2012?

[Chakravanti]

See TV makes you learn nothing lol. Thanks for clearing up but anyway if it ends in 2012 then it ends

One's end is another's beginning. Thing sdo not truly end but rather evolve. Death is a finite perspective for it is but change.

[Lman8786]

I think its stupied

[Alamarian]

I wonder what the over/under is on the world ending in 2012?

[Chakravanti]

according to some sources the world ended 1940 years ago and this is a false extrapolation waiting for the rubber band to snap.

[Flame]

2012 end of another era of maya calendar.
the planet also will change and there will be a lots of movements. More Heartquakes, tsunami, and stuff like this. More Energy from the sun and stars that change energy of the planet. Already started, some years ago.
And then the end of the energy and a start of the new era. (maya say so. START OF. So i dunno whay we should end at 2012.)
Surely could bring some problem all that hearth energy, cataclism aren't pretty cute. But we'll survive this.

I trust more maya than tv, so don't worry. We'll not end here XD

Most of us neither will feel the changes, at the end.

My think is:
If is true, is inevitable and is a natural thing.
If is not, less problems. XD

[DasGuntLord01]

Some also say planet X will complete a long revolution and enter our solar system to close to our plantes gravitational pull and pull it into earth destroying both wolrds completely

TL;DR: It's all bollocks, and there's some links at the bottom.

<rant>

We can detect planets that are circling other stars halfway accross the galaxy, and black asteroids further than pluto that reflect almost no light at all. We have instruments that can detect the energy released by the striking of a match on the surface of the moon (300 000km away). Objects the size of planets that are hurtling through space towards earth would be, you'd think, very easy to find.

The 2012 and Planet X (or Nibiru, or Eris, or whatever) people think it IS easy to find, but the best images they have of Planet X look something like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/V838_Mon_HST.jpg

If you're familiar with the sky at all, you'll recognise the structure instantly.


If you're asking WHY people believe the world is going to end in 2012, well... the only answer I can give you is that people are stupid. People have a habit of believing stupid things. One of those stupid things has been that the world is going to end. The worlds religions havn't helped in this regard. At least Christianity, not a small religion by any count, has a world-is-coming-to-and-end myth, when jesus returns, takes the believers to heaven, judges the living and the dead, and condemns the remainder to years of war and pestilence. Some doomsayers are of the UFO kind, that believe that ET is going to swoop down in the mothership and carry the believers to safety while the earth is destroyed.

So, people believe that the earth is coming to an end, but they have no idea when or how. There is a scramble to decide, in fact, when and how the earth is going to come to and end. Science' only answer is that the sun is going to explode in 5 billion years, and in any case the human race is going to be long gone by that time. So, obviously, science is WRONG, or it's all a gigantic conspiracy to HIDE THE TRUTH. People who fall into the former camp turn to scripture, invariably, and try to divine from century-old tomes of awful stories when God says the world is coming to an end. The people that fall into the latter camp (the tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist camp) will try to work it out themselves, but basically have to make things up for the science to conform with their belief, or radically misinterpret existing scientific findings through their government cover-up lense.

Every year there's another Doomsday Prediction, and every year, on the appointed month, on the appointed day, the world promptly fails to end.

For a comprehensive list of known doomsday predictions throughout history, see A Brief History of the Apocalypse (http://www.abhota.info/). The most important ones (and there's A LOT) would be in the 2000 - present list. The Future predictions list is interesting for a giggle.

</rant>

For what the believers are saying about 2012 specifically, you could start at http://www.2012doomsday.com/
For the skeptics answer, you can try http://www.skepdic.com/maya.html

And don't stop there. The interwebs are full of information from all sides. Get some reading in.

[Sever]

[Zizi]

The thing about Chicken Little is that sometimes, just rarely he's right. Oh, I don't mean that something mystic and awesome and foreordained is going to inevitably happen on Monday 23rd of 2012, 11:16 a.m. Greenwich time. I mean that if a percentage of your population is anxiously scanning the horizon and muttering that they feel it in their bones sooner or later there is going to be an ominous cloud of smoke over Vesuvius or the distant drumming sound of Genghis Khan's horsemen, and the only survivors may be the family trekking out of town with all their possessions in a rickety handcart and Grandma in her rocking chair piled precariously on top.

There is an equal and opposite side to those who all too readily believe the apocalypse is gonna happen in their lifetime. It's the people who say that that Dam Held Through the Lifetime of My Grandfather and His Grandfather, What's A Few Cracks, or who say that Nothing's Going to Change My World. There is a place for Keep Calm and Carry on, but equally there is a place for people who are quick to believe that sudden brutal changes are bound to happen.

Some people just naturally go around being anxious and thinking something terrible could easily happen and other people figure we can stay put and muddle through, but I think it comes down to basic temperament. Of course if you are a literalist and religeous you're going to believe either the rapture is gonna hit before you can pick up the kids from day care, and the proof is Nostradamus, or you're going to think that serious floods cannot possibly happen because God made a covenant with Noah, and the proof is that rainbow. Whatever your culture defines as the ultimate doom/ promise of safety is what you are going to believe in.

[Sever]

The theory is that the Mayan calendar ends when the sun is most directly lined up with the Earth and the center of the galaxy. Furthermore, this is supposed to open up a window or portal of some kind, be it a gravitational line or whatnot, from which the chaotic energy of the galactic core can feed into our solar system and cause mass bedlam. Predictions of the results range from increased solar activity to worldwide earthquakes, supervolcano eruptions and the dawn of a new ice age. Basically anything they can come up with.

Frankly I think they just wanted to make a stupid movie.

When you gamble in disasters, you're chancing on the ages. The fact is, a single supervolcano eruption would devastate the world, but when they talk about them they only give the fact that one eruption is expected in the next 100,000 years a little blurb somewhere near the end of the piece. By then nobody's paying attention because they think they're practically guaranteed to be the worst case scenario. The asteroid Apophis is the next big scare, since that's supposed to either hit us in a few years or 18 years later (something like that). There's something like a 0.05% chance of it being in just the wrong place and killing us all. We're between ice ages, right? That's pretty cool, because that's probably the most inevitable disaster, but we're in a weird window of remarkable stability, and I don't think anyone really knows why that is.

It's much more preferable to assume that the unimaginable, unpreventable disasters are not going to happen and have a tiny chance of being the sorry sap who was so very, very wrong, otherwise you will just worry over nothing for the rest of your life, because there is exactly fuck all that you can do about it if the entire planet wants you dead.

[DasGuntLord01]

The theory is that the Mayan calendar ends when the sun is most directly lined up with the Earth and the center of the galaxy.

It's true! The earth and sun are going to be perfectly aligned with the center of the galaxy on that date! What they neglect to mention is that this happens EVERY year, on EVERY december solstice.

The asteroid Apophis is the next big scare, since that's supposed to either hit us in a few years or 18 years later (something like that). There's something like a 0.05% chance of it being in just the wrong place and killing us all.

99942 Apophis is going to make what is now confirmed to be a near earth pass in 2029. It will not kill us all on that date. However, due to a lovely quirk of gravity, if Apophis passes through a tiny tiny "gravitational keyhole" on this pass (literally only 600m wide), then it will probably strike earth on 13 April 2036, killing bajilions of people. It will land in pacific, or the american west.

This is verified scientific data. But don't start evacuating your pacific home unless it passes through the keyhole. Then you can start worrying, and then you've got years the get out of the way of the initial explosion and resulting tidal waves.

Incidentally, 99942 Apophis is named for the egyptian god of death, which the crazies will have a field day with.