According to the latest findings by cosmic doomsayers, Planet X is due to eclipse the sun this Saturday, September 23, marking the start of The Rapture.
Although sceptics – such as NASA – have denied the very existence of Nibiru, there are still many conspiracists who are convinced that the end is nigh.
But they may in fact be right – in planetary terms at least.
One US geophysicist and award-winning mathematician has been studying Earth’s last five mass extinction events – and believes the next one could be just 83 years away.
Daniel Rothman, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has identified two “thresholds of catastrophe” that upset the world’s natural order, resulting in environmental instability and, eventually, mass extinction.
Both thresholds involve carbon cycles.
The first regards changes in the carbon cycle over a period of thousands or millions of years.
If changes occur faster than the ecosystem can adapt, then a mass extinction will ultimately occur.
The second threshold involves the magnitude of the carbon flux. In this scenario, it is not the speed of the changes, merely the size of them which will result in extinction.
Mr Rothman has now predicted that, with humans increasing the rate of carbon dioxide emissions at a faster rate over a shorter period of time, the tipping point for the sixth mass extinction could occur as early as 2100.
He calculated that by then, mankind will have added some 310 gigatons of carbon to the oceans, which he believes is the critical amount needed to trigger a future apocolyptic event.
However, Mr Rothman said the likelihood of ecological catastrophe occurring as soon as this point is reached is unlikely.
In his paper, publicised in Science Advances, he said: “This is not saying that disaster occurs the next day.
“It’s saying that, if left unchecked, the carbon cycle would move into a realm which would be no longer stable, and would behave in a way that would be difficult to predict.
“In the geologic past, this type of behaviour is associated with mass extinction.”
Earth has suffered five mass extinctions in the past 540 million years, with the worst wiping out more than 9 per cent of the planet’s marine life.