Should we take a holiday from answering 2012 questions?

Question

The "Moon-sized Mars" business caused coronaries in this section, and that's only a few weeks each year. It's still 5 years plus 2 days until 2012 and they're already coming thick and fast (especially thick). It will be an effort of supreme willpower for some of us, but why don't we give up and let the weird answerers give weird answers? It's not like the whole world comes here for knowledge.

Answer 1

I totally disagree with the very first answer here, When i answer one of thos questions I answer it short and to the point, IT WILL NOT HAPPEN, dont believe everythjing you hear,, This has over run the a& S recently and as Raymond siad its for other reasons they are asking, Sure there are kids who dont know and thats where the short and sweet answers come in, Its simply the end of an acient civilizatoins calander;

Answer 2

I'd also like to thank Raymond for his excellent summary of the 2012 facts, which I've saved to my hard disk for future reference.

I agree that we should continue to give short sweet and factual answers to these questions, because a lot of the kids here haven't developed the critical processes to distinguish fact from speculation, and are genuinely scared by these predictions of the end of the world. Those of us who've lived through the Cold War and countless doomsday prophesies can take these things lightly, but for a ten or fifteen year old with no life experience, they can be terrifying, especially when they seem to be backed by so many "experts."

What I can never fathom is why there are so many people in this world who seem to get a kick out of scaring little kids.

Answer 3

I give Raymond a huge thumbs up for yet another wonderful and elegant answer (this guy is good!).

We have to keep presenting reasoned and knowledgeable responses to questions like this so folks who take the time to read them can learn to recognize the difference between sense and nonsense.

If there's only nonsense to be had the genuinely open minded askers will never get what they deserve as an answer to a fair question.

Answer 4

Actually, my main concern is for other viewers who may be swayed by the question into thinking that there may actually be something to this 2012 question.

If we have learned anything with Y2k is that many people much prefer to be scared out of their wit, rather than understand the folly of the scare tactic.

I usually assume a high probability that the asker is not really interested in an answer, but is simply casting the seed of doubt (there are mind terrorists out there whose favorite sport is to disrupt the thinking process of others).

But my answers are usually aimed at other readers, giving them the info they need so that they do not fall prey to the nonsense.

What we should do is agree on giving short answers (not like this one) that show that all this 2012 stuff is not based on facts.

However, we must also recognise what does exist out there that may cause some people to think that 2012 may be special:

1. There is such a thing as a Mayan Calendar. Mayans knew enough about astronomy to realise that there is such a thing as a solstice (their common years were meant to end on the December solstice). They also understood the idea of the precession of the obliquity (the angle-direction that the Earth's rotation axis makes with Earth's orbital plane. It appears that one Long Count (in at least one version of the calendar) was meant to be 1/5 of the precession period. Today we know that the precession period is 25,800 years. But their Long Count appears to be 5125.36 years long (making their determination of the precession period to be 25,627 years).

2. There exists a Mayan scripture which, at some time in the Mayan culture, might have played the same role as the "New Testament" did in the Roman Empire. It too talks of the end of creations. The Popol Vuh does describe previous attempts by gods to establish human civilizations and, seeing their failures, they would destroy these on the last day of a long count. Like the New Testament in our human community, the Popol Vuh may have been the book of only a portion of the Mayans, not for all of them.

3. The Mayans themselves (other than followers of the Popol Vuh) do not appear to have believed in the end-of-the-world in 2012. There are a sufficient number of references to astronomical events that are to take place after 2012 (and they are dated in the Mayan system). It is as foolish as people, back in the 1990s, refering to dates in the 2000s, not knowing that we would all die from exploding computers on December 31, 1999.

4. It is possible that the Mayans understood precession well enough to anchor their calendar to the date on which the Sun's solstice position would be in the thickest portion of the Milky Way (whether or not they knew it was a galaxy). If that is the case, this would explain why the solstice position is (relatively speaking) close to the direction of the Galactic centre. However, the alignment is off by over 11 degrees (not much of an alignment) and the closest angle between the solstice position and the Galactic centre is not in 2012.
However, most civilizations anchor their calendars to dates in the past, not in the (civilization's) future. Our Anno Domini calendar is anchored on the date of Christ's birth as determined by the monk Dionysius Exiguus during the year we now call AD 525.

4. The planet Nibiru sprouted from initial translations of Sumerian documents. Later, as more texts were found, translations were improved and the original planet disappeared (the name "Nibiru" is now thought to be associated with Jupiter). Still, the proponent of the original kept pushing his idea that a planet does exist that will come back in our area (but in 2085); one of his followers twisted some dates around -- for example, making the orbital period 1/7 of 25,637 years -- to pretend that the return is forecast for 2012, to match the end of the Mayan long count.

5. There is no major planetary alignment in 2012.

6. The Earth's magnetic field is in the process of flipping. Despite the popular understanding of the word 'flip', the process takes a few centuries. It will not be completed for at least a couple of centuries. During that time, the magnetic field (which does protect us from some charged particles coming from the sun and from cosmic rays) does not disappear.

7. Starting in 1995, many books have been written claiming to have deciphered "secret codes" (in the Mayan litterature, in the Bible, in Nostradamus...). They all give themselves an air of scientific interpretation. However, given an objective and taking liberties with statistical analyses, I can predict anything you want, for any date you want. The lone I "like" best is the noosphere (the sphere of human thought) that should reveal itself with the return of Quetzalcoatl (the Aztec creator god) in -- you guessed it -- 2012.

Answer 5

Absolutely not! Who is going to feed the trolls????

And could you really live with the thought that some person without a future committed suicide in their parent's basement because YOU did not fill their insatiable need for recognition, no matter how low they had to go to get some?

:-)

Answer 6

Works for me.