I have a sick obsession with doomsday. Anytime Discovery or National Geographic or The History Channel air anything to do with Armageddon (in the biblical or the secular, science-y asteroid type), I am there. As a kid I used to love to be spooked by The Weekly World News. I can’t stay away.
But even I can’t buy this crap: ‘Web-bot project’ makes prophecy of 2012 apocalypse.
You should read the article, but if you’re too lazy I’ll summarize. There is this web tool that has supposedly predicted September 11th, The Boxing Day Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina by perusing the under workings of the internet. And now it is saying the Mayan Calendar Doomsday theory is right, we will all die on December 21, 2012.
How does this sophisticated machine work? Much like Google. It crawls the web, finds keywords and trending topics and, unlike Google, tells us we will all perish in a tragic, fiery way. Because you know that those damned tectonic plates were tweeting up a storm about throwing a big wave a Thailand. And those storm clouds were blogging about their true desire to make Bush look bad while getting the satisfaction of drowning poor people.
The internet CANNOT predict natural disasters. Scientists can create simulations for studies that become popular and crawl up the search results, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen! Yes, maybe it could be helpful for human created acts, like September 11th, but that’s it.
And maybe these findings are skewed by that crappy new Roland Emmerich movie and searches and stories that would increase the number ’2012.’
Still, 12/21/2012 is a Doomsday scenario I know little about, so I took to Google (and helped the Web-bot get even more stubborn on it’s feelings of correctness). One of the first few articles I came across was actually a little frightening. The author took the convincing scientific approach to proving the downfall of human civilization. All sorts of events are going to happen to form a perfect fry-the-earth event with solar flares and gravitational forces and pole shifting and celestial alignment.
The only problems are that the galactic alignment happens over 36 years and it’s peak was in 1998 and “polar shift” isn’t even the correct event, it would be geomagnetic reversal, which happens over 5000 years, not one day.
It’s the end of a calendar. As one great article borrowed from a book: “…when a calendar comes to the end of a cycle, it just rolls over into the next cycle. In our Western society, every year 31 December is followed, not by the End of the World, but by 1 January. So 13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan calendar will be followed by 0.0.0.0.1 – or good-ol’ 22 December 2012, with only a few shopping days left to Christmas.”
It’s that simple. And this is coming from a guy who might as well have doomsday trading cards and posters and bedsheets. It’s a calendar that flips to the next cycle.
And what if it is the end? I don’t want to know. Sure, I like shows about super volcanoes, but I am having enough trouble enjoying life while I am trying to find a new place to live. How would I do anything if I knew that I was going to die and there was no way around it? I want to enjoy life while it is right here and stop worrying about tomorrow. (Yeah, like that’ll happen).
Also, if I am wrong, we’ll apparently be dead so quick you’ll never have the chance to say I told you so.
