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You may have missed it last week, but according to one conspiracy theorist, a rogue planet should have smashed into Earth on Friday, ending life as we know it.
Mike Buckner announced the end of the world on Twitter, the apocalyptic soothsayers' medium of choice. Buckner spent the week before Nibiru was meant to hit warning as many people as he could to seek shelter, telling his audience "few will survive", before one final "I AM HEADED FOR THE CAVES" tweet.
As you have almost certainly noticed, the world did not end on Friday, instead choosing to continue with the usual Saturday. The reason for this lack of impact is that the planet Nibiru does not exist.
"Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims," NASA explained patiently in 2012, when Nibiru was supposed to hit Earth twice. "If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth [...] astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist."
While there is debate about whether the Solar System harbors a hidden Planet 9 beyond the orbit of Neptune, there is no talk of this planet swerving wildly out of its hidden orbit and heading at Earth. This would require an elongated orbit that crosses Earth's own orbit. According to professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology Mike Brown, if a planet were on the elongated orbit described by Nibiru fans, we would have seen it by now. But more importantly, it wouldn't have been there long.
"If the planet had the orbit that is ascribed to it, it would only last for about a million years before it came too close to Jupiter and got ejected out of the solar system," explained on his website.
So much for the scientific explanation for why we weren't all annihilated, now for the answer from Mike Buckner himself. Let's face it, it's difficult to follow up a "we are all going to die, I am headed for the caves" tweet, but Buckner gave it a good shot, explaining to his followers that the "physics worked" but he had gotten the shape of the Earth wrong.
For good measure, the attached map includes Atlantis, an area known as the scorched wastes, and the walls of Asgard stretching towards the Abyssal Ocean.
So there you have it. Either Nibiru was on course to collide with Earth and "the physics worked" but what was wrong is the Earth is flat and we haven't noticed yet despite all known experiments proving this and photographs taken of the Earth from space showing it is clearly round, or Nibiru doesn't exist and never did. Either or.
