Almost there.

[Trenton.]

We are just six months away. There have been many times of which people thought the world was going to end. Y2K. 2040 with the lining up of the planets. 2060 with the astroid. The most famous is coming in only a half a year. Some of you speculate nothing will happen. Some of you speculate something will. This has been discussed over and over again. Yet I want to know your opinion.

 

My favorite end-of-the-world-scenario of course.

 

Poll is up! Tell me what you think.

 

 

[The Mystic]

I was wondering if/when someone would post this topic.

 

My vote in the poll: No. It will have just as much impact as Y2K, except that 2012 will be more overhyped and underwhelming.

 

As for the 2040 alignment: I doubt it. Similar things have happened before without incident. Most likely, all that will happen is a nice spectacle for astronomers.

 

And the 2060 with the asteroid: I'll wait for a few decades; in my opinion, it's too soon to tell. Besides, assuming I'm still alive for it, I'll be an old man, and probably won't care either way.

[Dintiradan]

[Archaeolagent]

Originally Posted By: Wikipedia

Despite the publicity generated by the 2012 date, Susan Milbrath, curator of Latin American Art and Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, stated that "We have no record or knowledge that [the Maya] would think the world would come to an end" in 2012.[37] "For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle," says Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies in Crystal River, Florida. To render December 21, 2012, as a doomsday event or moment of cosmic shifting, she says, is "a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in."[37] "There will be another cycle," says E. Wyllys Andrews V, director of the Tulane University Middle American Research Institute (MARI). "We know the Maya thought there was one before this, and that implies they were comfortable with the idea of another one after this."[38]

[Actaeon]

Will the world end in 2012 because the Mayans predicted it? No, because they didn't. That's not to say it won't end. The West is only beginning to see the effects of a dismal snowpack, there are still quite a few nukes in the world, and you can't rule out the possibility of a vacuum metastability event.

 

(Also, what qualifies as the world ending? Actual destruction of the planet? Extinction of all life? Just the end of humanity? Would a return to a Carboniferous style climate qualify?)

[Trenton.]

Extinction of all life, in only some circumstances. In others on exit mundi, its the actual planet dying.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

ALL HAIL CAESAR!

[Triumph]

The U.S president needs to appoint a Time Czar!

[keira]

Everytime I hear someone talk about 2012 I put on my Nikki accent and exclaim "Poppycock!"

[Callie]

The world will end billions of years from now after the sun dies out and all the cool stuff. Yeah

[The Ratt]

I think it's plausible that something will happen in six months since it's impossible to account for every variable, but it's unlikely to be the end of the world. As someone said earlier: saying the world will end when the Mayan calendar ends is like saying the world will end after December 31, the end of the Roman calendar.

[Student of Trinity]

Even if the ancient Mayans had seriously predicted the end of the world, why the heck would we believe them? What would they know about it? They didn't have metal tools. They didn't have the wheel. They were presumably just as smart as anyone is today, and they may well have made some good astronomical observations, but they didn't know much about the world.

[Goldengirl]

SOT - just because some cultures or civilizations didn't develop certain technological benchmarks doesn't mean their knowledge should be discredited. That line of thinking is part of what allowed the Europeans to justify their invasion and conquest of the Americas, as they were only dealing with savages who hadn't even developed the wheel, after all. Obviously, you're not a racist conquistador, but please cool the rhetoric.

 

Though I have no reason to believe there will be an apocalypse due to the end of the Mayan calendar, I can see why people would perhaps believe them. With all of the craziness going on with the eurozone, a legislative coup in Paraguay, new leadership in China and North Korea, elections in the United States, escalating ethnic violence in Nigeria, ongoing violence in Syria, tensions in the Sudans, the ramifications of the Arab Spring (especially in Egypt right now), and worsening environmental disasters - to name just a few - it seems like as good of time as any for there to be an apocalypse.

[Lilith]

if there's a lesson to be learned from people predicting the apocalypse it's that any time is as good a time as any to have an apocalypse

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Goldenking

SOT - just because some cultures or civilizations didn't develop certain technological benchmarks doesn't mean their knowledge should be discredited. That line of thinking is part of what allowed the Europeans to justify their invasion and conquest of the Americas, as they were only dealing with savages who hadn't even developed the wheel, after all. Obviously, you're not a racist conquistador, but please cool the rhetoric.

It's not rhetoric but simple fact, nor is it discrediting what the Mayans did know, to point out how much they didn't know. Our descendants will no doubt realize much that we don't know now. Europeans were not any better than the Mayans, and their greater knowledge did almost nothing to justify their conquests. It did make their conquests possible. It doesn't help anyone to blur these major historical distinctions into a hobgoblin 'conquistador line of thinking'.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

if there's a lesson to be learned from people predicting the apocalypse it's that any time is as good a time as any to have an apocalypse

Especially if it happens before you have to do your taxes.

[Archaeolagent]

Who cares what the Mayans knew or didn't know? That is entirely irrelevant, because they DID NOT predict an apocalypse!

 

The question is not whether to believe the Mayans, it's whether or not to believe the people spreading irrational speculation about the Mayans.

[Dikiyoba]

SoT:

 

---

 

Originally Posted By: Goldenking

With all of the craziness going on... it seems like as good of time as any for there to be an apocalypse.

I disagree. Maybe if we weren't so focused on how the near future will end the world, we'd put more effort into solving the problems that currently exist. I mean, the worst that could happen if the world ends on a certain date is that all our attempts to solve problems and improve the world are suddenly for naught. The worst that can happen if we predict the end of the world but it doesn't happen is that we spent the last several months to years doing nothing but letting the world go to pot but, oops, we have to keep living in the messes we made. The latter seems a lot worse than the former, and a lot more likely to happen as well. After all, end-of-the-world predictions have been made hundreds of times. They've always been wrong.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Dintiradan]

You know, with all these people predicting an apocalypse in the future, I think there's a dearth of people predicting an apocalypse in the past. Personally, I think the Internet gained sentience and overthrew humanity last Thursday, and now we're all just brains in a vat.

[Rupert]

I think the obvious answer is that an apocalypse is unlikely, but given the state of world, may not really be a bad thing if it happened anyway.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

Originally Posted By: Lilith

if there's a lesson to be learned from people predicting the apocalypse it's that any time is as good a time as any to have an apocalypse

Especially if it happens before you have to do your taxes.

Unless you're owed a refund; then it can happen after you've spent it.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

Who cares what the Mayans knew or didn't know? That is entirely irrelevant, because they DID NOT predict an apocalypse!

But SoT is making a different point. If the Mayans had predicted an apocalypse, it would be crazy to believe them because they were, to the best of our knowledge, not experts in apocalypses.

—Alorael, who supposes that no one is now, either, since nobody has lived through one. But the models are really much better now. The models say so!

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Goldenking

SOT - just because some cultures or civilizations didn't develop certain technological benchmarks doesn't mean their knowledge should be discredited. That line of thinking is part of what allowed the Europeans to justify their invasion and conquest of the Americas, as they were only dealing with savages who hadn't even developed the wheel, after all. Obviously, you're not a racist conquistador, but please cool the rhetoric.

I see noting racist about SOT's post. I think his logic goes something like this.

1. An apocalypse must have a cause. Nuclear war, enviromental collapse, meteor strike, plague, whatever.

2. The Mayans did not have anywhere near the sort of scientific or technological acumen to understand any of these. They didn't have Newtonian physics to plot the courses of asteroid, advanced biological knowledge and evolutionary theory to chart epidemics, the grounding in nuclear physics to foresee nuclear warfare (or even conventional ballistic warfare, for that matter), the environmental understanding or data to predict global warming, etc.

3. As of today, we have all of these tools. To the best of our knowledge, none of these disasters are imminent. Medium to long term? Perhaps. But there certainly isn't a date X whereupon Russia will nuke China that we can predict to 100% accuracy.

4. Therefore, any predictions made by the Maya are not grounded in science and based on faith and mysticism alone. We might as well try to predict the future by doing numerology in the Torah or interpreting passages in the Bible or suras in the Qu'ran or analysis of the Vedas or the Tao Te Ching or whatever- they'd all give results of equal validity to the Mayan predictions.

5. Primitive superstition, whether in the form of Mayan predictions or interpretations of millenia-old scriptures and poems, is emphatically not legitimate evidence for an actual apocalypse. Therefore, any warnings they give can be disregarded.

QED.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Doesn't count if it's elective

If the Mayans had predicted an apocalypse, it would be crazy to believe them because they were, to the best of our knowledge, not experts in apocalypses.

—Alorael, who supposes that no one is now, either, since nobody has lived through one. But the models are really much better now. The models say so!

The Mayans probably had some sort of end-of-the-world mythology, but it I sincerely doubt it had anything to do with the end of any one particular calendar cycle. Even if it did, the date most likely has long since been lost, no matter how much modern people try to torture the numbers.

I doubt anyone at any point in time can truthfully claim to be an expert on apocalypses, least of all those who actually do claim to be experts. Sure, you can read up on every culture's beliefs on the end of days, but that's about it.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

I see noting racist about SOT's post.

It's the part about the Mayas not having metal tools or the wheel. It was meant as a joke, sure, but that doesn't make it any less racist. Especially since there are millions of Maya people alive today, mostly in Central America but some in the USA and Canada as well, so we're not discussing this in some people-free philosphical bubble. (So really the whole "acting as if the Mayas are dead and gone" and "abusing Mayan beliefs in order to create hype about the end of the world" are also racist on a far larger scale, but they're complicated enough I don't have the expertise to tackle them beyond pointing out that they're racist and therefore morally wrong.) Anyway, SoT's post comes out sounding awfully close to "They were so stupid they couldn't even come up with basic inventions like the wheel, so we can ignore anything they might say, because our use of the wheel makes us better than they were." Never mind that the wheel would be useless to people living on steep slopes in a wet climate without access to oxen or other large draft animals. (Yes, his post also says, more or less, "All cultures are equally dumb," but then what do metal tools or the wheel have to do with anything?)

Dikiyoba.

[Archaeolagent]

I can understand how SoT's post could be read that way. However, I think it's not a very direct reading of it. The last sentence in particular:

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

They were presumably just as smart as anyone is today, and they may well have made some good astronomical observations, but they didn't know much about the world.

Saying that an ancient civilization (with descendants who are alive today -- and whom we should be sensitive towards, absolutely -- but still talking about the ancient civilization) was equally intelligent to us today, but did not have the technology or the accrued scientific observations that we have today, is not subjective at all. It's not even controversial. It's a statement of fact. The same thing could be said about EVERY ancient civilization.

 

Those statements about metal tools and wheels? Wikipedia has them, too. They were perhaps not the most relevant examples he could have chosen, but they were clearly there to give a concrete example of how the ancient Mayans lacked scientific & technological progress we have today.

 

That said, I agree with Diki completely about this:

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

really the whole "acting as if the Mayas are dead and gone" and "abusing Mayan beliefs in order to create hype about the end of the world" are also racist on a far larger scale

[*i]

Let's not have discussions about who is or isn't racist please. I'm pretty much in agreement with Slarty on this, so I'm not going to repeat what he just said. Moving right along...