Nibiru doesn’t exist. Pass it on.
If you’ve never heard of the planet Nibiru, don’t fret.
It doesn’t exist.
Nonetheless, a lot of people seem to fervently believe this imaginary alien world will slam into Earth today—September 23, 2017, as I write this—extinguishing all life, including humanity. Also today, a lot of people believe a number of planets will propitiously align with the sun, moon and constellations Virgo and Leo, apparently heralding the start of End Times and at some point cause the world’s true Christian believers to begin floating skyward into a realm they call “heaven.”
It’s not just that this is all airily speculative, its fully, wholly and unimpeachably unsubstantiated in reality as well. The only reason we’re even talking about such nonsense (I use the term literally, as in “unrelated to human senses”) is because the media, whose duty is to “inform” us, are vividly aware that people absolutely love this stuff. It’s dramatic intellectual entertainment, not to be confused with useful learning. And promoting it makes media companies a lot of money with clicks, subscriptions, Facebook likes, Twitter tweets and re-tweets, and all the other ways these things “go viral” in the world today and carry people to where revenue-enhancing ads and subscription forms exist. It’s the same way Donald Trump became president: the media saturated the radio and airwaves, and mass publications, not with how His Hairness represents the “better angels” of our national nature—as if—but with his apparently charismatic hucksterism, which, for some unfathomable reason, still appeals greatly to about 40 percent of the American electorate.
In a rational world, these apocalyptic fairy tales, including Mr. Trump’s fitness for office, would simply be ignored—or at least hastily avoided—the same way your brother Fred would be if he announced at breakfast that he was Jesus Christ reincarnated. But this is not for the most part a rational world.
Various popularizers of the Nibiru rogue-planet prophesy, based on disputed biblical fantasies, have been spinning versions of this tale since the 1970s. The first Nibiru apocalypse scheduled for 2003 failed to occur, as did one recalculated for 2012. I’m certain the 2017 iteration, set for today, won’t happen either. But, if history has shown us anything, it’s that universally failed End Times prophesies have also miserably failed to permanently discourage its ever-hopeful practitioners.
But for those of us still thinking rationally, isn’t it long past time we stopped treating these prophesies as news we can use? At least predicted hurricanes actually happen sometimes.
