Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
First-time Visitors: Please visit Site Map and Disclaimer. Use"Back" to return here.
So the world is due to end on December 21, 2012. Sorry to seem blase', but the world has ended so often in my lifetime it's hard to keep track. What is it this week? Fire? Flood? Pestilence? Plague of locusts? Ho-hum. Sorry I was late for work, the world ended. What? Again?
After the world has ended half a dozen times in your lifetime, they all sort of blur together. So here is a rundown of some of the principal ends of the world.
The first Millennium after Christ was thought by some to be the thousand year reign of righteousness predicted in Revelation, except it wasn't particularly just or righteous. But some people predicted the end of the world anyway.
It's not all that unusual to be able to see all the naked eye planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) in the sky at once, roughly once a decade. But getting the Sun and Moon as well is harder.
There have been a number of close groupings of the Sun, Moon, and five naked eye planets. Unfortunately, if you include the Sun, you can't see anything. Unless there's a total eclipse, which there was. The path of totality swept across Indonesia and the Pacific. There was a partial eclipse at sunset in California, the first solar eclipse I ever saw. Astrologers and shamans predicted the grouping portended something dire. Sure enough, there were wars, earthquakes and famines. In about the same frequency as before the grouping.
Neville Shute's novel about the world dying by nuclear fallout was made into a movie, which showed a calendar bearing the date 1966. It might be fun to round up all the end of the world dates in science fiction and create a calendar.
Comet Kohoutek was going to be dazzling. A comet coming in from the far reaches of the Solar System on a path that would take it close to the Sun, produce a dazzling tail and a spectacular show. This was the Watergate era, and at least one counterculture group put out a pamphlet arguing that Kohoutek was a cosmic portent warning us of our corruption and all-around crimes against good vibes. The pamphlet asked why the public wasn't told about the comet, which was amusing to me because I had known about the comet for a year or so. You actually have to read things in order to be told about events. Anyway, Kohoutek fizzled, as comets can do, and for a time became a synonym for failure.
Supposedly, all the planets would be in a straight line, pulling the center of mass of the Solar System off to one side and creating all sorts of havoc like earthquakes, polar shifts, tsunamis, bad pseudoscience books, and so on.
I got a visit from a couple of astrologically inclined types who wanted to know what was going on. Some of these people are just bubble heads, but these two were creepy. Anyway, this was about the time Neptune was overtaking Pluto, and for several decades Neptune and Pluto were moving across the sky at similar rates, because Pluto was near its closest to the sun. As a result there was a long interval where Neptune and Pluto were within 60 degrees of each other. Since these are the two slowest planets, they limit how good alignments can be. It turns out the speeds of the planets are such that each time a planet crosses the 60 degree sector containing Neptune and Pluto, the next planet in will make a complete circuit of the Sun and will inevitably also be in the grouping. The only exception is Saturn, which has about an even chance of being or not being in the grouping. So every few hundred years, when Neptune overtakes Pluto, all the other planets except Saturn will at some point be in that grouping at the same time, and half the time Saturn will be as well. Unusual? Moderately. Meaning? None. remember, 60 degrees is one sixth of the circumference of the sky.
It turns out there never was a time in 1982 when the planets were very tightly bunched. The best I can do is getting them all within a 90 degree sector around April. There has never, ever been a time when they were all exactly in a straight line. Toss nine pennies in the air and let me know when they fall in a perfectly straight line. Mind if I do other things while I wait?
Supposedly, the Sun, Moon and six planets were arranged in an equilateral triangle as seen from Earth, ushering in a new epoch of peace and life. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa have been touted as effects of the convergence. Also, the convergence supposedly inaugurated the countdown toward the end of the world in 2012. It turns out that all the visible planets, plus the Sun and Moon, were strung out in the sector of sky between Cancer and Libra, but that's hardly a remarkable occurrence. For one thing, within a couple of days of new moon, you will always have the Sun, Moon, Mercury and Venus within less than 90 degrees in the sky.
In the comic strip Doonesbury, B.D.'s ditzy New Age lover got hyper over the Harmonic Convergence, and so she and B.D. went to the beach to await the cosmic transformation. They got a nice sunset for their efforts.
The first comet in forty years that was both brilliant and well placed in the night sky for easy viewing. It may be the first comet in history that billions of people could enjoy as a beautiful spectacle without fear of what it portended. But one group, the Heaven's Gate cult, believed that the comet was concealing a mother ship and committed mass suicide to gain access to the ship.
Y2K. Planes would fall from the sky, traffic signals would shoot laser beams, and pacemakers would be set to hummingbird mode. No, wait, that was a Simpsons episode. But there were plenty of really stupid predictions, including one author who claimed we would permanently lose the ability to generate electricity.
It all happened because there were tons of computer "legacy code" that used two-digit years, because back in 1965, who pictured their program still being used in 2000? But they were, and people had to cull out date references in programs and either ensure they were harmless or correct them. Most two digit dates would be harmless, but some might cause real problems, for example, an airline reservation program that might refuse to let an agent enter a reservation for 2000 because the computer thought 00 referred to 1900 and wouldn't let anyone enter a reservation for a date earlier than the current date.
There are some claims that hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on Y2K. I don't for a minute believe the figure was anything like that. I believe the amount reported might be that large, to get funding or tax writeoffs, but I don't believe the actual expense was even remotely that big. Much of the fix simply involved installing modern software and importing data to it, something that needed to be done in any case, but gets a lot more attractive if Y2K funding pays for it. Repairs to legacy code that can't be easily replaced also falls under the heading of necessary maintenance because there are lots of other bugs needing repair as well, except nobody ever got around to it. And personnel time? "Gee, I'm sorry I can't make the meeting to decide on goals and mission statements, but I have to work on the Y2K bug."
Imagine someone predicts that on January 1, 2010, all aircraft systems will fail simultaneously, and people take it seriously. So all planes are given extra thorough inspections. A lot of money is spent. And planes don't fall from the sky on January 1, 2010. Wasted? Definitely not. Good aircraft maintenance is never wasted, and neither are software upgrades.
6-6-06. 6-6-6. The number of the Beast in Revelation. People actually asked their doctors to induce or delay births so as not to risk giving birth to the Antichrist. Except that Revelation says the number is "six hundred threescore and 6," not three sixes juxtaposed, and the number is the number of a man, not a calendar date. Also it is not a highway route number, so the people who pressured the Government to change US 666 in Utah and Colorado were wasting their time. But I've noticed that a lot of the people who are most militant about the Bible are among the most scandalously biblically illiterate.
9-9-09, get it? It must mean something. And it did. As much as 9-9-99, or 8-8-08, or 6-6-06. But some folks saw it as a portent. Others played the lottery.
The fall of 2009 was rough on the Earth, with the end of the world coming every couple of weeks.
According to http://home.flash.net/~evt/rapture.htm: "FALL 2009“ THE END? IS THIS THE TIME OF THE RAPTURE?" and "Astronomical signs prove 100% that the ending of the 7-year tribulation period is at the end of 2015! Therefore, the beginning of the 7-year Tribulation period starts by FALL 2009!" There are links to pages on creationism and of course Ben Stein's movie "Expelled." The page design is as bad as you'd expect, with a light blue background and garish text colors and highlights.
Just in case the previous ends of the world don't do the job, the movie Knowing gives October 19, 2009 as the date the world will be fried by a massive solar flare, except for a handful who will be saved by aliens, but only those who can hear the messages. That crazy guy on the corner with the voices in his head? He'll have the last laugh. Boy, won't you feel silly when he flies away and you sizzle.
The Maya used a base 20 notation, except in their calendar one of the 20's was replaced by 18 to give a 360 day period approximating the length of the year. They had a variety of calendar cycles but weren't especially hung up on matching the solar year, because in the tropics the seasons aren't nearly as important. Wet and dry is a whole lot more important than winter and summer. In their mythology, creation cycles lasted 13 x 20 x 20 x 18 x 20 days = 1872000 days or 5125 years. Add that to 3114 BCE (or -3113 in astronomical calculation) and you get 2012.
And what will happen? Exactly what happens when s car's odometer rolls over from 99999.9 to 00000.0. The car keeps going and a new cycle begins. The Maya had far longer time cycles than the 5125 year cycle.
Sure enough, on December 21, 2012, the Sun will line up with the center of the Galaxy. Just like on December 21, 2011, or 2010, or 2009, and just like it will on December 21, 2013, 2014, etc. Well, the lineup will be approximate, since the galactic center is not on the ecliptic. Also, because of precession, the position of the solstice shifts a little each year, and it turns out the alignment will be closest in a couple of hundred years.
Now this is weird. I once looked over a copy of the Alphonsine Tables, the great medieval tables for calculating the positions of the planets. There was a table for calculating dates far into the future. Guess what the last year was?
Return to Pseudoscience Index
Return to Professor Dutch's Home Page
Created 18 July 2008; Last Update 24 May, 2020
Not an official UW Green Bay site