So Whats This 2012 Shit Anyway?
 

So theres this guy Patrick Geryl whos written a bunch of cheap looking softcover books saying that the world is going to end in 2012 by the sun reversing its magnetic axis, producing giant solar flares and reversing the Earth's rotation or something?

And then people talk about the Mayans saying how on December 21st either Man will evolve or be destroyed by an asteroid or by God?

Then again, we all lived through May 5th 2000 where all the planets in our solar system aligned for the first time in centuries - which was suppose to produce giant floods and solar flares.

So - whats this all about, Mulder?

Shadowrun also says it's going to end. If it is in 3 books, it MUST be true.

I personally like the Mayan one. It's not an end, just an end to this calendar. A new world starts. Cool idea. But mostly I'm just pissed Nostradamus was wrong about May 5th. It was my birthday. Told people not to show up.

Dick move, Nos Mos.

I thought that was "The Awakening" or something?

Also - The Alien Invasion was suppose to be 2012 in The X-Files, but I bet the box office disaster of I Want To Believe curtailed those crazy Greys into coming down with their ray guns and clones of Samantha Mulder.

Well, every couple of hundred thousand years, the Earth's magnetic fields will flip over. This is due to the convection of Earth's metallic core and its interaction with Earth's magnetic field. This isn't an un-usual event, its well documented by magnetized sediments. During the transition there will be a period of magnetic chaos that is commonly known as "magnetic storm" in which we have irregular magnetic poles. I think it is referring to something like that. Sun does similar things, but I don't know if there are any evidence that we are due one on sun yet.

Stuff that has happen before, but I don't remember seeing it correlated with any catastrophic events though. There doesn't seen to be any timeline that fits that I know of, but what do I know? I only watched that NOVA program about the magnetic storm. >.> .

So what the fuck would that mean? Like - would it be fucking Star Trek with its ION STORMS WE CANNOT BEAM DOWN SAVE GEORDI OH SHIT or would I just not be able to use my Cub Scouts Compass?

Man, did that movie ever flop. :(

And the Awakening is the end of the fifth world and the beginning of the sixth on the Mayan calendar. The world comes to a close, and at the same time sort of reverts to the fourth. It's complicated, but the basic idea is that the Mayan calendar is more or less cyclical.

I'd trust Shadowrun's prophecizing over some Nostradamus-blowing fucktard any day of the week.

Why? It's SHADOWRUN. I mean COME ON.

I KNOW RIGHT? IT'S IN A BOOK. LIKE... LOTS OF BOOKS.

Earth's polar axis flips every few million years or so. From what I've read, the technological effects will be the worst of the lot, there. Something about the moon having a beneficial gyroscopic effect on the planet keeping us from having "drifting poles" so on so forth. I am sure Gech would know A LOT MORE about that shit than I would.

The Mayan calendar abruptly ends in 2012, but I doubt that's a reason to be alarmed. I read somewhere (I wish I could cite it) that while the calendar stops in 2012, they do record things they "forsee" well ahead of 2012, into 4000+.

The Jews (or some sects of Judaism), I hear, also subscribe to the notion that the world will end in 2012. Something about a comet impacting Earth.

If you ask me, it's all a bunch of harbety-garble and nothing to consider seriously.

THIS MAN KNOWS WHERE I'M COMING FROM.

Sassu --
Yeah, polarity flips are very, very haphazard. There isn't any real trend to them. Plus, it doesn't go BAM, REVERSED. Polarity slowly inverts, the north and south poles weakening, then supposedly, there is a brief period with NO polarity. Folks kick around ideas about this period, since our magnetic field shields us from many bad things ;V If it were "canceled out" temporarily, results would be catastrophic. Buuuuut things seem okay. Scientists are still talking about it much today.

But more serious rantings on this stuff tomorrow when I have more time ;x But the doomsday prophecy in LeHah's post refers to the sun's magnetism going apeshit, and the Earth suddenly spinning the opposite way, not the Earth's magnetism (or did I miss that?). This all sounds pretty much impossible I'd think. Magnetic pole will change, but rotational speed is slowly, SLOWLY decreasing. The Earth is spinning one way and it'll stay that way. Days used to (millions and millions of years ago) be much shorter than they are now. In millions of years, they'll grow longer. It's pretty simple really =o

Look at it this way: the only thing I can think of that'd change our rotational direction would be something VERY BIG and VERY HEAVY hitting the planet. Something so big that nothing would survive :V

I think it would be interesting if the poles were reversed in the next few years. I mean Haley's comet comes once every lifetime so every generation sees it, however a pole flip? That is once in a million or so years so that is really rare.

Yeah, and the apocalypse can only really happen once ever, so oh boy wouldn't that be fascinating to witness

I thought it was something related to some gravitational fuckup.

Though I was pretty pissed my 15th birthday was on this day, I'd be pissed (or dead for that matter) if this actually did happen.

My understanding was that the 2012 end date of the Mayan calendar was basically the ancient equivalent to December 31: time to put up the new calendar you got for Mayan Christmas. There may have been spiritual rebirth and progression associated with it but they fully expected the world to keep on turning after.

Interesting from a technical standpoint, sure! But I somehow doubt that deadly cancer-rays and tons of beached whales, turtles and shit would be that ineresting up close.


The thing about the whole 2012 thing is, I would very much like to know the odds of them being right. I won't take my education that seriously, if the end of the Earth was actually near.
Well, first we have to survive the whole They are waiting for you in the test chamber, Gordon Large Hadron Collider thing.

You mean that giant atom smasher thats being used to create particles from the beginning of the universe? The chances of that thing going wrong in the spectacular fashion people suspect is infinitesimal; even if it did go wrong the result would be so sudden and so violent, it wouldn't even register to us. We'd be gone in the blink of an eye.

The court injunctions against it are a joke - if anything, they were filed to people's worries at ease, as the scientists had to avow what the machine was doing and what the chances were at malfunction.

You know, the more I think of it, the more I wish that the atom smasher wasn't infinitesimally unlikely to rip open a black hole - it would be the most benign, quickest, and most ideal way for humanity (and everything else in the immediate areas in space) to disappear.

The alternatives are rather bleak.

You mean it would be the coolest way for humanity to disappear.

Aliens in neighbouring galaxies would call it "epic lol".

The Large Hadron Collider destroying the world is a bunch of fearmongering bullshit by people who have no clue how quantum physics operates (99.9% of people). It could result in tiny black holes, yes, but said holes dissipate until they reach a proper size. The smaller the black hole, the faster it dissipates.

Yes, there is such a thing as a runaway black hole effect, but the black hole generated would need to be massive. I'm not talking about the size of a Buick. It would need to be the size of the SUN for it to turn in to a runaway black hole. The LHC is perfectly safe; don't let some doomsday sayers, uninformed fools, and CNN tell you otherwise. The POTENTIAL black holes generated by the collider are the size of an atom. And that's assuming we can even generate them; there is substantial proof that it might not even be able to create them.

Just adding to what Gech said, the Earth is bombarded with trillions of high energy cosmic rays everyday. These cosmic rays are the very same particles that the LHC intends to collide in its research, except cosmic rays have far greater energy than anything we can hope to produce with current technology. These collisions have been occurring naturally for billions of years with no dire consequences so there is no way that the LHC can trigger a doomsday event as some people claim.

If anything, I'd worry about methane clathrates rupturing under the ocean floor and releasing millions of tons of methane into the atmosphere, unless that is pure speculation as well.

I do my part in limiting methane pollution by eating hamburgers.

Seriously - one of the reasons we have ozone problems is because of cow farts. Look it up.

What we'll have to do once the Earth's rotation is reversed is drill down into the core and set off a series of nuclear bombs in a well timed succession to help jump start its engine in the right direction. Up and out of this terrible fucking galaxy. Starship Earth 2012. Be there.

As I remember it, there's even a prophecy in the I-Ching somewhere that predicts the world will end in 2012.
Some statistician graphed the I-Ching out, and when laying it out so that the X-axis represented dates and the Y-axis represented the severity of events, he was able to plot things out like major wars and extinctions and all that. But the graph suddenly stopped...12-21-2012... :erm:

I can't find the direct link to it, since I spotted this on The History Channel. But there are blogs out there where people talk about it. Here's one that sums it up pretty nicely:

If Joe Rogan believes it, then I believe it.

Joe Rogan is the solution to this problem, actually.

I, personally like the supervolcano way. I wouldn't want everything to die, I like the idea of a 'New Era'.

Or alternatively, I want to evolve into a being of light/energy like in Galactic Civilizations.

You mean just everything on the Continental United States, huh motherfucker?

2012 will mark the first Olympic games to be contested in an un-finished stadium. You know us Brits can't organise building projects for shit. Also, according to the Ghost Recon timeline 2012 is when America gets invaded by a bunch of Mexicans and I'm pretty sure Frontlines cites 2012 as the beginning of World War 3 so the signs are definitely all there.

As I understand it, the shift in Earth's magnetic axis will most likely confuse a load of migrating birds and fish more than anything else but I do tend to only ever read the first paragraph of New Scientist articles.

Ah, you're one of THEM!

No, I'm well aware of the fact that the Large Hardon Collider is completely harmless. I just thought it fitted along with unfounded 2012 talk.

From what I've read in some danish popular science thing, the lack of a magnetic field around the Earth should also lead to everything being soaked in cosmic and solar waves. Which would be like Fallout, without the humour.

What about that Millennium Dome thing that they featured in The World Is Not Enough?

And then had the world's biggest jewellery heist.

England's biggest joke/waste of money? You've got to be kidding.

Isn't it curious that Nostrodamus was (debatably) born on the 21st of December.

You still finished it on time.

The stupid part of it is that you have nothing to do with it NOW.

Barely. There was still scaffolding all over it on the millenium night. Also I cite the new Wembley stadium as an example of British building projects, cost double the budget and took a couple of years longer than it should have.

The Millenium Dome got bought by O2 and is now the O2 arena. They have concerts there that nobody can get home from because the public transport infrastructure never got finished properly and there's only about 20 parking spaces on site.

It was done on time because it was rushed to hell.

And while it was still known as the dome, it fucking sucked.

:rolleyes:according to a panel I read at the vancouver planetarium, a meteorite will come as close as 40000 Km (the moon is 380 000 KM far) to the planet around 2012. Who knows if it will come closer...

NASA has debunked this as a total myth. There is no way a Meteor would come that close without them already basing warnings and preparing for it.

With hope though, maybe a few hundred or thousand people will take this seriously and commit ritualistic suicides in the same fashion as Heaven's Gate, and all the other cult organizations. Maybe the Scientologists will follow suit too (thats hoping for a lot though), and so, we may just solve the problem with overpopulation.

Clearly though, this is nothing but another y2k scare.

Um. A few hundred thousand people isn't going to do jack squat about overpopulation.

A few hundred thousand morons who believe everything though just might do something good for the world.

Well, I can't argue with that.

No, but it just might get Janus X to stop posting here

No way? Its more likely than you think.

Nehmi, that entire article is about how incredibly unlikely it is for an asteroid to hit Earth. Did you even read it before linking to it?

What's going to happen is that Nemesis, which has never ever been documented and is pure speculation, will get within a short distance of its highly irregular orbit with a great amount of gravitational influence, this object will have to be super huge to even influence the Earth, and destroy the solar system. Or what a bunch of nutjobs think.

Personally I think that 2012 will happen like any other year and the most likely cause of our demise will be by our own hands.

I for one, hope it's the zombie apocalypse. Not some asteroid wiping out man, global warming, some global pandemic, nuclear warfare, Y2K, and/or Jesus coming back to kick some ass.

No, bring on the flesh eating zombies!

2012 is a numerologically ugly number. Why can't people say prophetic things about 2016 instead. Think of the possibilities one could have with the numbers it produces!

Like the article says:
We would know about now thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope or any outer space observatorial devices of such an object coming to hit the planet.

Would you two stop acting like Elixir for the rest of this thread?

Not to play devil's advocate, but taking in to account the amount of space debris and potential meteorites/asteroids, it's impossible to keep tabs on every single one. I actually saw a figure pertaining to this some time back, but it's quite staggering; it's like being able to count the number of (and keep tabs on) water droplets that make up an long burst of a fire-hose :V

Despite this, very very few make it toward the Earth. The Van Allen belts tend to sway most bodies away, and the few that remain typically disintegrate upon entry in to the atmosphere. To see the Van Allen belt working its magic, simply compare the Earth's topography to the moon's. Sure, the Earth has weathering and what-have-you to smooth out impacts over time, but the moon (which has a magnetic field less than a hundredth the power of Earth's, courtesy of its "dead" interior) is *covered* with impacts from meteors. In conjunction, the moon lacks an atmosphere and doesn't have a burn-up effect that we see upon re-entry in to Earth.

I'm no expert, but I read somewhere that in the event that something like a meteor comes HURDLING TOWARDS EARTH (and I believe there is one on it's way, but will pass without incident), they have a technique using gravity to lure the meteor away from it's collision course with Earth.

I forgot how they'd do it, exactly. But it involves no explosions or ARMAGEDDON-like blowing-up of huge flying debris. All done with mass and gravity in space.

Ah. Here we go.

Kudos, Sass =D I've never heard of this, but it's very feasible. As it mentions by usage of "keyhole", there is a sweet-spot that needs to be hit in order for the body to not get brushed aside by our Van Allen belts. It's akin to hitting a ramp in order to make a jump; if you're off, you'll miss or even screw up your trajectory. The drawback is that, given our constraints on sizes we could make these tractor shuttles or bodies, it'd need to be laid well in advance (the "shove" isn't too huge). If those fail, I think that directly plowing in to the asteroid body would be the follow-up; crude, inaccurate, but far more fast in its results.

Elixir falling off his chair.

The whole premise of the article is that we don't know how many NEOs are out there.

and
So to say there's "No Way", it could happen is quite wrong. In fact, it is the most likely thing to happen (that we won't see it coming), as any objects discovered and deemed dangerous would be dealt with. Also, "keyholes" only help us when we know about an asteroid (or comet) and can determine what the specific path it needs to take to be on a collision course.

Of course there's always the threat of some random comet coming out of nowhere that we've never seen before; they have been known to have highly eccentric orbits. Something of that nature could have a 100,000 (or however long outside of human history) year orbit and we'd have absolutely no record of them.

Do you have any idea what an impossibly small fraction of space we have under consistent observation? Do you have even the slightest idea? The most detailed and thorough image we have from Hubble is the Deep Field. The Hubble Deep Field is thought to represent roughly one thirteen-millionth of the sky. The observe the entire sky at that level of detail would, with current technology, take over a million years.

Space telescopes are an important and useful development, but omniscient they ain't.

So what you're basically saying is "We won't see it until its right in front of our noses, and then its too late." right? Because what I am implying is we would have ample time to prepare for such an object converging on our planet's orbital trajectory and ample time to do something about it. Not like a NEO is going to just appear out of nowhere and we will just have to brace for impact...

(in before any matrix jokes)

The deep field image is also pretty much all galaxies, and I don't think it's the way we'd go about looking for asteroids. It would be like trying to find an elephant on the savanna using a microscope.

I'm only using it as an example of how silly it is to assume that we'll automatically see any significant objects just because oh gee we got some telescopes. I'm not falling into Nehmi's predictable repent-the-end-is-near attitudes, but saying the issue is like TOTALLY TAKEN CARE OF, NO WORRIES is a little naive. Also naive is the notion that a collision-course object would automatically be dealt with, should it be observed. We'll just send the Space Marines, yeah?

We might require more Vespene Gas to do that.

But what about the mobile suits?!


Also see Sass' post for more info about changing trajectories and whatnot. It seems possible and likely. Also I am for sending mass amounts of weaponry into space to divert such crisis (Nuclear Missles that can reach outer orbital levels and collide with NEOS and whatnot). Hell, lets equip the International Space Station with reverse low-orbital Ion Cannons at this point and we are set!

keep hoping :p

Nehmi posted an interesting link. I wonder how big is that comet that's coming soon...

Damnit Lehah, I was thinking about posting a Starship troopers reference, but I doubted its validity on being funny.

I am - and I'm not the only one. Maybe that should give you an inkling of your posts instead of some glib smiley reply.

Let's see what I can do about this.

Well all in all, I hope that damn thing they're setting off tomorrow doesn't blow us up, and the asteriod they say will make a "fly by" won't hit, I didn't pop out my kids for nothing!
I plan on being around well passed 2012 and I plan on my neighbors and city to stick around until I'm long gone too.. I see the giant volcano erupting before any of these other crazy ideas take place...

You obviously don't know what CERN collider does.

I doubt she even knows what a collider is :(

Its'a large hadron colander. You use it to'a drain's your'a pasta for your'a large'a spaghetti dinner. Gonna be'a wonderful Wednesday! [/pizzapie]

Holy shit. Forget Jesus and his posse, I'm gonna start praying to this pew pew pew guy. Nigga gets shit DONE.

Collider? But I only just met her.

Then explain the hardon, you prude :mad:

My end of the world theory is the Earthquack. One day ducks will rise up an control the world, and we as humans will be forced to live in ponds and lakes the rest of our lives.
It will be a rather nice existence, to be honest. We get to chill out and let little ducklings feed us bread, our only concern will be when some jackass ducks shoot at us as we try to run south for the winter.

But honestly, I'm going with the super volcano theory even though it might only mean North America is doomed for certain. Australia will probably just sit there at the complete opposite end of the world laughing at us or something.

I did not agree with this prediction. I know this date comes from the Mayan calendar, which many believe says that the end of time is 2012. This is an incorrect interpretation of the Mayan perception of time. It is the end of an age in 2012. The Mayans had a 52 year cycle, much like we have a 100 year cycle. The date of 2012 is the end of one age, and the beginning of another.

Would you care to back that up with, you know, evidence, oh weary time-traveller?

Evidence of what? It's kind of a widely-accepted fact that 2012 is just the end of a cycle in the Maya calendar. The only people who interpret it as the end of the world are readers of esoteric magazines.

Strictly speaking talking about "facts" as applied to anything Mayan is a little flibbertygibbet

Is that a fact?

No.

It's flibbertygibbet. :mad:

This site says a lot of the same things as others I've seen

About half way down, it explains that per some interpretations of when the Mayan long-count date started, it resets to 13.0.0.0.0 on either the 21st or 23rd of December 2012. The Mayan long-count system is days on the far right, then uinals, 20 days each, then tuns, 18 uinals or 360 days, more or less a year, then katuns which are 20 tuns or 20 years, then baktuns which are 20 katuns or 400 odd years. There are 13 Katuns in the long-count so assuming archaeologists are right and they started counting in 3,114 BC, it's almost time for a reset.

Why the Mayans chose a 13 Katun cycle I couldn't tell you. They used 20's as a basis for most of their time divisions (Fingers and toes probably). The Aztec calendar had years split into 13 months of 28 days each with an extra day at the end called the day out of time. This suggests mathematical reasons as you get a whole number of days in each month with one remainder but also suggests that the number 13 was significant, otherwise why not have 14 months of 26 days? I've not read enough about the subject to know any more than that but idle speculation would suggest a connection to the zodiac of Western culture, possibly with an extra constellation you can only see from the southern hemisphere.

People are clearly putting far too much store in an ancient calendar system predicting the end of the world, especially as the Mayans had words for much longer periods of time. An alautun for example is 63 million years. The idea of the world ending has probably evolved from the Mayan use of two calendar systems to keep track of months. One was a 365 day cycle, the other a 260 day one which meant that they came into synch every 18,980 days. Mayans all shit themselves thinking the world would end every 52 years when this date rolled around so the tradition of resetting dates leading to armageddon probably springs from this. It's a little arrogant to believe that an arbitrary numbering system to record the passage of time could have any bearing whatsoever on actual global events. That's the kind of crap people get into their heads if you let priests get too much power...

Probably the same reason England used to use a 13 month callendar:

2012 is going to be awesome for a number of reasons. The Chinese are having political shakeups slated for that year, the US is having elections, the US is ceding military control to the Rep. of Korea after that 50 year agreement thing... the largely symbolic Mayan end-of-an-age thing seems oddly appropriate given the year. Also, I will finally finish grad school.