The end of the world?
Friday, December 14th, 2007Will the world, as the ancient Mayans predict, come to an end on Dec. 12, 2012?
Apocalypse 2012 author Lawrence E. Joseph joined me on air today. As a science consultant, journalist, and high-tech industrialist, he is uniquely suited to the interdisciplinary study of the end of our days. He has kids. And while he has written the book Larry does not want to see the party end.
I mentioned to him this morning that there is nothing more taboo in our culture than the contemplation of death. Bad for business I guess. However, there is nothing more titillating than ruminating upon the sensational crash of the whole civilization as a result of a colossal event!
The Ancient Mayans were astronomers of the first order. They knew as much about the sky, practically, (pre-hubble) as anybody. The ancient Mayan calendar ends on Dec. 12, 2012. While interesting, I, personally, do not attribute to this fact anything pressingly prescient.
Big deal, I say.
The more pressing issue is not the Mayans, or Nostradamus, or the Bible, or doomsday cults, nor “the rapture”; the issue concerns our pressing problems that are actual forces: economic, environmental, historical, that course through the world and that could easily upset our highly fragile civilizational applecart.
We are not only overdue for an asteroid hit — like the one that eliminated the dinosaurs 65-million years ago, and paved the way for mammals — we are overdue for a major war. Nuclear proliferation cannot continue unabated without repercussive effects; world population and resource competitions cannot continue without increased security (read military) competitions. Simply put, growth, as we know it, is unsustainable.
We also do not know where some of our scientific enquiries will lead us.
Nano technology, for example, has the potential to create a new, self replicating species of robot. Sun Micro Systems Chairman, Bill Joy, has warned us of this before. It is not science fiction either.
Our scientific Frankenstein’s are one thing, but it is good, old-fashioned human nature, the kind which Shakespeare so accurately defined, and which has gone unchanged, that is the culprit. We cannot escape human nature. Moreover, International relations Professor John Mersheimer calls it “the tragedy of great power politics.” War — inevitable war. Human beings like war, no matter how much we say we don’t.
As far as the year 2012 is concerned, Author Lawrence Joseph feels that anticipated, irregular, dangerous, sunspot activity and our planet’s shifting magnetic poles, will cause havoc.
There is also the danger of biological weapons: Labs are small, easily financed, and genetic engineering breakthroughs may have the opposite effect in the hands of the wrong people. No less a thinker than Britain’s Stephen Hawking is worried the most about this one. Super viruses and diseases are easy to make - and much harder to stop.
As well, naturally occurring viruses (a virus is a little bit of ribonucleic acid wrapped in a protein) such as bird flu, while not a civilization killer, has the potential to put a damper on our planet party in much the same way another avian flu, The Spanish Flu, killed millions in 1918.
One of the problems with having a well-publicized end of times date, is the capacity for some to make this a self-fulfilling prophesy. We are that dark as a species. We don’t need any help from volcanoes, sunspots, or asteroids.
Apocalypse 2012 author Lawrence Joseph qualifies the end of the world - from the Mayan perspective - by saying that the ancients spoke more towards a violent transformation, than just the raw negative of the end of things. But would our civilization be recognizable with such transformation? Would it be a metamorphosis?
Extinction is a part of life. The average species lasts about 300,000 years. In fact, species extinction is a constant. To presume otherwise is to be arrogantly false.
Speaking of human arrogance, the Roman poet Ovid wrote in Metamorphosis:
“Wherever Roman
power reaches, conquered lands, I’ll be read:
& with fame through all the ages, if poet’s predictions
are true at all, I’ll live”
Yet it was Horace Smith who wrote best about such human vanity, the truthfulness of the forgettable quality of this race, when he concluded his sonnet Ozymandias with a view upon the sand-blown ruins of a forgotten Babylon:
“He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
what powerful but unrecorded race
once dwelt in that annihilated place”.
December 12th, 2012.
And all this time I thought that April was the cruelest month.