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Pseudoscience rampant in 2012 predictions |
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Saturday, 14 November 2009 |
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Charles Spencer
Kansas City Science News Examiner The impending arrival in theaters of Sony Pictures’ movie 2012 will no doubt usher in a new flood of media stories dealing with end-of-the-world prophecies. A Google search for “end of the world 2012” turns up a mere 22,000,000 hits.
Unfortunately, the sites of organizations debunking the myth are not at the top of the list. That means, of course, that more people are visiting doomsday sites than science sites for information. Whether they do so solely for entertainment is an open question.
One would think that past failures of innumerable similar predictions of global doom would dampen enthusiasm for this one. Sadly that does not seem to be the case. No polls exist, but even a casual acquaintance with our culture leads to a suspicion that the percentage of the U.S. population that believes the predicted events might really happen is substantially greater than zero.
The problem lies in part with the fact that many of the scenarios contain enough kernels of science to sound plausible to many folks. For example, most of the 2012 prophecies place great significance on the Mayan calendar. Specifically, that an alignment of the earth, sun and galactic center was predicted to coincide with end of their Long Count calendar, which falls on December 21, 2012.
Anthony Aveni, writing in Archaeology Magazine (Apocalypse Soon? Archaeology, Nov-Dec 2009), does a superb job of exposing the fallacies of this myth. Aveni writes that there is no credible evidence that the Mayans ever tracked the movement of the Sun against the backdrop of stars in a way necessary to determine or predict when such an alignment would happen. He goes on to explain that the start date for the calendar, developed by Maya rulers around 100 B.C. as a way to back-date events in their civilization’s development and tie it all to their creation myths, may have been arbitrary; that Day 0, which corresponded to August 11, 3114 B.C., had no astronomical significance; and neither does the end date. He also points out that although the Maya believed in cyclic creations, they left no clear indication of what they imagined might happen at the end of the Long Count cycle.
Ascribing modern interpretations to stone-carved icons representing a primitive people’s mythology is pseudoscience. There is no scientific, archaeological evidence for the Maya myth. But that does not prevent a tidal wave of internet hucksters from preying on gullibility, ignorance and fear. Ignore them.
Next on this topic: more about astronomical alignment in 2012
These sites do a great job of debunking the myth: NASA’s Ask an Astrobiologist 2012 Summary – NASA’s Dr. David Morrison’s 2012 video – Wikipedia’s 2012 entry |
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2012 Predictions
- Doomsday
- End of Wold
- Apocalypse
- Nostradamus
- Natural Disasters
- Astroids
- Dark Holes
- Polar Shifts
- Mayan Prophecies
- Hopi Indians
- I Ching
- Bible Code
- 2012 Videos
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