End of Days!

[Michael Alexander]

Was watching the new found Nostradamus documentary on discovery the other night.... according to a few experts..... Life on earth as we know it will end sometime in 2012...... something catastrophic is going to happen..... I thought ...YAWN!  Blah blah! another nutter...however it made me think twice when it turned out that the year 2012 is also mentioned in the Mayan calendar and some other historical text as the end of days.....  Just hope that the rugby season concludes before the end of days happens.... Go Cheetahs!~  (the golden idols we all worship)   

[Florrie van Zyl (Muir)]

According to the Mayan calendar, supposed to be 21 Dec 2012, but I will believe it when I see it. There  are always doomsayers predicting the end of the world and it never happens. If it does, I am happy to go, just as long as my kids don't suffer in the process.

[Dalene Steenkamp (Coetzee)]

If it does happen, then there is nothing that anybody can do about it, so why the heck worry about it.  Old Nostradamus could have been wrong in his calculations and it could happen tonight or tomorrow or next week  -  I am of mind that my body can only truly die just once, no matter what the cause.  People around us die every day -  for them it is the end of this here world....    What your believes about the afterlife is, is mainly what causes the most worries with people  ...   each to his/her own in that regard.  I for sure am not going to sit around watching the skies or the oceans till then to see what may happen to our mother earth and all her stalkers  -  no, I want to live every day that is granted to me to the fullest.

[Michael Alexander]

21st of December you say......uhm!  I just hope the SPringboks have finished playing all their overseas tour games by then....

[Diana Rudd (Boehme)]

The "KING PROTEA'S" Michael.......hier kom die protea's, hier kom die proteas  ah la la la ah la la la.

[Michael Alexander]

It just does'nt sound right......   Turkey   

[Ricky Barron (RIP)]

Michael, while watching an interview on this topic the other morning, I thought of how you might have reacted had you been watching! Some pseudo intellectual was suggesting that the colours of the Springbok on the jersey should be those of the national flag; "Why was it ORANGE?" was what worried him most! (I was watching TV2).

[Michael Alexander]

Saw a letter sent into the Namibian Newspaper this week, wantinf to know why nobody else was worried about End Of Days....

Here;s a link to more about 2012 and the end of days... for those of you who might be interested..

http://www.2012endofdays.org/general/Predictions-for-2012.php

[SandyB]

Agree with Dalene ..  whatever happens , its beyond our control , for now  we just live our lives to the fullest ... each disaster we watch on the news  is a  universe event .. one day we watching  a disaster somewhere on the globe with loss  of life ,  the surviviors picking up the pieces  ... tomorrow  somebody could be watching it play  out with us .and  we have to be strong enough to pick up the pieces ,,,

[Michael Alexander]

End of days is around the corner..... we know that the earth has been struck a number of times by asteroids and the likes thereof.....

So what if the Mayans are right, what if the asteroids are heading back to this part of our solar system .... after all the Mayans were experts in astronomy....

here is an article that excited the astrological world.... an asteroid the size of the pacific ocean crashed into the southern part of jupiter......

Are we next? The solar eclipse that occured in asia yesterday, also was known by ancient folklore as a sign that there is great change on the way.....

" Astronomers were scrambling to get big telescopes turned to Jupiter on Tuesday to observe the remains of what looks like the biggest smashup in the solar system since fragments of the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into the planet 15 years ago.

Something — probably a small comet — smacked into Jupiter on Sunday, leaving a bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean near its south pole. Just after midnight, Australian time, Jupiter came into view in the eyepiece of Anthony Wesley, an amateur astronomer in Murrumbateman, Australia. The planet was bearing a black eye spookily similar to the ones left in 1994.

"This was a big event," said Leigh Fletcher of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA lab technician in Pasadena, Calif. "In the inner solar system it would have been a disaster."

Wesley, a 44-year-old computer programmer from the village north of Canberra, made the discovery "using his backyard 14.5-inch reflecting telescope," according to the Sydney Morning Herald. (For the record, 14.5 inches is the diameter of the telescope's mirror inside. His "back yard" telescope is taller than he is.) The paper explained: "Wesley, who has been keen on astronomy since he was a child, said telescopes and other astronomy equipment were so inexpensive now that the hobby had become a viable pastime for just about anybody. His own equipment cost about $10,000."

Glenn Orton, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said, "It could be the impact of a comet, but we don't know for sure yet."

Astronomers admit they might never know for sure. "It's like throwing a stone on the pond," Fletcher said. "You see the splash, but lose the stone. It's the splash we can study."

Fletcher said that he and his colleagues were frantically writing proposals for telescope time. Among the telescopes they have recruited is the Hubble Space Telescope, making its early return to the fray after a successful repair mission by astronauts this summer.

The discovery began as a routine night-gazing exercise. Wesley pointed his new telescope to the cosmos and started snapping images.

Conditions weren't ideal and when the sky got murkier, Wesley almost quit.

Instead, he took a half-hour break to watch sports on TV. When he peered back into the telescope, he noticed a curious black spot on Jupiter.

Was it a moon or a shadow? Can't be, he thought.

Wesley checked images that he took just two days earlier and found no sign of the spot.

Was Jupiter struck by something?

"I had no real idea, and the odds on that happening were so small as to be laughable, but I was really struggling to see any other possibility given the location of the mark," he wrote in an online posting. "If it really was an impact mark, then I had to start telling people, and quickly."

Wesley fired off an e-mail to a group of amateur and professional astronomers, among them Fletcher and Orton, who was preparing to look at Jupiter using NASA's infrared telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. He confirmed Wesley's finding.

Images released by NASA show the impact occurred near the south pole and caused debris to fly into the upper atmosphere. The scar is pale-looking from the reflection of debris.

Jupiter is 1,400 times larger than Earth. At its closest, Jupiter is about 390 million miles from Earth, four times as far as the Earth is from the sun.

Franck Marchis, an astronomer at the SETI Institute and the University of California at Berkeley, said the shape of the debris splash as revealed in Keck II telescope images suggested that whatever hit Jupiter might have been pulled apart by tidal forces from the planet's huge gravity before it hit. In an e-mail message, he said humans should be thankful for Jupiter.

"The solar system would have been a very dangerous place if we did not have Jupiter," he wrote. "We should thank our giant planet for suffering for us. Its strong gravitational field is acting like a shield protecting us from comets coming from the outer part of the solar system."

[Michael Alexander]

The image...

[Michael Alexander]

Sorry that I am harping on about this, it fascinates me..... here is another interesting link:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/721500/posts

[georgswa (Georg Ruf) (RIP)]

Interesting and frightening.....

[Bertie Horak]

Amazing.  But like the last line in the article reads - we can thank Jupiter.  It is so much bigger than our little marble, that most threats from outer space would rather be pulled towards it, and save our buts in the process.

[SandyB]

Well  it will happen one day ... its happened before ,, sometimes not enough to shape the destiny of planet earth but in the turbulent times of  universe creation lots happened ,, all  that is needed is a shift in  the  workings of the universe and we could find ourselves in the path of  lots of big chunks of rock ...  again I say .. we see disasters play  out ... next time around it can be us ...