Will the World Really End December 21st, 2012?

                                                                                                                                          

photo credit: Lacy Lichtenhan

As December 21^st, 2012 approaches, many people prepare themselves for possible end of the world (as we know it). December 21, 2012 marks the end of the 5,125 year cycle of the Mayan calendar, which is called the Great Cycle or the 13 Baktun Cycle. The Great Cycle is a period of time that when it reaches the end, humanity will enter the next stage; where it's a continuous cycle of birth to death to rebirth. The Mayans felt that these cycles held great amounts of power and that these cycles become events on earth.  Some people say that planet Nuribi will collide with us, or that alignment of the universe will cause a shift. Many people see this and just go ballistic, because for some strange reason they think that a calendar ending means that the world has to end as well. I don’t let my future be determined by someone who lived 5000 years ago. Especially by someone who just looked at the stars and earth cycles. I might consider it if there was proof to back it up, but there just isn’t any.

     

           Where is the hard-core evidence that there will be a doomsday? There is no reason to believe that Nuribi would collide, or our scientists would be tracking it since 2000. A planetary magnetic reversal, however more plausible than the other theories, would not end life, because we have proof that the Earth has indeed experience more than one magnetic reversals.       “2012 Doomsday?” By TheFutureAwaits, Macomb, MI <http://www.teenink.com/opinion/current_events_politics/article/403081/2012-Doomsday/>.

      

            It’s not just the Mayans though. Over the past two centuries there have been numerous other predictions to when the world will end and why. Many of these predictions have been based on religious beliefs. In 1848 many Christians quit their jobs and sold their possessions to prepare for the return of Jesus Christ. William Miller predicted this based on a little math and prophesies in the book of Daniel. The designated days came and went, so he changed the date. That also came and went. He still believed until his death in 1849. It is now known as the Great Disappointment because of those now job-less people. The Jehovah Witnesses also made about 10 predictions since the 1900’s that never happened, so instead they said it happened and we just couldn’t see it. These are but a few of the numerous predictions made by Christ-based religions, but what’s interesting is that in the Bible itself, it says that no one will know when the time will come but God himself (which I believe). In the more recent decades, predictions have been based on science and astrology. On May 18^th, 1910, Halley’s Comet passed and was thought to bring with it a tail of gas that would smother earth with its deadly poison. It didn’t even cause allergies. It was however, the first time that actual science caused apocalyptic panic, not just religious misapprehension. Y2K is the well known year 2000. People all over the world stacked water bottles and canned food (including my mother) and read survival books. Many suggested catastrophic problems ranging from huge blackouts to nuclear holocaust. It was the designated day where all the computers would go absolutely haywire because of the oh-so-scary 000 that the computers could not process. When January 1^st rolled around, a clock in Japan went out and a few computers had glitches. A new millennium rolled right in.

                 

          You see? There is no more reason, if not less of a reason the earth will end in December than all of the other predictions. I don’t think that we should base our apocalyptic beliefs on these predictions, but rather on the way we treat our earth. Why wouldn’t the world end? We destroy it with pollution, over population, and wasting of natural resources. Yes, people are making a difference but just a tiny dent in the overall downhill slide. It’s all about the money involved in the production. People are going to keep polluting the earth because of the money they get from their production. Maybe if we could find a more economic and environment-friendly way of production, then things would start looking up. But until then, predictions based on stars and prophesies are not going to destroy us, but we are going to destroy ourselves. I can easily see the world ending in the next century if we don’t actually change things.

We all affect the natural environment, but we are often are unaware of how much we affect it. There is no part of the earth that does not remain affected by our actions. Our actions are now threatening the health of our planet, the land we live and work on, the water supply, the ozone layer, the animal species as well as the health of our species           "What Can We Do to Save Our Environment." StudyMode.com. 

 28 Feb. 2011. <http://www.studymode.com/essays/What-Can-We-Do-To-Save-601589.html>.

       The world very well may end soon, but not because of prophesies and predictions made thousands of years ago. When you compare those to the ones already made and proven wrong, it seems silly to even consider it. We need to look at the picture of our whole earth and see what we are doing to it, change what we are doing to it, and then maybe we can stop worrying about the world ending.

                http://www.flickr.com/photos/papajoehermit/5962911416/