2012 not

Wow, I really did not blog at all in 2009, what's wrong with me? Anyway, having just seen 2012 I am inspired to point out a few of the more obvious scientific either blunders or at least tremendous unlikelihoods. First and foremost, I can't imagine any way that alignments of the planets would have an effect on the sun's activity. The planets have negligible mass compared to the sun's, so I don't think general relativity would predict any variation in solar output based on position of planets. Secondarily, I'm not aware of any obvious alignments in the planets coming up any time soon. This is more speculative, but I'm not sure whether the mayans actually knew of the planets, in the sense of recognizing that they move differently than other "lights in the sky" and predicting their patterns mathematically moreover.

The exact nature of the solar event is not specified in the movie (lucky for them! I can't pick it apart) but the claim is that it generated a lot of neutrinos. The sun already generates a lot of neutrinos, almost all of which go right through the earth, us, and all regular matter without effect. One thing that does generate bursts of neutrinos is supernova explosions - neutrino detectors place around the earth all saw the burst that preceded the visible appearance of supernova 1987a in a nearby galaxy. By the by, this was a wonderful validation of solar physics theory. I think we would have noticed if the sun had gone supernova. But in the movie these were not ordinary neutrinos, they "mutated" into some other kind of particle that could heat up the earth's core. Well, anything is possible, but I would expect something that could heat the earth's core to fry pretty much everything on the surface first. The core is mostly iron and nickel we think, so maybe these mutated particles just heat up metals. But we have a fair amount of iron in our bodies (all those red blood cells and hemoglobin, for example, plus lots of muscle myoglobin) so we should have heated up too.

Some new kind of solar wind that could do that to the earth's entire core would certainly have fried all communications systems. But tv and cell phones were working in the movie all the way through, as were cars, planes and other metallic engines and motors using electromagnetic induction fields.

More realistically, solar physicist expect the sun to expand into a red giant in a couple (5-10) of billion years. That is a real problem, the sun will grow probably to larger than the earth's orbit, and the earth (plus venus and mercury) will either melt or vaporize. We'll have to do something by then - leave the earth, move the earth, or learn how to control the sun. None is even remotely in our reach today, but a billion years is a long time. The average survival of any species on earth has been about a million years, and we humans aren't even halfway there yet. I myself doubt we'll make it that long, but maybe we will smarten up sometime.