2012 apocalypse



A very high [sic] sunspot is expected in 2012. When that happens, a huge, an enormous, a gigantic, GARGANTUAN solar flare will be thrown to the earth, and that will destroy our civilization. The 2012 apocalypse was the belief that civilization as we know it would come to an end in 2012. This bizarre idea was inspired by the Mayan Long Count calendar, which completed a cycle on the day corresponding to our Gregorian calendar date of December 21st 2012 CE.

The belief that this was a prediction of the world ending is something akin to believing the world is going to end on December 31st 1999 because the year 2000 starts with a 2 instead of a 1. An even more apt description is that it is the equivalent of believing the world will end on December 31st because you have to throw away this year's calendar, and go out and buy a new one for next year. Modern-day Maya found this all utterly ridiculous, furthering the irony of anyone who subscribes to noble savage crap anymore.

A number of pop culture books and websites tried to give this idea some scientific support, but as per normal with pseudoscience, only the evidence that fit the belief was cited.

The nonsense stole hours of many of the world's population as it received a significant amount of mainstream media attention, usually telling people what they already knew: that the world isn't going to end. Nonetheless, the idea was taken seriously by some people. NASA said that it received many emails and letters from worried people — especially those with the weakest critical thinking skills: the young — some saying that they couldn't eat, had trouble sleeping, or were suicidal. It was responsible for at least one suicide, a 16-year-old from the UK. People around the world prepared for the coming apocalypse,  and in China elderly people were persuaded to part with their life savings.

Before we begin…
Predictions of the end of the world happen, quite literally, all the time. Not a single one has ever come true, and not a single one has ever been based on enough evidence to merit serious consideration. The date that was "predicted" by the Mayan calendar (though see below for why this isn't really right, either) was simply shoehorned into pre-existing doomsday scenarios — from killer comets to apocalyptic planetary alignments. None of this was new — it had been said before and will undoubtedly be said again about another date which will also not come true.

The Mayan calendars
To calculate the date of the supposed "end of the world", proponents "consulted" three Mayan calendars: There is a fourth calendar based on Venus, but that calendar isn't important to the apocalypse.
 * The 260-day-long calendar called Tzolk'in, which is used for religious ceremonies and is divided into 20 weeks of 13 days.
 * The 365-day-long calendar called Haab', which is used for planting crops.
 * The Long Count calendar.

Once every 52 Haab' cycles, the Haab' cycle and Tzolk'in cycle begin on the same day. This is known as a "calendar round." As a result the Maya could only record dates for 18,980 days (about 52 years), one for each day in the round, which should have seen the average Mayan through most of his or her life. However, being extremely pedantic people, these weren't enough days for the Maya, so they created the Long Count calendar.

The Long Count calendar counts the number of days since Creation (described by Maya mythology as August 11, 3114 BCE) in base twenty, with four exceptions:
 * August 11th, 3114 BCE is 13.0.0.0.0 on the Long Count.
 * August 12th, 3114 BCE is 13.0.0.0.1
 * August 30th, 3114 BCE is 13.0.0.0.19
 * August 31st, 3114 BCE is 13.0.0.1.0

The second number from the right, the uinal, only goes to 18. As 18 times 20 is 360 days, 0.0.1.0.0 or 1 tun represents approximately one year. The fifth number or baktun, 1.0.0.0.0, is numbered 1 — 13 for no clearly obvious reason. Upon reaching 13.19.19.17.19, the calendar then ticks back over to 1.0.0.0.0. This would've last happened on November 13th, 2720 BCE.

The official use of this calendar began at 7.13.0.0.0 (September 12, 98 BCE). December 20th, 2012 CE was 12.19.19.17.19, and December 21st 2012 CE was (shock horror) 13.0.0.0.0 — the completion of one "Grand Cycle."

According to the Mayan creation myths, we are living in the "fourth world." The third is said to have ended on 12.19.19.17.19, and likewise, according to the apocalyptomaniacs, would the fourth. This is the origin of the notion that something would end on this date.

The Maya themselves thought it was important enough to record events, such as eclipses, that would occur after December 21st 2012 CE, so they didn't seem worried. In fact, the Maya had a unit of time, the alautun, which corresponds to about 63 million years, or 1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0 on the Long Count (told you they were pedantic). Other temple markings seem to indicate that this may be a short-hand version of the calendar, as at least one temple puts August 31st, 3114 BCE as 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.0.0.0.0. If this number is days since the universe began, the Maya had a much higher estimate than what is currently agreed upon. (In case you haven't noticed yet, the Maya were dead keen on the numbers 13 and 20.) They definitely did not expect the world to end in 2012.

Interestingly, although not coincidentally, 11:11 December 21st, 2012 UTC was also when the winter (or if you don't live on the Mayan side of the equator, summer) solstice occurred.

Modern Maya
Modern Maya — the descendants of the people who made the calendar in question — never believed this whole story about a doomsday; they simply considered the year to be the beginning of a new era in a manner comparable to the new millennium in 2000. Like rational people from other cultures, they had lots of parties and a general lack of planes falling out of the sky. They thought the advocates were scammers and are probably always going to be quite pissed off at them.

Maya scholars, who actually specialise in Mayan culture, considered the woo merchants to be a little funny in the head as well, and are now enjoying post-2012, where they have stopped answering bloody stupid questions from idiots. Yahoo! Answers was similarly flooded with breathless questions about whether the world was going to end, and those who spent time giving sensible answers to these questions breathed a similar sigh of relief when the date rolled around and people finally stopped asking about it.

Origins in proper anthropology
In 1966, Michael D. Coe, an anthropologist, "ambitiously" stated in his book The Maya that: There is a suggestion… that Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final day of the thirteenth [b'ak'tun]. Thus… our present universe [would] be annihilated when the Great Cycle of the Long Count reaches completion.

Coe's date was December 24th, 2011. He revised it to "11 January AD 2013" in the 1980 2nd edition of The Maya, settling on December 23, 2012 in the 1984 third edition. The first person to match 13.0.0.0.0 to December 21st, 2012 was Robert J. Sharer in his 1983 revision of The Ancient Maya by Sylvanus Morley.

Coe's assertion that the end of the Maya calendar was a prophecy of the end of the world was an interpretation of the New Age woo crowd. However, other researchers (e.g. Linda Schele and David Freidel in 1990) came to the conclusion that while the end of the 13th cycle would perhaps be a cause for partying like it's the Maya 1999, it did not prophesize the end of the world. The former notion passed from scholarly acceptance. And that's where it should have ended.

Adoption by the New Age
Unfortunately, the psychedelic end of the hippie culture had already picked up on it. Terence McKenna wrote about it in The Invisible Landscape: Mind Hallucinogens and The I Ching (1975), a book about the stupendous quantities of drugs he and his brother were taking at the time. Frank Waters, in Mexico Mystique: The Coming Sixth Age of Consciousness, tied Coe's 2011 date to Hopi prophecies and astrology. José Argüelles (who later originated Earth Day) wrote of it in The Transformative Vision and listed the popular date, December 21st 2012, in his 1987 book The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology. He claimed that, on this date, Earth would pass through a great "beam" (of some sort) from the centre of the galaxy, and that the Maya had aligned their calendar to predict this event.

The 2012 notion was visible in the fringes of New Age and anyone who could get a coherent sentence out of McKenna for many years. It went more mainstream with pushing the idea as hard as possible since 2003, culminating in his 2006 bilge 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, tying the earlier theorists' work into crop circles, alien abduction, and channelling entities whilst on drugs. The History Channel also cemented its reputation for hard-headed factual exposition with a 2006 show on the subject.

Once it had gained some momentum by the mid-2000s, it was all-in. Even Dan Brown used it (in The Lost Symbol), the truly objective measure of a conspiracy theory having jumped the shark.

Mechanism
Various unlikely, if not completely impossible, geological and astronomical events were put forth as possible causes of the apocalypse, such as: the return of aliens who supposedly made the pyramids; magnetic pole reversal; near miss by hidden planet; or astrological alignment with the galactic center. The only common threads were scientific ignorance and wishful thinking.

The "Planet X" hypothesis may be the most laughable. Any blurry, slightly round object in an astronomical photo was claimed to be an image of the elusive world. Apparently, the near-miss of Planet X would cause the Earth to stop rotating for several hours, then re-start. Gravity (and angular momentum, for that matter) can do whatever you want it to… when you're batshit insane.

The pole reversal hypothesis was loosely based on very real evidence of magnetic pole reversal in the past. Volcanic rocks are regularly observed to have magnetic field lines not pointing in the direction they should if the north magnetic pole had been where it is at the time of their formation. By dating rocks, it's been determined that the poles have reversed numerous times in the past. This process is poorly understood, but it's generally assumed to take hundreds to thousands of years for a reversal, not overnight. Doomsayers, however, predicted that the reversal would have been sudden, and that various ill effects would have taken place, such as increased influx of solar radiation or, once again, that the Earth will stop rotating for several hours, then re-start in the opposite direction (another violation of the law of the conservation of angular momentum).

The galactic center thing was pure bullshit astrology.[what's the difference?] Something about the Earth, the Sun, and the galactic core making a straight line at the solstice (which, incidentally, happens every year). "Planetary alignments" such as these are not terribly uncommon events on the cosmological timescale (in fact, many are inevitable due to ) and the solar system has never collapsed in on itself because of them.

NASA scientist Dr. Tony Philips predicted large solar storms in 2012. However, the world was not destroyed last time these occurred in 1859, nor did Philips suggest that it would be this time. (He actually turned out to be very close. )

McKenna suggested that the key to understanding 2012 is "timewave zero", a numerological formula for "novelty", defined as increase in the universe's organised complexity over time. Apparently, the universe has a teleological attractor at the end of time that increases interconnectedness, eventually reaching a singularity of infinite complexity in 2012, at which point anything and everything imaginable will occur simultaneously. He achieved this insight over several years' consumption of psilocybin and DMT in the 1970s.

Scientific proof
Unlike most pseudoscientific beliefs, the 2012 apocalypse contained a falsifiable prediction that could be tested by the scientific method. This prediction can be tested right now:


 * Are you alive? Is the world in any way more unusual than it was before?

If you are alive and things are normal, the theory was complete and utter bullshit. And, this should be a heads-up to apply more critical thinking next time you hear a new doomsday prediction.

Pop culture
On December 22nd 2012, 2012 will be officially changed to the﻿ genre "comedy." A major film was released by Columbia Pictures in November 2009, imaginatively titled 2012. Unfortunately, it was quite successful. It was directed by Roland Emmerich (known for also directing Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow), so it is an understated, character-driven romance against the backdrop of a well researched and realistic scenario of political intrigue and upheaval… well, maybe not.

The viral marketing for the film was deservedly criticized for lending too much weight to crackpot conspiracies about the end of the world. The reason behind the apocalypse (according to the film's "science") was that neutrinos coming from the Sun had somehow mutated, although curiously this sort of explanation was absent from how most predictions about the 2012 end of the world would occur. Now, the fact that this "mutating neutrino" stuff is total bullshit — or, at least, "mutation" with respect to neutrinos certainly isn't as depicted — is beside the point; the film depicts neutrinos managing to heat up the Earth's core and boil underground water reserves, much like microwaves do, yet the human bodies standing around it (which are mostly made of water) don't seem to be adversely affected. Don't worry, the finale of Batman Begins makes pretty much the same mistake.

"Mockbuster" film studio The Asylum — most famous for its films Mega Shark and Sharknado and its horrific knock-offs of popular movies including The Day The Earth Stopped and Transmorphers — did not just one, but three knock-offs of 2012 for your bad movie night-viewing pleasure. 2012: Ice Age ripped off The Day After Tomorrow, 2012: Supernova seemed to tear apart (actually decent sci-fi) Sunshine and 2012: Doomsday was a straight up Mayan apocalypse of epic-but-low-budget proportions. There's a good case to be made that these three films are the very worst thing that the 2012 apocalypse phenomenon has caused.

The film of The X-Files in 1998 notes 22 December 2012 as the day aliens return to Earth, foreshadowing an unknown doom. This did not prevent producers from releasing a not-nearly-as-good sequel.

In the opening sequence to the 20th anniversary episode of the long-running animated series The Simpsons, Bart is seen writing on the chalkboard, "The world may end in 2012 but this show won't." Their 2012 Halloween episode "Treehouse of Horror XXIII" had an intro segment based around the Mayans failing to prevent the apocalypse because the wrong person was sacrificed.

Occultist/comic book writer Grant Morrison regularly referenced the possibility of a 2012 apocalypse in his work, although usually in an Age of Aquarius-style paradigm shift rather than a literal end of the world scenario—it was the major plot device used in The Invisibles, appears in his work on Batman and is at least referenced in nearly everything else he writes. In interviews, Morrison admitted that he found the idea of anything at all happening unlikely, but found it compelling from a creative standpoint.

The role-playing game Shadowrun is set in the Sixth World, where the end of the Mayan Long Count (which actually came a year early, but who cares) brought magic back to the world.

The conspiracy-theory-based MMORPG The Secret World has a special "End of Days" event around December 21st, 2012, which has re-occurred every year since.

The only truly noteworthy thing to happen on December 21, 2012 is that this is the day when the music video for "Gangnam Style" surpassed one billion views. Of course, not even that could escape the 2012 apocalypse rumours, with a fake Nostradamus prophecy suggesting the world would end when the one billion view mark was reached.

Politics
A much more dire apocalypse would've been triggered by the election of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin or Minnesota congressthing Michelle Bachmann to the White House in 2012. Luckily, that didn't happen… but a worse apocalypse happened 4 years later.

Some idiot, who claims he is a "trend forecaster", predicted an economic Obamageddon would occur in 2012. Fox news was happy to hand him a microphone.

Televangelism
Jack Van Impe, fresh from his success predicting the rapture in Y2K, said the Great Tribulation would start in 2012. Why a Christian fundamentalist would give any credence to what a bunch of those godless devil-worshiping pagans said is a mystery for the ages.

Pleiadians
The Pleiadians, a purportedly friendly bunch of aliens with an intense interest in the planet Earth, were set to arrive and their mission was to help us. All this evil disaster stuff is the type of nonsense that frightens children. Referring to Edgar Cayce's opinion, the Pleiadian interest in Earth stems from the following:

Other aliens were said to be arriving at various places throughout Europe, including France, Turkey and many, many others. Which all sounds very impressive, but the plot of Battlestar Galactica is much better.

Ragnarok
Prophecies, such as the prediction of a coming apocalypse, generally have no place in Odinism — but swap a few vowels around and apparently they can place a central part of Wodenism. According to Woden's Folk — a border-line racist, English neopagan sect — 2012 would see Ragnarok and the coming of the Hooded Man and Heimdall, with the brave going to Valhalla. One 2009 posting on the Woden's Folk spinoff forum The Heathen Wolves was pretty adamant that the apocalypse would have a very Anglo-Saxon-cum-Norse flavour:

It looked to be a very crowded apocalypse.

What really happened
The Olympics were held in London, and the worst thing that happened were a few empty seats after some sponsors didn't bother using their tickets. There was an election in November, again uneventful. Economic basket-case Greece didn't blow up. "Snooki" — whatever one of those is — apparently reproduced. The Hobbit movie was released, no impending doom there either, and the last Twilight film that hopefully will ever be spawned finally came to pass. All-in-all, 2012 was a bit shitty, and certainly figuratively the end of the world for some people, but we're still here (albeit with a new dance craze stuck in our heads.) The transformation of the current world into hell is still ongoing, albeit slowly. The Earth will definitely and definitively end sometime within the next.

A major side-effect of the doomsday predictions had little to do with what external forces could actually destroy the planet, and everything to do with the very human and naturalistic reaction to such panic. Some scientists, most notably NASA's David Morrison, predicted that the 2012 apocalypse predictions may lead some people to get so worked up that they may contemplate killing themselves — and so the suicide rate will increase as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This isn't entirely unprecedented, as it was seen with the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, the May 21st rapture prediction, and there was one case of a man killing himself and his entire family allegedly over the fear that Barack Obama would be re-elected. Primarily, the issue is that fear-mongering preys on people who are most vulnerable, possibly triggering them to do things that normally they may not—predictions of the world ending on December 21st, 2012 were more widespread and well-publicised than any of these previous events, so the concern about increased suicides was warranted.

The only positive to take from this is that the death toll could have been much higher.

The future
Once December 21 passed, the crazies had begun to worry about The End coming in 2013 instead, shifting from the Mayans to Newton as their trusted source of mystical wisdom. Many other 2012 believers, taking a line from the Latter-Day Saints, claim that the Mayans were actually still correct, and the date was merely "the beginning of the end" rather than the actual end of the world. With 2013 uneventfully having closed, it remains unknown if they will reevaluate their predictions for 2014's Nostradamus predictions 2015's Blood Moon Tetrad  6/6/2016 or just throw in the towel and go home. But what remains inevitable, there will be another end-of-the-world paranoia coming, and that is something everyone should really be prepared for.

Really.