Is the End to Civilization as We Know It, Approaching?

army judge

army judge

Super Moderator
1751527360967.png

A scientist has warned that Earth's rotation is unexpectedly accelerating, leading to the shortest day in history in just a few weeks.

Graham Jones, an astrophysicist at the University of London, says Earth's rotation could speed up noticeably on one of three dates this summer, either July 9, July 22, or August 5.

On those days, time is predicted to drop by 1.30, 1.38, or 1.51 milliseconds, respectively.

Researchers say that although this change will be tiny, it can affect everything from satellite systems and GPS accuracy to how we measure time itself.

Leonid Zotov, a scientist at Moscow State University, said: 'Nobody expected this, the cause of this acceleration is not explained.'

Since 2020, scientists have noticed that Earth has been spinning slightly faster than usual, but the cause remains a mystery to this day..

Before that, the planet was slowing down over time, due to the moon's gravitational pull, which stretched days into the 24-hour cycle we now live by.

Earth normally takes 24 hours, or exactly 86,400 seconds, to complete one full rotation, which is called a solar day.

Earth's rotation is not always perfect, as it can shift by a tiny amount over time, a few milliseconds.

That is likely due to the Earth's spin being influenced by natural forces, like earthquakes and ocean currents.

Melting glaciers, movement in Earth's molten core, and large weather patterns like El Niño can also slightly speed up or slow down the planet's rotation.

These changes are measured using atomic clocks, which track time more accurately than regular watches. The recent spin-up has surprised researchers.

The fastest day recorded so far was on July 5, 2024, when Earth spun 1.66 milliseconds faster than the standard 24 hours.

Although the scientist does not know the exact reason for the acceleration, they are studying what's happening inside the Earth.

That includes shifting molten layers in the core, ocean currents, and high-altitude winds as they affect the Earth's spin.

Earth is not solid all the way through. Its core is made of hot, swirling liquid metal. As that molten metal moves, it can change the planet's shape and balance, similar to how a figure skater spins faster by pulling in their arms.

Ocean currents and jet streams, fast-moving ribbons of air in the atmosphere, also shift mass around the planet, causing small wobbles or changes in spin speed.

S
cientists are looking at all these pieces together, the moon's orbit, core activity, ocean flow, and wind patterns, to figure out what's going on.

Starting in 2020, Earth began breaking its records for the shortest day.

That year, July 19 came in 1.47 milliseconds short. On July 9, 2021, there was a 1.47 millisecond drop.

In 2022, Earth recorded its shortest day on June 30, shaving off 1.59 milliseconds from the usual 24 hours.

In 2023, the rotation slowed slightly, and no new records were set. But in 2024, the speed picked up again. Several days broke the previous records, making it the year with the most consistently short days ever measured.

These estimates are based on past observations and computer models, and include systematic corrections and smoothing to account for natural fluctuations.

Jones used information from the US Naval Observatory and international Earth rotation services.

Atomic clocks track the numbers, and the tools measure what's called 'Length of Day,' or LOD. That's the time it takes Earth to rotate once, down to the millisecond.

Even tiny changes in day length matter. GPS, phone networks, and financial systems rely on split-second accuracy. A shift of just a few milliseconds can cause tech glitches.

Right now, the world keeps time using Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. Sometimes we add a leap second to stay in sync with Earth's slow shifts.

If the Earth keeps rotating faster, experts may have to remove a second, called a negative leap second. It's never happened before.

The long-term trend is more familiar. Billions of years ago, Earth spun so fast that a day lasted only a few hours. It happened due to the moon's gravitational pull.

Now, something inside Earth may be speeding it back up. But researchers say current models of the atmosphere and oceans don't explain what's happening.

'Sooner or later, Earth will decelerate,' Zotov said. But for now, the spin continues to speed up.


www.dailymail.co.uk

Scientist warns shortest day in history is coming in WEEKS

A scientist has warned that Earth's rotation is unexpectedly accelerating, leading to the shortest day in history. Graham Jones, an astrophysicist, predicted this could occur in this summer.
www.dailymail.co.uk www.dailymail.co.uk
 
army judge said:
View attachment 5428

A scientist has warned that Earth's rotation is unexpectedly accelerating, leading to the shortest day in history in just a few weeks.
Click to expand...

You can rest easy army judge. Civilization will not end due to the earth speeding up. It may end (if something else doesn't doom the planet first) as the planet continues to slow down in rotation, however.

The Daily Mail is not known as a stellar news source. Not as bad as our National Enquirer, but closer the Enquirer than it is to more trusted news sources like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Given the sensationalist nature of the Mail's publication I'm not surprised it left out some key information to put these changes in rotation into the proper context. In particular the article pointedly does not say what measure of history it's using to make the claim of "the shortest day in history". I did a little digging as to the likely source of the Daily Mail's information and found that the claim is based on an article published in Space magazine in 2022.

Reading that Space article reveals an important point that the Mail left out: the time frame used to measure what the fastest day has been is the period 1960 (when atomic clocks were first used to measure time) to today. In the history of Earth 65 years is but a blink of an eye. The degrees of variation in the earth's rotation since 1960 is measured in milliseconds. That's so tiny that humans wouldn't notice any change at all but for the very precise measurements that atomic clocks make possible. The earth has sped up and slowed down very slightly over the decades since 1960 and nothing dire happened because of it. The worst effect has been that scientists have had to adjust the atomic clocks to account for these teeny changes.

Soon after the collision that broke off part of the earth to form the moon an earth day is estimated to have been about 5 hours, much faster than it has been during the entirety of man's existence on the planet. That faster speed was due to the moon being much closer to Earth than it is today. The moon continues to move away from the Earth every year with the long term effect being that the Earth's rotaton will continue to slow, not speed up. The change is so slow that it'll take millions of years to make a profound difference on life on Earth.

In billions of years the moon will be far enough away that the earth's gravity will no longer be able to hold the moon in orbit and the moon will go flying out into space. Also over the course of billions of years the earth will slow to the point that it is tidally locked with the sun. Thus, an observer on the sun would only ever see one side of the planet, just as all we see of the moon from Earth is one side of it, again due to tidal lock.

Man will be long gone from Earth before either of those events happen.
 
Tax Counsel said:
Man will be long gone from Earth before either of those events happen.
Click to expand...

Potentially, yes, but I'll put my money on some crackpot, wannabe, ignorant, mentally disturbed, greedy dictator dropping a couple dozen nukes all over our little, blue marble; becoming the immediate, proximate cause that destroys our little, blue home, and formerly peaceful, little planet.
 
army judge said:
Potentially, yes, but I'll put my money on some crackpot, wannabe, ignorant, mentally disturbed, greedy dictator dropping a couple dozen nukes all over our little, blue marble; becoming the immediate, proximate cause that destroys our little, blue home, and formerly peaceful, little planet.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, I agree that the chance of humankind destroying ourselves before nature has the opportunity to wipe us out is the more likely scenario. Maybe at some point in the future we'll learn how to get along with each other without breaking out weapons and killing each other. The history of humankind is not very encouraging that we'll be around long enough for that to happen.
 
1753097273906.png
The South African Astronomical Observatory is situated in the Karoo Desert outside the small town of Sutherland.

In January, at a US Space Force Base in the Rocky Mountains near Colorado Springs, an operator received an unusual email. It was an alert — but not one triggered by the military's network of space-based sensors. Nor had it originated from the Space Force's array of early-warning radar systems. Instead, the email appeared to have been forwarded to US Space Command by a tiny UN outfit in Vienna called the Office for Outer Space Affairs. The subject line read "Potential Asteroid Impact Notification".
Upon scanning the email, the operator, according to one ex-Space Force official, began to panic. For the first time, the world's alert system for defending the planet against incoming asteroids and comets had been activated. "We are," said the anxious operator to a colleague, "under asteroid attack".

The asteroid in question was 2024 YR4. Its name, according to the conventions of the International Astronomical Union, referred to the time of its discovery at the end of last year. At that point, 2024 YR4 was around 830,000 kilometres away from the Earth and orbiting the sun at a speed of 13km per second. Its brightness indicated it was between 40 and 90 metres long. It was rotating quickly, spinning once every 19 minutes upon its axis. It appeared to be gently elongated. From certain angles it looked like a fish head. The object was moving swiftly away from our planet, but when astronomers did a rough calculation of its orbit, they realised there was a slight chance that it might, in eight years, swing back and collide with the Earth.

Things were calmer in California. In Los Angeles, Davide Farnocchia, a mathematician with Nasa, was busy calculating orbital trajectories. Farnocchia had been monitoring the object's passage for the previous month, starting on December 27 2024, when astronomers first spotted 2024 YR4 in the top right corner of a crowded image of the night sky taken by one of Nasa's remotely operated telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert. By the middle of January, as California's second-most destructive wildfire in history was encroaching upon his workplace, the likelihood that the Earth lay in the asteroid's path was increasing. Farnocchia fled Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory with his colleagues. He continued tracking the asteroid from home.

He wasn't the only one. Around the world, more than 60 observatories were fixated on 2024 YR4. In space, too, the James Webb Space Telescope was feeding back infrared images of the asteroid. This stream of data showed Farnocchia and his counterparts at the European Space Agency that the impact risk was climbing. By the end of January, the threat of collision had risen to 1 per cent — the trigger for alerting the UN. Nearly three weeks later, it was more than 3 per cent, making it the most dangerous near-Earth object ever found. Farnocchia, Italian-born with a pacific manner, remained calm. "Even during the darkest hour," he said during a recent onstage debrief, "we were not freaking out."

Establishing whether or not planet Earth lies in the way of an asteroid is a tough assignment. From the ground, near-Earth asteroids usually appear small and faint. Their orbits, Farnocchia told me, can be highly uncertain — pulled this way and that by the gravitational tug of larger celestial bodies and by solar radiation. Near-Earth asteroids are only visible for a short time before they journey far from Earth or vanish into the glare of the daytime sky. From a few blurry snapshots, astronomers must calculate the precise trajectories of multiple laps around the sun. A mistake could be disastrous, leaving humanity without enough time to launch a mission to defend the planet.

Farnocchia did not know whether the collision would happen — but he knew where and he knew when. If there was an impact, it would occur on December 22 2032, along a broad corridor roughly following the equator, from the eastern Pacific Ocean, across the top of South America and the Atlantic, through Nigeria, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and into India and Bangladesh. The asteroid would release around 500 times the amount of energy of the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima. It would do so either by exploding in the atmosphere, or splashing into the ocean, where it might cause a tsunami, or making landfall somewhere along the impact corridor.

If the asteroid's threat level kept growing, officials would consider destroying or deflecting it. At the time, though, the attention of the scientists who advise the world's governments about what to do about incoming asteroids and comets was elsewhere. The Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, or SMPAG (pronounced "same page"), was in the middle of a months-long asteroid war game. "It was a bit annoying at first," Detlef Koschny, an astronomer at the Technical University of Munich who chairs SMPAG, told me. "We're in this nice exercise, and now comes in this stupid real thing."

As it turned out, no mission would be necessary. At the end of February, further observational data defused the threat. The risk of Earth impact is now close to zero. On December 22 2032, 2024 YR4 will pass by the Earth around 270,000km away. There is still a 4 per cent chance it will hit the moon. A lunar impact would not shift the moon's orbit — but such a collision could release up to 100,000,000kg of moon rocks, some of which might strike the Earth.

SMPAG returned to its fictional scenario, but I couldn't stop thinking about 2024 YR4. What would have happened if the risk had kept on climbing and the news of an Earthbound asteroid had to be absorbed by an increasingly febrile world? Defending the Earth from incoming asteroids and comets is where celestial mechanics collides with geopolitics, where the clean and calculable sphere of outer space runs up against the human tumult.

In March, I emailed Nasa. I wanted to understand what would happen from the point at which astronomers discover an asteroid on a guaranteed collision course. Who would make the decision to launch a deflection mission? And on what authority? And what would happen if the mission failed?

Larry Denneau, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii who helps Nasa map near-Earth objects, got back to me quickly. Members of Nasa's planetary defence team, he explained, would soon be gathering near Cape Town where they would be hashing out answers to these issues and many others with the world's planetary defence community. Also, one of Nasa's remotely controlled asteroid-hunting telescopes had been acting up in the desert 300km outside of Cape Town. It needed some seeing to, perhaps a replacement motor. He invited me along for the ride.


 
Hmmm, not so fast, Mr. or Ms. Smarty Pants.....


www.dailystar.co.uk

World to come to an end with 'Big Crunch' and 'humans will burn in cosmic hell'

Boffins have put out a start date on when the universe will come to an end and collapse in on itself in a process opposite to the Big Bang, called the 'Big Crunch'
www.dailystar.co.uk www.dailystar.co.uk



www.bgr.com

New Study Claims The Universe Will Start Shrinking In 7 Billion Years - BGR

A new study may have given us a glimpse of when the "Big Crunch" will take place and the universe will start shrinking.
www.bgr.com www.bgr.com
 
Last edited:
Scientists have yet to fully agree on the issue of whether our universe will just keep expanding forever or whether at some point the expansion will stop and the universe will start shrinking. Part of the problem in solving that is that we don't really know the exact size of our universe or how much mass the universe actually has. As a result I get a good laugh at predictions like this one. Given that we aren't even yet sure whether the universe will ever change from expanding to collapsing any prediction of when it will happen is very premature. I hope no tax dollars were used to fund this bit of conjecture.
 

Ask a Question

Share this page

Get a free case review from a lawyer
Back
Top