With less than 48 hours until the beginning of the end, I find myself quite distracted from the final projects due for my classes. The irony is that if I rush to finish now, I’ll be completely done with this term and on break for the next two and a half weeks, but if I am to believe the end is coming within 48 hours, I will have wasted my last days doing school work. Rather than writing my final papers and enjoying my time off, I’m forced to contemplate life and the meaning thereof. Also, I am famous for procrastinating. This is as good a reason as any to do so.
For as long as a stream of people have been able to follow a single path, there has been someone at some random point along the way with warnings that ‘the end is near’. Starting in the early 90s, that path has included, to a large extent, the internet. Thus, we can readily find oration on all manner of complex, graphic descriptions of how the world will end, by all manner of someones at random points in cyberspace. The first widespread prediction of the end of civilization as we know it, within the context of this medium, was Y2K. Of course, the century changed with no measurable events that could be construed as civilization’s downfall.
And after that, the next major date we had to fear was the year 2036, when the asteroid 99942 Apophis was supposed to have crashed into the earth, triggering an extinction level event, whereby the sun would be blocked by dust and debris resulting from an impact, for several months. This was, for a time, the source of much consternation among the general public. Upon closer investigation, if 99942 Apophis does impact the earth, the most devastating result would be a tsunami, should it fall into either the Pacific or Atlantic ocean. Naturally, the closer to the impact site, the greater the effects, but hardly enough to have a sustained global environmental effect. The Tunguska event in 1908 released the equivalent of between 8 and 10 megatons of TNT. 99942 Apophis would be on the measure of between 150 and 200 megatons. By comparison, the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 produced about the equivalent of 250 megatons. Not that an impact would be easily dismissed, but it’s hardly worth attributing to it the label ‘harbinger of the end of days’.
Interestingly, the next most terrible end of days scenario involves the end of the Mayan Calendar on 21 December 2012… at 11:11 UTC. This date and time represents the end of the long count of the 5,125 year cycle that the Mayans crafted to keep track of the transiting sun and moon across the sky. Coincidentally, and perhaps only intended as a universal point of reference, the earth will align with the center of the galaxy, unobstructed, for the first time in about 29,000 years. One ramification of this alignment is a direct dose of gamma rays that are thrown out from the galactic core, which would have the unpleasant result of sterilizing the planet’s surface. Only the ocean’s floors and deep caverns inside mountains would escape the radiation. On the show Ancient Aliens on the History Channel (you see the irony in that, right?), a contributor posits that increasing global temperature is not confined to earth, but the phenomenon can be observed in the atmospheres of every planet in the solar system (even Pluto). The only reasonable explanation is that the closer toward a galactic core alignment the sun and planets get, the greater the effects of the gamma radiation on the entire solar system. Never mind the scores of satellites in orbit around the planet designed to detect event he slightest increase in gamma particles- a tell tale sign of a nuclear weapons detonation. So sensitive are these satellites, that when first launched, managed to detect gamma ray bursts in galaxies halfway across the universe. If this alignment is going to sterilize the surface of the earth, why did it not do so 29,000 years ago, thus dooming humanity, along with our primary food source- cows, to extinction.
As inheritors of the Mayan culture, Mexico has embraced the artistic value that the calendar represents; It was, for years, the central motif on the 1 Peso bill. Paradoxically, the ‘long count’ Mayan calendar is the one that ends in 2012- and it is linear. This is different than the ‘calendar round’ or ‘round count’ calendar that is still in use today in some parts of Guatemala and remote Mayan enclaves in Mexico. No real significance is attached, in the Mayan culture, to the end of the linear long count calendar. It is assumed that there were previous ‘ages’ and that merely another age would begin again, presumably at 11:12 UTC on 21 December 2012. Since the culture was exterminated upon Spanish conquest in the 1600s, a long count calendar indicating the fate of the world for the next age of 5,125 years, could hardly have been engraved on any stone face. Furthermore, the round count calendar seems to indicate that the day after the end of the long count calendar is a day of no major significance.
I mentioned that this particular end of days scenario is interesting… here’s why: predictions that asteroid 99942 Apophis will impact the earth on 13 April 2036, will come to fruition if the asteroid passes through a particular gravitational keyhole hundreds of thousands of miles from earth. The indication of this passage will occur exactly 7 years before supposed impact, on 13 April 2029 (a Friday!). As it happens, both of these dates are mentioned in inscriptions to dates beyond the end of the current 5,125 year cycle- one is the arrival of the god Bolon Yokte' K'uh, the other roughly corresponds to the investiture of Bolon Yokte' K'uh in the form of a completed temple. Loosely translated, this means that abut 17 after the end of the Mayan calendar this December, a Mayan god will appear and a temple will begin to be built in his honor. 7 years after that, it will be completed and the god will be honored with much human sacrifice and perhaps a game or two of ulama. Aside from the amusing correspondences of these dates, there is nothing that purports the end of civilization as we know it.
Were I to worry about the end of civilization (as I do on occasion), I would be far more concerned with the slow deterioration of the human immune system resulting from the over use of ‘anti-bacterial’ products such as hand sanitizer and other detergents. Only those with less than socially acceptable hygienic habits will inherit the earth following the imminent pandemic.
This coming Saturday, 21 May, is supposed to usher in a period of rapture, whereby the ‘good’ people are whisked away to heaven and the rest of us are left to writhe in hellish agony until the world is destroyed five months later on 21 October.
After this Saturday passes without incident, when all is well and good, come 22 December 2012, when Apophis is either blown to smithereens, or otherwise rendered innocuous by the ingenuity of humankind and, finally, when the smelly people inherit the earth just after the rest of us die of a cold, the next big thing to worry about will occur on 28 January 2044: the last day of the 79th cycle of the 60-year cyclical Chinese Lunar calendar. That’s when dumplings will rise against humans and take over Golden Dragon Buffets all over the world.
I, for one, welcome our dumpling overlords.
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