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.