2012 or 2029: A Lot to Do About Nothing

If 2012 is just a number to you then you are probably Amish and therefore not reading this article. It seems that everyone has a prophecy from somewhere screaming the end is near. Web sites and articles warn that the earth and all life is in imminent peril and we should be stockpiling, plotting and planning for our final stand against the rioting of universal and natural forces. Basically it's a load of crap. How can I be so certain you may ask? Well aside from never being wrong about labeling a crackpot theory about the end of the world as such, to date, there is a lot of science, observation, and just plain common sense that backs me up on this.

The 2012 hypothesis is as such. The ancient people known to us today as the Mayans, were obsessed with time keeping. They had calenders of all types and kept track of everything from the emperor's indigestion to the zodiac with some form of schedule. The purportedly "important" calender is known as "The Long Count". The last date on the long count calender coincides with December 21 2012 when no corrections for the errors of our current calendar system are addressed. That's it, it isn't a prophecy, it doesn't say that it's the end of the world it's just the last date on the calendar. There is no dated prophecy. The Long Count calendar is circular for a reason. The Mayans believed in cycles. Time, like everything around them, seemed to renew. Just like the seasons and the cycle of life. The circular motion of time and renewal of life is a ubiquitous concept. It is present in some fashion in almost every culture.

The motives for hyping this are the same ones that have driven everyone that has done so for thousands of years. Personal glory, greed and fear. There are truly good people that have been so sucked in by these predictions of disaster that in their blind faith they have considered, if not already committed the murders of their own children to "protect" them from the perceived horrors of the supposed end of days. The Ask An Astrobiologist website has received thousands of emails, some from people considering such things seriously. All the while the greedy and power hungry keep pushing the fearful to greater and greater lengths. The Calender itself simply resets to the year zero heralding the beginning of the next cycle of the long count. The other supposed sources are the I-Ching and other supposed prophets such as nostradamus who somehow keep making new predictions despite having been dead for centuries.

The I-Ching is an ancient oracle from the east that when expressed mathematically as a graph coincidently matches up with some big events in recorded history. Heres the problem, the peaks of the graph generated by the I-Ching do in fact fall roughly in the same places as some greatly historical events but how many events don't they fall on? If you look hard enough in a bin of chaotic mess you can find any pattern you want. I guarantee there is a constellation shaped like George Bush in a bear suit. If you shift the I-Ching graph over it will still match history remarkably well, it will just match different events. This doesn't make it an all knowing oracle, it simply displays the self ordering nature of mathematics and the universe. With the proper formula you can use the number of hairs in an orangutans belly button to perfectly match and graph out the last five thousand years of written history.

Now the actual methods by which the earth is supposed to fall victim to in 2012 range from the ridiculous to marginally plausible. Beginning with the ridiculous is the flip flopping crust theory. Yes, science has determined that the magnetic poles do change, but this has nothing to do with the crust. At many points in the past the flux lines of the Earth's magnetic field have become twisted around each other and knotted up to a degree that the Earths protective magnetic shield does descend below the surface before unfolding again. Although this does happen it does not mean the end of the world. What it really means for our modern society is that in the year 3300 anyone with stock in Johnson and Johnson will make a lot of money on sunblock for roughly a thousand years. It takes roughly four to five thousand years for the field to cycle completely and we are only about a quarter of the way in so far. Even with a loss of the magnetic shielding the atmosphere will still continue to protect us from UV radiation. All the magnetic field does is protect us from charged particle bombardment. The result will be a lot of revamping of our electronics and power grids to shield the unwanted distruptions.

This is still thousands of years in the future and is not anything we can currently do anything about nor do we need to worry right now. This has happened at least a half dozen times so far that geologists can find and historically has not coincided with any major extinction events. The extinction events all seem to coincide with volcanism, impact events and climate change. Ice ages possibly being the result of the former. Throughout all of this the crust will continue to float and drift across the surface of the earth the same as it always has. The amount of energy required to rotate the crust against it's own gyroscopic stabilization is so great that it would require an impact of such force that the entire surface of the planet would be incinerated. Frankly, we would see that coming a long time in advance. Its not that big of a sky. When the magnetic field becomes so entangled that it flips it will not flip the crust or the core because both have enormous amounts of kinetic energy forcing them to maintain their paths. That kinetic energy is the source of the knotting of the fields to begin with. Energy has to come from somewhere. The only possible physical alteration of matter in such a case will be the polarity of individual particles flipping over while maintaining their positions and trajectory. In layman's terms, the magnetic field goes over but everything else stays put. Nobody knows exactly where the magnetic fields will end up afterward but it should be a roughly north south flip. Remember thats the magnetic field only. Any resulting chaos will only be a scramble to re-label compasses by short sighted manufacturers two thousand years from now.

Another hypothesis is the mysterious planet that will somehow sneak into the solar system and either fly very close to us or crash into us, depending on who you ask. Well, for starters, the near earth object program (NEO) can't track the whole sky but, I beg to differ with some comments I've heard. I say "It ain't that big a sky". They constantly "look" everywhere whether they input data or not. You really think all these people that have a vested interest in not having their world blown up are going to just throw up their hands and say "oh darn, budgets too short I guess we can't look to the left." We are talking about a planet here. Anything the size of a planet or larger would be detected just by it's gravitational distortion. We found Saturn in the 16th century with a spyglass. Seriously, They find stuff the size of the IGA grocery store across the street from my house with such regularity it's ridiculous to think they'd miss a planet. They have been tracking Apophis 99942 since 2004 and that is only 260 meters across. It was spotted at a distance of 20 million miles away. Apophis itself is no where near large enough to be considered a planet killer and it has also recently been added to the list of "End of days" hyped events. You may have heard of rogue planets but I doubt they can stealth like rogues in World of Warcraft. So let's call our hypothetical sneaky planet (SPOON 2012). If a 200 meter asteroid is visible at 20 million miles how far away would a planet or dwarf star sized object with much more reflective surface area be visible at? When asked if there was an object of the size and composition attributed to our mysterious planet SPOON the NEO representative said flat out, "no".

There have been hundreds of planets discovered around many stars in other solar systems throughout the galaxy just by looking for the disturbances they create in the visible light around them. These are much farther than our own back yard. Any large bodies approaching the solar system would be doing so very slowly as their orbits decay meaning we'd see them centuries or Millennia before they get here. The other possibility is something winging through the solar system on a very large elliptical orbit. The problem with this is there is an absolute limit to just how much mass can be captured in what kind of orbit. You aren't going to find a planetoid with enough mass to distort our orbit with such a huge aphelion on an elliptical orbit that would bring it anywhere near Earth. The inner solar system would have been trashed long ago if a returning body of that size existed. That leaves the "stone in the road" type scenario as the only possibility. I am quite certain we would see anything of that nature coming, as a matter of fact scientists the world over have flat out stated that we would. Further, the odds are astronomical if you will forgive the pun that we would just happen to be perfectly aligned with an object in our solar systems path. There is no more chance of that happening in 2012 than any other day throughout all of time.

Another much hyped and only slightly less ludicrous notion is that the sun itself is going to turn traitor and barrage us with coronal discharge. The sun currently is actually not showing much activity at all and is not expected to peak during this cycle of activity until a year or two after 2012. Very large coronal mass ejections are theoretically possible but first you have the slim odds of it actually being large enough to even reach our orbit at significant strength and second the remote chance that it would even be on our orbital plane and finally the unlikely chances that it would be pointed in our direction and fired at an angle that we would intersect it since we are moving. The ejections do not travel at light speed so it would take hours even days to reach our orbital path. We would actually have to run into it and not the other way around. With all the odds against it if we did run into a coronal mass ejection there is still the entire atmosphere and magnetic field for it to contend with. The interaction of the charged particles would create rogue electrical charges on the surface and heavily disrupt communications but would be unlikely to prove harmfull on a significant scale.

There really were no dated predictions for the end of the world from the Maya. Much like the scenarios laid out by many other cultures for the end of the world, the undated mayan stories that do exist feature elements common to natural disasters of the day, floods, volcanic activity, earthquakes, famine, drought, plagues of pests. All of these things still happen to this day in every part of the world at random. It's the nature of our planet to have small shifts here and there and to undergo large shifts over time. 2012 has no more significance to the long count calendar than December or January has to our own. To those that find fear mongering funny, profitable or just a way to boost yourself somehow, maybe you should do a little research into how many have already died from believing the lies. That is the real danger of 2012, the psychological damage done by charlatans who use peoples faith as a weapon. I will be spending December 20-31 of 2012 the same way I do every year. I will be with my family trusting the sun to rise the next day and complaining about shoveling the driveway.