Apocalypse whenever

OK, 2012 is finally here.  I don’t really care about how many times people may have seen that over-the-top movie with John Cusack.  I seriously doubt that the world is going to end this year, or that is it is specifically going to end on or soon after December 21st of this year.

Put it this way.  I am quite familiar with Dr. Charles Hapgood and his theories, having read some of his work as well as some of the books by his contemporary followers like Graham Hancock.  So when I watched the movie and saw all of the references to Dr. Hapgood, I groaned and held my head in my hands.  That’s what you guys are basing all of this on?  Really?  Come on.  It became clear near the end of his life that Dr. Hapgood had taken a trip off to la-la land.  And If you have ever read anything by Graham Hancock, you will see that Hancock is well on his way too, if he is not already there.  Don’t get me wrong, I think that it is quite possible that human civilization is much older than we realize.  After all, modern humans have been around for 100,000 plus years, and that is a hell of a long time.  It is quite possible that at some point in the distant past a civilization may have developed, and then collapsed or died off for whatever reason, and we simply have not found (or have not identified) anything that belonged to them.  After all, we know that the eruption of the Toba supervolcano  in Indonesia about 70,000 years ago very nearly wiped out the human race.  We were literally reduced to a few thousand survivors – possibly as low as 2,000 – worldwide.  So it is possible that Hapgood and Hancock may be asking some of the right questions.  But their answers are where I part ways with them.  Don’t start concocting theories out of thin air based on half-assed analysis or evidence.  You do a disservice to yourself and to your cause.  Keep your nose to the grindstone and start slowly winning people over with the force of your evidence and arguments, the way science is supposed to work.

Anyway, yeah, back to the whole 2012 thing.  I don’t know if it is just laziness or stupidity or both, but the whole “Mayans say the worlds will end on December 21st, 2012” seems to be a startling misrepresentation and/or misunderstanding of the way the Long Count calendar works.  The Maya never said the world would end on that date.  It is simply the end of the Long Count calendar, which begins a new era on December 21st, 2012, or in the long count, 13.0.0.0.0, if I am not mistaken.  It is sort of like coming to the year 2000 in the Gregorian calendar.  It is a time of celebrations and a “new era” in the sense of the way time is measured.  It does not mean anything else.  In fact, it means even less, because the Maya did not program their electronics to use only two years the way we did, and so in that sense Y2K had a much better chance of ending the world than this does, and we know how that turned out.

So while I am a fan of apocalyptic fiction and science fiction, I do not buy this, and I honestly hope that no one with an ounce of sense in their head will buy it either.  By way of analogy, Kelly had a 2011 Betty White calendar that ended on December 31st, 2011.  It did not mean that Betty White predicted the end of the world, or that she had secret knowledge of a coming disaster, or that she was some sort of prophet of doom, or that she was in any way responsible for destroying the world and/or universe.  The fact that we owned this calendar did not impart us with “special knowledge” or make us special in any way, aside from the general coolness of having a Betty White calendar.   So please do not make me reach through the series of tubes that is the Internets and make me smack the taste out of your mouth and the stoopit out of your head if you start on any of this nonsense to me.  I believe in preparedness and all, but the idea that we can set a date to a world cataclysm is pretty damn ridiculous, unless we had managed to predict an impact event such as a comet or asteroid.  Now THAT would at least have the possibility of being true.  So go ahead and stock your survival bunkers, just realize that the December 21st deadline is probably not going to amount to much of anything.

Personally, I am preparing for the zombie uprising.*

-Geoff

*Just kidding.  Or…. am I?  Muah hah hah hah hah hah.