Today in History—March 10: The Day the Planets Aligned—and the World Didn’t End

March 10, 1982: Could planetary alignment predict doomsday?

On this day in 1982, every planet in the solar system aligned on one side of the Sun—and we braced for the world to end.

And then nothing happened.

That planetary panic was thanks to the 1974 book The Jupiter Effect, in which scientists John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann claimed that the temporary alignment of the planets in 1982 would lead to global disasters of devastating proportions—tidal waves, catastrophic storms, and earthquakes (oh my!). They wrote that such chaos would occur because the combined gravitational pull of the planets would lead to massive explosions on the Sun, which would then disrupt Earth’s magnetic fields. Which would then lead to the end of life as we know it. Theoretically.

The authors went so far as to claim that Earth’s speed of orbit would change, and that the center of the entire solar system would shift. In what sounds like the “Age of Aquarius” turned bleak, Gribbin and Plagemann wrote that “‘when the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars’ and with the other seven planets…Los Angeles will be destroyed.” Somebody call Hollywood.

Though the prediction led some people to panic, others held end-of-world parties. Of course, many did not give in to the hype. The New York Times wryly stated that “despite widespread rumors, the world is unlikely to end today.”

Fun Fact

The organization New York Center for the Strange satirically predicted the alignment would cause nationwide shortages in sparkling wine, hockey pucks, gerbil cages, and soy sauce.

Outer-planet alignment (excluding Pluto) occurs about every 179 years, and every other occurrence has also passed without event. Syzygy (SIZ-i-jee), the name given to such alignments, refers to any instance in which three or more celestial bodies sit in a row, such as during solar and lunar eclipses. The last time the planets had aligned like they did in 1982 was the year 1803—but people were busy worrying about other things at the time.

Interestingly, the planets were not in a straight line in 1982’s syzygy. They were loosely aligned. As The Washington Post put it at the time: “If the solar system were a pie, it would take a real hog to eat the slice big enough to contain all the planets.”