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| 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 18th,
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 1st 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/
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