2012: An armageddon oddity

The end is nigh. Again.
Over the centuries, there have been untold predictions that the world will end.
The latest predictions claim the end will come on December 21, 2012. There are various reasons for this, including the end of the Mayan calendar, a supposed rogue planet that is due to plough into us, the stars and the sun will be in some sort of special alignment and the new movie, says so in surround sound.
And while some people scoff and roll their eyes, others take these things very seriously. The National Geographic website’s story on the 2012 predictions quotes a senior scientist from the Nasa Astrobiology Institute, David Morrison, as saying he knew of two teenagers who were considering killing themselves and two women who were contemplating killing their children and themselves so they wouldn’t have to go through the end of the world.
Closer to home, Opshop lead singer Jason Kerrison told TV One’s Close Up programme this week he was building an ark a rigid dome to keep his family safe. And in Taranaki, New Plymouth Astronomical Society president Rodney Austin has been fielding calls from people concerned about the doomsday predictions.
All roads seem to lead to the Mayan calendar. Usually, when a calendar ends on December 31, it is taken down and a new one is put up that starts January 1. But when the ancient Mayan calendar ends around December 21, 2012, many are predicting more than just the end of the calendar. The Maya aren’t bothered. They don’t think it means a thing, but in the West .
If that doesn’t have you worried, there’s more. Around the same time, the Earth will be in alignment with the sun and the centre of the Milky Way galaxy something that only happens once every 25,800 years. Or perhaps you would prefer a polar shift or the sun burning us up.
Then there is the rogue planet, called Nibiru or Planet X, that is floating around in the universe somewhere and is scheduled to take out Earth on or around December 21, 2012. It was due to arrive in May 2003, but didn’t. Maybe it got lost. But a woman in Wisconsin has it on good authority from extraterrestrials, with whom she is in contact, that the planet is on its way.
According to Wikipedia, Nancy Lieder claims that as a girl she was contacted by gray (as opposed to green) extraterrestrials called Zetas who implanted a communication device in her brain. If the planet had arrived in 2003, it was expected to cause the Earth’s rotation to cease for exactly 5.9 terrestial days. Then the Earth’s poles would physically shift and there would then be a displacement of the Earth’s crust all in all, a major disaster. Who knows what it will do in 2012 if it gets here.
But Mr Austin doesn’t think it will. He says, bluntly, that it’s all ”and you can quote me on this, a load of crap”.
If there was a rogue planet hurtling towards us, we’d be able to see it.
”It’s another hoax a total load of rubbish.”
He has seen photos of the supposed planet. A friend even emailed him one.
”I sent back an email of the exact position where [the telecope] is looking and the name of the object. It is a well-known catalogued object. It’s not a planet.”
If a planet were coming ”dead straight” at Earth at a super high velocity, it might not have been found already, he says. But a planet would have a gravitational effect on other planets, so its presence would have been detected.
”There’s a lot of junk out there bits and pieces, minor planets and all the rest. Over 500 million minor planets have been found, just bits of rock and so on. Occasionally, once in a blue moon, every 100 million years, we get sideswiped by something particularly large. It’s not too good for us wipes out dinosaurs and things like that. Basically, if a planet was going to clobber us in two years’ time, they would have found some real indication, people who know what they are doing, not a lot of hand-waving by idiots.”
And no, he doesn’t believe Nibiru is hiding behind the sun.
”They do crawl out of the woodwork.” He means the crazies, not the planets.
As for predictions of a dangerous planetary alignment, he doesn’t buy into that either.
December 21, 2012, will be the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the summer solstice down here.
”It just simply means the sun is at its farthest south in the sky.”
The Earth’s axis is tilted by 23.5 degrees and as it goes round the sun Earth stays pointing towards the same the direction.
So, consequently, in mid-winter New Zealand or about three weeks from now, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted towards the sun. In December, the southern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun. There will be no difference in 2012.
The Earth does wobble like a top, but it takes 26,000 years to do it, Mr Austin says.
”The Mayans knew about that, actually, that actual rate of processional. They didn’t know why. Their figure is remarkably accurate, actually.”
He gets a good laugh out of all the theories, he says.
”It’s total rubbish. It really is.”
A lot of people have been asking him what is going to happen in 2012 and he generally he tells them to come back and ask him in 2013.
”It’s just hocus pocus.”
But people are concerned about it, he says.
Howard Bloom, writing in Psychology Today last December, says people get caught up in these theories because they like the idea of endings and new beginnings. Every end-of-the-world movement says people will be wiped out through various means, including plague and apocalyptic battles.
”But not the true believers. They’ll be saved. And they’ll have a fresh new world, a world purged of us, a world they can turn into their own private paradise.”
One of the most popular apocalyptic belief systems of the past 30 years has been the idea that humans are bringing about the destruction of the planet, he says.
”The greenhouse-gas scenario is partly a scientific hypothesis and partly a deeply appealing myth.”
It’s a new way of saying that the end is coming and that only the believers will be saved. Only those who’ve embraced the right god or the right philosophy will survive.
New Plymouth psychotherapist Lynne Holdem doesn’t think the people talking about 2012 are the same people talking about global warming, but they appear to be related to each other.
The end of the world is unthinkable, somehow, so is therefore is a strangely exciting prospect, she says.
”I haven’t seen the film 2012, but I imagine there are a few survivors. A sense of a new beginning or an after-life is then possible. Perhaps, in a strange way, there could be a kind of longing for this.”
The apocalyptic movie genre holds people in thrall because they bring what people fear and dread under sway of human creativity and control, she says ”something we can manipulate rather than only feel at the mercy of”.
The fantasies are as old as history.
Indeed, end of the world predictions, at least within organised religions, have a name: eschatology, which is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as ”the part of theology concerned with death, judgment and destiny”. Each of the world’s major religions Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddism and Hinduism has its own end-time beliefs.
Wisconsin University history professor Paul Boyer says people need beginnings and endings and says that’s why armageddon predictions appeal.
”So, at its deepest level, it is a utopian belief system. It speaks to the human need to believe that life somehow must be better than we’re experiencing it today; that a very different kind of society must be out there somewhere, if only we could achieve it. The prophetic belief system speaks to that need in a very profound and direct way.”
The movie 2012 will be coming to a theatre near you. There are hundreds of books on the 2012 phenomenon (check out amazon.com) and heaps of websites, from the scientific to the weird and wacky. Last month, Trade Me had a Copper Mayan Calendar Wall Hanging for sale. It didn’t sell. Perhaps it had too short a shelf life. Even the seller pointed out a prospective buyer would only be able to appreciate it until the end of 2012.
References:
Wikipedia
news.nationalgeographic.com 2012: Six end of the world myths debunked.
www.psychologytoday.com: Why the world will end in 2012.
www.pbs.com

The 2012 phenomenon

The end of the Mayan calendar is the major event in what has become known as the 2012 Phenomenon. December 21, 2012, is the end date of a 5125-year-long cycle of the Mayan Long Count calendar.
Maya themselves don’t think it means the end of the world or anything else, for that matter.
But it is important for them, because it is the time when the largest grand cycle in the Mayan calendar 1,872,000 days or 5125.37 years overturns and a new cycle begins, according to Mayan expert Anthony Aveni from Colgate University in New York and author of ifThe End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012. nf
Dr Aveni, quoted on the National Geographic website, says during the empire’s heyday, the Maya invented the Long Count a lengthy circular calendar that ”transplanted the roots of Maya culture all the way back to creation itself”.
In December 2012, the lengthy era ends and the complicated, cyclical calendar will roll over again to Day Zero, beginning another enormous cycle.
”The idea is that time gets renewed, that the world gets renewed all over again, often after a period of stress, the same way we renew time on New Year’s Day or even on Monday morning.”
Scholars say the Mayan empire didn’t leave clear records predicting that anything will happen in 2012.
Dr Aveni likens the cycles to the new year period, when the closing of an era is accompanied by frenetic activities and stress, followed by a rebirth period, when many people take stock and resolve to begin living better.
He tells National Geographic the Maya weren’t much for predictions.
”The whole timekeeping scale is very past-directed, not future-directed. What you read on these monuments of the Long Count are events that connected Maya rulers with ancestors and the divine. The farther back you can plant your roots in deep time, the better argument you can make that you’re legit. And I think that’s why these Maya rulers were using Long Count time. It’s not about a fixed prediction about what’s going to happen.”

By HELEN HARVEY
Source: www.stuff.co.nz