The Mayan calendar is about to end, and with it, the world.
People love nothing more than an apocalypse. Meteor collisions, gamma-ray bursters, alien invasions, super volcanoes, nuclear winter and global warming all provide great material for mass entertainment and breathless news reporting.
The latest apocalypse to capture our imagination is the idea that, along with the Mayan calendar, the world will
end on the twenty-first day of this month. The Mayan "Long Count"
calendar, which began in 3114 BC, ends on December 21, 2012. The calendar is supposedly the measure of days from the beginning of humanity to the end. As a result, some doomsayers predict the end of the world in a few days.
Proposed scientific reasons why we won't have a merry Christmas include a coronal mass ejection from the sun, a sudden switching of Earth's magnetic poles, a massive meteorite collision with Earth, and a sudden shift in Earth's crust. At this very moment, people across the world are stockpiling guns, machetes, kerosene, matches, sugar and candles in preparation for the coming disaster. But our National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA)
assures us that the world won't end on December 21.
Over that last two centuries, most doomsday threats have been blamed on humanity itself. Consider overpopulation. The Anglican minister Thomas Malthus
postulated in 1798 that because population grows geometrically and food production was growing arithmetically, global population would outstrip mankind's ability to feed itself, leading to economic disaster. Dr. Paul Ehrlich followed up with his 1968
book The Population Bomb, predicting that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death during the decade of the 1970s. But the agricultural revolution of the twentieth century and slowing population growth have confounded the predictions of Malthus and Ehrlich.
Comment: What is going on below us?
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