nasa - the great 2012 doomsday scare

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Page 1 of 33http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012-guest.html

The Great 2012 Doomsday Scare

Scenes from the

motion picture"2012." CourtesyColumbiaPictures.

Frequently Asked

Questions

This guest article on2012 was written byE. C. Krupp, Direc-

tor of Griffith Ob-servatory in Los An-geles and is reprint-

ed with permissionfrom Sky & TelescopeMagazine . The publisher and

the author reserve all rights. All
http://skyandtelescope.com/http://www.griffithobs.org/http://skyandtelescope.com/http://www.griffithobs.org/


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nents, plunging asteroids, burn-ing cities, and a tsunami throw-ing an aircraft carrier through theWhite House. The movie's omi-nous slogan: "Find out the truth."Two other major movies aboutthe 2012 doomsday are also re-ported to be in the works.

Anyone who cruises the internet

or all-night talk radio knowswhy. The ancient Maya of Mexi-co and Guatemala kept a calen-

dar that is about to roll up the


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red carpet of time, swing the so-lar system into transcendentalalignment with the heart of theMilky Way, and turn Earth into abowling pin for a rogue planetheading down our alley for astrike.

None of it is true. People youknow, however, are likely be-

coming a bit afraid that modernastronomy and Maya secrets areindeed conspiring to bring our

doom. If people know youre an


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astronomer, they will soon beasking you all about it.

Here is what you need to know.

Birth of a NotionWe"ve had similar scares in therecent past, but none quite likethis. The last time the world gotall worked up over the mystical

turning of a calendar was thefalse Millennium of Jan. 1, 2000.Never mind the actual Y2K com-

puter-date bug. True-believer au-


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thors (and their imitators) pub-lished scary and/or hopefulbooks about the moment'sprophetic potential to catch animmense cosmic wave andchange everything for eithergood or ill. Borrowing a forecastfrom Nostradamus, the 16th-cen-tury French riddler, authorCharles Berlitz predicted cata-

strophe in his 1981 book Dooms-day 1999. Berlitz (fresh off bookson Atlantis and the Bermuda Tri-

angle), warned that 1999 could


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inflict flood, famine, pollutionand a shift of Earth's magneticpoles. He also spotlighted theplanetary alignment of May 5,2000, and warned that it couldbring solar flares, severe earth-quakes, "land changes" and "seis-mic explosions."

In the 1990s an entire "Earth

Changes" movement swelled intobeing as the end of the centuryneared, with all sorts of Millenni-

al expectations -- earthquakes,


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plagues, polar axis shifts, conti-nents sliding into the sea, At-lantis rising and more. In Eng-land, the Sun tabloid predicted a"marvelous millennium of joy,peace, prosperity."

When Jan. 1, 2000, came andwent with nothing worse thanski-lift passes printing the date as

1900, the focus shifted to"5/5/2000" several months later.Most believers in the power of

planetary alignments forgot the


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failure of earlier lineups to in-duce disaster. The "Jupiter Effect"cataclysm predicted for March10, 1982 (named for the 1974book about it by John Gribbinand Stephen Plagemann) com-manded headlines but never ma-terialized.

Throughout history, end-of-the-

world movements missing theirmark number in the "hundreds of thousands at the very least, says

Richard Landes, historian at


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like a millennium. In Maya calen-drics, however, it's not the end of a thousand years. It's the end of Baktun 13. The Maya calendarwas based on multiple cycles of time, and the baktun was one of them. A baktun is 144,000 days: alittle more than 394 years.

Scholars have deciphered how

the Maya calendar worked fromhistorical texts and ancient in-scriptions, and they have accu-

rately correlated so-called Maya


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Long Count dates with theequivalent dates in our calendar.Just as we number our yearscounting from a historically andculturally significant event (thepresumed birth year of Christ),Maya times were numbered froma date endowed with religiousand cosmic significance: the cre-ation date of the present world

order. A Long Count date is thetally of days from that mythicstartup. Most experts think the

start point corresponds to Aug.


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11, 3114 B.C.

Most of the Maya calendar inter-vals accumulate as multiples of 20. An interval of 7,200 days (360! 20) was known as a katun. Ittakes 20 katuns to complete abaktun (20 ! 7,200 = 144,000days). Although some ancient in-scriptions turn 13 baktuns into an

important reset milestone, othersimply that the calendar simplykeeps running. For instance, it

takes 20 baktuns to make a pic-


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in the worlds destruction andrebirth. There is no genuineMaya tradition behind any of this.

Waters also miscalculated thedate when the calendar wouldsupposedly pull down theshades. "The end of the Great Cy-cle . . . will occur Dec. 24, 2011

A.D.," he announced, when theworld "will be destroyed by cata-strophic earthquakes." Exact date

aside, the doomsday ball was


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now rolling.

Another book in 1975 also spot-lighted the Maya calendricroundup. Dennis and TerenceMcKenna discussed it in The In-visible Landscape: Mind, Hallu-cinogens, and the I Ching. Thatbook at least got the Baktun-13end date right: Dec. 21, 2012. It

also noted that the date is thewinter solstice, when the Sunwill be "in the constellation Sagit-

tarius, only about 3 degrees from


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the Galactic Center, which, alsocoincidentally, is within 2 de-grees of the ecliptic." The McKen-nas continued, "Because the win-ter solstice node is precessing, itis moving closer and closer to thepoint on the ecliptic where it willeclipse the galactic center." In re-ality this event will never hap-pen, but it hardly matters. The

McKennas linked the wholearrangement with the concept of renewal and called 2012 a mo-

ment of "potential transformative


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opportunity."

Broader interest in 2012 caughton beginning in 1987. In TheMayan Factor: Path Beyond Tech-nology , Jos Argelles (an "artist,poet, and visionary historian" ac-cording to the dust jacket) linkedthe 13-baktun period with an im-palpable "beam" from the center

of the Milky Way Galaxy. Ac-cording to Argelles, the Mayaknew when we entered this beam

and when we would leave it, and


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set their 13-baktun cycle to mark our passage through it accord-ingly. The beam, he asserted, op-erates as "invisible galactic lifethreads" that link people, theplanet, the Sun, and the center of the Galaxy. Neither Maya tradi-tion nor modern astronomy sup-ports a belief in any such beam. Itstemmed instead from

Argelless personal philosophy,which emphasizes "the principleof harmonic resonance."

Argelles also concluded that the


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vergence." That event turned intoa global phenomenon, with thou-sands gathering at Earthsacupuncture points to create a"synchronized and unified bio-electromagnetic collective bat-tery." Unfortunately, the datepassed with nothing more thancolorful newspaper stories and aDoonesbury satire. (A character

explains earnestly that that thealignment could bring either"mass unification of divine and

earth-plane selves," or perhaps


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nuclear annihilation. "Either waythere will probably be a craftsfair.")

Galactic Guessing GamesFast-forward to 1995. That yearJohn Major Jenkins packagedseveral of these themes intoMaya Cosmogenesis 2012. Ac-cording to Jenkins, the winter-

solstice point and the centerlineof the Galaxy will line up exactlyon Dec. 21. Arguing that this mo-

tivated the Maya to contrive the


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calendar to end on that date,Jenkins concludes that it will be"a tremendous transformationand opportunity for spiritualgrowth, a transition from oneworld age to another."

In fact, astronomy cannot pin-point such a "galactic alignment"to within a year, much less a day.

The alignment depends on therather arbitrary modern defini-tion of the galactic equator,

and/or the visual appearance of


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the Milky Way. There is no pre-cise definition of the Milky Way'sedges -- they are very vague anddepend on the clarity of yourview. (Jenkins says that he per-sonally established the MilkyWays edges by viewing it from11,000 feet, far above anywherethe Maya lived.) So to give a pre-cise visual position for its center-

line is not meaningful.

Jenkins did acknowledge that the

winter-solstice Sun actually


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crosses the center of the MilkyWay anytime between 1980 and2016. Elsewhere he expands thisapproach zone to a 900-year peri-od, and settles for an imprecisealignment to which Dec. 21, 2012,is arbitrarily and circularly as-signed. Real astronomy does notsupport any match between theBaktun-13 end date and a galac-

tic alignment. The advocates bothadmit and ignore this discrepan-cy.


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It's almost a sidelight that thewinter-solstice sun will never ac-tually "eclipse" the galaxy's truecenter, the pointlike radio sourcemarking the Milky Way's centralblack hole. Moreover, the winter-solstice sun wont even pass clos-est to it on the sky for another200 years. What did the Mayathemselves think about End

Times? There is no evidence thatthey saw the calendar and aworld age ending in either tran-

scendence or catastrophe on De-


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cember 21, 2012. Some MayaLong Count texts refer to datesmany baktuns past 13 and eveninto the next pictun and beyond.For instance, an inscription com-missioned in the 7th century A.D.by King Pacal of Palenque pre-dicts that an anniversary of hisaccession would be commemo-rated on Oct. 15, 4772.

In all of the Long Count texts dis-covered, transcribed, and trans-

lated, only one mentions the key


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date in 2012: Monument 6 at Tor-tuguero, a Maya site in the Mexi-can state of Tabasco. The text isdamaged, but what remains doesnot imply the end of time.

The Secret NASA ConspiracySome advocates for the 2012 cata-strophe say that what will actual-ly cause the devastation is an

alignment of planets. There is noplanet alignment on the wintersolstice in 2012. Nonetheless, ad-

vocates of doom connect the fic-


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tional alignment to astrologicalpredictions or groundless claimsabout a reversal of Earth's mag-netic field and unprecedented so-lar storms. Many internet post-ings and guests on all-nightapocalyptic radio have elaborat-ed on these themes.

In particular, several threads of

irrational thought have createdan internet phantom, the secretplanet Nibiru. It's the bowling

ball, and Earth is the pin. There is


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no such planet, though it is oftenequated with Eris, a plutoid or-biting safely and permanentlybeyond Pluto. Some insist, how-ever, that a NASA conspiracy isin play and that Nibiru, loomingin on the approach, can alreadybe seen in broad daylight fromthe Southern Hemisphere. It wassupposed to become visible from

the Northern Hemisphere, too,by last May, but like a fickleblind date, it stood up those

awaiting it.


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Others on the Web, confusedabout the supposed alignment of the winter-solstice sun with theMilky Way's center, have de-clared that the Sun is now plum-meting to the Milky Ways centerand dragging Earth with it. Thepredicted result? Earths polaraxis will shift. Most of what's

claimed for 2012 relies on wishfulthinking, wild pseudoscientificfolly, ignorance of astronomy,

and a level of paranoia worthy of


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Night of the Living Dead.

So maybe the Maya were on tous after all. The clock is ticking.And its the end of the world aswe know it.

E.C. Krupp, a Sky & Telescopecontributing editor, is Director of

Griffith Observatory in Los An-


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