AMID THE BALONEY, IGNORANCE IS CURABLE

I thought I’d use this extra Leap Day to remind us all about the 2012 silliness.

"I've been involved for a long time in debunking bad ideas about astronomy,” explained Phil Plait, an astronomer and astrophysicists during a lecture last November at the University of Texas-Pan American.

"They come up with these doomsday scenarios of giant planets that are going to swing by the Earth and kill us all and in 2012 the sun is going to align with a black hole in the center of the galaxy. These are invariably wrong and I can show that because we are still here."

Author of "Death from the Skies," Plait addressed the myths that surround real science such as astronomy.

Case in point, the film Armageddon. Crunching the numbers presented in the film for the size of the asteroid approaching earth and the necessary power to split it into halves, Plait found the following:

"It turns out using all these numbers, if you're a giant dork like I am, you can actually do the math and say how fast these two halves have to separate," Plait said. "I can figure out how big their bomb had to be. The bigger the bomb, the faster they spread apart. So I was able to calculate how much energy that bomb gave off in the movie, it turns out that bomb gave off more energy than the sun."

When the audience was allowed to ask questions, the “planetary alignment” of 2012 came up.

"2012 is 100 percent utter bologna and I'm being polite," he said. "There is nothing to it. The Mayan calendar does not end on 2012, this is what it's based on. It didn't end in 2012, it's just the next cycle. On December 21 at midnight, the earth doesn't get destroyed by something. The Mayan calendar is like an odometer in a car, it just gets turned over. So there's no reason to think the earth is going to end. "

As for the alignment of the planets, Plait again emphasized the "bologna" of it all. Planets, he explained, do not line up in a straight line and when they do line up the combined gravity is only two percent of the moon’s gravity.

"The moon orbits the earth in an ellipse, sometimes its closer, sometimes it’s further. And it turns out when it's closer to us, its gravity is more than two percent stronger. And that happens every month," Plait said. "So if the planetary alignment could wipe us out in 2012, the moon would be doing it every month."

At the end of his presentation, Plait pointed out that, unlike stupidity, "Ignorance is curable."