Foresight of Hindsight: "End of the World" in the Year 2012 ??

Friday, October 3, 2008

"End of the World" in the Year 2012 ??

Foresight of Hindsight
"End of the World" in the Year 2012 ??

This post was found on a forum called: ironwolf.dangerousgames.com :-
"... But anyway ... anyone else see this story the other day? http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=5301284&page=1 It details what one man thinks will happen in 2012 as far as the earths poles swapping ... thus killing half the planet. There is a link towards the end of the article to the guys actual site where you can find excerpts from his books ... detailing what is going to happen and what to do to be "prepared".

"But what I want to talk about is the bigger picture. Mayan calendar, Biblical prophets, solar flares and heightened hurricane seasons, and the real threat of the bad guys actually succeeding with a plan to nuke. Will the panic be worse then the catastrophe? Has the media already started to plant the seeds of despair and panic? I think some of these things are worse than the dreaded threat of traffic jams and empty bank accounts circa 1999. (thinking Y2k bug). Are we headed for a mass hysteria as 2012 approaches? More importantly ... if "doomsday" starts getting predicted by people who are not calling it "religious" ... will more people be "afraid", stop paying their bills ... etc. Equally so ... let’s talk about what sensible, un-afraid people can do to try to stop the panic. What can be done to fight the media machine? Yeah ... I like to speculate. Let this be the official place to do it. It's wide open for debate."

This was my response :-

In the article, this section gets to the crux of the 'debate' :-
Quote ---
"But for all the hype, there is little evidence the ancient Maya ever intended for the end of their calendar to be read as a portent for disaster. "These prophecies of doom really don't have any basis in what we know about the Maya," said Stephen Houston, a professor of anthropology at Brown University and a specialist of Maya hieroglyphic writing. "The Maya descriptions barely talk about this event." Instead, Houston said, the Maya saw their "long count" — the longest of their cyclical calendars — coming to an end in 2012 but also beginning anew on that date, without disastrous consequences. "Really, it's a conversion of people's anxieties about our times, and finding some remote mythological precedent or prediction of it," Houston said about the origins of the current 2012 myths. "People like to believe that ancient wisdom is somehow predicting this time of upheaval." John Hall, a professor of sociology at the University of California Davis who is writing a book on the history of apocalyptic ideas, agreed. He said movements predicting the end of the world often reflect a much larger nervousness about the state of our society. "Terrorism, 9/11, ecological disasters, floods and earthquakes," Hall said. "[There is] a sense that modern civilization has had its run. Those kinds of anxieties are much more widely shared than simply among people who believe in the exact date." To Lehmann, though, those very events are warnings of what's to come. "We had Hurricane Katrina, the recent cyclone in Myanmar," Lehmann said. "We've got major flooding in Iowa. We're always going to have natural disasters. But they are picking up quite frequently now."

So, there is little evidence that the Maya predicted anything in particular.
Forgive me for saying, but that's also the conclusion I came to a number of years ago. The '2012' sites have been on the web for a long time!

It is true that the sunspot activity looks to be high around 2011 or 2012, but it's only part of long established cycles. Quote from NASA: "Solar cycles usually take a few years to build from solar minimum (where we are now) to Solar Max, expected in 2011 or 2012." http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/2008/08-005.html
The Earth has obviously been through countless solar cycles that haven't caused "the end of the world."
What evidence is there that December 21, 2012 will be the peak of the activity?

There is apparently evidence that there have been pole reversals in the Earth's early history, but it is only wild speculation that it might happen sometime in the future. Again, what evidence is there that a pole reversal might happen on December 21, 2012?

Regarding "hurricane seasons", please supply links to information about any research projects - if they are available on the web.

Speculation about terrorists getting their hands on effective nuclear devices, being able to locate them in particular spots above and around cities, and being able to propagate effective electromagnetic pulses "relies on hype and distortion". Go here if you're interested: http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2005/11/checking_the_pu.html

That last highlighted quote above: "We're always going to have natural disasters. But they are picking up quite frequently now." is irresponsible in the extreme. Forgive me for saying (again!), that is exactly the type of comment that easily influenced people will latch on to and will refuse to relinquish no matter how hard you try. It has absolutely no credibility! The historical records simply do not show that that is true. We have tried very hard in other threads on this forum to debunk those crazy ideas. For more information, please go here: http://ironwolf.dangerousgames.com/forum/index.php/topic,293.0.html

PS. The original poster did not post a reply...
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Wikipedia article :-
2012 Doomsday Prediction

What the Ancient Maya Tell Us About 2012 (very definitive)