Opinions requested

[Aragorn]

With respect Aragorn, how can you be certain?

I come from a scientific background training — mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and geology at the middle and high school levels, paramedical sciences and computer sciences at the college level, and several eclectic disciplines at the personal level — and I am very familiar with the phenomenon of optical refraction by the atmosphere. Besides, if that second sun were actually real, then it would look very different, and — as I've already written in an earlier post to this thread — it would also be visible from everywhere on Earth, and not just every once in a while in only a very limited number of locations.

YouTube is full of people who see things that aren't there, and who misconstrue perfectly rationally explicable phenomena out of some superstitious belief or an addiction to fear porn — and please note that I'm not talking about yourself here. But such people exist in great abundance — we've had some of those among our members here in the past — and all they do is muddy the waters and spread more fear and confusion. They're scaremongers, trapped in their own addiction to drama and spectacle.

By the way, magnetic pole reversals have been occurring all over history — and if the statistics are correct, then we're actually already overdue for yet another one — but this has nothing to do with the gravitational effects of any nearby (and potentially rogue) celestial body. Magnetic pole reversal occurs because of electromagnetic influences only, such as a prolonged and repeated bombardment with coronal mass ejections from the sun, in combination with the fact that Earth's core is made of liquid metal, which behaves according to the principle of fluid dynamics and which thus changes the shape of Earth's magnetic field.

There is however another theory, which doesn't have anything to do with the magnetic poles, but which states that the geographical north pole and south pole could reverse. In other words, according to this theory, Earth's crust has moved all around the planet over time, and it would have moved by 20'000 km — because that's half the circumference of Earth.

Now, Earth's crust does indeed move a bit here and there — that's what tectonic activity is all about — because in the end, that crust is floating on top of a molten core and it isn't exactly anchored down anywhere. But I doubt that it would move over any significant distances anytime soon, given that Earth isn't perfectly spherical — this in itself is a consequence of the perpetual spin of Earth along its (slightly offset) vertical axis and because of the gravitational effects from the sun over a time span of four billion years — and thus there is a certain amount of mechanical friction holding the vast majority of the crust in place.

This whole scaremongering situation then becomes even more exacerbated because people conflate the above theory of a geographical pole reversal with the historically and geologically very real phenomenon of magnetic pole reversals. Very few people even realize that the magnetic poles do actually shift — I'm not talking of pole reversal now but of a shift in their location — all the time, and that Earth's magnetic poles also don't exactly align with their geographical counterparts.

But neither the magnetic poles nor the geographical poles are going to flip overnight. The magnetic poles take thousands of years of wandering before they can be considered reversed, and if the Earth's geographical poles were to suddenly flip, then all life on the planet would be instantly wiped out because of the enormous shock wave. Every volcano in the world would suddenly erupt, and the whole planet would be flooded by tsunamis the size of a decent mountain.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that every member of society should be trained as a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon — or alternatively, as a rocket surgeon and a brain scientist, if you will — but it is really a crying shame that so little attention is given to a proper scientific education in schools. But then again, schools are intended to prepare the upcoming generation of adults for the labor market, and according to the offer and demand of that very labor market.

And of course, kids are also righteously being indoctrinated with political and religious propaganda from the earliest age on, and then they continue to be indoctrinated by that very same propaganda in adult life through the mainstream media. It's not just a crying shame, it's ludicrous. But then again, I guess that's what you get when society is being led by certifiable idiots, criminals and sociopaths.

[ArtyCarl]

I am, and have been for many years, an amateur astronomer and have owned a variety of telescopes of various sizes.

You have to realise that the world has thousands of amateurs watching the skies and anything, and I mean anything, unusual will be noted and reported long long before anything would become visible to the naked eye in our skies.

I do not discount a planetoid on an elliptical orbit making rare returns but as Modwiz said in an earlier post, the perturbations on other planetary bodies of any object of sufficient size would be obvious for many many years beforehand. These things do not pop up overnight.