Alignment of the Earth and Milky Way on December 21st 2012?

Question

Look we all the the internet hype about what will occur. About the Mayan Calender lets be logical, could it be they ran out of space and became and obselete race before they could have created a new calender? Also if the new Calendar started some five thousand years ago it must be documented what happened at the "end" of the last long count calendar. What worries me is there is no scientific data what occurred 26,000 years ago when there was the last alignment of the earth and the milky way. When that happens ,what happesn to the earth?What happens to the human race, did the last set of people survive? Ill like to hear from actual scientist.

Answer 1

I will attempt to answer your questions in the order which they are presented.

Your use of the word 'alignment' is incorrect. Due to precession, the Earth's axial tilt will reach it's maximum of 60 degrees in relation to the equatorial plane of the Milky Way galaxy.

Regarding internet hype, my best advice is to avoid the internet when researching 2012. The subject has attracted doomsayers, end-of-the-world armegeddonists, occultists, and just plain misinformed kooks. Many of these websites exist not to give credible and real information but to make money as most websites do by attracting sponsors. There exists only one credible author who has devoted the last decade into researching the Mayan culture and calendars. John Major Jenkins. If you are interested in learning the facts regarding 2012, this is your starting point.

The long-count calendar was one based upon the 26,000 year precession of Earth's axial wobble. Contrary to another answer on this page, the Mayans were some of the greatest astronomers and mathematicians to have lived. They divided the 26,000 year precessional cycle into 5 Ages of about 5,125 years each. This is the age which comes to an end 2012. This is not the end of their calendar any more than our calendar ends in 2007. In 2013, the next Age begins and will last 5,125 years in the same way that our Gregorian calendar will go to 2008. The Mayan calendar is further subdivided into tuns, baktuns, etc the same as we divide ours into months and weeks.

I have yet to find out why the Mayan divided the procession into 5 instead of what would seem to be a more logical 4. Their only "prediction" is that each of these ages ends in a certain way. The age we are now in is called the age of the jaguar. When the jaguar dies, it's body will shiver and quake. This would be a referrence to the Earth experiencing earthquakes and possibly volcanic activity. This is the only Mayan prediction. All others are false and have been made up during the last ten years by people living today to assert fear and confusion. Mayans have never spoke of any age as the 'end of the world' as unfortunately most people assume. They only spoke of the ending of an age as a time of transition. This is what is the cause of so much of the confusion and scare-hype happening on the internet these days. 2012 has absolutely nothing to do with asteroids or polarity flips.

The Mayan were aware of naturally occuring cycles. The age that ended 3114BC was the age of water. Documented evidence does not exist but one could suppose that that may have been the time of the Biblical flood which is also spoken of in many other cultures of the globe. We know that previous civilizations have existed in the far past yet we have very little in the form of historical documents that go much beyond the last 2000 years. Information does not even exist about the building of the Egyptian pyramids or the Sphinx. One could presume that the demise of these previous civilizations were possibly caused by global catastrophies.

Clearly, the last set of humans did survive otherwise you and I would not be here today. Exactly what happened at the ends of the other ages will probably never be known. Nor the percentage of humans that died or survived. Possibly 26,000 years from now the records of today may still exist. But who can say?

I am not a scientist. I am just trying to give people proper education regarding a subject which unfortunately has become so twisted and mangled with misinformation and lies. This is an astronomical event which occurs only once every 26,000 years. Look forward to it with admiration and respect, not fear.

Answer 2

Saying Earth aligns with the Milky Way is nonsense. Our solar system is always part of the Milky Way far from the center and in orbit around the edge of it. It never aligns more at one time than another. Have you forgotten the nonsense about Y2K? How soon we forget! Why do some people love silly Doomsday nonsense? You can find much nonsense of many types on the internet or elsewhere.

Answer 3

There is no such thing as "alignment of the earth and the milky way". What does that even mean? When people talk about "alignment of planets" at least you can imagine two or more planets being lined up, like an opposition or conjunction, even though there is no astronomical term called "alignment of planets". I don't know who made up that Milky Way alignment idea, but it wasn't anybody who knows astronomy.

Answer 4

There is no meaning to saying that the Earth and Milky Way will be aligned. Nothing bad will happen.

Answer 5

I've actually never heard of this one, but I don't see any reason why something bad would happen just because of the alignment. I thought the 2012 thing had something to do with a meteor hitting Earth.

Answer 6

WHAT DOES "ALIGNMENT" MEAN?

It may take two to tango, as the saying goes, but mathematically speaking, it takes three to align. Every single one of the 200 billion or more stars in the Milky Way is at this very moment individually aligned with the Galactic Centre of the Milky Way, or with Alpha Hercules or with my left nostril or any other point you may care to name: in the sense that a straight line can always be drawn between two points, but it takes three to produce an alignment, as in gravitational microlensing.

Alignment is a purely temporary and fortuitous phenomenon, and carries no especial significance whatsoever. Only people who believe in astrology will succumb to that temptation!

WHERE DID THE IDEA OF ALIGNMENT COME FROM?

Well we can say confidently that the one place the idea of alignment of the earth with the Milky Way (and its Galactic Centre) did NOT come from was the Mayans.

They had no idea what a galaxy was, and no idea that we were part of one, and the imagery of milk spilled by Hera when feeding the infant Herakles placed at her breast when she was sleeping by Zeus was Greek, and with the Mayans and the Greeks being separated by the Atlantic Ocean. and there being no ocean-going liners or communications satellites (not so much as a Kontiki raft or a mobile phone) in those days, the Mayans did not know of the Greeks and vice-versa.

Any contact there was between Europe and the Americas was from the Vikings sailing to Iceland and Greenland and Nordic myths about the Milky Way were rather different from Greek ones: the Finns and Estonians thought of the Milky Way as the flight path of migratory birds flying south, like an astronomical road sign to point them in the right direction.

So to pretend that the Mayans thought in terms of alignments with the Milky Way is like Shakespeare writing of a clock striking one in Julius Caesar. The Romans did not have clocks and Shakespeare was just unthinkingly projecting the values of a later civilisation onto the beliefs and practices of an early, more primitive one. i.e. assuming they would have had clocks because we have clocks.

Which is essentially what the 2012 propagandists are doing, assuming that the Mayans knew what we know about the cosmos and alleging the Mayans made prophecies that only make sense with contemporary knowledge.

e,g, One person came on here and insisted that the Mayans had foreseen a giant asteroid hitting earth in 2012. "That was jolly clever of them!" I said, seeing as how they had no telescopes and seeing how asteroids were not discovered until 1801 and the name wasn't even coined by Sir William Herschel until 1802!

What I think is going on is that pseudo-science bullshit is spread thickly all over what can be discerned as Mayan ideas and beliefs, in the belief that it gives the Mayans prophetic credibility to attribute to them what they could not possibly have known.(Quite the contrary, of course, it makes all Mayan statements look suspect, where some may not be.)

THE 26,000 YEAR CYCLE

I fail to see why any point of the 26,000 year cycle of precession of the equinoxes should be regarded as the "start" and another point as the "end" of the cycle. Surely it is arbitrary?

Different Pole Stars, each in their turn, do a stint as the North Pole Star when they come nearest to the Celestial North Pole and then they move away again. Polaris became North Pole Star about 500 AD, taking over from Thuban and at about 3,000 AD, it will relinquish the job, and hand over to Gamma Cephei.

It makes no kind of sense to me to say the "start/end" of a cycle is in 2012, part-way through Polaris' "reign". It would be more logical to date the start/end point of a cycle when Vega, the 5th brightest star in the skies, takes over the job in 14,000 AD or so, as it did in 12,000 BC.

Given the start/end point is arbitrary, I don't see that any significance can be attached to when it occurs. Nothing will happen because the date is 2012, or the date is 14,000. No Supermassive Black Hole reaches out across the void from the Galactic Centre, 26,000 light years away and scoops up the Earth from out of its hidey-hole in the Orion Arm on anniversary day and swallows it whole for breakfast, as some nutcases seem to think has been prophesied (What? Does it leave the Moon and Sun and all the other 350,000+ Solar System bodies untouched?) (Black Holes of course can only swallow up what is immediately close to them, so I think we are safe on that score!)

I would agree that a complete picture of how the 26,000 year cycle works will only become apparent when one complete cycle has taken place, with humanity able to record and archive observations throughout that period. It is inevitably the case that a certain amount of guesswork and filling in the gaps in our knowledge will have to suffice, in the meantime.

And indeed, we could say the same of the Sun's 225-250 million year orbit around the Milky Way. We will need to live through and observe and record one of those complete cycles to fully get the picture of what is involved. But that is how knowledge increases, A bigger statistical sample facilitates it.

DID THE LAST SET OF PEOPLE SURVIVE?

Plainly there are periodic declines in both human and animal populations because of Ice Ages, wars, diseases. floods, polar ice caps melting. deforestation, tsunamai etc, but I am not aware of any correlation between such disasters and astronomical events (other than asteroid impacts on earth).

Neanderthal Man died out, presumably because he was less skilled and adaptable than Homo Sapiens, but Homo Sapiens has survive as a species since it first emerged (it has survived several waves of genocide, though some Native American tribes have not, nor did the Tasmanian aborigines.)

Answer 7

good question i agree let the scientist answer

Answer 8

You'll just have to wait and see

Answer 9

We cant do anything about it..

I just wanna tell you.. please search for the question before posting it!!!!.. i'm encountering this question for 5th day consecutively!!