For planet X to cause earthquakes and floods and such, as the believers would claim, it has to be close enough to have a tidal effect, by having a significantly different pull on different parts of the earth. I did the math (please don't ask me to type it all in here ) and it works out that for a 5 earth mass planet to cause a tidal effect similar to the moon's, it would have to pass within 2.9 million km of earth. For a jupiter sized planet, 11.4 million km. For reference, the asteroid belt starts about 200 million km from here, the kuiper belt starts at 4.5 billion km and the oort cloud around 7.5 trillion km. So if there's something far enough out there that we can't see it yet, it sure as hell isn't causing any earthquakes.

Hi dirty_g (and everyone - it's been a very long time since my last post; just had to break my lurking hiatus with the response below).

Wow, that link you provided! Incredible! Let me quote the site's introduction:

Hooray! Finally we've found it - a unified theory of everything, the one scientists have been dreaming of for so long!

Bwahahahahaha!

No offence dirty_g, you did post that link with your tongue planted firmly in your cheek... didn't you?

Cheers.

__________________
Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. ...in the principles of evolution we have had our answer: of men elsewhere... there will be none, forever. - Loren Eisely, The Immense Journey, 1956.

So it was around some 200 years BC. Any evidence for that? It should have been easily visible to the naked eye, I imagine.

__________________
Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

That link was just some weird stuff with a load of maths on it which is far beyond me. I just saw flashy stuff and wanted people to take a look at it. How do we know it was apparently last ment to come by in 200BC? I thought it was 3600 years ago or something. Not that I beleive it anyway. But isnt this what the doom mongers are getting at? That its now another 3600 years.

The doomsayers say Planet X, with a period of some 3600 years, is due now (well, in 2003, but apparently there was a delay, due to fog or so). Of course, there is no fun (or moeny) to be made of predicting doom in 1200 years, it has to happen now.
Nibiru, on the other hand, the hypothetical planet some people think the gods come from (some alien race that fabricated humans and teached us a few things), as proposed by Sitchin and others (and whose main proponents around here are A.DIM and outcast), is supposed to have been around at 200 BC and more importantly around 3800 BC (the supposed dawn of civilization and so on).

__________________
Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

And lets not forget (with apologies to A.DIM, and Outcast) the biggest "Sitchin proponent" of all, HankSolo.

He hasn't posted here in quite a while...his last post was in this thread from the middle of last year...

I "kinda" miss him...

Sorry but FOG delayed a huge massive comet from getting here? Did it get lost on the way?? Maybe it hit an ice berg and sunk.......

Indeed.

This is actually one of the hangups I have with Sitchin's thesis; he only glances over any "evidence" of Nibiru's appearance at this time.

I'll have to check (I can't remember in which book he deals with it).

__________________
"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

Incidentally, http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc...orbitmath.html is the page with the BA's calculations for how far away Planet X might be at certain times before a close approach.

A.DIM said: Fram said: If it's supposed to cause cataclysms every time it nears Earth, then there'd be very clear records of this. 200BC is at the start of the Han Dynasty in China, at the height of the Hellenistic age of Greek history, and just after the end of the Second Punic War in Roman history. There are plenty of records from the time. Yet there are no such stories.

This would be beacuse it didnt come past then. In fact it probably never existed. Still even if it came past 3600 years ago and is due now do we not think that there would of been such a major affect on the Earth that humans may not of survived. Wouldnt these wonderful Mayans that seemed to know so much of astronomy of known of it. There would be some proper record of it. There isnt. The man that investigated Nibiru most of his life concluded it does not exist. (I will look for a link for this later as have work now) I doubt the planet exists. Considering it is jupiter sized in legend we should see it now if it was due

Never mind that there is no sign of its passing in 1600BC, if it was due now(ish). It didn't cause the collapse of the Shang dynasty, the Egyptian New Kingdom managed to appear less than 40 years after this catastrophic event, just to take two examples that spring to mind.

For me, at least, this is filed under "nonsense".

I hope you get that I was sarcastic there

__________________
Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

Anyone remember a poster called astera?

Seems to be MIA...

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Of course I did mate! just joining in!

Phew, as we slowly step away from the Panic buttons. `;]

__________________
"If they put me on a postage stamp tell them to use the young Bender"
--Bender

A body with a perihelion of 1AU and a period of 3600 years would have an aphelion of just under 469AU. I don't have the exact equations, but if it's 6 years from perihelion, then it would be ~16AU from the Sun (between the orbits of Saturn & Uranus).

__________________
"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

Am I missing something here, or are earthquakes (moonquakes, titan-quakes, mercury-quakes et al) produced more from tidal effects than from sheer gravitational pull? Seems to me the sun and the moon are influencing us plenty already. If something wants to tug us out of orbit from it's vantage somewhere in the Kuiper Belt it'd better be sun sized or bigger. If it wants to raise quakes, tho, the closer the better -- get that tidal gradient happening. I think I'd have an easier time with a small dense object passing EXTREMELY close (like, within lunar orbit), then imaging the effects described from distant jovian (not the least, because the distant jovian would make itself felt by the entire solar system).

__________________
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

That's correct. The kicker is that tidal effects vary in direct proportion to the mass, and by the inverse-cube of the distance. Thus a planet twice as far away as Jupiter (i.e. out around the orbit of Saturn) would have to have eight times the mass of Jupiter to have the same tiny tidal effect as that planet.

This is why the comparitively tiny Moon has three times as much tidal effect on the Earth as the far more massive Sun, 400 times further away.

Here is a good article on planetary tides.

__________________
"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

Is NASA article. Is part of coverup

__________________
So descredo no incrivel

Beauty I’d always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can’t say anymore.

-- Moody Blues

Yep, I worked out some distances in an earlier post in this thread (well I didn't show my work, but I'm pretty sure it's right. ) Something jupiter sized would have to pass 11.4 million km from earth (0.08AU) to have the same tidal effect as the moon.

So let's work the other way. Assume something of app. the mass of Mars, find the lowest possible albedo it could have, and figure how close that has to get before it raises quakes -- and how close it can be and still be missed (not "undetectable," just not detected YET).

Of course two major problems immediately raise their heads. First is that if it passes close enough to effect Earth tidally, it is passing close enough to perturb its own orbit considerable. So long to perfectly predictable thousand-year cycles. Other problem is, of course, unless the Earth is subject to premonitions or a geologic form of the shakes, it doesn't have an effect until it is (at a guess) a naked-eye object.

__________________
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."