As the time drew near, survivors were faced with painful decisions. How should they deal with the coming difficulties? Many asked if there were steps they could take to weather the impending disaster. Some wondered if it wasn't best to simply avoid the agonies ahead by committing suicide. More than one suggested that they owed it to their children to kill them quickly, mercifully, to save them from having to endure through such horrendous times.
The people facing these unthinkable choices were not behind the walls at Masada or cowering under the ash clouds of Vesuvius. They were Americans who phoned NASA in just the last few months, terrified by the approach of doomsday on December 21, 2012. Even two years in advance of the date, both teenagers and adults called to talk to researchers and astronomers, looking for information on what they might expect as the planets assembled in an unprecedented cosmic alignment, as predicted by the ancient Mayans, and the world drew to an end.
The idea of someone proclaiming the approaching end of the world is so common that it's become a long standing joke -- the shaggy, ill-kept madman with his rope-belted robe and sign announcing "The End Is Nigh." But even as we make fun of such characters there are dozens of apocalyptic threads running through the public discourse at any moment. There are strategic visionaries who foretell approaching war; scientists who worry over resource shortages, population growth, and climate change; self-proclaimed mystics who declare their exclusive knowledge of devastation to be brought on by everything from impending earthquakes to alien invasion, and always there are preachers and religious "experts" who warn that the Day of Judgment is fast approaching.
Most of the time these fears remain in the background of our conversation, staying little more than the subject of chain emails or late night filler on cable stations. But with some regularity these predictions of doom bubble up and become prominent in public thought. It happened in 2000 as fears of the "Y2K" bug brought on forecasts of money disappearing from banks and airliners plunging from the sky. It happened in the 1950s as fear of nuclear annihilation drove the construction of basement fallout shelters and taught a generation to "duck and cover." It happened in 1844, when tens of thousands of Americans stood on hillsides and rooftops, certain that the Great Day of the Lord was at hand.
The "Ancient Mayan Prediction" of the world's end in 2012 seems typical of a threat that captures the public attention. It comes complete with a star-studded theatrical film and a spate of TV specials. Not only has NASA received sobbing phone calls, but the modern markers of a disaster prediction -- hysterical emails and garish web sites -- are present in abundance. If any of these have reached your screen you may be a bit comforted by this...
The Great Planetary Alignment of 2012
As the planets swing around our sun, those closest to the sun move more rapidly than those farther away. It takes the Earth exactly one year to make it around the sun (not exactly a coincidence) while Mercury swings past every 88 days. At the other end of the dial, Neptune takes 164.79 years to make just one orbit. If you were born on Neptune, you’d be less than a year old – and very, very chilly. In fact, just last week Neptune completed its first full orbit since its discovery in 1844.
Because the planets are all moving around the sun at different rates, they are constantly changing their positions relative to each other. Sometimes they are on opposite sides of the sun from each other. Sometimes on the same side.
For example, let’s take a look at Mars. Mars is farther from the Sun than Earth and has an orbit of 687 days. Every 780 days, Earth and Mars have an “opposition,” the point in both orbits where the planets are at their closest approach. The actual distance between the planets is different each time around, but the shortest distance between Mars and Earth is around 36 million miles. Just over a year after each close approach, Earth and Mars will be on at their greatest distance from each other, on opposite sides of the sun. The distance between them is then around 250 million miles.
Every now and then, several planets are in opposition at the same time, a condition seen as an alignment. In 5 Feb 1962, the five inner planets and the moon were all briefly grouped into an area of about 16 degrees (out of a full 360 circle) – a pretty good alignment. On 17 May 2000, these planets were once again spaced over an area of about 19 degrees. In 8 Sep 2040 they’ll all be spaced over only about 8 degrees – as good a grouping as there has been for 1000 years. Of course, they won’t really be in a line – the planets don’t all orbit the sun on the same plane, so any line drawn through them all will be pretty wiggly. Still, 8 degrees is pretty snug spacing when it comes to alignments. On 21 Dec 2012, these planets will be lined up, um, across about 200 degrees of the sky. In other words, not at all.
Still, couldn’t the position of the planets at that time have some effect on Earth? After all, the moon's position is enough to raise tides around the planet, and most of the planets are many times larger than the moon. Jupiter alone has a mass that is 27,000 times that of the moon. So even it’s not really an alignment, couldn’t there be something that makes the position of the planets on that day troublesome?
Here, take a look at this:
G x ((Mass1 x Mass2) / Distance squared)
That’s little ditty is the formula for calculating the gravity between any two bodies. "G" in this case is the Gravitational Constant. Mass1 and Mass2 are the mass of the two objects to be measure, and Distance is the distance between them. As physics calculations go, this one is a gimme.
The important thing about this calculation is that “squared” bit at the end. Because the effect of gravity increases directly with the mass of the objects, but drops off at the square of the distance between them, distance matters far more than mass in determining how one object affects another. Jupiter may be 27,000 the mass of the Moon, but even at its closest approach, it’s also 400 times farther away than the Moon. I’ll spare you the math and just tell you that Jupiter’s maximum gravitational affect on Earth is about 1% that of the Moon. All the other planets? Even less.
Even if you did manage to get all the planets perfectly aligned at their closest approach to Earth (an event that will not happen this side of the end of the Solar System some four or five billion years from now), it still wouldn’t be enough to make a difference. And it’s certainly not happening in 2012.
The Great Galactic Alignment of 2012
Oh yeah, smartypants? Well, what if the problem isn’t a planetary alignment, but a galactic alignment? That’s the idea that’s been pushed by some authors, particularly John Major Jenkins.
Earth’s orbit has a slight wobble, and because of this the constellation visible at the start of the spring equinox slowly changes, flipping from one of the traditional constellations to the next about every 2150 years. That’s why Hair contains that nifty song about “The Age of Aquarius.” According to Jenkins, the Maya used something similar in setting up their calendar. Instead of a constellation, the Maya fixed their calendar on the date in which the spring sun would rise against a particular black band in the middle of the Milky Way that marks the "galactic equator." But the thing is that 1) there’s no evidence that the Maya ever constructed their calendar in this way, 2) even if they did Jenkins made his measurements incorrectly and the sun as seen from Maya territory will not match the location he indicates in 2012, and 3) even if he was right it would mean exactly nothing. The Earth, Sun, and this so-called galactic equator have been lined up at some point every year for about a 1,000 years now, and doom has yet to put in an appearance. There’s absolutely nothing different about 2012.
The Mayan Prediction of Doom
Even if the astronomical evidence isn’t there, there’s always the biggee – the ancient Mayan prophecy that the world will end on 21 December 2012. The only thing is... there is no such prophecy.
Most of the story centers around the Mayan calendar. In the Classic Mayan period there were actually three calendars. The oldest was a 260 day rotating calendar that mixes 20 day names with 13 numbers for each. This is the calendar that most Mayan ceremonial events were based on. A second calendar was more closely aligned with the year. It had 18 months of 20 days each, with a 5 day "nameless" period tossed in at the end of the year. Because there was nothing in the calendar system to correct for the fact that the year isn't exactly 365 days long, this system wasn't very good for nailing down a dates in connection with the seasons, but hey, Mayans lived in the tropics and there was no major river system with an annual rise, so whether spring started on 10 Xul or 18 Sek wasn't a big deal.
By running these two cycles against each other, Mayans got a unique date for every day in a 52 year period – plenty good for scheduling most events. However, if you were a Mayan king, and you wanted to put up a monument to your great achievements, you wanted it to be something that would last and impress the great-grand kiddies. So Mayans came up with the Long Count.
The Long Count Calendar is another system of rotating cycles, most of them marked off in blocks of 20. Every 20 days was a winal. Every 18 winals made a tun. 20 Tuns was a k'atun, and 20 k'aluns went into a b'ak'tun. By making a tun equal to 18 winals instead of twenty, each tun had 360 days – roughly a year. A k'atun ends up a bit short of 20 years, while a b'ak'tun is over 394 years.
The Mayans set the start of the calendar on 11 August 3114 BC – the date they set for creation. As it happens, when you write out the date 20 December 2012 in Long Count digits, what you get is 12.20.18.20.20 And the next day, the terrible day of 21 December 2012 is... 13.0.0.0.0.
That date doesn’t mark the "end of the Mayan calendar." It simply marks the start of the 14th b'ak'tun. That digit on the Mayan calendar has already turned over several times before. How did the Mayan's mark the completion of previous cycles? Celebration, that's how. How unspecial is the end of a b'ak'tun? There are at least four terms for even bigger time units, and some Mayan monuments contain dates that appear to be millions of years in the past or future.
There's no doomsday prediction about 2012 in the Mayan tradition. It's not in any of the surviving Mayan writings. It's not in any of recorded Mayan traditions made by the Spanish. It's not in the traditions of the living Maya. It doesn't exist.
The Real 2012 Disaster
So why does everyone think such a prediction exists? Well, there are writers like Jenkins, stirring up a mishmash of personal ideas, drug dreams, and ludicrous interpretations of ancient texts. There are also all those web sites (all too easily found in a Google search) ready to sell you guides to either the spiritual enlightenment that will come with the dawning of this new age, or protection from cosmic rays / solar flares / asteroid impacts. There are directors like Roland Emmerich whose last fresh idea died a decade back leaving him with 2012 as just another excuse to blow things up on film. There are also some Christian ministries (the oh-so-reasonable John Hagee's among them) that have latched onto 2012 as another way to bolster their market for books sold based on End Times paranoia.
However, in this case there's a bigger reason why this silly idea has taken on a life of its own. It's called the History Channel.
You might think a channel by that name would be involved in chronicling history, and they do run material of that sort – though at this point it would be better if they didn't. Because again and again the History Channel has paraded before the public piles of bull tripe that would embarrass P. T. Barnum. Here are just a few of the "historical" programs that watchers of the History Channel have been able to enjoy recently: 2012, the End of Days, Seven Signs of the Apocalypse, and Nostradamus 2012. Not even Jenkins' predictions were sufficient for these "specials," so they had to spice them up, make them more "doomsy." Mostly the History Channel and its production companies simply made up, from whole cloth, tales of impending doom and "predictions" of coming destruction then passed them off as something historical.
The reason for this is simple: it grabs eyeballs. The History Channel has discovered that it can get far more viewers for a show about some imagined disaster in the near future, than it can for factual accounts of events in the past. What's more, making up shit is cheaper than doing research. So they've become a factory for lunatic accounts of impending doom. When it's not 2012, it's Nostradamus, when it's not Nostradamus, it's Revelation, when it's not Revelation it's other books of the Bible (it need not be actual prophecies, since they're only going to chop out a few words and use them out of context in any case) and when all that gets boring they swirl it together into disaster soup.
Just as a test, I wandered over to my TV ten minutes ago to check what was playing. Sure enough History International was running Nostradamus: 500 Years Later while the History Channel was about to start a brand new special called Apocalypse Island – all about how a Pacific island, one that the Mayans never knew existed, has artifacts that hold the key to (you guessed it) Mayan predictions of doom in 2012.
Having a channel called the History Channel running a nearly non-stop stream of this lunacy is a true disaster, and one for which we don't even have to wait till 2012. By mixing in these fear fests with actual bits of history, they are doing more make it impossible for people to distinguish between fact and fiction than all the gibbering pundits of AM radio combined. They are, quite simply, the purveyors of the most harmful bullshit on television. If someone does harm themselves out of fear about impending disaster in 2012, I hope that their friends and family look very closely at where they got such ideas.
Thanks to the History Channel and their ilk, predictions of doom are so common that it's tempting to consign them all to the same trash bin. End of the world dates pass with the regularity of birthdays, and the world keeps spinning. Concern over the 2012 date seems typical. Not only is there no scientific basis to believe that disaster is lurking on the horizon that December, there's not even a prophecy of doom on which to base all those books, movies, and television shows. When the long count reaches the end of the current 394 year set of days, it will start the next. Nothing more.
But just because the so-called Mayan prophecy is more marketing event than date with destiny, it doesn't mean that all such predictions can be safely ignored. Our civilization, like our predecessors, comes with no guarantee of immortality. Our lifestyles, our economies, even our governments and nations, will end one day. Seinfeld reruns, Oreo cookies, and the United States of America will eventually become as remote and exotic as the kingdoms of Sargon and the festivals of Ur.
Some of the genuine threats seem so remote as to be not worth worrying about. Others are so improbable (or unstoppable) that planning for them would seem pointless. But there may be a middle ground out there, threats that fall between the ridiculous and the remote, problems we might actually address before they become the "dinosaur killers" of our age.
Determining which doomsday scenarios will catch the public consciousness is a difficult task – especially when you have media willing to spread public panic for a buck. Finding how to draw public attention to those issues really worthy of concern and investment is only made more difficult by the confusion.
But it's worth the effort. After all, as bad as it is to contemplate the inevitable end of all things, it would be worse to check out early through our own folly.