What Will Happen in 2012? A Look At The Mayan Prophecy 

What will happen in 2012, when the Mayan calendar ends? Will December 21, 2012 mark the end of the world? Is there any credence to the Mayan Prophecy?    To me, the whole Mayan 2012 debate seems like a hodge podge of misinformation - so let's take this bag of snakes and lay 'em out straight!    

Who Were The Mayans?

The Maya civilization thrived in Central and South America from around 3000 BC. Their dynamic and intelligent culture survived for thousands of years but finally collapsed during an intense 200-year drought, not long before Christopher Columbus landed on America's shores in the 15th century. The Mayans are known for their advanced written language, as well as their art, architecture, maths and astronomy. They used a base 20 and base 5 numbering system and independently created the concept of zero by 36 BC. This capacity for numbers produced highly accurate astronomical observations, charting the movements of the moon and other planets. The resulting Mayan calendar was one of prophecies, and supporters of the Mayan 2012 theory point to several seemingly accurate predictions to date.

 

What Is The Mayan Prophecy?

Contrary to popular belief (we can blame the eager media and doomsday hopefuls for that), the Mayan Prophecy does not predict the end of the world on December 21, 2012. Instead it highlights the end of an era as our modern civilization enters a new kind of spiritual and collective conscious. There won't be any sudden moment of destruction - least of all at 11:11 GMT as some suggest.The Mayans believed that starting from the year 1999, mankind would have 13 years to recognize our own patterns of self destruction. It's now our responsibility to get our act together and understand the importance of following a more spiritual existence in tune with the living, breathing universe.

Why December 21, 2012? What will happen in 2012 that is so major to the collective conscious of mankind? According to the Mayan calendar, our planet (heck, our solar system) cycles within our galaxy every 5,125 years. Since the dawn of the Mayan civilization in 3113 BC, a whopping 5,125 years will have passed - which is what makes the winter solstice of 2012 so special. It marks the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar. It does not mark the end of time.

Exactly What Will Happen in 2012?

Personally, I don't expect anything to happen. I'm more concerned about the impending economic crisis and what will happen when unemployment rates start topping 10... 20... 30%. How will our 'civilized' society keep it together then?

My dad jokes to me that December 21, 2012 will be the day that the financial world finally crumbles. Perhaps Mayan 2012 will be a self fulfilling prophecy!The fact is, we are more likely to affect our own destiny with this obsession, than a prophetic calendar created by an ancient civilization is able to predict the exact timing of an asteroid impact, or volcanic eruption, or nuclear war. Take a look at what the more extreme Mayan Prophecy supporters think might occur in 2012. Sure, these may be reasonably valid concerns - but they are just as likely to happen tomorrow as on December 21, 2012!

Sun Storms

In the last few years, the sun has been getting a bit hot and bothered, it seems. Despite being in the stable part of it's natural cycle, the sun has been experiencing unusual solar storms which have apparently been destroying satellites and knocking out power grids with its radiation. Notably, these solar flares may also be responsible for the current bout of climate change.

 

Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming is famous for its hot springs and geysers. This is because it's sitting atop the worlds biggest volcano, which has a habit of erupting every 650,000 years or so. And we are long overdue for the next eruption. Such a catastrophe would fill the entire atmosphere with ash, blotting out the sun around the world and plunging Earth into a 15,000-year winter.

Magnetic Field Reversal

Our planet is surrounded by a magnetic field that protects us from a lot of the sun's radiation. It undergoes a massive reversal - north switching poles with south - on average every 250,000 years. Right now we're about 30,000 years over that average. Significantly, the poles are rapidly drifting apart by 30kms each year, pointing to an imminent reversal (feasibly in 3000 - 4000 AD). Mayan enthusiasts reckon it may be sooner than we think. This disruption will cause the magnetic field to disappear entirely for up to a hundred years, leaving us with the kind of exposure to the sun's UV light that would turn you to a crisp in a matter of seconds.

Meteor Impact

433 Eros, named after the Greek god of love, is one of the few Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) over 10km wide. In fact, it is thought to be larger than the impactor that created the Chicxulub Crater in Mexico, which has been linked (at least in part) to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Eros is calculated to pass by Earth at 70 lunar distances in 2012, although there is always room for error.

 

The Large Hadron Collider

While physicists are smashing atoms in Switzerland in the hope of finding The God Particle, laymen expect it to create a black hole that will destroy Earth. In truth, scientists at the atom smashers in America have been creating mini black holes this way long before the LHC was switched on. Their smaller colliders can cause black holes to pop in and out of existence in a fraction of a second. Nonetheless, fear mongers insist that in 2012 the Large Hadron Collider will crush Earth into the size of a marble.Update: In August 2009 on my trip home to Europe, we took a free tour around CERN's Large Hadron Collider. I can't quite convey the sheer size of this experiment; the collider itself spans a 27km track, which must be cooled to temperatures of -270 degrees Celsius to operate. The particles are accelerated using powerful magnets and finally smash together inside a complex detector. Smaller bits of energy fly out in all directions, but even the whizziest ones (muons) run out of steam before they reach the surface some 100 meters up. I should add that we are constantly bombarded by cosmic rays like this from outer space. When we asked our tour guide (one of the engineers at CERN) "when are you going to destroy the Earth with a black hole?" he just laughed incredulously. Methinks the laymen should stop jumping to conclusions.

So now that I've got all the doomsday theories out of my system - let's get back to the original Mayan Prophecy. It's all about a change in global consciousness; a maturing of minds. Some believe this will be sparked by a catastrophic event, like a global economic collapse that takes us back to living off the land. Others suggest it may be a cultural thing, as more people become aware of their spiritual roots and become less materialistic. Others yet believe that the Mayan calendar is fundamentally flawed, because it's an arbitrary date system that uses base 10 (as quantum physicist Brain Cox points out, what if then Mayans had 12 fingers?).

Either way, speculating over what will happen in 2012 probably won't do us any good. There will always be natural and man-made threats and we should be reasonably prepared for these. But acting like the world is going to end won't help you enjoy life today. Bizarrely though, the immense popularity of the Mayan Prophecy may be enough to raise the global consciousness and set our money-driven society on a new path of happiness and enlightenment today.

 

2012  day  after