When Worlds Collide, the 1932 novel of planetary catastrophe, presented the most extreme extinction event imaginable. A pair of wandering planets enters the Solar System, one on collision course with the Earth, the other destined to be captured into orbit around the Sun. The doughty crew of an escaping rocket, on their way to a new life on the captured world, can only watch in horror as the Earth is destroyed.

Now we learn about a ‘when worlds collide’ scenario that seems to have involved two mature, Earth-sized planets in a distant Solar System. The system in question is BD+20 307, originally thought to be a single star with a massive, warm dust disk, but now known to be a close binary orbiting the common center of mass every 3.42 days. Both stars are similar to the Sun in mass, temperature and size. Moreover, the system seems to have an age comparable to our own Sun, and the sheer amount of dust at roughly Venus to Earth distance is quite interesting.

We would expect the dust particles to be pushed outward from the stars by stellar radiation. That they have not been indicates that the event that produced them must have occurred relatively recently, perhaps within the past few hundred thousand years. A planetary collision is inferred from the evidence of a disk with a million times more dust than is found around our own Sun, says Gregory Henry (Tennessee State University):

“The planetary collision in BD+20 307 was not observed directly but rather was inferred from the extraordinary quantity of dust particles that orbit the binary pair at about the same distance as Earth and Venus are from our sun. If this dust does indeed point to the presence of terrestrial planets, then this represents the first known example of planets of any mass in orbit around a close binary star.”

Once again we have a glimpse of how violent a planetary system can be, although destabilized planetary orbits in a mature system do seem to be rare. Henry goes on in this news release to discuss Jacques Laskar’s work in France and that of Gregory Laughlin (UCSC) and student Konstantin Batygin, whose models make it clear that planets even in our own system can go awry, with Mercury in particular prone to odd behavior if we extrapolate far enough into the future. The odds of collision are indeed small, but that also tracks with the rarity of mature, dusty systems like BD+20 307.

As to When Worlds Collide, I loved the 1951 film version of the Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer novel as a kid, although it can only be said that the movie doesn’t age well, and a recent viewing made every bit of stilted dialog and lame character interplay all too apparent. Still, the story is captivating, and watching the team of determined scientists racing to complete a space ark in time to save at least a portion of humanity has its pleasures. I notice that a re-make is in the works, scheduled for 2010 or thereabouts. This one seems to posit a near-term collision between our system and the Alpha Centauri stars, so the odds on scientific verisimilitude don’t look good.

I'm pretty sure I've just discovered a new favorite photographer.

(Twitch of the antennae to Ectoplasmosis.)

From 2006

I've been accused of scare-mongering because of my interest in global warming. But my interest isn't so much alarmist than a reflection of my fascination with the unknown.

We're actively engaged in reformatting the planet's climate. The process is all-encompassing and largely heedless. And although we can make some generally accurate predictions (all pretty grisly), we don't know when things get so bad that day-to-day life as we know it is turned utterly upside-down. Instead, we continue stumbling into unknown waters because, as far as I can tell, we prefer to die slowly.

I'm fascinated by this behavior. It's altogether weirder than any single "paranormal" item I've posted here since I launched this blog four years ago.

Scare-mongering? Hardly. I'm just watching the show.

__________________

2008 Update 

Jeremy has reminded me that this post is two years old.  Has my "estimate of the situation" changed? Hardly.  If anything, my conviction that the world as we know it is about to end messily has hardened.  But at the same time I've begun to appreciate the possible silver lining of business as usual grinding to a halt. After all, what sane person really *wants* the current paradigm to persist?

I maintain that we've entered a necessary transition that could very well be looked back on as an essential step in the evolution of our species.  Painful?  Sure.  But that's life: in more or less equal measures excruciating, surprising, and jarring.

I've always been intrigued by the essentially clumsy methods employed by the purported aliens. Their induced amnesia has a way of crumbling over a curiously brief period of time. Their craft -- which proponents of the ETH would have us believe are arbitrarily more advanced than our own -- tend to leave incriminating scars on the terrain, if not crash with worrisome frequency. Coupled with their occupants' human mannerisms, such seeming anachronisms suggest that we rethink an extraterrestrial origin; instead of dealing with beings wielding technology "indistinguishable from magic," UFO files reveal beings with surprisingly limited capabilities.

Indeed, their arsenal of gadgets, while impressive, is only a few decades in advance of our own. This observation, culled from a near-inexhaustible catalog of close encounters, hints that the phenomenon is at least partly physical, yet extraordinarily unlikely to represent ET visitation.

For example, Betty Hill reported a pregnancy test identical to amniocentesis, a technique invented shortly after her abduction. Similarly, accounts of electromagnetic effects on car engines and appliances are more in keeping with proposed earthly propulsion technologies than the sort of stealthy efficiency in keeping with a species hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us.

Scientists are already creating microscopic robots for use in medicine and industry. Given the inevitability of such devices, the presence of large metallic craft manned by humanoid pilots would appear, at best, a remarkably inept way to go about observing and cataloging life on this planet. Wouldn't a genuine ET survey mission employ miniaturized surveillance in keeping with its need for secrecy?

Instead, UFOs cruise our skies with an implacable arrogance. If our visitors are indeed extrasolar aliens, then they have a most curious penchant for drama. If, on the other hand, we're observing the activities of a cryptoterrestrial civilization, the apparent desire to be seen can be readily explained in terms of misdirection.

"Alien" imagery is the perfect cover, as our own military understands all-too-well. Greg Bishop chronicles just one example in "Project Beta," a devastating critique of the black-ops underworld and its readiness to exploit ET mythology in order to deflate serious interest in secret Air Force projects.

By utilizing our innate fascination with interplanetary visitors, the cryptoterrestrials have ensured that any accidental sightings of their craft will be ascribed to the ETH. The mainstream media, quick to "debunk" for fear of inciting ridicule, thus ignores credible sightings and inadvertently assists the cryptoterrestrial agenda. And if by some chance the sighting is undeniable, its cultural connotations will almost certainly relegate it to our collective Fortean attic.

I don't think it's accidental that so many UFOs are adorned with mesmerizing flashing lights. While one can always argue that conspicuous lights indicate the presence of some truly unearthly propulsion system, it's just as possible that they're a deliberate (and relatively low-tech) attempt to make a rather ordinary conveyance look unearthly, thereby eliciting the excitement of the very ET enthusiasts whose sightings are certain to be ignored . . . or, at best, published in some obscure journal or website.

As Vallee has astutely noted, many accounts of UFO landings have the undeniable flavor of staged events. The controversial events at Rendlesham, for instance, seem to make sense only if they were intended to be witnessed, perhaps in an attempt to further impress us with the extraterrestrial meme. In the same vein, the famous Washington National sightings, in which objects were tracked over Washington, D.C. with ground- and air-based radar and confirmed visually by mutiple witnesses, smack of an orchestrated event.

Intriguingly, the objects over Washington were limited to inexplicable sources of light -- not the "structured craft" described in other notable cases. Could the UFO intelligence use a form of holography to trick us into thinking we're observing tangible vehicles? The possibility can't be discounted. Michael Talbot supports the holographic theory in his book "The Holographic Universe," noting that some UFO displays have more in common with sophisticated projections than spacecraft.

The same can be said of many close encounters of the third or fourth kind in which witnesses report anomalous spatial effects. Some witnesses have described the interior of apparent alien vehicles as considerably larger than the craft as seen from outside; this odd detail, so bizarre when considered in isolation, might be explained as a perceptual trick enacted by the "aliens" to render their vehicles more impressive than they actually are. Upon exiting, a witness would be more likely to describe her experience in otherworldly terms.

(That the ufonauts use a form of mind control is practically taken as a given by most abduction researchers. But once we concede that our visitors are able to induce or dampen perception at will, where does one draw the line? Who's to say the bulk of abduction narratives can't be interpreted in an illusory context? Perhaps some incredible abduction reports, while sincere, reflect an intimate brush with virtual reality rather than encounters with literal extraterrestrials.)