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 NASA: The World Won’t End in 2012Posted on Jan 2, 2012
Sorry, all you Mayan-influenced doomsday enthusiasts, but it’s looking to some of the great minds over at NASA as though 2012 isn’t going to be particularly apocalypse-friendly as such. Ancient augury versus contemporary astronomy: Who will prevail? —KA
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Copyright © 2012 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
By Dr. Rat, January 3 at 11:01 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
gerard, Just a note of thanks, as you remind readers that the stockpiling of nuclear weapons by ANY nation is a palpable indication of insanity.
Leading the world by example, a supposed Obama tenet, is a thing of which we are incapable. In ten-million years, as the descendants of today’s crafty and durable sewer-rats emerge as the new-thinkers, they will decypher your comments, perhaps on some fragment of petrified newsprint, and nod to each other, “look at this, one of them wasn’t stupid.”
Report thisBy Marian Griffith, January 3 at 4:54 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Expecting the world to end because the mayan calendar ran out is about as silly as predicting that the world had to end some 60000 years ago when Urm the Neanderthaler ran out of fingers to count the days on…
Or that the world ended after the year 999 because we could not figure out which number came after that.
Then again, the end of the world is predicted for every other year (and in good years we get two or three predictions at once), so I suppose it satisfies some deep seated need in humans.
And when have self-proclaimed experts ever been bothered by a lack of facts? Thanks to the tireless efforts of those who see their convictions threatened by facts, science has now been so vilified that refering to it is more likely to discredit your argument than to support it.
Report thisBy gerard, January 2 at 5:40 pm Link to this comment
Articles like this are a challenge to people who think that they know something about politics or history and that they have something worthwhile to say about what passes in daily conversation as “world affairs.” But what can be said—even by the most profound scholar—about whether or not the world is going to end, and if so, when?
Report thisAnd as to those who believe they know the answer to this question (which has been asked and re-answered tens of thousands of times during tens of thousands of years, and always wrongly, well, what can one possibly say beyond “Hmmmmm?
Stories about the end of the world, however, can have a revealing and awakening effect. When it comes down to the how and the why, things can get really exciting. Who will do it? How will it occur? Will it be fire or water? Or something else? Why will it happen? Who said so? Will I and my family be saved? How? Who said?
It seems that ever since the world was inhabited by “thinking” (so-called) beings, some wizard has stepped onstage from time to time and claimed
special insight into the Unknowable Ignorance of Creation. Sucn prophets have abilities to convince ordinary people to scare each other half to death with news that, in the blink of an eye, pushes known facts completely out of sight
How come the facts of science and math and the laws of chance and inevitability made perilously obvious by a number of demonstrably insane nations who possess nuclear bombs are blithely overlooked year after year while the fantastical and amorphous existence of a “Mayan Calendar Prediction” receives serious attention?
On balance, it does seem wiser to concentrate on how to avoid a possible nuclear holocaust and ignore the more nebulous mystery of inscrutable divinations.