Year 2012: End of the World

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.

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.

Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero theory is one of many popular theories about what might possibly occur on 12 21, 2012. Granted, the fact that he may have tailored his date to coincide with the end of the Maya(n) calendar’s current cycle is a pretty reasonable explanation as to why this theory is becoming widely accepted.

Essentially Timewave Zero is based on the results of a computer program that McKenna developed as part of his formulation of Novelty Theory. Essentially McKenna posits that the amount of “novelty” occurring in the Universe will increase or decrease in relation to time. According to this theory the Universe is designed to both increase and decrease Novelty, or newness. He posits that this newness can be modeled as a wave that indicates when, if not where, Novelty will increase or decrease. This model is supposedly capable of tracking significant events in history, though considering it’s a cosmological model, one has to wonder what kind of event actually has historical significance from a cosmological viewpoint.

This model apparently has an asymptote in 2012, or as McKenna called it a “Singularity of Novelty.” While reports vary as to whether or not the model initially coincided with the 12 21 2012 end date of the Maya(n) calendar cycle, by the time McKenna died this was the “official” time that theorized singularity would occur. But what would a Singularity of Novelty actually entail?

That is a hard question to answer, as the theory itself essentially claims that such an event would involve everything possible happening all at once. If his theory is accurate the world as we know it, hell the Universe as we know it, would be radically and fundamentally altered. But there is good news, according to Timewave Zero, the period after would be an “Age of Peace.” Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that if such a cosmic shift did occur that anybody would be particularly bothered by it. Everything, existence itself, would be fundamentally changed by the event. Concerns about anarchistic post-apocalyptic survival would not only be unnecessary but irrelevant.

Terence McKenna was a brilliant man, but it is important to remember that much of his Novelty Theory was based on his own experimentation with psychedelic substances such as psilocybin mushrooms. Not to discount the possibility that altered states of consciousness might lead to better understandings of the Universe and how we fit into them, it is important to remember that such states can just as easily lead people into believing that they are being chased by mythic beings or speaking to God. (McKenna himself felt that he was able to hear the voice of Logos, an essentially benevolent God like entity while under the influence of these substances, who in fact helped him develop his Novelty Theory.)

The cynic in me has a hard time believing that the ideas proposed by the Timewave Zero theory will come to pass. However, even if they do, there does not seem to be any way to avoid the consequences, or even a reason to worry much about what they will be. On the other hand, if Timewave Zero is not accurate, there are plenty of dangers to the human species from both natural and man made events that we must all prepare for. If Timewave Zero does not deliver an Age of Peace, it is up to all of us to usher in such a time of prosperity ourselves.

If I had a nickel for a every theory about how the world is going to end in 2012, I would be sipping margaritas on a beach somewhere right now. I have not had the time to break down the convoluted logic that has lumped the Nemesis star into the Planet X theory or what they have to do with 2012. By all accounts the answer is that they are entirely unrelated except to those who wish to sell you a book explaining their esoteric connections. The really important word in that sentence? Sell.

I have however found this report which analyzes a theoretical connection between the “Nemesis” star and a cyclical pattern of mass extinctions that seems to occur roughly every 27 million years. How this is tied into 2012 I cannot imagine as it is widely agreed upon that if this cycle does occur again, it is not due for another 16 million years. If we as a species cannot find a way to spread beyond the confines of Earth to a “safe” location in 16 million years, well, we deserve that extinction.

That report is pretty darn technical, so to break it down, the researchers have ruled out the possibility of the Nemesis star as the cause of the cyclical extinctions because it is too regular. You see, due to the distance between our planet and the Nemesis star, if some kind of energy was being emitted from it that caused those extinctions, the number of gravitational fields and celestial bodies that would effect whatever might be transmitted would result in the cycle being more erratic than it actually is. That is right, the cycle is too reliable to be caused by a celestial body as distant from us as the Nemesis Star.

Image by NuclearVacuum

The Nemesis Star has lately been tangled up in the theories of “Planet X” or “Nibiru” which assert that a planet or nearly planet sized celestial body will collide or nearly collide with Earth causing a polar shift. If anything, I think this is an excellent example of how these various scenarios and theories tend to bleed together in the statements of those who are trying to assert their truth. The theory began with Nancy Lieder of Montana who asserted that she had received information from aliens of dire importance. It seems she initially argued that the Hale-Bopp comet was a false cover for an impending calamity. Later she would cite 2003 as the year of Earth’s inevitable doom. Now apparently the date has shifted to 2012 to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar’s current cycle which has been embraced by pseudo-scientists, new age crazies, and countless others as the new “hip” date to predict the end of the world. Frankly, the idea that a celestial body 4 times the size of the planet Earth could be kept secret is patently absurd. Between the communication systems available today, the number of amateur astronomers, and the sad state of international political relations, an object like that would certainly be common knowledge.

If you’re thinking that perhaps there is a secret “Ark” program like in 2012, well, that wouldn’t work either. If a mass that size collided with our planet it would not be feasible to maintain the resources to support the population of elitists and specialists for the amount of time required for Earth to become hospitable to human life after such an impact. Essentially, the long running hysteria people have had about an impending Apocalypse continues today, and the conspiracy theorists that cite Planet X, Nibiru, and the Nemesis Star as the cause are far more concerned with reinforcing their own preferred world view than actually looking at the data and facts. Either that, or they’re just looking at their bank accounts.

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 21^st and 23^rd.

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 13^th 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 31^st, 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.