Apocalypse 2012: An optimist investigates the end of civilization
Lawrence E. Joseph
Is the world really coming to an end in 2012? The answer frighteningly is ‘maybe’, according to the Bible, the I Ching, the Mayans, meteorologists and vulcanologists. Apocalypse 2012 is cheerful sceptic Laurence E Joseph’s investigation into the 2012 Doomsday phenomenon.Journalist and science writer Laurence E Joseph is our incisive and witty guide unravelling the religious, astrological and mystical prophecies behind the potentially earth-shattering events of 2012. And at the core of this book is Joseph's investigation into the growing number of scientific researchers trying to figure out why conditions around our planet are becoming so bizarre.His adventures include:• Hooking up with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement whose cheerful motto 'Live Long and Die Out' is now available as a tattoo.• Meeting the scientists who are trying to figure out why the present state of the sun is so worrisome – is it just going through a phase or is something major going on?• Visiting Yellowstone National Park to see whether the seething supervolcano could soon stop civilisation dead in its tracks.• Exploring the possibility of a terrorist attack that could plunge the whole Northern Hemisphere into the equivalent of a nuclear winter.So, if 2012 really is going to be a year of unprecedented catastrophe, what can we do to increase our odds of surviving it? Should we head for the Kentucky hills or hightail it to Western Africa, where the Australian Doomsday 2012 enthusiast is staking his claim, or perhaps we'd be better blasting off for solar systems unknown?With its mixture of hard science, investigative reportage and cast of colourful characters, Apocaplyse 2012 is Fast Food Nation for the terminally paranoid.
APOCALYPSE 2012
AN OPTIMIST INVESTIGATES THE END OF CIVILIZATION
Lawrence E. Joseph
DEDICATION (#ulink_a83d8cc1-0bcc-5ade-b402-b1b4b7bcf7ab)
To Phoebe and Milo. I love you.
CONTENTS
COVER (#u5ac88ae9-5bd9-58cd-a2dc-ced4fb9b230e)
TITLE PAGE (#u3ab61db0-3fc7-5294-8761-a00ecbf1e7c5)
DEDICATION (#u594f20e2-4ed4-53e6-8710-172a208ba1a3)
INTRODUCTION
GUILTY OF APOCALYPSE: THE CASE AGAINST 2012
SECTION I: TIME
1. WHY 2012, EXACTLY?
2. THE SERPENT AND THE JAGUAR
SECTION II: EARTH
3. THE MAW OF 2012
4. HELLFIRES BURNING
5. CROSSING ATITLÁN
SECTION III: SUN
6. SEE SUN. SEE SUN SPOT.
7. AFRICA CRACKING, EUROPE NEXT
SECTION IV: SPACE
8. HEADING INTO THE ENERGY CLOUD
9. THROUGH THE THINKING GLASS
SECTION V: EXTINCTION
10. OOF!
SECTION VI: ARMAGEDDON
11. LET THE END-TIMES ROLL
12. HAIL THE STATUS QUO
13. 2012, THE STRANGE ATTRACTOR
CONCLUSION
EPILOGUE
NOTES
REFERENCES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION (#u8e1386e0-1fe7-581f-a6e3-79cddab0e6e5)
On the first day of freshman writing class, the instructor told us that good writing was all about emotions—portraying them, eliciting them, unraveling them, being true to them. I stuck up my hand and stammered out something to the effect that, to me, emotions were just the details, and that what really mattered was whether or not people got to stay alive in order to have any. Happy, sad, angry, diffident, deep or shallow, shared with a loved one or burning from within—that’s all very interesting, but of secondary importance compared, say, to whether or not one is poisoned to death, or burnt to a crisp.
So when I first heard about how the world might end in 2012, I took to the idea right away. Except that no one in his right mind believes the world is really going to end. That’s the kind of thing weird men wearing sandwich boards and giving out smudgy pamphlets with lots of exclamation points on them like to claim. Theoretically, of course, the world must burn, freeze, crumble, or existentially wig out one day, but that’s billions of years down the road, right? Who knows, maybe by then we’ll all have moved to another planet, or even figured out a cure for time. But for all practical purposes, the unfathomable concept of the world coming to an end is used mostly to put things in perspective, as in “it’s not the end of the world” if your pants don’t get back from the dry cleaners until Monday.
There are any number of end-time scenarios, from Hitler/bin Laden/Pol Pot getting his finger on the button, to an asteroid the size of Everest cracking the Earth like an apple, to the Lord God Almighty saying enough is enough. But our planet does not have to literally disintegrate, or all its inhabitants perish, for our world to come to an end, or close enough. If civilization as we know it, that burgeoning and magnificent social, political, and cultural entity, were damaged to the point where its evolution was retarded, where normal relations between nations were disrupted, where a significant percentage of human beings lost their lives and most of the rest faced a future of hardship and horror—that would count.
Since the early 1990s, I have been involved with a company that has sought to help save the world from poisoning itself. Aerospace Consulting Corporation (AC2), of which I am currently chairman, has begged, borrowed, and blood-from-stoned about $10 million to develop the Vulcan Plasma Disintegrator, U.S. patent #7,026,570 B2, a portable, ultra-high-temperature furnace that will completely dissociate highly toxic wastes, including but not limited to lethal biological and chemical weapons that cannot otherwise be disposed of. The Vulcan, when it is finally produced, will be a fifty-yard tube with a robotic arm sticking out at one end. The arm grasps a fifty-five-gallon drum of hazardous, nonnuclear waste, samples its contents to prepare the right settings, sticks it inside the tube, which then heats up to 10,000 degrees, and zaps that sucker, container and all, into nothing: zero toxic residue.
There was always plenty of office space available at the Inhalation Toxicology Laboratory, out on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For next to nothing, our company had a nice suite and complimentary coffee station in the building out behind the kennel with the hundred identical dogs. True, the commute was an ordeal. After going through various security checkpoints, you had to drive all the way around the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Testing Center, a giant wooden platform held together without a single metal nail or screw, on which they would zap, say, a specially shielded 747 jumbo jet, to see if its instruments would fry. Next was the Big Melt Laser Laboratory; no one would ever tell me what it was they melted. Then mile after mile of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in their silos, dug into the hillside. The temptation to speed past them all had to be resisted because that part of the base is shoot-to-kill for vehicles violating the 30-mile-per-hour speed limit or any of the other traffic laws.
Over the past five years we have received considerable support and encouragement from Kirtland Air Force Base, a Department of Defense facility, and from Sandia National Laboratories, a Department of Energy facility responsible for, among other things, the construction and maintenance of every nuclear warhead in the United States.
For the record, neither AC2, Kirtland Air Force Base, nor Sandia National Laboratories, nor any employees or contractual workers associated with those entities are known to take any position whatsoever on predictions concerning the year 2012.
YOU DON’T NEED dire predictions about Apocalypse 2012 to freak out a little about all the weird stuff we’ve invented that could destroy the world. More than enough biochemical weapons are stockpiled around the globe, starting with mustard gas, a deadly paralytic agent left over from World War I, on through anthrax, sarin, and a variety of other classified compounds, to keep the Vulcan incinerating for many years to come. And the good news/bad news is that there will be even more incredibly toxic stuff to burn up in the future, at least according to those who share the fears voiced by Stephen Hawking, who believes that humankind will extinguish itself from the face of the planet through the misuse of biological weapons:
“I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet,” Hawking told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, expressed the opinion that the threat was not so much from a Cold War-style nuclear holocaust as from a more insidious form. “In the long term, I am more worried about biology. Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab.”
What manner of vile pestilence will renegade eggheads concoct with their gene splicers? They might try to “improve” upon the worst Nature has to offer. For example, some of the latest strains of superbacteria have an enzyme called VIM-2 that breaks down antibiotics. Genetically enhancing the VIM-2 enzyme could give the resulting superorganism a head start so big that antibiotics could never catch up. Perhaps the gene-splicing sociopaths will create “priobots.” By bolstering the already formidable self-replicating abilities of prions, these new predatory proteins could turn our brains into useless sponges through Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, also known as mad cow disease. The priobots might also cause an epidemic of kuru, a brain disorder in which cannibals have been known to giggle themselves to death. How’s that for an evil genius’s last laugh?
Even if we catch these malefactors before they can do harm, the poisons that they cook up will have to be disposed of. But there’s no furnace hot enough to burn up such compounds without leaving toxic residue. That’s the niche that Vulcan seeks to fill. It just might save the world after all. That is, as long as it doesn’t explode. Since it’s planned as the hottest furnace in the world and filled with deadly waste materials, we’ve had to make damn sure the device is stable and secure. In fact, Vulcan’s underlying plasma containment technology has potential applications as a rocket thruster: basically, you just take one end off the containment tube, and zoom, the unit takes off. Upon command, presumably.
ATOM SMASHING
Running a Vulcan furnace requires a megawatt of direct electrical power, enough to run about 25 contemporary, standard, three-bedroom homes, or 200 rent-controlled apartments in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Victor Simuoli and I planned to construct our atom smasher for the annual Junior High School 51 science fair. The Atomic Energy Commission had kindly sent us the plans for a linear accelerator, a device that propels subatomic particles from either end toward the middle and then smashes them into each other head-on at terrific speeds. Seeing how incredibly complicated the blueprints were, and how running the atom smasher would probably have shorted out the whole neighborhood, Victor and I settled, as I recall, for making a crystal radio receiver out of a cigar box.
We probably wouldn’t have given up so easily if we knew there was a possibility that our atom smasher could potentially create a tiny black hole that would eventually destroy the world. Not, mind you, that we were pre-Columbine or anything, just that, as two nerdy adolescents, the temptation of unleashing Star Trek-scale forces would have been hard to resist.
Though our machine would have been way too small to punch a black hole into space-time, the same cannot be said for the large hadron collider (LHC), a 27-kilometer circle on the border between France and Switzerland. When it begins operation in 2007, it will pack the colossal wallop of 14 trillion electron volts. A trillion electron volts, it turns out, is about the same amount of energy used by a mosquito to fly. The remarkable thing about the LHC is that it will concentrate its energy beam into a space one-trillionth the size of a mosquito, smashing protons into 10,000 pieces or more.
According to physicist Michio Kaku, the LHC’s incredible focusing power will create “an entire zoo of subatomic particles not seen since the Big Bang,” including mini black holes. Mini black holes? Intellectually scintillating though such a smash-up may be, questions must be raised about the calamity potential for some of these experiments. Don’t black holes, mini and otherwise, have a tendency to suck up everything around them into oblivion?
Martin Rees, a colleague of Hawking’s at the University of Cambridge, is a physicist who also has the distinction of serving as the United Kingdom’s Royal Astronomer. Rees warns that the shower of quarks resulting from proton-antiproton collisions could create mini black holes, called strangelets, which have the capability of contagiously converting everything they encounter into a new, hyperdense form of matter. Atoms are made mostly of empty space, space that would be squeezed out by the strangelet, compressing the Earth into an inert sphere about the size of a Home Depot.
An inglorious ending, that.
GRAY GOO
There’s always a risk of unanticipated outcomes with new inventions—for example, the “gray goo” scenario that they try not to talk much about, up the road at Los Alamos National Laboratory, famed as the atom bomb’s birthplace. Los Alamos is a leader in nanotechnology, which seeks to create nanoscale (billionth of a meter) machines designed to behave like the ribosomes in the cells of our body, assembling complex structures, such as proteins, out of simpler compounds, such as nitrogen, a key component. Nanotechnologists have discovered that, given the right circumstances, the atoms of certain elements naturally assemble themselves into complex structures; germanium atoms will, like cheerleaders at a football game, climb on top of each other to form a pyramid, defying the natural tendency of most atoms, and most noncheerleaders, to give in to gravity and remain on the ground. This self-assembly property proves quite convenient for all sorts of nanoscale endeavors, from breeding ultrapowerful computer chips from bacteria to creating infinitesimal machines that can be injected into the bloodstream to eat up cancers or infections.
What if the nanomachines’ appetites got out of control? The result would be gray goo, a term coined by nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler, in Engines of Creation. Gray goo is a hypothetical nanosubstance that keeps on reproducing itself until it devours all the carbon, hydrogen, and whatever other elements it lusts for and has gooed over the face of the Earth. Imagine the parts of a box of Tinkertoys, carefully laid out on the right kind of mat, assembling themselves into, say, a Tinkertoy robot. Kind of cool. But now imagine that process going haywire, Tinkertoy Robot #1 making Tinkertoy Robot #2, and then those two making two more, and then those four making four more, with the numbers doubling into the thousands, millions, billions, in a runaway process that would continue until the world’s raw materials were consumed.
According to Drexler, rapidly self-replicating nanomachines could outweigh the Earth in less than two days. The good news is that something would undoubtedly come along to devour the gray goo. The bad news of course is that there would then be untold gray goo devourers to deal with.
Save the world. Destroy the world. It’s all pretty much the same ambition—that is, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the absurd proposition that life is divided into two roughly equal halves: oneself, and the rest of the Universe.
Strangelet black holes Pac-Manning the Earth. Priobots infesting our brains. Gray goo engulfing Life as we know it. Way too weird to lose any sleep over, but a man can dream. Ever since kindergarten days, when I and Marty Raichalk would spend hours in the backyard of the house our families shared on a dirt road in Danbury, Connecticut, protecting our imaginary girlfriends, Betty and Sue, from crazed murderers and bumblebees, I’d been waiting, you know, for an opportunity to show off my skills. In grade school I ached to take on the Martians plotting to steal my brain. One’s valuables must be safeguarded, for the sake of all decent people. And who knows how much evil could have been vaporized if Victor and I had ever managed to plug in that atom smasher?
Not to say that Vulcan, if we ever really get it up and running, won’t prove lucrative. But that’s just milkshake, and what we’re talking here is pure malted ego, so rich you can sip yourself into a coma. To save the world from poisoning itself, the planet and the people. Now that would be taking a bow.
SOLAR INDIGESTION
Being of Lebanese descent and therefore somewhat dark-skinned, I’ve always had a rather arrogant attitude toward the Sun—problems associated with it were what white folks had to worry about. So I couldn’t be bothered at first, when Roger Remy, our company’s principal scientist and founder, announced that the Sun was “making mayonnaise,” which in his idiosyncratic vernacular means “having a breakdown.” Roger is kind of a French Moroccan Indiana Jones gone-to-seed, who talks a lot about covert operations, known as “skunk projects,” and space travel. But his specialty is the manipulation of plasmas, intensely hot ionized gases, of which the Sun is an immense ball, so I couldn’t just dismiss his statement outright.
Whatever the Sun’s problems, they were 93 million miles away, unlike Christmas, which at the time, November 2004, was bearing down like a freight train. So with two young children, an exhausted wife, and overbooked holiday travel plans, I let the matter drop.
“The Sun can’t get sick, you silly,” said my four-year-old daughter, Phoebe, who must have overheard a conversation. I was happy to agree.
On the day after Christmas, a close family friend died of an overdose of narcotics and antidepressants. The overdose was intentional, but the resulting suicide apparently was not. That day, December 26, 2004, was also the day the tsunami struck the Indian Ocean. In the week that followed, my wife grew more distraught over the death of her friend, a young woman of eighteen whom my wife had known since the girl’s infancy, while I became preoccupied with the aftermath of the tsunami. I am sorry to say that neither of us had much compassion for the other’s grief. The photo I will never forget, on the front page of the New York Times, was of a dozen or so people on a beautiful beach—Phuket, Thailand, as I recall—watching the unimaginable wave bear down on them. They looked so defenseless in their skimpy bathing suits. A few were running, but most were just slackjaw transfixed. All died, most likely. Why I felt more for a few figures in a photograph than my wife’s young friend, and why my wife felt more for the loss of one troubled teenager than 250,000 people in eleven nations, cannot be explained, except that we’re different.
Although the connection between the behavior of the Sun and the Indian Ocean tsunami is debatable, the sheer magnitude of that disaster, so out of the blue, made checking out Roger’s mayonnaise hypothesis seem the prudent thing to do. So after the holidays I looked into the matter and, sure enough, the Sun seemed like it had eaten some bad mayonnaise. It was mottled with sunspots, which are larger-than-Earth magnetic storms that can unleash as much energy as 10 billion hydrogen bombs, according to Tony Phillips, editor of the excellent Web site science.nasa.gov. The sunspots were belching billion-ton proton blasts and trillion-volt electron skewers all around the Solar System. Very dramatic, but isn’t this how the Sun normally conducts itself?
Not really. Ever since Galileo invented the telescope in 1610, solar activity has been observed to follow cycles of roughly eleven years, activity being judged by the number of sunspots popping up. When I started my research in January 2005, the sunspot cycle was, by scientific consensus, approaching the solar minimum, that is, the period of lowest solar activity, which bottomed out in 2006. Instead, for some unknown reason, the Sun has been throwing a tantrum ever since Halloween 2003, when the largest radiation storms ever recorded pounded the Solar System. Thank goodness most of the Halloween outbursts happened to miss the Earth; they were about twice as strong as the March 1989 solar radiation storm that popped the Hydro-Quebec power grid, blacking out the households of 6 million unsuspecting Canadians. Solar activity remained abnormally high and spiked with the giant sunspots of January 20, 2005, which pelted the Earth’s atmosphere with its largest proton storm in fifteen years. What made this all the more astonishing is that it occurred at or near solar minimum, the point in the eleven-year sunspot cycle where there is supposed to be little or no solar activity. Chilling, but not nearly as chilling as September, when the Sun went from perfectly calm, not a blemish, to being covered with sunspots and spitting out record-setting mouthfuls of radiation, right at the height of the hurricane season that produced Katrina, Rita, Wilma, and so many others.
There is nothing in the human experience, including the sacred concept of Almighty God, as reliable as the Sun. The Sun empowers Earthly life. It warms the land and the oceans, begets all plant and animal growth, energizes the atmosphere, helps generate clouds, drives the wind and the ocean currents, and cycles the planet’s water supply. The notion, therefore, that the Sun may somehow be changing in any way is the very definition of unthinkable—far beyond the leap required, for example, to grasp the consequences of all-out nuclear holocaust, as Herman Kahn and other doomsday philosophers were once wont to do.
An increase of as little as 0.5 percent in the Sun’s energy output would be enough to fry the satellite system on which global telecommunications, military security, and banking depend. Ditto our skin, with spikes in cancer and other radiation diseases. Runaway global warming, and the attendant upsurge in sea levels and flooding, megastorm activity, and even seismic and volcanic holocausts, would seem inevitable.
Having reported on science and nature for more than twenty years, I expected roadblocks in researching this bizarre solar behavior. Famous institutions would naturally be loath to associate their names with such a potentially devastating subject as the changing Sun, for the very good reason that their stamp of authority might cause panic in certain quarters. So I was taken aback to find that the Max Planck Institute, Germany’s equivalent of MIT and CalTech, has conducted a number of studies confirming that the Sun hasn’t been this turbulent for 11,000 years at least. Ever since the 1940s, and in particular since 2003, solar activity levels have been off the charts. We could be zapped at any moment.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Maybe the most frightening apocalypse scenario of all is what’s happening in space. Talk about change being unthinkable. I mean, besides a few asteroids here and there, space is just there, right? It doesn’t change. Well, the whole Solar System is becoming increasingly agitated because we are moving into an interstellar energy cloud, according to an emerging Russian school of planetary geophysics. These scientists, who base their findings on decades of analyzing satellite data, have found that all the planets’ atmospheres, including the Earth’s, are beginning to show the effects of this massive input, both directly from the energy cloud and indirectly from the disturbances being created within the Sun from its encounter with the energy cloud.
Not to worry. The Earth’s atmosphere will protect us, right? Maybe in the old days it would have, but now Harvard and NASA scientists are reporting that California-sized cracks have inexplicably opened up in the Earth’s magnetic field, our essential shield against solar radiation and the deadly cancers and climatic disturbances that come with it. Some scientists are even predicting that a pole reversal, in which the North and South magnetic poles switch places, is imminent. That’s a several-thousand-year process in which multiple magnetic pole sites pop up around the globe, confusing and sometimes extinguishing the thousands of species of birds, fish, and mammals that depend upon magnetism for their sense of direction. During the confusion, the Earth’s magnetic protection drops to near zero, the cosmic equivalent of a very pale person getting caught on a beach in Miami with no hat, no shade, no sunblock, and an imperfect ass in a teeny Speedo.
One source of protection from excess solar radiation comes from another way the world might end. The sky could fill up with ray-absorbent ash, but that’s about the only good news I could find in a BBC documentary reporting that Yellowstone, probably the largest supervolcano in the world, is preparing to erupt. The last time Yellowstone erupted, 600,000 years ago, it vomited enough dust to cover the North American continent several feet deep. Today such an eruption would lead to a nuclear-winter-type scenario that would savage global agriculture and economy, killing hundreds of millions.
And the biggest reason to worry about the end of life is the prediction in Nature, perhaps the world’s most respected science journal, that at least three-quarters of the Earth’s species are wiped out every 62 to 65 million years. It has been 65 million years since the Cretaceous-Tertiary disaster extinguished the dinosaurs, meaning that we are now overdue for a cataclysm that will without doubt reduce our population by at least half, smash our infrastructure to smithereens, and drive most of whatever is left of our civilization underground.
If Yellowstone blows or the Sun’s acne festers into boils, ecological problems like ozone holes and global warming will be fondly lamented, the way we started out the 1980s worrying about herpes simplex and ended up with the scourge of AIDS. But the good news, as the irrepressible Admiral Hyman Rickover liked to point out, is that, whatever happens, “a new and wiser species will evolve.”
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
Firm dates are hard to come by in the disaster prediction game, and about the only thing scientists seemed to agree upon is that whatever was happening now, as we approached the solar minimum, would pale in comparison to the unprecedented turbulence projected for the next solar maximum, expected in 2012.
On impulse, I googled “2012” and promptly fell down the rabbit hole into a thriving apocalypse subculture. Blogs, books, music, and art from every continent prophesied doom for that year. Exponents of a bewildering array of ideologies and philosophies, from indigenous cultures, the Bible, the I Ching, point to 2012 as the time of Apocalypse. Could it be just a coincidence? Or is it more reasonable to assume that divinely inspired traditions would, after all, reach congruent conclusions about the fate of humanity?
“Twenty twelve! That’s when, you know, it’s all supposed to happen. Big time!” exclaimed our nanny, Erica, when I mentioned my discovery the next morning. A bowl of popcorn would have emptied fast as Erica, a late-night net surfer and talk-radio devotee, burbled with dire predictions and assurances that 2012 is the real Y2K. She seemed to see it all as kind of an ongoing reality show, of the horror variety. Several of her friends were into this doomsday 2012 thing as well, and she gaily recounted some of their suggestions for what to do as The End draws near: “Pass the bong. Build a spaceship. Move underground. Have lots of sex. Commit suicide. See the world. Go about your business. Stop taking your medication. Start taking someone else’s. Write that novel. Euthanize your family. Hit Vegas. Praise Allah. Take revenge. Take a crash course in astral projection. Be sure to get a good seat for the ultimate fireworks display.”
Why the year 2012, specifically? The hubbub had nothing to do with that being the projected date of the next solar maximum in the sunspot cycle. In fact, there was little or no mention of the Sun, or for that matter science topics in general, among those prophesying doom. Galvanizing the movement was an utterly ancient prediction from Mayan mythology that Time will either end or begin on the winter solstice, December 21, 2012.
At that point I almost dropped the whole thing, because, how to put this … I am not New Agey. I am your basic Brooklyn wiseguy Beeming around Beverly Hills. Not that all that ancient oojie-boojie is necessarily invalid, just that most of it is lost on me.
THE MAYAN PROPHECIES
Ancient Mayan astronomy is anything but oojie-boojie. It is a staggering intellectual achievement, equivalent in magnitude to ancient Egyptian geometry or to Greek philosophy. Without telescopes or any other apparatus, Mayan astronomers calculated the length of the lunar month to be 29.53020 days, within 34 seconds of what we now know to be its actual length of 29.53059 days. Overall, the 2,000-year-old Mayan calendar is believed by many to be more accurate than the 500-year-old Gregorian calendar we use today.
The Maya were obsessed with time. Over the centuries, they devised at least twenty calendars, attuned to the cycles of everything from pregnancy to the harvest, from the Moon to Venus, whose orbit they calculated accurately to 1 day every 1,000 years. After centuries of observations, their astronomers came to the conclusion that on the winter solstice of 2012, 12/21/12, or 13.0.0.0.0 by what is known as their Long Count calendar, a new era in human history will commence. This 12/21/12 “stroke of midnight” begins a new age, just as the Earth’s completion of its orbit around the Sun brings a new year at the stroke of midnight every January 1. But so what? Aside from a change in date and a day off from work, there is no inherent, palpable difference between December 31 and January 1—it’s not as though we go from cold and dark one day to warm and sunny the next. For that matter, there is no inherent, palpable difference between one year and the next, unless such difference is externally ascribed: going from 1999 to 2000, Y2K was nothing but a transition from a digitally unremarkable number to a nice big round one. It proved to be about as spiritually resonant as an odometer change.
The date 12/21/12 has significance beyond numerical happenstance. It is the annual winter solstice, when the Northern Hemisphere is farthest away from the Sun, and when therefore there is the least daylight and the longest night. On that date our Solar System will eclipse—interpose itself so as to block the view from Earth—the center of the Milky Way. The dark hole at the center of the galaxy spiral was considered the Milky Way’s womb by the ancients and now also by contemporary astronomers, who believe that that’s the spot where our galaxy’s stars are created. Indeed, there’s a vast black hole right at the center, making for a nice navel motif.
The Mayan ancients held that 12/21/12 would begin a new age, in vital fact as well as calendar technicality. The date thus portends a most sacred, propitious, and dangerous moment in our history, destined, they believed, to bring both catastrophe and revelation. The years leading up to it presage this awesome potential in terrible and wonderful ways.
I went to Guatemala to evaluate the beliefs and predictions attached to 12/21/12 and concluded, in a nutshell, that the Maya have a track record that is impossible to ignore. Always give genius the benefit of the doubt, and the ancient Mayan astronomers were indeed geniuses. The Mayan prophecies concerning 2012 seem therefore to contain wisdom not necessarily beyond science, but most likely beyond anything contemporary scientific methodology could prove, or disprove, in the short time remaining before the apocalypse deadline.
What possessed the Maya to devote so much exquisite work to astronomy, while never even getting around, for example, to inventing the wheel or even simple metal tools, I cannot say. But simply to ignore their fundamental conclusion that December 21, 2012, is a pivotal date in human history—especially given the profoundly disturbing set of concurrences regarding the 2012 deadline in fields ranging from solar physics to Eastern philosophy—would be foolish in the extreme.
DISCLAIMERS
Some disclaimers are in order here:
I represent no religious or political ideology nor have I, to the very best of my knowledge, fallen under the influence of any individual or group with views relating to 2012. Unlike many of those concerned with end-times, Apocalypse, or Armageddon, I have had no divine revelations, no instructions from alien intelligence, no channelings from ancient sages, no numerological epiphanies.
Neither am I one of those skeptical balloon-puncturers who deflate every notion not 100 percent supported by available physical evidence. Lord save us from the dearth of artistry and creativity that would inevitably result were those killjoys ever to gain the power that they think logic dictates should be theirs.
Nor am I a catastrophe buff. I am proud to report that I expended not one cent or one minute defending against the possibility of the Y2K computer bug. Neither have I ever prepared myself nor my household for nuclear holocaust, comet impact, harmonic convergence gone haywire, or any other such donnybrook. Living in the earthquake zone of Southern California, I do however keep a flashlight by the bed and an extra jug of water in the closet. And for the record, I do not hope, advocate, agitate, or pray for any catastrophe, 2012-related or otherwise, regardless of how uplifting the outcome is purported to be.
My conclusions concerning the potentially cataclysmic nature of 2012 are based on approximately fifteen months of research, conducted with the expertise gained from more than twenty years as an author of nonfiction books and as a journalist covering science, nature, religion, and politics for a variety of publications, most frequently the New York Times.
Is writing this book an irresponsible thing to do, for fear of the panic it might cause? The public’s right to know is not absolute, but neither is it contingent upon the paternalistic assessments of the global oligarchy. I can only have faith in the overall process wherein the powers-that-be, using their best judgment, attempt to control information that might cause social instability, and also where passionate individuals, groups, and organizations work to bring vital facts to light. Ultimately, the best solutions come from a spirited interchange between truth-seeking individuals and the power structures created to protect us.
THE MARK OF DESTINY
Will the world end in 2012? Will all hell break loose, on the order of an all-out, World War III-scale nuclear holocaust or a meteoric impact like the one believed to have extinguished the dinosaurs? I do not believe so, though that may be partly a reflection of my emotional limitations—as the father of two young, wonderful children, I am simply not capable of such a conviction. Not capable of confronting the possibility that everyone and everything that anyone has ever held dear could be destroyed.
What I am capable of doing is gathering the facts and presenting the evidence necessary to ferret out the reality of 2012. I have found that the prospect of an apocalypse in 2012 should be treated with respect and fear.
This book will demonstrate what I consider the middle-case scenario, namely that 2012 is destined to be a year of unprecedented turmoil and upheaval. Whether the birth agony of a New Age or simply the death throes of our current era, a disturbing confluence of scientific, religious, and historical trends indicates that an onslaught of disasters and revelations, man-made, natural, and quite possibly supernatural, will culminate tumultuously.
The year 2012 has the mark of destiny upon it. Judging from the facts gathered for this book, there is at least an even chance of some massive tragedy and/or great awakening occurring or commencing in that year. The question ultimately is not if but when, not so much the exact date as whether or not this transformational event will occur within our own or our loved ones’ lifetime. The value of the 2012 deadline is that, being so close, it forces us to confront the myriad possibilities for global catastrophe, to gauge their likelihood and destructive potential, and to examine how prepared we are to respond to them, individually and as a civilization.
Everyone responds to deadlines, constructively or otherwise. Especially if there’s pressure. It’s human nature. The last two minutes of each half of a football game, together less than 7 percent of the total playing time, yield at least half the action. I need deadlines. Most of us do. With the unlikely exception of Y2K, that silly dress rehearsal, the 2012 deadline is the first in modern history when so much is on the line for so many.
The blessing of a deadline is the advance notice that goes with it, to get body, mind, and soul together, to take some sensible precautions for oneself and one’s family. In some sense, not necessarily including physical survival, we’ve all got a chance like never before to come together and rise to our collective higher Self. That’s the invigorating challenge of 2012. It forces us to find a common purpose. And having a purpose in life is about the surest way I know to stave off demise.
GUILTY OF APOCALYPSE: THE CASE AGAINST 2012 (#u8e1386e0-1fe7-581f-a6e3-79cddab0e6e5)
The thesis of this book is that the year 2012 will be pivotal, perhaps catastrophic, possibly revelatory, to a degree unmatched in human history.
1. Ancient Mayan prophecies based on two millennia of meticulous astronomical observations indicate that 12/21/12 will mark the birth of a new age, accompanied, as all births are, by blood and agony as well as hope and promise.
2. Since the 1940s, and particularly since 2003, the Sun has behaved more tumultuously than any time since the rapid global warming that accompanied the melting of the last Ice Age 11,000 years ago. Solar physicists concur that solar activity will next peak, at record-setting levels, in 2012.
3. Storms on the Sun are related to storms on the Earth. The great wave of 2005 hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma coincided with one of the stormiest weeks in the recorded history of the Sun.
4. The Earth’s magnetic field, our primary defense against harmful solar radiation, has begun to dwindle, with California-sized cracks opening up randomly. A pole shift, in which such protection falls nearly to zero as the North and South magnetic poles reverse position, may well be under way.
5. Russian geophysicists believe that the Solar System has entered an interstellar energy cloud. This cloud is energizing and destabilizing the Sun and all the planets’ atmospheres. Their predictions for catastrophe resulting from the Earth’s encounter with this energy cloud range from 2010 to 2020.
6. Physicists at UC Berkeley, who discovered that the dinosaurs and 70 percent of all other species on Earth were extinguished by the impact of a comet or asteroid 65 million years ago, maintain with 99 percent certainty that we are now overdue for another such megacatastrophe.
7. The Yellowstone supervolcano, which erupts catastrophically every 600,000 to 700,000 years, is preparing to blow. The most recent eruption of comparable magnitude, at Lake Toba, Indonesia, 74,000 years ago, led to the death of more than 90 percent of the world’s population at the time.
8. Eastern philosophies, such as the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, and Hindu theology, have been plausibly interpreted as supporting the 2012 end date, as have a range of indigenous belief systems.
9. At least one scholarly interpretation of the Bible predicts that the Earth will be annihilated in 2012. The burgeoning Armageddonist movement of Muslims, Christians, and Jews actively seeks to precipitate the final end-times battle.
10. Have a nice day.
SECTION I TIME (#u8e1386e0-1fe7-581f-a6e3-79cddab0e6e5)
That the Rastafarian cabdriver sang reggae prayers to the Almighty Jah all the way to the airport, bowing his head right down to the steering wheel at least fifty times while shooting the rapids of 1405, the busiest freeway in Southern California, did not in itself disturb me. The man was an excellent driver, very smooth. No problem either with the interior of his taxi being plastered with 8 × 10 glossies of snarling lions covered with religious messages about love, death, and the Lion of Judah. I am originally from New York City, where crazy cabbies spice the day. What did give pause, however, was the flawless way in which, when his cell phone rang, Rasta Cabbie would become James Earl Jones saying, “West Side Transportation, may I help you?” After wrapping up his office business, it was back to Jah and the lions and the bowing and the prayers.
I was headed to Guatemala, to meet with Mayan shamans who would explain the prophecies of 2012. When I mentioned this to Elia, my housekeeper, who is from El Salvador, she shouted, “No te vayas! Gangas! Think of your children. What if you don’t come back?” and ran out of the room. Maybe Rasta Cabbie’s prayer dance was some sort of tripped-out empathic blessing for a safe trip. Praise … Jah.
We pulled into LAX and on impulse I asked Rasta Cabbie if he’d ever heard about 2012.
“Educate me,” he replied, as he hoisted my luggage out of the trunk.
“Well, people say big things are going to happen in 2012. Maybe, you know, the End.”
“They always sayin’ that. I was waitin’ for that to happen in year 2000,” he said, shaking his head sadly. But it was tip time, and Rasta Cabbie wanted to end on a positive note. “We keep workin’ on things, and your year could be the one.”
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