End of the World?
NOVA scienceNOW | Ask the Expert | December 21, 2012
Sep 8th
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Neil Degrasse Tyson debunks 2012 at the 2010 World Science Festival
Sep 7th
Here Neil Degrasse Tyson talks of the Mayan 2012 planetary predictions. He talks about how the alignment of the Sun Earth and center of the galaxy is NOT a unique phenomenon. In fact, this alignment happens each and every year. So why is 2012 any different? He also explains many other non-scientific Mayan perceptions of cosmology. Including the observation that the Mayans thought the Earth was flat, had four corners, and was held up in space on the back of a crocodile and five trees of various bright colors. Which is in and of itself intriguing and culturally important but factually NOT TRUE.
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson – 2012 debunked
Sep 5th
Dr. Tyson debunks the 2012 myth at a meeting of the Secret Science Club at the Bell House in Brooklyn, NY 03.18.09
Capped, Really?
Aug 6th
Well, it’s been a while since I last commented on the situation in the Gulf so it is probably well past time for an update. As of a few weeks ago there is a temporary cap that seems to have managed to stop the oil gusher. I did not make a joyous post right away because after BP’s previous efforts, I thought a “wait and see” position would be prudent. There was initially some concern that the cap might cause the seabed to destabilize or that there might have been a second leak, but supposedly that was not the case. At least, anything that was detected was “not consequential.” While I wont say there is a conspiracy, I find myself wondering how reliable BP’s reports to Thad Allen actually are, what with their assurances that they had plans to handle situations just like this one when they got permission to begin drilling.
Then there was the tropical storm Bonnie, the second tropical weather event to hit the gulf since the leak began on April 20th. Essentially this caused a delay of a few days in that the support fleet had to pack up all their pipes and sail away, until they decided the weather wasn’t really that bad. Still, between the tear down, the move, and then the reassembly of the pipes the plug process was delayed for several days.
The good news is that with the relief well essentially completed BP launched the first half of their plan to finally plug the well by injecting mud into the cap. (As of this writing the top injection is “done” and seems to have worked.) Once the relief well is completed they intend to inject a mud and concrete mixture into the broken well head from beneath the surface to finally put an end to this gusher, presumably once and for all. The relief well for the second injection is expected to be completed in less than two weeks at this point.
It is pretty clear that a lot of people are just hoping this thing will go away, so it is no surprise that many are beginning to ask where all of this leaked oil has gone. BP’s new chief executive Bob Dudley was claiming the leak was over as early as July 27th, and discussed scaling back clean up efforts. The scale back is apparently sensible, as most reports seem to indicate that the effort to keep the oil from reaching shore, (or the surface of the ocean for that matter) were for the most part effective. This is of course due to the unprecedented use of the dispersant Corexit. While Corexit is EPA approved, there have been findings of tiny droplets of oil making their way into the Gulf food chain thanks to Corexit’s efficiency at breaking down the black blobs into essentially too small to see particles. These particles actually have an easier time making it into the food chain.
At this point, of course, the threat that this combination might have on the ecology is being vastly downplayed, and some even claim that due to the rich ecosystem of the Gulf, oil is not something to be all that concerned about. Couple that with the proclamation that roughly 75% of the oil has been “cleaned” and I would be surprised if this was still a news story by September. Granted, it’s also just come out that apparently the estimated rate of the leak was still too low and this is in fact the largest off shore oil spill in global history.
But everything will be all right, I’m sure. The off shore drilling ban is going to be lifted sooner than anticipated, the judge who ruled on the case sees no conflict of interest between his own oil and gas investments and ruling on off shore drilling, and local politicians are hoping the Obamas will go swimming in the Gulf when they come down for a vacation! I mean, I’m sure this sort of thing will never happen again, it is not like we’re going to be letting the people responsible collect all the evidence or anything.
Oh, and in case you somehow missed it, there was also an oil spill in China, an oil spill in Michigan, a second blown oil head in Louisiana, and an Alaskan pipe line all happened while this was going on. The truth is that our own burn now, pay later attitude as a society is far more dangerous than any curse that the Maya(n) people never made in the first place. As long as we remain silent, nothing will change.
It is time to take action, be heard.
Aug 3rd
It is evident in my articles that while I have no fear of a foretold apocalypse in the year 2012 I am genuinely concerned for the future of the human species. Our planet is durable, having survived multiple mass extinction events in the past (including some that cycle with apparently clockwork precision every 27 million years, but do not worry, we still have 16 million years before the next one in this cycle should occur) it is far more likely that humanity will be wiped out than the entire planet. As the fictional Ian Malcolm says, “Life Finds a Way.”
That does not however give me much solace. Our world is rampant with corruption, poor policy, and ignorance, putting all of us on a dangerous precipice. It is essential that we collectively demand more from our leadership, locally, nationally, internationally, and privately. It is only by making our voices heard that we can hope to sway policy makers to take a long term view of our place in this world and the cosmos. With that idea in mind, I have decided to try and compile information on how to contact your local government leaders. As we are based in the USA, the information we were most easily able to compile will be for the USA. However, we will try to provide information where possible for international visitors so they too can take up the cause with their own leaders. If you have useful information in this regard that we were unfortunately able to track down on our own, please, add it to the comments. Hopefully at some point in the future we can compile a more up-to-date resource list than what we have been able to put together so far.
So to start off with, here’s some useful links for our US visitors.
Find your Federal House Representative
Both of these links will provide you with contact information for your federal legislator. These people are supposed to be your representative in the government, so make sure they know what your ideas are so they can represent them accordingly.
Vote Smart is also an excellent resource for US citizens as it will not only list your current Federal congress people, it will list all of your local elected officials as well as candidates. While it seems to be lacking direct contact information, it does give you their names which is an excellent place to start. Most, if not all, state legislatures have some method of contacting your local official through their websites these days. While some may not make it as easy as entering a zip code and being given contact information for your official, by using the information from Vote Smart you can easily identify your district and the name of your official to make contacting them that much easier.
This link will help you locate your Parliament Member if you’re from the UK.
And this one has the information for the European Parliament (note: the link is to the English version of their page as that is the language we use here on the site)
And here’s a link to the website of the Australian Parliament
While we would like to be able to provide comprehensive information for everybody in the world, such an undertaking would require a whole website of it’s own (and of course, there are still some countries that are not democracies, representative or otherwise). Regardless of whether we were able to provide information for you specifically, we would encourage you to do the necessary research and take the required steps to make your voice heard and help drive our leaders to pursue policies that will benefit both our species, and our planet.
The Maya(n) 2012 Prophecy, the Mesoamerican Long Count, and Why People Are So Confused
Jul 26th
If you’re wondering why the “n” in Mayan is in parenthesis in the title, it’s because it should in fact be Maya, but media more typically uses the popular, but incorrect, “Mayan.” This is a relatively small mix up compared to all of the excitement about a supposed “Mayan Prophecy” for world shaking events of some kind in December of 2012. There’s debate as to which exact day it supposedly occurs on, but the two most common interpretations are the 21st and 23rd.
There are some good reasons for the discrepancy of when the Maya(n) calendar supposedly ends that have to do with determining where it starts. While the Mayan calendar is very good at measuring days, the start point, or day one, of the calendar is not universally agreed upon. This is why you have disagreements on where it ends, they purport that it has a specific number of days (1,872,000, as the end is supposedly the “end” of our current period, the 13th b’ak’tun.) so depending on which exact start date they choose, they get a slight different end date. By and large we have managed to get a relatively accurate correspondence with our modern calendar thanks to historical documents during Europe’s conquest of the America’s.
The thing is, the calendar does not actually end with the 13th ba’k’tun. Specifically, the Temple of Inscriptions in Palneque contains references to a date that would correspond with October of 4772. The Mayans believed there was a cycle that predated the current one they lived in(and we’re living in it too). It is faulty reasoning at best, and crass arrogance and disrespect at worse, to suppose they would not expect there to be another one. In short, while a cycle of the long count Maya calendar is 13 b’ak’tuns, which is ending in Dec of 2012, that does not mean the world ends with the cycle. Quite the contrary, it is a milestone achievement.
The argument that the end of the world will occur when the Mayan calendar’s current cycle does is the equivalent of seeing a 2009-2010 calendar and assuming that the whole world is going to end on Dec 31st, 2010. Most people would quickly point out the absurdity of that. We make calendars annually. The calendar ending does not mean the world does. The fact that there are far fewer dates recorded by the Maya for the next cycle compared to our own is simply a question of distance. You would be hard pressed to find a publisher making calendars for the year 2100, or even 2020, at this point, but we could easily calculate a future date with our calendar system. If one was to set a long term goal or perhaps an elaborate fantasy in a far flung future, they could do so simply. Nobody can see the future, but we can recognize and predict patterns fairly well as a species. Considering that people have been “foretelling the End of the World” since man discovered fire for some reason or another, and they have all been wrong, there is no justification in believing the hype that claims this impressive feat of time keeping has any kind of life and death significance. No, things that have life and death significance are for more subtle, widespread, and all too common.
The Problem with Prophecy
Jul 22nd
Doomsday prophecies are nothing new. Neither is a widespread desire to believe them. But in the end, they’re meaningless. The thing that most people fail to realize about “prophecy” is that it is ultimately open to interpretation. If an individual wants to believe a prophecy is true, whether as reinforcement for their religious world view, because they’re superstitious, or simply because the idea of a Universe in which they might actually be accountable for their actions is truly terrifying, it is a relatively simple matter to interpret specific lines as being relevant or in reference to actual historical events. The fact that the link between the event and the prophecy exists only in their mind is all too easy for them to dismiss.
Nostradamus is famous, or infamous, for a plethora of prophecies he wrote in his life time. He has been credited with predicting World War 2, the Atomic Bomb, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, and more, but the truth is none of these things are actually explicitly expressed in his own words. Rather, he uses vague poetic images which people hundreds of years later have decided allude to events that transpired between the time of Nostradamus and their present time. This is like seeing a television with no signal, cluttered with snow, then suddenly seeing the image of a sailboat after somebody else tells you it is there. It is all to easy to fit the random elements into a pattern when you have a pattern you want or expect to see.
This same process holds true with “biblical prophecy.” Most “biblical prophecy” as espoused by the “Rapture Ready” is a crude hack job of biblical texts that has as much reason and consistency as William S Burrough’s “cut up” technique of writing. That is to say, they’ll take a few lines from one book, a few lines from another, toss them in a blender, set it to puree, and then pour out the sauce and go “literal interpretation of the ineffable word of God” despite the fact that for it to be the “literal interpretation of the ineffable word of God” it would a) have to be true for the present time, which would b) make it utterly meaningless and insensible for the 2000 some odd year history of Christianity. I have a hard time seeing how something “ineffable” can be right for the last 20 years, and wrong for the 2000 years proceeding it. That seems like a pretty huge and glaring error.
At the end of the day, the value of prophecy to those that believe in it is the concept that things are preordained. That they are not accountable, or for that matter, even capable of affecting the world in which they live or it’s future. It is in short a “bury your head in the sand” card. If everything has already been foretold, why make an effort to change it? This is why prophecy, despite being utterly bogus, is all too dangerous. If people at large do not make an effort to create positive change, to push for progressive reform that safeguards the environment while elevating the living conditions of human beings, then nothing will change. The status quo is not our friend. While what we know may be comfortable, it is anything but safe.
The Leak That Will Not End (in the foreseeable future)
Jun 20th
I wish I did not have cause to write this article. Unfortunately the problem that is the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico just does not seem like it will go away. The truth of the matter is the leak could be stopped today and the problems it presents us as a planet, ecologically and economically, will not go away. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex) had the audacity to call a 20 billion dollar restitution fund a “shake down.” If only that were true. The truth of the matter is that 20 billion dollars will not, can not, ever hope to “compensate” for the kind of damages this leak has and is continuing to cause. Sure it will cover the losses of some of the fishing and tourist industry losses for a few years, but to think that this problem is localized in space to gulf coast states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, or in time to a few seasons of fishing is more fantastic than believing a unicorn will enter your bedroom tonight and leave you a pile of diamond dung to cash in tomorrow.
Thanks to the Gulf Stream, the massive current that moves around Florida out of the gulf, up the eastern seaboard, and across the Atlantic to ocean where it becomes the North Atlantic Drift and North Atlantic Deep Water currents, this spill has the potential to effect beaches and fishing territory through out the whole world. There has been little to no testing on the environmental impact of the dispersants BP is using to try and break up the oil. In short, the oil, and the “solution” could result in serious damages to ocean beds and coast lines not just along the Gulf of Mexico, but across the entire eastern seaboard of North America, as well as Europe, and potentially even all the way south to West Africa. The ocean is not a contained body of water, it is interconnected and constantly flowing. While spills off other coasts may have been containable in the past having occurred in harbors or other areas not in such proximity to such massive currents, it is entirely possible that the rate of the current leak, and its proximity to this major ocean current (Seriously. Global weather patterns are effected by the Gulf and North Atlantic, not to mention untold billions in fishing and tourism jobs. There is also the impact on physical food supplies. It taints the fish, it taints the plankton, it taints the soil, it taints the plants, it taints the land mammals that eat the plants. Hopefully you get the picture at this point.) could result in this accident having a global impact for generations to come.
Like any oil leak, the damage is not a brief event that is quickly forgotten. Ecosystems recover, but slowly, and when we’re talking about things like fossilized carbon we’re not talking about processes that take years. We’re talking about decades, possibly centuries for the ecosystem to regain it’s tenuous balance. It is only in the last few decades that humans have consistently survived to the century mark, and perhaps that is part of the problem. Our perspective of life and the world is so often limited to what is ultimately the narrow window of our lifetime that we fail to really grasp the magnitude of things. You can still find oil along the shores of the Prince William Sound where the Exxon Valdez fatefully ran ashore 21 years ago. Just look under the rocks. The native communities who sustained their existence by fishing and living off the bounty of that sea are now decimated. Worst of all, Exxon ultimately was only held accountable for 10% of the punitive damages initially assessed, cynically deciding to tie up restitution in litigation so long that most of the injured parties would be dead. After all, Exxon is a corporation, it can’t die. While BP rushed to get booms in place to contain the spill, it is readily apparent that nobody at BP or anywhere else was actually prepared or capable of handling a catastrophe of this magnitude.
The truth is that a combination of lax oversight from friendly political allies allowed corporations to operate callously with disregard to their potential impact on the untold millions and billions who also make a living “mining” the sea. It was not in the best of interest of the bottom line for BP to install “optional” equipment that might have made containing this leak in a timely manner more possible. The technology was “too advanced, too fool proof” to spend any time seriously contemplating what to do if a well sprung a leak 5000 ft beneath the sea (That’s literally .95 miles or 1.5 km, which for those of you who took basic sciences might recall works out to roughly 166 times the atmospheric pressure here at the surface. In two words, “crush depth.” To put that into context the estimated crush depth of a US Seawolf class submarine is half the depth of this leak.) and as BP has made abundantly clear, nobody has any fucking clue what to do now that there is one.
We can only pray that this leak is somehow, miraculously, stopped sooner than later. Do not kid your self into thinking that the Russian suggestion of using a nuclear bast to turn the seabed to glass would be any safer to the ecosystem or industries that rely on that ecosystem either. What we must do is demand our leaders hold corporations accountable, not after the fact but before. It is the responsibility of government to make certain that private interests act not only on their own financial interests, but consider their impact on their neighbors, their employees, and our planet. The human race has found one planet in all the limitless cosmos that can support it’s survival needs. This one. If we don’t take care of it, it could very possibly mean our extinction coming sooner than later. We’re on the clock people,but not because of any prophecy. If we do not learn to control ourselves, we will destroy ourselves. It is that simple.
The Lesson of Eyjafjallajokull
May 5th
Weeks ago the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull (the volcano in Iceland everybody was butchering the name of in the televised news) was international news. This slumbering volcano stirred and belched molten earth and ash into the skies. From there, winds and the jet stream spread this dangerous gaseous soup all over Europe, affecting weather patterns and international travel for days. It was almost impossible to get a flight in or out of Northern Europe at the time. Industry experts project the lost revenues caused by the initial eruption to be $1.7 billion or more. Some speculate it might have been bad enough to literally drive some European air carriers into bankruptcy.
But the eruption is not over. In recent days Ireland and Scotland have been struggling with another ash cloud which may soon, once again, influence larger segments of Europe. While some people might consider this a sign that “the Mayans were right” or as some kind of evidence of a foretold doomsday scenario unfolding before our eyes, I am confident in saying that is simply not true. What we are witnessing is a normal and natural geological process. The process by which the Earth’s mantle is replaced is well documented and easy to understand.
At fault lines and trenches, the crust of the Earth winds up being pushed down into the core. The deeper this material goes the more heat and pressure it is subjected to. Eventually this material is reduced into magma. Magma flows all around and through the planet in various concentrations and densities. Eventually, a local concentration of magma will reach a critical level and trigger a volcanic eruption. This is not a strange or mystical process. It does however seem to be basic geology that is somehow not learned during the course of most people’s elementary sciences.
There are volcanoes all over the world, both dormant and active. Unfortunately, a lack of funding has led to a woeful inability to monitor, track, and even understand the complicated systems involved in volcanic eruptions. It has been deemed more important to fund weapons systems than developing early warning capabilities that might, at the least, help us prepare for and work around volcanic eruptions. Do not think that such an investment would be fool hardy. Eyjafjallajokull is just a “normal” volcano and the impact it has had on Europe’s people and businesses is impossible to deny. The threat that ought to concern humanity lies in “super volcanoes.”
There are at present at least six known super volcanoes, three of them in North America alone. These volcanoes are so massive that if one were to erupt they would belch more than 240 cubic miles of ash, dirt, and magma into the sky. These are eruptions that are large enough to change weather patterns, block out the sun, and potentially even trigger new ice ages. There is currently no “real” way to “prepare” for the eruption of a super volcano. The best you can do is hope that they manage to release their pressure in smaller and less destructive ways (like geysers) than a full scale eruption.
The fact that we are so woefully unprepared to understand and predict, or possibly even prevent, catastrophic eruptions has nothing to do with it being “impossible.” It is instead the fault of people in positions of authority refusing to deal with such situations because it is considered a political liability with little to no reward. I cannot help but wonder what the people of New Orleans think about the decades of negligence on the part of local, state, and Federal officials to deal with the problem of their inadequate levies, preferring instead to “hope nothing bad would happen.”
What we should learn from the Gulf of Mexico Oil spill
May 4th
While the alleged Mayan Prophecy regarding 2012 is growing like wildfire in popular awareness there are far more serious threats that exist right now. When the mobile platform Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20th it was just the beginning of an event that will have significant impact on people’s everyday lives. For days the oil on the surface burned as emergency crews raced to try and contain as much of the oil as possible. But the trouble did not stop when the platform finally sank into the murky depths.
Thousands of barrels of oil and natural gas are presently escaping from the now unplugged well 5,000 ft below the surface. This crisis will not only have an impact on the Gulf coast environment, but on the global economy as well. Prices for oil are bound to increase as production is delayed indefinitely. At this point BP is hoping to have the well capped in the next week or two. If the past is any indication though, the leak may continue for another 6 weeks or more. The well is estimated to be leaking 1000 barrels of oil and natural gas per day. If it takes as long to contain this spell as it did to contain the Montara Well Head Platform leak in 2009 it is easily possible that more than 100,000 barrels of oil will spill into the waters of the Gulf.
While this is a small fraction of the planet’s capacity, it’s impact on future prices is still going to be felt. The US has a dwindling amount of domestic oil production and while this spill its self may not be that large (The US produces 5.4 million barrels per day) it will very likely have an impact on offshore drilling policy for years to come. This one incident alone may seem inconsequential, but when you look at a list of oil spills and eruptions you become aware of just how often tragedies like this actually occur. In fact, since 1980 Australia alone has had 20 significant off shore oil spills. That does not even begin to take into consideration events like the collision of the Exxon Valdez which resulted in 250000 barrels of oil ruining miles of pristine Alaskan shore line, killing wildlife and devastating the fishing economy and health of the local population.
While at it’s present rate it would take a full 8 months for the leak to match the devastating magnitude of the Valdez collision, the truth is that BP and the US are still not sure what to do with the current problem. Nobody expects the leak to go on for eight months, but nobody has ever had to face the challenges of sealing off an uncapped well at this depth before either. Currently they are trying a number of methods to stop the leaking ranging from activating an emergency seal (though at this point this is most likely not a viable option anymore) to actually building an underwater dome to help funnel the oil so it can be contained. The most permanent solution at this time is to drill another well, and use it to pump a chemical suppressant to the current leak and patch it.
Regardless of what solution eventually works, or how long it takes them to implement it, this is a reminder of what we should all really be afraid of. There is no reason to fear “celestial prophecies” and “End Times proclamations” when the truth is that commonplace accidents and the fallibility of human engineering have already placed our planet, and our population, on a precarious edge.
UPDATE
The initial estimate by BP for the rate of the leak of 1000 barrels per day is apparently grossly inaccurate. There is no firm number yet determined (it is easy to imagine the difficulty of “measuring” an oil leak 5000 ft below sea level) but guesses now seem to range from 5000 barrels a day all the way up to a potential million barrels per day. Remember that this spill will not only have a massive impact on the fishing industry (the price of Shrimp is about to skyrocket) but also the energy sector and even dish washing detergents. (Dawn dish washing detergent is a popular “dispersant” that is used when cleaning up oil spills. Some reports indicate that BP has purchased 1/3 of the planet’s current supply of dispersant agents to try and clean up this mess.) Also reports indicate one of the three leaking spots has been capped, however it does not seem to have slowed the over all rate of the leak at all.
