Like its doomsday-foretelling predecessors (The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact and others — here’s an apparent exhaustive list), the new movie 2012 gives us a taste of the end of days, this time via a prophecy that the Sun and Earth align with the center of the galaxy, which, consequently, is an annual occurrence, as NASA reminds us, which happens each December. It’s called the winter solstice.
But we shouldn’t let annoying little scientific facts get in the way of giving us a good scare. Since its initial setting in 1947 at 11:53 p.m., the actual Doomsday Clock, maintained by the The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has teetered on the brink for half a century, varying between 11:43 p.m.in 1991, when the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and 11:58 p.m. in 1953, when the same two countries tested thermonuclear devices within nine months of each other. Suffice it to say, relations between the U.S. and Russia will probably determine our fate, at least our fate based on international relations. Here’s a graphical look at our past potential dates with destiny:
Graph showing the changes in the time of the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. From wikipedia.org.
The movie 2012, however, provides, not an international breakdown, but a cosmic episode on the scale of a gamma ray burst, a black hole eating up the Earth or a comet colliding with Earth that is based on Mayan soothsayers’ opinions on when the world will come to a combustible end. According to an essay in The New York Times, folks are being scared out of their boots by supposed end of days foretellings.
NASA astronomer David Morrison said he’s gotten numerous letters and e-mails from folks wondering how they should prepare for the end.
“I get angry at the way people are being manipulated and frightened to make money,” Dr. Morrison said. “There is no ethical right to frighten children to make a buck [or for any other reason, religion included].”
Dr. Morrison said he had been getting about 20 letters and e-mail messages a day from people as far away as India scared out of their wits. In an e-mail message, he enclosed a sample that included one from a woman wondering if she should kill herself, her daughter and her unborn baby. Another came from a person pondering whether to put her dog to sleep to avoid suffering in 2012.
It’s unclear to me why people are giving so much credibility to prophecies written by ancient people with no more insight into future events — in truth, far less — than you or I. This is a culture which regularly performed human sacrifices and worshiped the Sun, and did both simultaneously, in fact. Four people would hold the human being down on a stone by all fours, while another stabbed the person and pulled out its still-beating heart, so that the sacrificial human got to see its own thumping life in someone else’s hand before the cheering masses. True, the Mayans were highly developed — civilized would be a misnomer — people in their ability to build great structures, but to give any credence whatsoever to a prophecy told under such an archaic belief system is just as arcane. One can only wonder: were these supposed phophecies handed down from the ball of hydrogen gas being worshiped 93 million miles away?
The above essay notes, though there’s not much to be concerned about regarding the year 2012, we still have plenty potential realities to confront, not the least of which are real natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamies and climate change and manmade ones like nuclear proliferation. Although, if we insist on worrying ourselves with some sort of crisis hurling toward us from the cosmos, one might consider learning more about the asteroid Apophis, set to cruise under our satellite orbits, about 22,000 miles from Earth, on Friday the 13th in April 2029. Or, just go see the movie.