Has anyone seen the documentary called The Jupiter Menace?

Question

I was shown this doc. by a good friend who was a scientist (he has now passed). it was about the alignment of the planets with the sun and the effect it would have on our planet. It stated that the world would start to have more and deadlier natural disasters from May 2001, if you follow world events this is now happening.

Answer 1

natural disasters have been happening since the dawn of the earth.

if we didn't have any, our planet would be cold and dead.

many have happened over time, but we've only experienced at most 100 years of them, while there have been thousands and millions of years of them already.

heres a little list of a few hundred disasters.
most are listed between 1700s and mid 1950s

info/history started to be recorded in a better fasion during this time period so we don't have many accounts of earlier disasters.

Answer 2

The planets have "aligned" with Earth and the sun thousands of times during the history of the solar system. And while there might be some small effects in the solar wind or the sun's EM field, there is no scientific evidence to suggest they have devastated the Earth.

Even though Jupiter is the most massive planet (and therefore has the most intense gravitational field of any of the planets), the sun's gravity completely dominates the planets in our solar system.

And even if all the planets lined up in a perfectly straight line on one side of the sun, there are a few things to consider:
- all the planets move all the time, so any single alignment would last only a few hours as Mercury and then Venus moved out of alignment
- the planets are all close to the ecliptic (the plane of the sun's motion in our sky) but they are not all perfectly lined up in one single plane, so any alignment would still be misaligned in the vertical direction by some amount

The gravity of all the planets together is not enough to affect the Earth directly - if all planets were aligned on one side of the sun it could influence (to a small degree) the sunspot activity in that region of the sun, which could affect auroras and electromagnetic communication on the Earth. But that happens all the time now.

Disasters only appear to be increasing today. Instant news coverage, the Internet, digital cameras, CNN, etc. all make any event on the Earth anywhere an immediate "crisis" that everyone hears about. As little as 20 years ago, a tsunami in Southeast Asia would have had very little news coverage on the other side of the world.
There are no more natural disasters today than in the past, we just find out about them now and wouldn't have in the past.