have inexplicably opened up in the Earth’s magnetic field, our essential shield against solar radiation and the deadly cancers and climatic disturbances that come with it. Some scientists are even predicting that a pole reversal, in which the North and South magnetic poles switch places, is imminent. That’s a several-thousand-year process in which multiple magnetic pole sites pop up around the globe, confusing and sometimes extinguishing the thousands of species of birds, fish, and mammals that depend upon magnetism for their sense of direction. During the confusion, the Earth’s magnetic protection drops to near zero, the cosmic equivalent of a very pale person getting caught on a beach in Miami with no hat, no shade, no sunblock, and an imperfect ass in a teeny Speedo.
One source of protection from excess solar radiation comes from another way the world might end. The sky could fill up with ray-absorbent ash, but that’s about the only good news I could find in a BBC documentary reporting that Yellowstone, probably the largest supervolcano in the world, is preparing to erupt. The last time Yellowstone erupted, 600,000 years ago, it vomited enough dust to cover the North American continent several feet deep. Today such an eruption would lead to a nuclear-winter-type scenario that would savage global agriculture and economy, killing hundreds of millions.
And the biggest reason to worry about the end of life is the prediction in Nature, perhaps the world’s most respected science journal, that at least three-quarters of the Earth’s species are wiped out every 62 to 65 million years. It has been 65 million years since the Cretaceous-Tertiary disaster extinguished the dinosaurs, meaning that we are now overdue for a cataclysm that will without doubt reduce our population by at least half, smash our infrastructure to smithereens, and drive most of whatever is left of our civilization underground.
If Yellowstone blows or the Sun’s acne festers into boils, ecological problems like ozone holes and global warming will be fondly lamented, the way we started out the 1980s worrying about herpes simplex and ended up with the scourge of AIDS. But the good news, as the irrepressible Admiral Hyman Rickover liked to point out, is that, whatever happens, “a new and wiser species will evolve.”
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
Firm dates are hard to come by in the disaster prediction game, and about the only thing scientists seemed to agree upon is that whatever was happening now, as we approached the solar minimum, would pale in comparison to the unprecedented turbulence projected for the next solar maximum, expected in 2012.
On impulse, I googled “2012” and promptly fell down the rabbit hole into a thriving apocalypse subculture. Blogs, books, music, and art from every continent prophesied doom for that year. Exponents of a bewildering array of ideologies and philosophies, from indigenous cultures, the Bible, the I Ching, point to 2012 as the time of Apocalypse. Could it be just a coincidence? Or is it more reasonable to assume that divinely inspired traditions would, after all, reach congruent conclusions about the fate of humanity?
“Twenty twelve! That’s when, you know, it’s all supposed to happen. Big time!” exclaimed our nanny, Erica, when I mentioned my discovery the next morning. A bowl of popcorn would have emptied fast as Erica, a late-night net surfer and talk-radio devotee, burbled with dire predictions and assurances that 2012 is the real Y2K. She seemed to see it all as kind of an ongoing reality show, of the horror variety. Several of her friends were into this doomsday 2012 thing as well, and she gaily recounted some of their suggestions for what to do as The End draws near: “Pass the bong. Build a spaceship. Move underground. Have lots of sex. Commit suicide. See the world. Go about your business. Stop taking your medication. Start taking someone else’s. Write that novel. Euthanize your family. Hit Vegas. Praise Allah. Take revenge. Take a crash course in astral projection. Be sure to get a good seat for the ultimate fireworks display.”
Why the year 2012, specifically? The hubbub had nothing to do with that being the projected date of the next solar maximum in the sunspot cycle. In fact, there was little or no mention of the Sun, or for that matter science topics in general, among those prophesying doom. Galvanizing the movement was an utterly ancient prediction from Mayan mythology that Time will either end or begin on the winter solstice, December 21, 2012.
At that point I almost dropped the whole thing, because, how to put this … I am not New Agey. I am your basic Brooklyn wiseguy Beeming around Beverly Hills. Not that all that ancient oojie-boojie is necessarily invalid, just that most of it is lost on me.
THE MAYAN PROPHECIES
Ancient Mayan astronomy is anything but oojie-boojie. It is a staggering intellectual achievement, equivalent in magnitude to ancient Egyptian geometry or to Greek philosophy. Without telescopes or any other apparatus, Mayan astronomers calculated the length of the lunar month to be 29.53020 days, within 34 seconds of what we now know to be its actual length of 29.53059 days. Overall, the 2,000-year-old Mayan calendar is believed by many to be more accurate than the 500-year-old Gregorian calendar we use today.
The Maya were obsessed with time. Over the centuries, they devised at least twenty calendars, attuned to the cycles of everything from pregnancy to the harvest, from the Moon to Venus, whose orbit they calculated accurately to 1 day every 1,000 years. After centuries of observations, their astronomers came to the conclusion that on the winter solstice of 2012, 12/21/12, or 13.0.0.0.0 by what is known as their Long Count calendar, a new era in human history will commence. This 12/21/12 “stroke of midnight” begins a new age, just as the Earth’s completion of its orbit around the Sun brings a new year at the stroke of midnight every January 1. But so what? Aside from a change in date and a day off from work, there is no inherent, palpable difference between December 31 and January 1—it’s not as though we go from cold and dark one day to warm and sunny the next. For that matter, there is no inherent, palpable difference between one year and the next, unless such difference is externally ascribed: going from 1999 to 2000, Y2K was nothing but a transition from a digitally unremarkable number to a nice big round one. It proved to be about as spiritually resonant as an odometer change.
The date 12/21/12 has significance beyond numerical happenstance. It is the annual winter solstice, when the Northern Hemisphere is farthest away from the Sun, and when therefore there is the least daylight and the longest night. On that date our Solar System will eclipse—interpose itself so as to block the view from Earth—the center of the Milky Way. The dark hole at the center of the galaxy spiral was considered the Milky Way’s womb by the ancients and now also by contemporary astronomers, who believe that that’s the spot where our galaxy’s stars are created. Indeed, there’s a vast black hole right at the center, making for a nice navel motif.
The Mayan ancients held that 12/21/12 would begin a new age, in vital fact as well as calendar technicality. The date thus portends a most sacred, propitious, and dangerous moment in our history, destined, they believed, to bring both catastrophe and revelation. The years leading up to it presage this awesome potential in terrible and wonderful ways.
I went to Guatemala to evaluate the beliefs and predictions attached to 12/21/12 and concluded, in a nutshell, that the Maya have a track record that is impossible to ignore. Always give genius the benefit of the doubt, and the ancient Mayan astronomers were indeed geniuses. The Mayan prophecies concerning 2012 seem therefore to contain wisdom not necessarily beyond science, but most likely beyond anything contemporary scientific methodology could prove, or disprove, in the short time remaining before the apocalypse deadline.
What possessed the Maya to devote so much exquisite work to astronomy, while never even getting around, for example, to inventing the wheel or even simple metal tools, I cannot say. But simply to ignore their fundamental conclusion that December 21, 2012, is a pivotal date in human history—especially given the profoundly disturbing set of concurrences regarding the 2012 deadline in fields ranging from solar physics to Eastern philosophy—would be foolish in the extreme.
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