The world is coming to an end...and this time Im not kidding

[momopi]

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/ ... 114lw.html

The world is coming to an end...and this time, I'm not kidding

By John Silveira

If you havent already heard, on September 10, 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located on the border of France and Switzerland, was turned on for a test run. Sometime in early or mid-December, the scientists running the collider are going to accelerate protons in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light, and crash them head-on into each other. They hope the collisions will duplicate conditions thought to have existed in the first one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

But heres the bad news: The LHC may also create microscopic black holes that will end the world. Black holes are bodies so dense, and whose gravitational fields are so powerful, even light cannot escape from them. They rapaciously swallow everything that gets close to them, their gravity getting more powerful with every particle they absorb. The black holes will fall inside the earth where they will gain in gravitational power as they gobble up the earths core. We wont notice anything, at first, but within a few years well start to realize somethings wrong as the interior of the earth disappears and earthquakes of biblical proportions take place. A short time after that, the entire world will be sucked in and well all be dead. The terrible thing is, from the second that first black hole is formed in December, there is nothing we can ever do to stop it. Run for your life!

Are you scared? Well, let me add, physicists who understand this stuff say this is baloney. Still, the forecast of impending doom is all over the Internet. Its even on CNN.

So, try this one on for size instead. There are at least four books written about it, so it must be true: The Mayan calendar predicts that December 21, 2012, the world is going to end. The priests from that ancient civilization made calendars of uncanny accuracy, but their calendar stops on this date and doom is certain to follow. Not scared, yet?

This morning I googled end of the earth. Are you ready for this? Real scientists say were actually in the middle of an ice age. At the moment were in an interglacial or warm period, but its not going to last. Glaciers and ice sheets will come back, American cities will be swept away before the advancing ice, and its going to start happening...well, it could start tomorrow, or not for another 10,000 years.

"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. Its already tomorrow in Australia."
-- Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip.

There are more prophesies of inevitable doom than I can shake a Ouija board at. In my lifetime we waited for The Bomb to end civilization, Y2K to send us back to the Dark Ages, avian flu to send us to the hospital, for Planet X to...to... What was Planet X going to do? On top of those, California was repeatedly posited to be about to fall into the Pacific Ocean, asteroids were going to collide with our planet and send us the way of the dinosaurs, and superbugsdrug-resistant microbeswere going to eat us all up.

Then theres a thing called eschatology that deals with apocalyptic theories. There have been thousands of predictions forecasting the imminent Second Coming and the end of the world next week, next month, or next year. None, to my knowledge, have come true.

The earliest apocalyptic prediction we know of is one inscribed on an Assyrian clay tablet from 2800 B.C. It listed signs that the world was going to end any daywell, at least any day 4800 years ago. As near as I can tell, no religion and no civilization is immune to apocalyptic predictions.

So, why do we succumb to the latest doomsday story and forget the thousands before that didnt come true? Ill tell you why: Because everyone likes a good scary story.

Look what Hollywood churns out every year: One disaster epic after another. There are end-of-the-world movies, monster movies, and adaptations of one Stephen King novel after another. And theyre making billions showing them.

Is there anyone immune to this kind of stuff? You may think I am because Im writing about them. But let me make a little confession: Back in the 80s, even I got caught up in end-of-the-world scenarios. Yeah, I became survivalist, bought a Mini-14 and handguns, acquired some M1 Garands, socked away a bunch of food, ammo, medical supplies, junk silver coins, etc. I was the real-deal armed to the teeth and waiting for the economic collapse, nuclear winter, or the bogeyman. One day, it dawned on me that more than being scared of the end of the world, I was actually having fun preparing for it. The guns were funtoys, really. Making plans was fun, better than watching TV. Having a full pantry was satisfying. Being a survivalist had become a game, sort of the way taking a self-defense course becomes both fun and a social event. But, just as with taking a judo class, there were some benefits to my little bout with paranoia. Having the food, Band-Aids, and money stashed actually turned out to be prudent when I was laid off, and then again when my then-wife took extended maternity leaves. And Ive socked food away ever since. Ive come to realize its like a savings account. And the guns have more than held their valuesand theyre still fun. And if I lose my job, again, or I decide to take a sabbatical, or the ice sheets actually start advancing tomorrow...Ive still got everything.

Had God asked my opinion (He hasnt, yet) of what he should do to make us really happy, Id have said, Make life hell; make it scary. Make us different from one another so we can be suspicious of each other. Give us lots of things to be fearful of and worry about so we... Wait a minute, thats the way we are. Hmm. Now I understand why Adam and Eve ate that apple; because they were human. Can you imagine how boring Eden must have been?

[Shokkers]

So, are we doomed or not? Let us know, so I can start stocking up on whiskey.
Best, K.K.

[Grunt]

Global destruction is probably not part of the Creators plan.

Would He allow all his plans to be unraveled by a bunch of 40 year old virgins with pocket protectors and coke bottle glasses?

[polya]

Be very afraid!! This is the doomsday machine. Nostradamous said their will be terrible problems along the French & Swiss border (where is collider is). You can read this in "Conversations with Nostradamous" by D. Cannon. I think it will cause a pole shift (The north pole will become the south pole) and cause black holes, so stop this insanity now.

[Winston]

Be very afraid!! This is the doomsday machine. Nostradamous said their will be terrible problems along the French & Swiss border (where is collider is). You can read this in "Conversations with Nostradamous" by D. Cannon. I think it will cause a pole shift (The north pole will become the south pole) and cause black holes, so stop this insanity now.

W: Excuse me, but Nostradamus has no dates on his predictions and they are full of vague ambiguous imagery, which could be interpreted as anything. So I wouldn't use him. Back in the 80's, people said that Nostradamus predicted a nuclear war in 1988. Never happened. His prophecies are always interpreted after something occurs.

[Winston]

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/rea ... ld-in-2012


Does the Mayan calendar predict the end of the world in 2012?

February 12, 2008

In World Studies class at school we studied the ancient Mayans, specifically their calendars, and I found it quite frightening. Scientists say that these calendars and their predictions of various astronomical events were incredibly accurate. But then a movie we watched said the Mayans also predicted the end of the world, and that it'll be on December 23, 2012. Are they accurate about this as well? What is the deal with the Mayan calendar and the date December 21, 2012? Is the world going to really end on this date, or is it just a scare tactic?

— Caitlin, Columbia, Missouri; Joshua High

One of the perks of traveling by car is getting to see the odometer turn over. For whatever reason, people tend to be mildly fascinated by the sight of a string of nines giving way to a string of zeros. No one thinks it's the end of the world, or even the end of the car; they just like to be there when it happens.

The same fascination extends to calendars, only amplified considerably and (at least for some) with a little bit of apocalyptic terror added in. Remember all the dire predictions that got tossed around during the run-up to 2000? Well, the whole the-Mayans-said-the-world-will-end-in-2012 thing is basically just Y2K fever, ancient Mesoamerican style.

The Mayans developed a sophisticated system of mathematics, as primitive civilizations go – they worked mainly in base 20, and they understood the concept of zero. Though they seem to have taken great interest in what they saw as the cyclical nature of the universe and displayed considerable skill in recording the motion of the moon, planets, and stars, their method of reckoning time was tied neither to lunar cycles nor to seasonal cycles; in fact, it's synchronized only approximately with the solar year. They were apparently aware of the resulting discrepancy but, as far as we know, didn't try to adjust for it, as most ancient Mediterranean civilizations did.

Their calendar system fell out of use after the Spanish invaded in the 1500s, and it's only fairly recently, in the 1990s, that archaeologists have reconstructed it. Though there's still some disagreement among the experts over the details, at this point we believe that the Mayans actually had three distinct calendars:

* The Tzolkin calendar, for religious or ceremonial use. It was divided into 20 periods of 13 days each, which obviously falls well shy of a solar year.
* The Haab calendar, for civil use. A year consisted of 18 periods of 20 days each plus 5 extra days of prayer at the end for a total of 365. Still a bit short (that's why we've got leap years), but not too far off.
* Finally, the so-called Long Count calendar. No accuracy issue here: this one just counted the number of days from a start date. Mind you, the counting was done in a hybrid of base 20 and base 18, but once you got past that it was pretty simple.

Now, we don't know for sure when the start date for the Long Count was. Most Mayan-ologists believe it was August 13, 3114 BC; the other serious contenders are August 11 of the same year and October 15, 3374 BC. (All dates have been converted to their Gregorian equivalents.)

Whichever one it is, why that date? No one knows. All three possibilities are at least 1,200 years earlier than the earliest evidence of Mayan civilization, and probably at least 3,000 years prior to the development of the Mayan calendrical system. What we do know (we think) is that the five-part format they used for counting the days thereafter wasn't open-ended but maxed out at 1.872 million days. So, as we think we understand it, and assuming that the start date was one of those two days in August 3114 BC, then the Long Count will reach this maximum value on December 21 or 23, 2012.

And that's where the apocalyptic talk comes from: the notion that the Long Count is designed to stop counting on a particular day and is thus an implicit prediction of the end of the world. But remember: the Mayans saw the universe as running in cycles – diurnal, lunar, seasonal, solar. It makes sense, then, that the Long Count, like many early calendars, would be cyclic too. It happens to have a very, very long cycle, but it's apparently cyclic nonetheless.

(For another example of a cyclic calendar, think of the traditional Chinese system, familiar as a motif on old-school Chinese-restaurant place mats, in which each year is named for one of 12 animals: rat, ox, tiger, etc. When the last year in the sequence, the year of the pig, comes to an end, the whole thing doesn't grind to a halt – it just starts over with another year of the rat.)

So when the Long Count calendar hits its limit on the 23rd (or 21st) of December four years from now, will that be it – the end of everything? There's no reason to think so, or to think the Mayans thought so. Just picture a very large and complex odometer flipping over to a long line of zeros and continuing on from there.

— Dex

[Winston]

So did anything happen when they switched on the Large Hadron Collider?

[Jester]

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/rea ... ld-in-2012


Does the Mayan calendar predict the end of the world in 2012?

February 12, 2008

In World Studies class at school we studied the ancient Mayans, specifically their calendars, and I found it quite frightening. Scientists say that these calendars and their predictions of various astronomical events were incredibly accurate. But then a movie we watched said the Mayans also predicted the end of the world, and that it'll be on December 23, 2012. Are they accurate about this as well? What is the deal with the Mayan calendar and the date December 21, 2012? Is the world going to really end on this date, or is it just a scare tactic?

— Caitlin, Columbia, Missouri; Joshua High

One of the perks of traveling by car is getting to see the odometer turn over. For whatever reason, people tend to be mildly fascinated by the sight of a string of nines giving way to a string of zeros. No one thinks it's the end of the world, or even the end of the car; they just like to be there when it happens.

The same fascination extends to calendars, only amplified considerably and (at least for some) with a little bit of apocalyptic terror added in. Remember all the dire predictions that got tossed around during the run-up to 2000? Well, the whole the-Mayans-said-the-world-will-end-in-2012 thing is basically just Y2K fever, ancient Mesoamerican style.

The Mayans developed a sophisticated system of mathematics, as primitive civilizations go – they worked mainly in base 20, and they understood the concept of zero. Though they seem to have taken great interest in what they saw as the cyclical nature of the universe and displayed considerable skill in recording the motion of the moon, planets, and stars, their method of reckoning time was tied neither to lunar cycles nor to seasonal cycles; in fact, it's synchronized only approximately with the solar year. They were apparently aware of the resulting discrepancy but, as far as we know, didn't try to adjust for it, as most ancient Mediterranean civilizations did.

Their calendar system fell out of use after the Spanish invaded in the 1500s, and it's only fairly recently, in the 1990s, that archaeologists have reconstructed it. Though there's still some disagreement among the experts over the details, at this point we believe that the Mayans actually had three distinct calendars:

* The Tzolkin calendar, for religious or ceremonial use. It was divided into 20 periods of 13 days each, which obviously falls well shy of a solar year.
* The Haab calendar, for civil use. A year consisted of 18 periods of 20 days each plus 5 extra days of prayer at the end for a total of 365. Still a bit short (that's why we've got leap years), but not too far off.
* Finally, the so-called Long Count calendar. No accuracy issue here: this one just counted the number of days from a start date. Mind you, the counting was done in a hybrid of base 20 and base 18, but once you got past that it was pretty simple.

Now, we don't know for sure when the start date for the Long Count was. Most Mayan-ologists believe it was August 13, 3114 BC; the other serious contenders are August 11 of the same year and October 15, 3374 BC. (All dates have been converted to their Gregorian equivalents.)

Whichever one it is, why that date? No one knows. All three possibilities are at least 1,200 years earlier than the earliest evidence of Mayan civilization, and probably at least 3,000 years prior to the development of the Mayan calendrical system. What we do know (we think) is that the five-part format they used for counting the days thereafter wasn't open-ended but maxed out at 1.872 million days. So, as we think we understand it, and assuming that the start date was one of those two days in August 3114 BC, then the Long Count will reach this maximum value on December 21 or 23, 2012.

And that's where the apocalyptic talk comes from: the notion that the Long Count is designed to stop counting on a particular day and is thus an implicit prediction of the end of the world. But remember: the Mayans saw the universe as running in cycles – diurnal, lunar, seasonal, solar. It makes sense, then, that the Long Count, like many early calendars, would be cyclic too. It happens to have a very, very long cycle, but it's apparently cyclic nonetheless.

(For another example of a cyclic calendar, think of the traditional Chinese system, familiar as a motif on old-school Chinese-restaurant place mats, in which each year is named for one of 12 animals: rat, ox, tiger, etc. When the last year in the sequence, the year of the pig, comes to an end, the whole thing doesn't grind to a halt – it just starts over with another year of the rat.)

So when the Long Count calendar hits its limit on the 23rd (or 21st) of December four years from now, will that be it – the end of everything? There's no reason to think so, or to think the Mayans thought so. Just picture a very large and complex odometer flipping over to a long line of zeros and continuing on from there.

— Dex

Thanks for the clear explanation.

[polya]

Be very afraid!! This is the doomsday machine. Nostradamous said their will be terrible problems along the French & Swiss border (where is collider is). You can read this in "Conversations with Nostradamous" by D. Cannon. I think it will cause a pole shift (The north pole will become the south pole) and cause black holes, so stop this insanity now.

W: Excuse me, but Nostradamus has no dates on his predictions and they are full of vague ambiguous imagery, which could be interpreted as anything. So I wouldn't use him. Back in the 80's, people said that Nostradamus predicted a nuclear war in 1988. Never happened. His prophecies are always interpreted after something occurs.

My author has specifically said what will happen where the collider is located, the Bush presidencies, the fall of Russia...