I’m an end-of-the-world survivor. Through my life, there have been dozens of dates set for doomsday. Magic comets, mysterious asteroids, the second coming, planetary alignments, the rapture, you name it. People keep picking dates and years that the world will end – so many that I don’t think I’ve lived through a single year when there has not been at least one prediction that the world would end that year.
Stubbornly, the world has refused to end, much to the embarrassment and chagrin of many doomsday prophets.
Welcome to 2012.
Now, what’s coming up this year?
Well, Robert Weinland says that Jesus Christ is returning on 27 May this year, and that if you mock his prediction or fail to properly respect God’s infinite grace and mercy and love, well, he’s promised to use God’s power to murder you with cancer. That’s only 22 weeks away, so if you’re a mocker you’ll be on your last legs already.
Then we have the Mayan ‘Long Count’ calendar, which ends… well, actually, there’s a little bit of variation here. The most popular notion is that it ends in December this year. However, others claim that the Long Count calendar actually ended as much as two years ago, because we’re actually a little vague on exactly when the calendar started. We think it was in 3114BC, but it might have been earlier.
Now, this one guy in 1962 suggested that the end of the Mayan calendar would be the time of Armageddon and the end of the world, but it isn’t actually clear quite why he thought that, since apparently none of the Mayans ever did predict anything bad would happen then at all. Nevertheless, lots of folks have been repeating that for a while. However the guy did sell a whole lot of books with the Mayans and the end of the world in them.
Besides, the Mayans wrote down a lot of dates for things that they wanted to clear their cultural schedule for after the end of the Long Count calendar. Hootenannies and such. The sort of stuff you don’t generally chisel into your temple wall if you’re (say) expecting the world to end some 2000 years earlier than that.
There’s a so-called ‘galactic alignment’ that is thought by some to cause mass extinctions every 26 million years. The last one was about three million years ago, but some people believe that the next one will be 23 million years early and happen this year. Never mind that the ‘alignment’ itself actually takes 36 years. There’s no apparent reason for it to be be early, but people are saying it will be early and sudden anyway.
Then there’s the notion of Nibiru (also called Planet X, or sometimes Nemesis) which is either a planet, or a star or a neutron star (nobody’s really very clear on that) which will destroy the whole of the Earth exactly the same way it was predicted to in May 2003. Nibiru is supposed to be impossible to see or detect in any way at all. Thankfully, a few people have been in psychic contact with aliens who decided to encourage feelings of dread and worry by telling them all about it. Mind you, these aliens got it wrong last time, so maybe they’re just griefers.
Then we have a geomagnetic reversal that is supposed to be triggered by the upcoming solar maximum. Now, geomagnetic reversals do happen. They take about seven thousand years, and they mostly cause mild annoyance to some birds or birdlike animals. Proponents of the geomagnetic-reversal-end-of-the-world say that the upcoming huge solar maximum will trigger a sudden reversal, releasing the energy of 100 billion atomic bombs – a figure that I understand was arrived at by the painstaking process of completely misunderstanding the interaction of solar radiation. Also, the upcoming solar maximum isn’t going to be particularly large – all forecasts suggest it will be a comparatively sedate one compared to the last few. Anyway, as usual, everyone and everything dies.
The final major contender this year is alien invasion. I’m guessing that the people who believe in this one are expecting aliens who don’t know about the Second Coming, the Mayan calendar, the galactic alignment mass extinction, the microwaving of Earth by geomagnetic reversal, or the destruction of Earth by Nibiru.
And by an unhappy coincidence, all of these are predicted (by their relative adherence) to take place on 21 December – except the Second Coming, which obviously will take place in May after a whole bunch of us have been murdered by cancer for doubting.
I tell you, that one day will be an exciting time – what with all those disasters happening on the one day. I’d hate to be those invading aliens. That would just suck.
Now it’s time for a Christian Dogma break: Believing that you know the date, time or even year of the end of the world is, in the Christian faith, what they call heresy. Dogmatically speaking, even God doesn’t know when the Second Coming, the Rapture or the Apocalypse will be – He said so, and He’s supposed to be playing it by ear. Besides, He said it was going to be a surprise for everyone, and I’m sure nobody wants to come out and call God a liar. Therefore if you were to suggest that you know when it is going to happen, you’re pretty much believing that you have better knowledge than God. I’m sure I can leave it to you to figure out just how heretical that is, and which of the major sins are involved.
So, Christians? You’re all exempt from believing in predictions of the end of the world. That bit of a soaking we got as children certainly turned out to be good for something after all.
As for the rest of you? You don’t have to believe that the Mayans had a better space program than we ever had. You don’t have to believe in psychic alien contact, or undetectable stars, or a bunch of made-up hooey that doesn’t turn out to be any more real this year than any other year that it was supposed to happen.
Yet both the religious and the secular alike apparently keep hanging on to the hope that the world will actually end. Really soon.
Sit there and think about that for a moment. Right at this very moment, there are thousands – indeed tens or hundreds of thousands – of people around the world who have their fingers crossed for the catastrophic end of the planet, whether by the power of God, or by some badly-aimed stellar body, or… well, by anything. And when they’re disappointed that it doesn’t happen, they latch onto a new date, as if they could shatter this Earth by faith and will alone.
You might start wondering exactly why.
I think it is that an increasing number of people don’t want to see the consequences of the things they’re doing now. They don’t want to suffer withering looks from their children or grandchildren over the state of the economy, or the climate, or energy resources, or pollution, or pay-to-play legislatures.
We know deep-down that we’re soiling the nest, and we think we’re screwing things up so badly that we’re wishing the planet would go away rather than face the consequences of our choices today, or the blame that history will assign us. That’s why so many of us want the world to end. As for me, I suppose I’ll just get murdered by that cancer guy in a month or three.
Of course some few people believe instead that this year will be a year of sudden enlightenment for humanity. If so, I’m rather hoping that it happens on the 22nd of December; that we all wake up in the morning and realise that the continual doomsday predictions are essentially always bullshit and stop caring about those, and maybe start thinking about the future, caring more about each-other and maybe working to fix up our mess in countless little ways.
But that really seems as unlikely and outlandish as all of the others, doesn’t it?
| I’m an end-of-the-world survivor. Through my life, there have been dozens of dates set for doomsday. Magic comets, mysterious asteroids, the second coming, planetary alignments, the rapture, you name it. People keep picking dates and years that the world will end – so many that I don’t think I’ve lived through a single year when there has not been at least one prediction that the world would end that year.
Stubbornly, the world has refused to end, much to the embarrassment and chagrin of many doomsday prophets.
Welcome to 2012.
Now, what’s coming up this year?
Well, Robert Weinland says that Jesus Christ is returning on 27 May this year, and that if you mock his prediction or fail to properly respect God’s infinite grace and mercy and love, well, he’s promised to use God’s power to murder you with cancer. That’s only 22 weeks away, so if you’re a mocker you’ll be on your last legs already.
Then we have the Mayan ‘Long Count’ calendar, which ends… well, actually, there’s a little bit of variation here. The most popular notion is that it ends in December this year. However, others claim that the Long Count calendar actually ended as much as two years ago, because we’re actually a little vague on exactly when the calendar started. We think it was in 3114BC, but it might have been earlier.
Now, this one guy in 1962 suggested that the end of the Mayan calendar would be the time of Armageddon and the end of the world, but it isn’t actually clear quite why he thought that, since apparently none of the Mayans ever did predict anything bad would happen then at all. Nevertheless, lots of folks have been repeating that for a while. However the guy did sell a whole lot of books with the Mayans and the end of the world in them.
Besides, the Mayans wrote down a lot of dates for things that they wanted to clear their cultural schedule for after the end of the Long Count calendar. Hootenannies and such. The sort of stuff you don’t generally chisel into your temple wall if you’re (say) expecting the world to end some 2000 years earlier than that.
There’s a so-called ‘galactic alignment’ that is thought by some to cause mass extinctions every 26 million years. The last one was about three million years ago, but some people believe that the next one will be 23 million years early and happen this year. Never mind that the ‘alignment’ itself actually takes 36 years. There’s no apparent reason for it to be be early, but people are saying it will be early and sudden anyway.
Then there’s the notion of Nibiru (also called Planet X, or sometimes Nemesis) which is either a planet, or a star or a neutron star (nobody’s really very clear on that) which will destroy the whole of the Earth exactly the same way it was predicted to in May 2003. Nibiru is supposed to be impossible to see or detect in any way at all. Thankfully, a few people have been in psychic contact with aliens who decided to encourage feelings of dread and worry by telling them all about it. Mind you, these aliens got it wrong last time, so maybe they’re just griefers.
Then we have a geomagnetic reversal that is supposed to be triggered by the upcoming solar maximum. Now, geomagnetic reversals do happen. They take about seven thousand years, and they mostly cause mild annoyance to some birds or birdlike animals. Proponents of the geomagnetic-reversal-end-of-the-world say that the upcoming huge solar maximum will trigger a sudden reversal, releasing the energy of 100 billion atomic bombs – a figure that I understand was arrived at by the painstaking process of completely misunderstanding the interaction of solar radiation. Also, the upcoming solar maximum isn’t going to be particularly large – all forecasts suggest it will be a comparatively sedate one compared to the last few. Anyway, as usual, everyone and everything dies.
The final major contender this year is alien invasion. I’m guessing that the people who believe in this one are expecting aliens who don’t know about the Second Coming, the Mayan calendar, the galactic alignment mass extinction, the microwaving of Earth by geomagnetic reversal, or the destruction of Earth by Nibiru.
And by an unhappy coincidence, all of these are predicted (by their relative adherence) to take place on 21 December – except the Second Coming, which obviously will take place in May after a whole bunch of us have been murdered by cancer for doubting.
I tell you, that one day will be an exciting time – what with all those disasters happening on the one day. I’d hate to be those invading aliens. That would just suck.
Now it’s time for a Christian Dogma break: Believing that you know the date, time or even year of the end of the world is, in the Christian faith, what they call heresy. Dogmatically speaking, even God doesn’t know when the Second Coming, the Rapture or the Apocalypse will be – He said so, and He’s supposed to be playing it by ear. Besides, He said it was going to be a surprise for everyone, and I’m sure nobody wants to come out and call God a liar. Therefore if you were to suggest that you know when it is going to happen, you’re pretty much believing that you have better knowledge than God. I’m sure I can leave it to you to figure out just how heretical that is, and which of the major sins are involved.
So, Christians? You’re all exempt from believing in predictions of the end of the world. That bit of a soaking we got as children certainly turned out to be good for something after all.
As for the rest of you? You don’t have to believe that the Mayans had a better space program than we ever had. You don’t have to believe in psychic alien contact, or undetectable stars, or a bunch of made-up hooey that doesn’t turn out to be any more real this year than any other year that it was supposed to happen.
Yet both the religious and the secular alike apparently keep hanging on to the hope that the world will actually end. Really soon.
Sit there and think about that for a moment. Right at this very moment, there are thousands – indeed tens or hundreds of thousands – of people around the world who have their fingers crossed for the catastrophic end of the planet, whether by the power of God, or by some badly-aimed stellar body, or… well, by anything. And when they’re disappointed that it doesn’t happen, they latch onto a new date, as if they could shatter this Earth by faith and will alone.
You might start wondering exactly why.
I think it is that an increasing number of people don’t want to see the consequences of the things they’re doing now. They don’t want to suffer withering looks from their children or grandchildren over the state of the economy, or the climate, or energy resources, or pollution, or pay-to-play legislatures.
We know deep-down that we’re soiling the nest, and we think we’re screwing things up so badly that we’re wishing the planet would go away rather than face the consequences of our choices today, or the blame that history will assign us. That’s why so many of us want the world to end. As for me, I suppose I’ll just get murdered by that cancer guy in a month or three.
Of course some few people believe instead that this year will be a year of sudden enlightenment for humanity. If so, I’m rather hoping that it happens on the 22nd of December; that we all wake up in the morning and realise that the continual doomsday predictions are essentially always bullshit and stop caring about those, and maybe start thinking about the future, caring more about each-other and maybe working to fix up our mess in countless little ways.
But that really seems as unlikely and outlandish as all of the others, doesn’t it? | |  | |
Tags: Alien Invasion, Apocalypse, Cancer, Christianity, Doomsday, End of the World, Geomagnetic Reversal, God, Heresy, Jesus Christ, Mayan Calendar, Nemesis, Nibiru, Planet X, Religion, Robert Weinland
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I guess with all these doomsday scenarios, I don’t have to release my deadly neurotoxin after al-
*clink*
=SHATTER=
Um… er… never mind.
-ls/cm
2012 is going to be a loooooooooong year. But it’s nothing new. I came home from Catholic School one day, full of as much angst as an 8-year-old could muster. I recall the conversation pretty well:
Mom: “What IS wrong with you?”
Me: “Sister said the world is going to end and a lot of us will go to hell.”
Mom: “Oh, what the hell does SHE know? She’s never been with a man!”
Me: “Huh?”
Mom: “Never mind. The world ends when you die. Now go play with your GI Joes.”
Me: “M’kay.”
Actually, based on one article I read, the calculation used to determine the end date itself had some errors in it, and its believed that the calculation may have been off by as much as a century.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/mayan-calendars-2012-doomsday-prophecy-wrong/story?id=11926347#.Tw2Z3qPLNQI
I vaguely remember your writing an article this long. Yummy.
My favorite is the whole Second Ice-age that turned into Global Warming that turned into :Climate Change” arguments. I figure climate change has been occurring for 4.5 billion years so why sweat the next 20?
Nostrodomus [sp?] predicted the end of the world in something like 4250 or whatnot. As we can always fall back on that if all the others fail. In which case, I figure we’ll all be dead and not much care about it by then.
I prefer seers and prophets who are rather less vague. Wouldn’t it be nice if Nostradamus could have just come out and written his quatrains something like:
Sun twentieth of Taurus the earth will tremble very mightily,
It will ruin the great theater filled:
Yet the designated hitter rule stands fast,
Shall the Giants thus win the pennant.
Of course there is always the possibility somthing we don’t know and/or understand might result or be involved in the world ending around that date (we can’t say such a thing doesn’t exist since we can’t say we know and understand everything in the Universe and beyond); but i’m more worried about what the bunch of crazy people will do across the world thinking it’s their last day and they won’t have to live with the consequences of their actions…
Well, that was a long post. You obviously think something is going to happen.
Of those scenarios enlightenment is probably the least likely…
I suppose the luck of those psychic aliens is why human psychics have such a hard time in Las Vegas.
@Zauber; Harold Camping said the same thing a few dozen times.
It was the end of the world when gambling was forbidden.
It was the end of the world when adult content was banned from mature parcels.
It was the end of the world when the price of homestead increased.
It was the end of the world when viewer 2 arrived.
Nowadays the world is dying because of mesh and tomorrow it will die because of Linden Realms.
Guess who is going to survive? You and me.
@Gaga No, I just write long posts sometimes – the length isn’t always proportional to the importance. Just to the amount that there is actually to say.
Yay! Tateru back writing again! Nice long article yummy!
OK, I must point out that if Mr/Pastor/Father Weinland is going to give you cancer for not believing him, when Jesus comes in May, He’ll heal you up, so [insert Simpson's Nelson-laugh here] Ha ha.
Also, did you consider that perhaps the aliens are coming to HELP us evacuate before all these disasters and the hyperspatial express route plows Earth into the gr… into space-dust? Just a thought. Remember your towel.
@Tigro:
Ah, well predictions are a funny thing. You see, just because something happens as it is predicted to doesn’t make the prediction actually true.
Say, for example, I just pull a number out of the air and say that there will be 30 car accidents in this city tomorrow, and it turns out that there are 30 car accidents on the day. I’m only actually right by accident. The odds were that I would more likely be completely wrong. Getting the right result doesn’t mean that a prediction is accurate – it canjust be random numbers or guesswork.
Here’s a prediction scam:
Email 10000 people and tell them psychic aliens have given you the result of a 10 horse race. Give each group of 1000 the name of one of the horses.
After the race, 1000 of those people think you were right, because their horse won. The other 9000 people were losers.
Contact the 1000 winners and tell them that your psychic aliens have another winner for them. 900 people lose. 100 people win.
Contact the 100 remaining victims and give them a new winner. 90 of them lose. 10 of them win.
Now, contact the ten remaining victims and that you want to get them the winner for one of the big races, and tell them that you’re getting psychic interference and need a thousand dollars to improve your psychic antenna.
Now, these ten people have never ever known you to be wrong. As far as they’re concerned you have a perfect record. You have been right every single time.
Now you are ten thousand dollars richer.
Send out ten names to your ten victims. One of them wins. The others are losers.
Contact the last one (who should now have won quite a lot of money). Tell them about the problems you are still having with your psychic antenna and ask for ten thousand dollars to work on it.
Now you have twenty thousand dollars. Send your last victim a horse name. If it wins. Repeat. If it loses, disappear and start over with another ten thousand people.
Even if some of the last ten people lose, they may still be willing to give you money for another winner.
I can take no credit for this scam, as it has been done before – quite a number of times. Often the perpetrator gets away with it, because the last quarter or so of their victims have made a lot more money than they lost and aren’t interested in complaining.
It’s wire-fraud when done by email, or mail fraud when done by regular post, but it isn’t accurate prediction, even if a bunch of your victims think it is.
Carrying on from the last comment. I could predict also that there will be a major disaster this year. That will obviously come true as there are at least five major disasters every year somewhere in the world.
That X number of armed conflicts and Y number of major disasters will happen in 2012 – as they happen every year doesn’t make 2012 special. If none of them happened, though, that would make it a very special year, but they’ll happen as usual, and some people will take these to be signs and proof, just as they do every other year.
And yes, some people will kill themselves to avoid the impending apocalypse. Some will quit their jobs and sell or give away everything that they own and go stand in the woods waiting for the Rapture to come on the appointed day (as they do every year). And that’s terrible.
Darwinian, but terrible.
If they just off themselves that won’t be such a big deal in comparison with other things they might do; someone might go on a shooting spree ’cause anyone they hit will die in the next 24 hours anyway, nuclear powerplant workers might vent the radiation to the atmosphere to ruin the planet so the aliens will not want it, an upset airline pilot might try to park his 747 over the company owner’s house since he won’t need the job anymore, some religious demolition worker might implode some big busy building to spare the people from the suffering that is to come, mobs might go out looting to have the things they could never afford at least during the last 24 hours of their life, prison guards might let out all the dangerous prisoners out of pity to give them one last day of freedom before the end, some big stock broker might sell all to have some live cash for his last day crashing the stock market in the process, emergency services could get understaffed as workers take a collective sickday to spend their last hours with their family and close ones, the list goes on, and most of the stuff won’t necessarily happen alone, other shit could be going down at the same time elsewhere…
Great article – so many ways to go
As an aside there is some evidence that geomagnetic pole flips can occur in just a few years – http://www.physorg.com/news202971192.html, but still no evidence it is catstrophic.
@hitomi Well, the magnetic poles have been drifting for quite some time now (a few centuries, perhaps), so it might already be happening – but it isn’t very quick.
It’s accelerating though
Potents of doom are many and varied.
There is nothing remarkable about SVC-7231, for instance, which was tagged as resolved, a few days ago. Apparently the fix went live in September.
It is reported in comments that the long-standing SVC-22 has also been fixed. No official announcement there. We’ve already had the Second Coming of Philip Rosedale, so what might happen next? What comes after the furry AVs for new players? A seven-headed leopard with ten horns, perhaps?
With a sufficiently twisted imagination, anything is possible, and the gullible will be on tenterhooks, waiting to hear the screams of tortured prims.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Rosedale R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
It does usually give me the sense of people wanting an end to suffering or some mechanism to go, “you’ll get yours”. But it’s likely just a fanciful try at a guess of what is universally believed that all good things come to an end. So people play the guess the number of jelly beans in the jar with our existence.
Or I’m just craving confectionary tonight.