Hi Sam,

This is also bull. Here are a few helpful guidelines for sharpening your BS filters:

1. ) If something has the word "prophecy" in it, it is BS. Predictions about the future can be made by following these steps:

1. Figure out what has happened in the past.
2. Observe what's happening in the present.
3. Propose a trend that can connect the past with the present.
4. Extend that trend into the future, and make predictions based upon it.
5. Observe whether or not the future actually follows that trend, and refine your theory accordingly.

"Prophecy" doesn't follow any of these steps -- it doesn't have any logic, and thus no relation to science. Or reality. "Prophecy" is just an eight-letter word for "I'm pulling this out of my ass."

If you want to be really amused, try picking up any book about prophecy that was written before 1990, and look at the predictions they make. I don't care if it is Nostrodamus, Edgar Cayce, or Elizabeth Claire-Prophet -- everything they'll have predicted for the 1990's and 2000's will be completely wrong. Period.

• ) If what you're reading mentions anything about extra terrestrial intelligences, in such a way as to imply that anyone is already in contact or has any clue about what they might thinking, it's BS. The aliens just aren't here, and even if they were, I'm sure that they wouldn't only be showing themselves to cracked-out losers who've gone off their medications. Unless the universe has a sicker sense of humor than I really want to contemplate.


• ) Here's a quick test for determining if a claim is plausible: has it happened before? Let's say that someone is predicting that the Earth will be destroyed next Tuesday. Well, the Earth has been around for nearly 4,000,000,000 years -- that's fifty million human lifetimes -- and it hasn't been destroyed yet. So what are the chances of it being destroyed in your lifetime? Less than one in fifty million, obviously. So, to counter odds like that, someone better have really compelling evidence to back up their claim. (Again, "evidence" and "prophecy" are pretty much mutually exclusive concepts.)

• ) Of course, to be able to judge the quality of people's evidence, you need to know something yourself. For instance, you need to know that if there were a planet-sized body that was going to pass close to Earth in May, it would have been visible long ago. Not just to the Hubble Space Telescope, but to anyone with eyeballs. There are more than 12 billion eyeballs on the planet: the government isn't going to cover it up. I'm sure there are plenty of introductory-level astronomy and cosmology books which can get you at least basically familiar with the concepts. But for a very basic overview of cosmology, I recommend The Cartoon History of the Universe. For a somewhat more advanced (but still very readable) book on cosmology, check out <a href=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/068801836X/qid=1042168594/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-3727065-9291945?v=glance&s=books">The Red Limit.




Cheers,

Nathan.