This year, there will be no need to decorate the house for the holidays, no reason to buy gifts for loved ones and no need to get into the holiday spirit. In fact, some would probably advise you to simply save yourself the time, money and disappointment; this year, there will be no Christmas, no Boxing Day and no New Year.
The fateful month is upon us, and the world is about to end.
Or is it?
The Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, more commonly known as the Mayan Calendar, has no recorded dates past Dec. 21, 2012 and many interpret its abrupt ending to mean the end of the world.
But with humankind having continuously and falsely predicted the world’s end ever since civilization’s beginning (the earliest known prediction can be traced back as far as 79 AD) how can we be sure the predictions this time are right?
The Mayan Calendar
According to Carleton sociology instructor Craig McFarlane, there’s no reason to believe in the Mayan theory.
“It is obviously false,” he says. “The probability of the world ending in December is as close to zero as possible.”
For nearly half a century it has been argued that the end of their calendar represents the end of our world.
In reality, the Mayans never made any such admonition.
Rather, they believed that time was divided into cycles and in turn, each cycle would end to make way for the next.
While some say the Mayans believed the gods ended each cycle by way of a catastrophic event and so we can only expect the same to happen next month, evidence of such a theory is disputable.
“This isn’t the end of the world, it is just a new cycle starting,” author and Washington State University professor Dirk Schulze-Makuch says.
While he’s not convinced the world will end next month, in his book Megacatastrophes! Nine Strange Ways the World Could End, Schulze-Makuch sheds light on some more probable doomsday theories.
Citing an alien invasion, a super-volcanic eruption and a massive asteroid hurtling towards Earth, he rates all nine theories on the Catastrophometer, a scale thought of by the authors to measure the probability of each megacatastrophe.
An alien invasion and a deadly pandemic were given the highest Catastrophometer ratings, meaning they’re more likely to happen and have a bigger effect on humanity.
Though the ratings and the book itself merely reflect the authors’ personal opinions, Schulze-Makuch believes it’s simply human nature to contemplate the end of the world.
“It’s just something human to think about the end and to become especially critical not only of the end of life, but of humanity and all of life on Earth,” he explains. “It’s obviously something of concern.”
Welcoming the end?
But for McFarlane, there’s no need for concern.
“The apocalypse is to be welcomed,” he said last month during a Double Major lecture series at Carleton University.
“It’d be best if the apocalypse and extinction came sooner rather than later.”
Using the examples of a zombie apocalypse and the critically-acclaimed TV series The Walking Dead, McFarlane explains the significance of the zombie apocalypse.
“It isn’t so much a return to the state of nature as an attempt to reduce sociality to its minimum,” he explains.
“Small amounts of technology exist, the population is scaled down significantly and people exist in small family or tribe-like groups. Why would this be a bad thing?”
McFarlane’s position is simply one of many perspectives on doomsday theories and the notion of Armageddon.
With so many different theories, ideas, and beliefs, Earth and its human inhabitants have been prophesied to face extinction for millennia. Though we manage to survive each prediction, there’s little time to celebrate before another is born. s it possible that somewhere in the midst of our fascination and fear of the end of the world, we’ve become obsessed?
McFarlane doesn’t think so. “The world would be significantly different if people thought the end was imminent.
For instance, people likely wouldn’t waste billions of dollars on killer robots assassinating wedding parties in the mountains of Pakistan and they wouldn’t be willing to accept things like austerity programs,” he says.
If the world wakes on the morning of Dec. 22, 2012 to find life very much the same as the day before, will it mean we’re finally in the clear? To answer that question, Schulze-Makuch uses the final words from Megacatastrophes!:
“[O]ur fate isn’t completely in our hands. But the way we choose to live, and the way we apply the ever-increasingly powerful tools at our disposal, will largely determine if we make it to see a third millennium.”
