[vox_mundi]

Since we don't have enough Apocalypse threads ...

Apocalypse when? Infographic guide to Doomsday threats



Apocalypse When? Data

Is a Death Star Coming at Us? Study Says It's Possible, but Don't Panic

A new study analyzing the motions of more than 50,000 stars has focused attention on one orange dwarf star known as HIP 85605 that has a chance of disrupting our solar system and sending a hail of killer comets our way.

Such threats, known as Nemesis or Death Star scenarios, have been the stuff of science fiction and serious astronomical studies for decades. But the latest study has reignited interest because it targets a particular star during a particular time frame, between 240,000 and 470,000 years from now.

The latest study was conducted by Coryn Bailer-Jones of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, and accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. He used Monte Carlo statistical simulations to analyze the galactic orbits of tens of thousands of stars tracked by the European Space Agency's Hipparchos satellite. Bailer-Jones wanted to find out how many of those stars could conceivably come within 2 parsecs (6.5 light-years) of our own sun.

Out of those 42 alien suns, HIP 85605 appeared likely to have the closest encounter. Today the star is 4.9 parsecs (16 light-years) away, but hundreds of thousands of years from now, it's judged to have a 90 percent probability of passing through at a distance of 0.04 to 0.2 parsecs (767 billion to 3.8 trillion miles).

That may not sound all that close, but it's close enough to disrupt the vast repository of comets in the solar system's Oort Cloud, which is thought to extend about 0.5 parsecs (1.6 light-years) from the sun. "That would really tear it up, and I'm guessing you would have a pretty big comet shower, potentially pretty disastrous," Adrian Melott, a physicist at the University of Kansas, told NBC News.

Close encounters of the stellar kind

It would be 99.8% closer than the current closest star Proxima Centuri, and shine as bright as a full moon. Were talking Tataouine!

The apocalypse will be televised: CNN's mythical end of the world video is real

The video posted to a Gawker Media blog by a former network intern has been verified by the Guardian and numerous sources and was to be held ‘till end of world confirmed’


HFR (Hold For Release)

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[GHung]

Methane release in the next million years? I guess the methane didn't get the memo and jumped the gun.

[vox_mundi]

I was thinking the same thing, and I'm thinkin' the honeybees will probably last longer than a decade.

[Shaved Monkey]

Re Honey bees
Varroa destructor mite is on the edge of Australia the last place without it (possibly a place in Libya too).
Only a mater of time before a swarm infested from PNG jumps across via a container ship.

[ralfy]

It might be better to assume that several crises have been taking place for years, and that we face combinations of crises, with several amplifying others.

[Keith_McClary]

Peak topsoil,but no worry about peak oil?

[Quinny]

Rather like looking at the renewable solutions/options, I suppose apocalypse is all about scale and timescale.

PO is now! Maybe not apocalyptic in terms of end of Earth, but for a lot of individuals, economic collapse could cause individual extinctions.

[Ibon]

Our global dilemma isn't exactly rallying governments toward any concrete solutions but there certainly is more noise out there than say 10 years ago when the threats we talk about here were only considered by a fraction of society. Movies, blogospheres, media, books, conversations at the diner.... the space is getting crowded with this genre of societal collapse.