B. Todd
Huffman (10/10/2009)
This is basically a pre-emptive debunking e-mail
regarding the 2012 doomsday scare that I've heard rumors about and is
completely ridiculous.
What I have heard so far seems to take many forms. But
the unique feature this time is that the date Dec. 12, 2012 marks the end of
the Mayan calendar and this is, somehow, connected to the end of the world.
There is apparently a series of disaster movies about to come out about this
too.
The first thing to recognize is that ANY calendar that
uses a stone tablet as the medium upon which it is recorded must have a finite
length. It's like the digits in your car's odometer. If you only have physical
room for 5 digits on your dashboard then you will get all zeros every 100,000
miles. Likewise, if you are writing your calendar out on a finite object you
have to make a 'choice' as to how big you make it. The Mayan calendar chose
increments that are multiples of 12's and 20's and it turns out that 144,000
days (a bit over 394 years) was the rollover point. Kind of like our Gegorian calendar rolls over, in a sense, every 1000 years.
The Mayans called this rollover period a "baktun"
kind of like we call a rollover period a 'millenium'...it's
just a word that signifies a human-invented mark on an arbitrary measure of
time. The "baktun" wasn't even the Mayan's
longest measure of time, apparently 20 "baktuns"
made up a "pictun" and the end of the
current "baktun" is the 13th one.
(Oh brother...I can imagine the idiocy of the numeroligists regarding THAT...unlucky 13...mixing western
mystical numerical attachments to other cultures...but I digress.)
Now that's the basis for choosing this date. But then,
not content with such a mundane explanation the crystal-kissers, end-timers,
and various fringe religons have to bring in other
factors as well. Some of thier claims are just
nonsense that can be proven false and here are a few of them.
1). There
will be a planetary alignment: This is utterly and completely
false. We know where the planets will be throughout the whole year of 2012 and
there is no alignment at any time during that year, let alone on Dec. 12th.
2). Of course,
planetary alignments are supposed to cause all kinds of catastrophic events.
This is hard to believe since there was one back in the early 80's when Reagan
was elected. Of course I would argue that this indeed was a catastrophic event
but there are a significant number of people in the US who disagree with
that...opinions aside the one thing that came from THAT planetary alignment was
the fact that the Voyager 2 probe was able to make a Grand Tour of ALL the
outer planets and with only one space mission expand our knowledge of those
distant worlds by 1000 times. Perhaps this is the catestrophic
event that is referred to? Again, a matter of opinion,
because I think that this is a good thing. But no doubt there are people
who believe that investigating worlds other than our own is very very bad. Anyway, unless I was asleep that alignment did
not cause any addtional storms, earthquakes,
volcanoes, nor did it cause the earth's magnetic field to flip or to disappear.
And it definately did not significantly change the
orbit of the earth around the sun.
By the way, we are not due for another planetary
alignment of that type for something like another 170 years.
3). The Winter
solstice occurs on that date and the sun will ecplispe
the galactic center: Actually it will not. In fact, the sun
will NEVER eclipse the galactic centre and it will not even reach the closest
approach in the sky (getting within around 2 degrees) to the galactic center
for another 200 years. But more to the point, so what even if it did! The
Galactic centre is 125,000 light years away. ONE light year is 5 Trillion
miles. The moon is only 93 million miles away from the sun and when the moon ecplispes the sun nothing that serious
happens. Indeed, our galactic center is completely obscured
from us already by a 4,000 light-year thick cloud of gas and dust in
one of our galaxy's spiral arms which is closer in than we are....so
the galactic center is already eclipsed by one of the inward spiral
arms of our galaxy and has been since the first scorpion-like anthropods climbed out of the sea 400 million years
ago.
There are many other fanciful claims I've seen, all of
them demonstrate a either a phenominal
ignorance or imagination. I've stuck to the ones that are easily
provable as being falsehoods and also underpin most of the other arguments
that I have heard. I'm almost sure though, given the cleverness of
conspiracy theorists and the bunker mentality that seems to pervade much of
modern culture, that you may see a FOX news installment about this 'end
time' date at some point during the next few years. You will most CERTAINLY get
one of those mass e-mailings from some concerned friend.
When you do remember that it is totally and completely
false with no basis in fact whatsoever.
By all means! please do pass
this one around!
By the way: The
source for much of my information regarding the Mayan calendar is from the
November 2009 issue of "Sky and Telescope". A lot of the other
information on where the planets will actually be can be obtained from this and
from many other Astronomy sources. You can find out about the "Grand
Tour" here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Grand_Tour