Strange

There are a lot of events that occur very infrequently. Sometimes when people anticipate them, they equate them with doom, or the end of the world. In ancient times the coming of the year 1,000 AD was looked upon with dread by a lot of people. Many of them felt that this marked the end of the world. It is kind of ironic, because the end of the world for us is when we die and we will all reach that point, so worrying about some fictitious end of days date does seem to me like a gross waste of the limited time we have. Having said this, some dates that are thought of doomsday events were not originally. An example of this is the year 2012. The Maya descendants claim that the reason for their calendar ending on this date was only because the Maya thought they would all be gone by that date and yet this date is feared by many in the world today as a date that marks the end for us.

An interesting event that only occurs once in a thousand years is going to happen this year. It will occur on July 7th. At exactly 4:05:06 am and pm. The time and date will be 04:05:06 07/08/09. We will be able to say that we were around for that event, Lord willing and nobody that I have seen thinks ill of it. Another rare event is the appearance of Halley's comet. Some people never have the event happen in their lifetimes. The average time between appearances of the comet is about 70 years. The comet will not return to our solar system again until 2061, so anyone born today will be 52 years old when it reappears. In ancient times the appearance of a comet during a battle, would have been taken as an omen and could have been considered either good or bad, depending on how the appearance was interpreted.

Jupiter
Photo Source: Stock.xching

One event that really had people nervous was when the planets lined up. Some strange religions even had members giving away all their possessions, because they believed this was the end. One thing that I don't understand is what was anyone else going to do with these possessions if the end was coming? On September 8, 2040 there will be another planetary alignment. There are two types of these alignments. One is known as Heliocentric and the other is Geocentric. Heliocentric alignments are comprised of the planets lining up within a 90 sector. Geocentric alignments are visible to the naked eye and Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will align. The planets will be in a straighter line in 2040 then when they last lined up on May 5, 2000. As you all know we survived the last alignment despite the warnings of some that told us to get ready for the end.

Ice Age
Photo Source: Stock.xching

The last ice age started about 110,000 years ago and lasted until about 9700 BC. That is over 100,000 years. There is usually about 10,000 years between them. We are a couple of thousand years past that, therefore many people believe that this warming cycle is signaling the coming of a new ice age. It does sound crazy that warming would bring on cold, but that is entirely possible. No one is saying that an ice age would bring on the end of the world, but it certainly wouldn't be too comfortable. All those Florida residents would be quite cold with all their thin blood. Maybe the conditions on the earth have changed sufficiently to avoid that ice age, but nature is funny and it will probably be here sooner or later.

On June 8th a very rare event will happen, it is the planet Venus getting between the Earth and Sun. While this may not sound so rare, it only happens about once in one hundred years. This means that very few people have ever seen it happen twice. The three bodies will actually line up, that being Earth, Venus and the Sun. Unfortunately for the U.S., this will happen before dawn for us. The very final moments of the transit will be visible in the North East U.S. in places like Boston, New York and Philadelphia but will be fully visible from the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. Precautions must be taken while viewing this event. Looking at the Sun with unprotected eyes is a sure recipe for disaster. Mercury had such an event on May 6, 2003 and only experiences them about 13 times a century.

There is something called a Rare disaster that is an economic event that is of the infrequent type, has a very large impact, and a very negative effect on the economy. This is what the U.S. and the world is experiencing today. The last one of such magnitude was considered to be the Great Depression. There are actually mathematical formulas for this, but they are too boring to go into and I can't help but think that if they were any good, we wouldn't be in the mess that we are in.

The arctic was once tropical and may be headed this way again. About 55 million years ago the arctic was a tropical zone, much as the tropics are today. There was no ice there at all. Will the arctic return to what it once was? As global warming proceeds will the arctic get warmer and the south pole get colder? Could it be that every 55 million years or so this is what is supposed to happen? An event known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was responsible for the change. Guess what? That period in time had very strong greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere, just like we do now. The water warmed up until it hit 75 degrees F.

The events I cited may have been infrequent, but that didn't and doesn't make them any less important. What will be the rarest event of all? I have the answer to that, it will be when the Earth is destroyed, there is just no returning from that event.