Pseudoastronomy

Pseudoastronomy (not to be confused with astrology) is a subset of pseudophysics that claims to have found additional astronomical bodies, different ways of forming/developing astronomical bodies, different physics of the Universe, or just straight-up doom-mongering. And of course, creationists have found many very scientific-sounding ways to explain away problems in their 6,000-year-old Earth.

The fault in our stars
Pseudoastronomy
Adding epicycles
Epicyclists
v - t - e

Many of these pseudoastronomical claims fall into the category of "Earth changes", which is as vague as it is apocalyptic.

None of these theories are scientifically supported.

Additional astronomical bodies
  • Planet X: A hypothetical tenth ninth planet. It's used in a wide variety of pseudoastronomy, so claims about its nature are inconsistent.
  • Sakloth: Like Planet X, but more Biblical-prophecy-y.
  • Nibiru: Like Planet X, but more Zecharia Sitchin-y.
  • Hercólubus: A giant planet that will fly by Earth, cause volcanoes to erupt and kill everyone in a cataclysm. The only solution is astral projection.
  • Nuitari Lilith, a claimed second moon of Ansalon Earth so dark that it is invisible.

Different formation/development methods

Planetary

Lunar

Solar

Universal
  • Cellular cosmogony: The Earth's surface is the inside surface of a sphere. The entire Universe fits within this sphere, because of gravitational distortion. Right.

Alternate physics

Doom-mongering
  • Geomagnetism: A geomagnetic reversal will end civilization and/or life as we know it! Discount the previous 170-171 times this has happened in the past 76 million years!
  • Pole shift: Earth will flip over, and human civilization will flip its shit.
  • Comet Elenin: It's gonna fuck shit up.Oh wait... it passed by harmlessly and then disintegrated. Never mind.
  • CW Leonis: It's obviously Nibiru and/or Comet Elenin and/or impending doom!

Creationism

People

Promoters
  • Maurice Cotterell: Claims that the Sun directly affects female fertility, civilizational rise and fall, and human life and death.
  • Mike Bara: Among Bara's many mistaken ideas about astronomy, he's a proponent of solar fission--which was a favorite of the maverick astronomer Thomas Van Flandern.
  • Stephen J. Crothers: Rejects most of modern physics, with a special emphasis on the claim that black holes do not exist.
  • Richard C. Hoagland: Whines about NASA and finds weird-looking shit on Mars.
  • James McCanney: Both the Sun and comets are electrically charged. Comets contain no ice whatsoever.
  • ZetaTalk: A cult that claims to talk with aliens. Claimed that Nibiru would pass Earth in 2003; it didn't.
  • Time Cube: Gene Ray's idiocy knows no bounds.
  • Stars are Souls: Stars are souls. No, really.
  • David Icke: Depending on his mood, claims the Moon is either hollow, an alien spacecraft, an interdimensional portal or doesn't exist at all.
  • W. Cleon Skousen: A Mormon apologist who believed that God's home planet, Kolob, exists in orbit around Sagittarius A*, what we now believe the be the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
  • Scientology: The Xenu mythology posits a galactic federation ruled the Milky Way 75,000,000 years ago. Hubbard, in official church scripture, recounts events occurring "four quadrillion" years in the past, or about 289,855 times older than the current age of the Universe.

Skeptics
gollark: Skynet was written in Rust some years back and it works perfectly with essentially zero CPU use and no maintenence.
gollark: I mean, it's excellent if I need something to be really fast or really reliable, but also very slow and annoying to write in.
gollark: I don't actually feel very productive in Rust.
gollark: osamarks.net actually uses that Node/COBOL bridge to run certain Discord bots.
gollark: All tools above some minimum standard technically *work*. Lots are *very bad*.

See also
For those of you in the mood, RationalWiki has a fun article about Scientific Geoterrapinism.

References
  1. Alternatively, and more positively: what holds it down?
  2. Not your local government. Not your state/provincial/regional government. THE government.
  3. Well, not unless we postulate a non-Biblical global flood...
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