Question: Is the film '2012' an accurate example of what is going to happen to earth?:S

Daniel Scully answered on 16 Nov 2011:

I’ve not seen the film but the Wikipedia article says that neutrinos from a solar flare heat up the Earth’s core?

Neutrinos are being made in the Sun all the time, about 10 billion neutrinos coming from the Sun pass through you every second! (wow!)
But almost all of them travel not just through you but through the entire planet and out the other side because neutrinos hardly ever do anything.

Of course some of them do stop, but if you had enough of them to heat up the Earth’s core there would also be a lot of them stopping in you. Everyone would be long dead from the radiation before the Earth got much hotter.

Also, neutrinos are all made in the centre of the Sun, where it’s hottest, not in solar flares which are relatively cold (as Sun temperatures go).

The only time I’ve heard of neutrinos killing us off, is if a star very near us went super-nova – then there might be enough neutrinos to kill us. I don’t know if there is a star close enough, but our Sun definitely isn’t big enough to go super nova.

There are many things that could kill us all off, but neutrinos aren’t the one I’d worry about most!