Space: The final frontier (for conspiracy theories)

OK guys, you have heard of Planet Nibiru which is supposed to hit earth and kill us all in 2003..(yes, it's true, because aliens told a lady in Wisconsin that this would happen. And you thought warnings from the Virgin were weird).

Well, anyway, wikipedia says Nibiru that it was first found by the ancient Sumerians.

The Sumerians and later also the Babylonians mention about a long time ago in Ancient times in which Nibiru (Marduk), until that time a stranger in our solar system, had a fight in heaven with Tiamat and Kingu. At that time, millions of years ago, the satellites of Nibiru (Marduk) collapsed with Tiamat (a planet at least two times the mass of Earth) and broke it in 2 parts.
In accordance to the theory of Zecharia Sitchin and others, the 2 parts of Tiamat were forced to another orbit around the Sun, One part was broken in small parts and are now called The Asteroid Belt (between Mars and Jupiter) and Asteroids Meteorites and Comets. The other part was forced into his new orbit between Venus and Mars and became the Earth. Kingu became the Moon of the "new planet" Earth. Nibiru was forced into an elliptical orbit around the Sun and its new orbit was from that time on a cycle of 3,600 years around the Sun.

all nonsense, of course, but then in today's news I read these stories:

ABC NEWS (Australia): Ancient Babylonians used calculus to find Jupiter 1400 yrs before Europeans.

Calculus? But in the story they used Geometry, which is not the same thing, and the cunieform tablets date from "350 to 50 BCE", but came from ancient Uruk or maybe ancient Babylon.

then we read: SciTechNews: Planet Nine might exist.

Pluto was demoted, because it was no larger than a lot of other planetoids in the area, but now scientists note that another planet might be out there: a big one. Well, they haven't really "found" it yet but it might be there:

The newly discovered object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun. The researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet’s existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations but have not yet observed the object directly.

so how about those crazy theories that Nibiru collided with earth eons ago?

oops:

from UKTelegraph: Earth is actually two planets

Earth is actually made up from two planets which came together in a head-on collision that was so violent it formed the Moon, scientists have concluded.

-and then there are the theorists trying to figure out how the universe started.

At this point, my head spins, because I predate the "big bang" theory, when we were told the universe was static and that stars just sort of popped up by themselves.

I try to keep up on the  latest theories, but the dirty little secret is that a lot of the stuff out there is philosophical speculation and not backed by hard data... they are still trying to figure out why there is anything instead of nothing.