Is the World going to end in 2012?

It’s hard to pin down exactly what the specific threat actually is, and what evidence is being put forward to support the claim, as there are so many different variations. The specific date has been given to us by the Mayans, and all manner of disasters have been invented and forecast to occur on that day. Some claim death will come as a result of powerful solar flares, others that earthquakes and tidal waves will kill millions, and yet others that some dire consequence will arise from the black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

Here are a few claims I’ve heard…

1)      The Mayans predicted the world would end on this day,

It is true that the Mayan “Long Count” calendar completes a 5,125 year cycle on that date, and that the Mayans attached a spiritual significance to such cycles. But the evidence that they believed this cycle would mark the end of the world is patchy at best. It’s more probable that they would have anticipated and celebrated this event in the same way as we marked the recent turn of the millennium.

Those 2012 believers who that feel that the Mayans were capable of foreseeing the end of our civilization, might do well to remember how incapable they were of foreseeing the end of their own.

2)      The Earth will pass through the central plane of our galaxy on this day.

This is false. Surveys of the distribution of stars throughout our galaxy reveal that our solar system is currently positioned at about 50 light years or so, above the central plane of the galaxy, and whilst (one day) we will pass through this central plane, that day is millions of years away, not less than three years. 

3)      The Earth and Sun will line up with the black hole at the centre of the galaxy on this day.

This is false. The Earth and Sun will NOT be aligned with the black hole at the centre of the galaxy on this day, and even if they were – it would not be harmful in any way. The black hole at the centre of our galaxy is nearly 30,000 light years away and poses no threat to us. On that day, the Sun will appear to be crossing the central plane of Miky Way (from our viewpoint, and just as it does EVERY year), but misses the galactic centre by about 7 degrees (which is about 15x the width of the full moon).

4)      The Winter Solstice occurs exactly at the same time as the sun is crossing the Galactic Equator (ie the central plane of the Milky Way).

Actually, this is more or less true, but this is neither significant nor unusual. The Winter Solstice (in the northern hemisphere) is the point in the Earth’s orbit, when the Earth’s geographic South Pole is most tilted towards the Sun, and this happens on Dec 21^st every year. By coincidence, we live in an age where this is happening whilst the Sun is in Sagittarius and at the moment of the Winter solstice, the Sun is indeed crossing the galactic plane from our viewpoint. This is of course just a line of sight effect – the sun is not moving through the plane in any sense.

But it’s important to understand that these things have been happening at around the same time EVERY year for the past 30 years or so, and will continue to overlap in time for another 6 years – something which is almost never mentioned by 2012 believers. The optimum coincidence of timing happened in 1998. There were no harmful effects then, and there won’t be in 2012 either.

5)      Planet Nibiru will pass close by on this day, and wreak havoc with tides and earthquakes.

Planet Nibiru is an imaginary planet dreamed up by one Zacharia Sitchin who claims that the ancient Sumerians tell of advanced beings (called the Annunaki) who came from this planet to enslave mankind to mine the Earth for its gold. The planet apparently has a highly elliptical orbit which only brings it into the inner solar system every 3,600 years.

It’s hard to know where to begin to debunk this fanciful notion. Here are a few things to note and consider…

i) Scholarly opinion is somewhat ‘dismissive’ of Sitchin’s ideas, and of the quality of his translations of Sumerian texts.

ii) A planet with a highly elliptical 3,600 year orbit would travel many times further out from the Sun than Pluto does, and would suffer enormous swings of temperature. Note that Pluto’s orbit already takes if far enough away from the sun that its atmosphere freezes solid during the most distant sections of  its orbit. It’s hard to believe that an advanced civilisation could evolve (or would choose to settle) there.

iii) A planet of any reasonable size headed towards a rendezvous with Earth within the next 3 years would already be highly visible to astronomers. In fact, some of the YouTube videos from a few years ago, seem to agree on this – and confidently predict that it will become visible to the naked eye in the Summer of 2009 (!!) Personally, I’m still waiting to see this. Claims that NASA has already imaged this are similarly fanciful.

iv) Our solar system comprises 8 planets in near-circular orbits – all approximately aligned in a plane we call the ecliptic. If a large planet capable of causing great gravitational disruption passes through every 3,600 years, it would have passed through over one million times since the solar system began, and the orbits of the planets would now be highly chaotically arranged. But of course they’re not.

6)      The Earthquakes and Tsunamis have already started.

Whilst we’re all stunned and saddened by reports of the human tragedies surrounding such events, they are not happening any more frequently or strongly than previously. If we are seeing more of these stories on the evening news, it’s primarily the result of a more effective global news service.

An examination of seismological data on IRIS or other reputable geological sites, shows that strong earthquakes are happening at the same rate and strength they always have. We are detecting more weak earthquakes than several decades ago, but that’s because of significant increases in the number of sensors deployed, and improvements in the technology to detect earthquakes – ie the world is better monitored now than ever before.

Furthermore, there is no possibility whatsoever that any recent quakes could be the result of an approaching (but as yet unseen) Planet Nibiru. If we make the assumption that such a planet is currently (say) as far away as Jupiter, and (say) the size of the Earth, then we can calculate its ability to cause earthquakes and destructive tides. The answer that we get from those assumptions is that Nibiru’s tidal forces would be 20 orders of magnitude smaller than we feel from the Moon, or if you prefer – they are at about 100 million, million, million times too weak to have the claimed effect.

7)      The Sun will achieve a record breaking Solar Maximum on this day. Solar flares will punch through the earth’s magnetic fields and be highly dangerous to life.

Our Sun does indeed go through a cycle of activity approximately every 11 years, and in recent years NASA has been predicting a higher-than-normal solar maximum in 2012. But higher-than-normal does not mean end-of-the-world dangerous, and there was never any threat to life implied whatsoever.

As it happens, NASA’s current prediction is that the solar maximum will not occur until Spring 2013, and moreover that it will be milder than usual. Predicting space weather isn’t any easier than any other kind of long range weather forecasting.

8)      Scientists predict that the Earth’s magnetic poles will reverse on that day – the magnetic field protecting us from solar radiation will fail, and we’ll all suffer lethal doses of radiation.

Scientists have made no such prediction. The Earth’s magnetic field has changed polarity a number of times over geological time, but it seems to be a random event with no apparent pattern. The Earth’s magnetic field is produced by huge flows of charges within the Earth’s molten core, and the exact location of the poles wanders around all the time. The last reversal happened about 780,000 years ago, and no-one can predict when the next one is going to happen.

Also, what we see as records of geological reversals in the magnetic poles, may well arise from a slow drift of the poles from one hemisphere to the other. There’s no obvious mechanism that would give rise to a sudden switch, nor is there evidence that it ever happened that way.

And so – is there any truth in the claims that the earth is coming to an end on 21^st December 2012? Not a bit of it. It’s all scaremongering and bad science.

-oOo-