Miles's blog

Meg and I were talking yesterday about various and sundry topics when she mentioned that the end of the world was occurring this winter, a fact I had heard before but had forgotten about.  I gave her my usual answer—that I am going to go on vacation until then and run up my credit card balance.  Just my luck, the world probably won’t end, I will be bankrupt, and left on Earth with a bunch of people I will have inevitably pissed off over the next three months, believing we will all be pieces of space dust.

This particular end-of-the-world prediction comes from the ancient Mayans, by way of New Age philosphers who have read the Mayan calendar as ending in 2012, a fact which I find shocking since they didn’t number their years this way.

Apparently, for people seeking deep understanding in the traditions of lost civilizations, the Mayans had some way of forecasting the end of the world about 600 years after their own demise.  I personally find it difficult to believe that a population which failed to predict the coming of Europeans bearing guns, germs, and malice, can accurately tell us that some, as yet unseen, event or intervention will end us all.  Why should their calendar be any more accurate than anyone else’s?  The Mayans, you might recall, chose to mollify their gods by use of human sacrifice, often involving tearing the heart out of the chest of live victims.  Please forgive me if I decline to accept their calendar as the be-all and end-all (lame pun intended) of future prognostication.

There have been end of the world predictions since people started having enough time on their hands to wonder about the future.  According to Wikipedia (which I will accept while recognizing that it has no actual independent confirmation of anything in there), ancient Romans believed their city was a goner in 634 BCE.  They were only off by about 1500 years.  Martin Luther thought the world was doomed by 1600; Cotton Mather gave the Earth only until 1697, a date he had to revise a few times.  Charles Manson thought a race war was coming in 1969, Pat Robertson said the end was coming in 1982; and Nostradamus was read to see the end in 1999.  Rev. Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite led mass suicides based upon their views of the end of the world, and some joker named Harold Camping predicted only last year that the end was near.  I was tempted then to run up my credit card debt, but refrained.

I do accept that in four billion years or so the Earth will be destroyed by the death of the sun, and almost certainly will become uninhabitable long before that.  Heck, the way things are going we may have a heated-up planet in a matter of decades rather than millennia.  Whether or not the Earth ceases to exist, lots of species have gone extinct over time, homo sapiens are probably not much different.  The dinosaurs lasted for millions of years until they died out as a result of a meteor strike.  Neanderthals once roamed the forests of Europe right alongside of homo sapiens until climate, interbreeding, and the apparent superiority of our ancestors pushed them onto the pages of history.  They exist now only in anthropology texts and Geico commercials.

This is why, I suppose, that people are so willing to believe the end is near.  I mean when you pick up the paper, turn on the news, or merely walk down the street you have cause to doubt whether our civilization has much of a future.  Rioters in the middle east seem to portend worldwide unrest, drug-resistant superbugs bring death in hospitals, polar ice is melting, fossil fuels are being used up, unstable regimes possess nuclear weapons, and hip-hop sells in the millions.  Yeah, I am pessimistic about the future.  The end of it all is way to hazy for me to see.  If I knew for sure the world would end, or that people would become extinct anytime soon, I would make sure to have more fun.  I mean why reduce your sodium intake when apocalypse is near?  My bucket list would become my game plan—Paris here I come. 

The Mayan calendar, I fear, will end up being no more reliable than this prediction from Wikipedia:

Too bad he was wrong, there is never anything good on tv.