nothing needs to be outside. Sure, this is the point where we people have a big problem, as the way we know it is that there’s always something on the outside.

    It may very well be a limitation of the human mind at this point. Too many people are still having trouble grasping much more basic paradigms of social organization, let alone capable of grasping so much more fundamental alternative paradigms of thinking.

    But I’d like to think we keep evolving and will indeed come to understand more.

    In a sense, by that time, it doesn’t even matter as much as what is actually happening right here on Earth, around it, in our solar system and at best our own galaxy.

    > By the way, getting back to the original topic (and btw, thanks for reminding me of the name of Planet X, when I read it I remembered reading about it), a really cool movie referencing the fact that our solar-system does not only contain 9 planets is K-Pax.

    I actually watched it a long while ago and yes it was quite interesting. Maybe I should watch it again too. :)

    Cheers

  6. Some people predict good things will happen in 2012, most notably humanity reaching a new level of awareness. In any case, I think that at the end of 2011 I’ll make myself a tshirt with the number 2013 on it, just to annoy the prophets of doom.

    Asking what is outside the universe is just like asking what was before it, or what will be after it: the question doesn’t make sense. All of spacetime is within the universe, there is no “outside” space or “before” time. Of course there might be other universes that have spacetime, but their positions in space and time in relation to our universe are undefined.

    If there is nothing outside space, how can space grow? Well, what is there getting in the way of it? :P .
    It might be helpful to think of an ant sitting on a balloon that is being blown up. The ant thinks the balloon is a 2D surface, and is confused about how it could grow when there is no possibility to leave the surface.

    So did God create the universe? “To create” is a verb, use of a verb implies time, and anything happening in the timeline and therefore spacetime of our universe happens within our universe. That puts God within our universe, which means God also created Himself, which then means that the universe came to be by itself (with God being the first part of it). But if the universe came to be by itself either way… what’s the point of saying God did it?

    So, if we insist on believing in the Abrahamic God, He must be something we on the most fundamental level cannot understand. Him being a “being” and “creating” and even “existing” should be considered as metaphors then.

    And now for some amusing facts:

    - Most scholars think Nibiru in Sumerian and Babylonian astrology is Jupiter

    - The three facts mentioned here: http://www.michaelsheiser.com/va_243%20page.htm
    (The Sumerians and Babylonians knew only five planets, the “sun” on the “sun with planets” tablet matches the “star” pattern rather than the “sun” pattern, and the tablet isn’t about astrology anyway)

    Is there a planet X at all? Well, there are a lot of big things orbiting the sun, such as Eris: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_%28dwarf_planet%29
    So why not… but there isn’t a snowflakes chance in hell of any of those colliding with earth.

    Oh, and I did see K-Pax too, I liked it :) .

  7. > Asking what is outside the universe is just like asking what was before it, or what will be after it: the question doesn’t make sense. All of spacetime is within the universe, there is no “outside” space or “before” time.

    Good point. It seems easy to forget that time and space aren’t actually separate. I like your explanations based on that further on.

    > – Most scholars think Nibiru in Sumerian and Babylonian astrology is Jupiter

    I’ve seen that mentioned on some NASA Q&A’s on the subject.

    > – The three facts mentioned here

    Oh well, that pretty much blows up much of the theory, at least as far as its sources are concerned. :P

    > So why not… but there isn’t a snowflakes chance in hell of any of those colliding with earth.

    I certainly hope so, and actually I believe it. The bit of uncertainty is in objects we don’t know about yet and so whose course we didn’t actually determine yet.

    Perhaps the most plausible scenario of doom yet is getting hit by an asteroid either because we didn’t see it coming (which I doubt) or we did, but failed to distract it from its course in time (which is what scientists are working on). Thing is, we’ve already been hit before (for example, the Arizona crater and the Tunguska event) and our moon is full of scars too, so it’s only logical to assume we *may* get hit again at some point.

    Apparently, we’ll come dangerously close in 2029 (and these appear to be valid scientific calculation): http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/13may_2004mn4.htm

    Luckily, that’s gonna be one hell of a show. I remember watching Hale Bopp comet in 1997 and it was pretty cool, but the 2029 one will be much more amazing. I’ll be “only” 44 then. :)

    Cheers

  8. [...] watched and some texts read, a couple of blog entries and a little discussion we’re having beneath one of them on the topic of ancient texts, Planet X and extraordinary 2012 events I am taking the following out [...]

  9. Taco, I like your balloon-analogy. Actually I was thinking about using this too, as it also is used in the Hawking-books. Also it’s the only model which would explain that everything is moving away from everything else. Otherwise, for everything to be moving away from us we would pretty much need to be the center of the universe, which in my opinion would be quite ridiculous…
    Btw, @libervisco, this movement has been observed on a grander scale than for only our own galaxy. The measurements done by Hubble were done on other galaxies, not on objects within our own galaxy.

    Now following the thought that we are projections on the surface of a balloon we get to the following (similarly nonsensic questions):
    - When we look up, shouldn’t we see something that surrounds the balloon? We are on Earth, which slightly resembles a balloon. When we look up, we see space, which surrounds Earth.
    - If all that is “inside” the universe actually is on the surface of a balloon/bubble, then what is inside this bubble?

    I know that also these questions do not make much sense, just like the question about what is outside the universe or what was before time and space started to exist.

    As I said before, I think the big problem is that we are pretty limited in our imagination and too used to the world we observe, that there’s always something around, or something inside (like air in the balloon).

    But I have to say I am quite happy both about this discussion (although we clearly have different POVs on this, or maybe because of that) and that all of us liked K-Pax.

  10. - When we look up, shouldn’t we see something that surrounds the balloon? We are on Earth, which slightly resembles a balloon. When we look up, we see space, which surrounds Earth.
    - If all that is “inside” the universe actually is on the surface of a balloon/bubble, then what is inside this bubble?

    The difference between the balloon and the universe is that the balloon is an apparent 2d surface, whereas the universe is 3d.

    So what is the air inside the balloon? I guess that might be time?

  11. Very nice. Thanks for this.

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