Critically examining the "End of the World"
Posts tagged 2012 predictions
The Year 2012: End of the World?
Feb 2nd
There is a lot of speculation these days about the possibility of a global cataclysm in the next few years. Most of this attention is based on the Mayan calendar. December 21, 2012 is the supposed end of the Mayan long form calendar, but it is only the end of one epoch, not the end of time. This date has been popularized by the modern media, being featured in everything from History Channel specials to a major Hollywood blockbuster film. There is no shortage of people out there willing to cash in on the attention being given to this phenomenon, but sadly, personal gain all too often outweighs informed or reasonable analysis.
To start off with most of the people talking about the “Mayan’s 2012 prophecy” do not have a proper understanding of the long count Mayan Calendar. December 21, 2012 is not actually the end of the calendar, it is the end of the 13th b’ak’tun. We will be delving into the intricacies of the Mayan calendar in the future, but to keep it simple for now, even the Mayans predicted events to occur after the 13th b’ak’tun’s conclusion. Not even the fascinating culture who’s calendar has inspired much of this frenzy thought that this impending date would be the end of the world.
End times prophecies and fears are common. While the most recent and easily remembered is probably the threat of the Y2K virus, they are not a new or recent phenomenon. Even the belief in an impending Rapture and biblical End Times prophecies, a relatively new school of thought within Christianity, is essentially only a little over 100 years old in a religion with a history that spans two millenniums. All you have to do is look at accounts of the turn of the first millennium to find evidence of groups shouting about the impending end of the world, and that was a thousand years ago.
However, it is also true that a failing infrastructure has left large segments of the population at risk from perfectly normal natural disasters. The National Academy of Sciences did issue a statement in January of 2009 warning about potential issues to modern electrical and communication networks caused by solar flaring. Prophecies might not be anything to worry about, but that does not mean there are no dangers presented by our reliance on modern systems and how they would interact with the processes of our planet and solar system.
It is our goal to not only examine theories and risks that modern society might face in the near future, it is our intention to provide reasonable advice you can act upon to help protect your self and your family. With all of the hysteria about the end times in today’s culture it is comforting to know that you are actually doing something. The year 2012 is probably not going to be the end of the world. However, unless we as a civilization fail to prepare ourselves and our culture to adapt to the challenges we will be facing in the future the era of man on Earth may be coming to a close sooner than we think.
Water water, everywhere…
Jan 24th
It is a well known fact that three quarters of the Earth’s surface is water. What is not well known is just how little of that water is actually fit for human consumption. Thanks to the wonders of modern plumbing, or the plethora of bottled waters available for purchase, most people in industrialized nations have come to take potable water for granted. In fact, less than 1% of the planet’s water is clean enough for healthy human consumption. In fact, a number of major US cities are already facing down water shortages even without the possibility of impending threat.
Take into account that the human body is also roughly 70% water and that it is essential for metabolizing nutrients as well as breaking up and removing waste, and the danger of not being able to get clean water quickly becomes very alarming. Water always tops the list of supplies needed for relief efforts after hurricanes, earthquakes, or other natural disasters that can decimate a community’s infrastructure. There is good reason for that.
If there was to be a Earth shattering event like those predicted by Patrick Geryl, or Nancy Leider, you can rest assured that access to clean water would be one of the first things you would need to secure for the health of you and your family. But the wild prognostications of people like this are not the real threat to the drinking water supply. The infrastructure of the United States water supplies is decades old and well past time for replacement. Water and sewage mains are breaking down from disrepair and governments, both local and Federal, are loath to spend the kind of money it takes to replace these systems until it is too late, that is to say, until they’ve already broken.
These breaks can result in homes without water, crumbling streets, and ultimately cost more money to repair than they would have to just refit before they failed. Unfortunately, finding politicians willing to make hard choices now for the sake of the long term picture is increasingly difficult when more and more of their energy is focused on keeping the electorate happy right now. Tomorrow’s problems belong to a nebulous future, while keeping your present day poll numbers up is essential to maintaining your office. The fact that this kind of short sighted policy is ultimately detrimental to the community is a fact that is lost on both the elected officials, and the voters, who are more concerned about today than they are about ten years from now. It is essentially a collective decision to put off the oil change in the car because the budget is tight, so long as the motor keeps running. But eventually the head gasket will blow.
On the plus side, it is possible for individuals to build their own water filtration systems. (Sorry, Brita, you might work on tap water, but you wont work on contaminated water) There are also plenty of methods to both test and purify your water as well. In the mean time, it’s important for people to remember that water might be everywhere, but we can drink very very little of it, and to take steps to conserve as much drinking water as we can, while we can.
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.
Patrick Geryl – Mr 2012 or Mr Crazy?
Feb 2nd
In his book The Orion Prophecy, Patrick Geryl, sometimes called “Mr 2012″ claims to understand secret information about the process of geomagnetic reversal. Essentialy Mr Geryl asserts that bombardment by the sun will lead to an instant change in the polarization of the magnetic field, thus causing apocalyptic havoc on the planet. While it is true that the magnetic field reverses, the tidal waves and earthquakes he insists will coincide with the event are fantastic in nature. The truth is that the Earth’s magnetic field has reversed dozens of times, including several times in humanity’s past.
Not only does he seem to be anticipating earthquakes and tidal waves along with the magnetic reversal, he asserts that entire continents will shift hundreds of kilometers almost instantly. If any of this is sounding like science fiction, or a recent Roland Emmerich Hollywood Blockbuster, I would not be surprised. The hyperbole used in his text is not uncommon, there are any number of gurus willing to claim that they have “secret insight” of “esoteric knowledge” in the name of turning a profit. The problem arises that when what should be entertainment at the least, and theory at the most, is espoused as irrefutable truth is the very real panic and fear that it can instill in people who do not have a background in geology, physics, or history.
That being said, if you do want to take a brief walk through crazy town to see first hand what profiteering hysteria looks like, you can find The Orion Prophecy by Mr Geryl on Amazon.
