Expert: Steve Nelson - 7/1/2009

Question
I read an article stating that the alignment of the earth, moon and sun on the 2012 solstice and the peak of solar flares and sunspot activity could have a bad effect on earth.  so my question is could any type of gravitational effect of the alignment make us more suseptable to the suns peaking activity?

Answer
Alignment of arbitrary orbit planes?

We actually came closer to "alignment" in 1998 than we will in 2012 by a good bit.  This type of crackpot isn't even scientific, they just note a coincidence between a date and the end of the Mayan calendar and came up with many different doomsday theories.  

This is a bit like the people who thought the Large Hadron Collider in Europe would create micro black holes and destroy the Earth, when we know that cosmic rays (many of which are high-energy protons just like the LHC uses) of much higher energy hit the Earth every single day...and yet here we are, not destroyed.  Or the very real y2k problem, due to everyone working to reprogram their computers we all experienced little to no difficulty.  The standard doomsday theory is engrossing and gripping, but when you think about almost all of them there's way less logic in doomsday theories than more boring theories that suggest we'll all get up on the 22nd of December 2012 and go to work, go shopping, do laundry...not exciting but the truth.  There's also no physical mechanism by which "gravitational alignment" will affect sunspots and solar flares.  The Sun is much larger than the Earth and we're very far away, we have almost no effect on it.  Also, Jupiter exerts over 10x the gravitational force on the Sun than our planet does, so why wouldn't its orbit be more important?  See?  No reason to believe anything about this myth. If you google it you'll find a zillion "survive 2012" websites, but absolutely nothing with any good science.