I enjoyed the turn of the millennium. As the new year and millennium commenced I was to be found among thousands of others on the banks of the Thames in London watching an awesome firework display and quaffing champagne in large amounts. However, if you were expecting anything more than a drunken evening with fireworks – you were probably disappointed.
There were no earthquakes and tsunamis, not even a minor volcanic eruption. No comets or asteroids collided with planet earth. Although global warming had been happily warming everything up for years, the Antarctic failed to suddenly melt down and wipe out the Maldives and the Netherlands. The year 2000 bug was a damp squid, with far too many computers behaving themselves and there was a complete absence of nuclear war. All in all, it must have been a pretty glum time for any self-respecting millennialist anticipating a spectacular “Hollywood Ending”.
But never mind, roll on 2012 (or December 21st, 2012 to be exact) when we all get another chance at “the end of days”, courtesy of the Mayans. The Mayan civilization collapsed because of climate change, long before Columbus set out on his Caribbean holiday.
Nevertheless quite a lot is known about the Mayans because the archaeological record is fairly rich. In particular, the Mayans are fondly remembered for their astronomical skills. They calculated the length of the year with phenomenal accuracy and they had a calendar which divided the “time of the earth” into ages. According to this calendar, the current “age” comes to an end in 2012. Ostensibly, apart from the mathematics, this is no different to our Christian millennium coming to its end at the close of 1999 – or is it?
The thing is that the Mayans (according to some sources) expected cataclysms to occur when the calendar changed. And this means, if it means nothing else, lots and lots of wacky web sites.
In my on-going web safari (last stop alien abductions) I ran into the 2012 phenomenon – and surfed many alarming predictions of; the second coming, world war 3, earthquake, fire, flood, comets, continents sinking, alien visitations and the dawning of age of Aquarius (by the way, just about nobody seems to agree on when this “astrological age” actually dawns and I advise all astrologists to come into alignment on this, lest people should cease to take astrology seriously.)
Anyway for your edification …
Type: “2012″, “end of days” into Google and you’ll get 32,000 hits. (A few years ago it was 600) Type: “2012″, “cataclysm” and you’ll get 33,700 hits (it used to be 5000). Type: “2012″, “second coming”, and you’ll get 53,900 hits (it used to be 7000). Type: “2012″, “aliens” and you’ll get 314,000 hits (it used to be 67,000). But type: “2012″, “nothing significant happens” into Google and you only get 71 hits (it used to be 6).
Note that the fgures in brackets coem from the first time I made this post. I’m reposting it here and have rechecked. As we approach 2012, more wacky pages appear on the Internet for that date.
Nevertheless, the web page count is still voting strongly in favour of alien visitations for 2012 and gives very little credence to the possibility of “nothing special happening”.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte
