FollowUp 2: Not Doomsday

I continue to stand by my prediction that doomsday is not in 2012 (no matter who is elected in November).  Don Yeomans is a Senior Research Scientist at NASA who has put together a short video that offers pretty good evidence that most of the popular doomsday scenarios for this year are wrong.



21 December 2011, Original Pedantic Political Ponderings post.

2 January 2012, FollowUp 1.

FollowUp 1: Not Doomsday

I continue to stand by my prediction that doomsday is not in 2012 (no matter who is elected in November).  Space.com has an excellent debunking of a lot of silly doomsday scenarios.  Based on data from NASA and interviews with NASA scientists, they disprove

• the end of the Mayan long calendar, which will begin its thirteenth cycle on 22 December 2012.
• Nibiru or Planet X, which is not headed to impact with Earth on 21 December 2012.
• gravity destroying Earth due to the Sun crossing the plane of the Milky Way.
• gravity destroying Earth due to an alignment of other planets.
• solar storms destroying the Earth.
• destruction of the Earth by the flipping of the magnetic poles.
• impact by a significant asteroid.

Who knew that there were so many ways for our planet to end? While it is technically feasible to destroy the Earth, this is far from likely.  Far more likely is that our overpopulation stresses the ecosystem to the point where we endanger our own survival, but not that of our planet.

21 December 2011, Original Pedantic Political Ponderings post.

13 March 2012, FollowUp 2.

Prediction: Not Doomsday

This year saw, despite its relative lack of importance, two predictions of the end of the world that failed to materialize.  The world neither ended on 21 March nor on 21 October as Harold Camping predicted.

Picture from the Washington Post:  Mayan green ceramic calendar (Stephen Drago) 

Some people are now sure that the world will end when the Mayan calendar ends a year from today.  Except that scientists at the University of Texas and at Cornell University say that this is a misconception.

Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 B.C., marking time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and the 13th Baktun ends around Dec. 21, 2012.

"It's a special anniversary of creation," said David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin. "The Maya never said the world is going to end, they never said anything bad would happen necessarily, they're just recording this future anniversary on Monument Six."

To paraphrase a line from The Dark Crystal, "endings, beginnings, they are all the same."  The world will end when we each go to sleep and begin anew tomorrow.

My prediction, the world continues after 21 December 2012.  It even continues after 22 December 2012.  And so on.

2 January 2012, FollowUp 1.

13 March 2012, FollowUp 2.