Upvoted because 10% as an estimate seems too high.
I especially can’t imagine why transhuman powers would have used the end of the calendar of a long-dead civilization (one of many comparable civilizations) to foreshadow the end of their game plan.
Also, even if the transhuman powers are choosing based on current end-of-the-world predictions, there’s no reason why they would choose 2012 rather than any of the many past predictions.
It’s easy to invent scenarios. But the high probability estimate really derives from two things.
First, the special date from the Mayan calendar is astronomically determined, to a degree that hasn’t been recognized by mainstream scholarship about Mayan culture. The precession of the equinoxes takes 26000 years. Every 6000 years or so, you have a period in which a solstice sun or an equinox sun lines up close to the galactic center, as seen from Earth. We are in such a period right now; I think the point of closest approach was in 1998. Then, if you mark time by transits of Venus (Venus was important in Mayan culture, being identified with their version of the Aztecs’ Quetzalcoatl), that picks out the years 2004 and 2012. It’s the December solstice which is the “galactic solstice” at this time, and 21 December 2012 will be the first December solstice after the last transit of Venus during the current period of alignment.
OK, so one might suppose that a medieval human civilization with highly developed naked-eye astronomy might see all that coming and attach a quasi-astrological significance to it. What’s always bugged me is that this period in time, whose like comes around only every 6000 years, is historically so close to the dramatic technological developments of the present day.
Carl Sagan wrote a novel (Contact) in which, when humans speak to the ultra-advanced aliens, they discover that the aliens also struggle with impossible messages from beyond, because there are glyphs and messages encoded in the digits of pi. If you were setting up a universe in such a way that you wanted creatures to go through a singularity, and yet know that the universe they had now mastered was just a second-tier reality, one way to do it would certainly be to have that singularity occur simultaneously with some rare, predetermined astronomical configuration.
Nothing as dramatic as a singularity is happening yet in 2012, but it’s not every day that a human probe first reaches interstellar space, the black hole at the center of the galaxy visibly lights up, and we begin to measure the properties of the fundamental field that produces mass, all of this happening within a year of an ancient, astronomically timed prophecy of world-change. It sounds like an unrealistic science-fiction plot. So perhaps one should give consideration to models which treat this as more than a coincidence.
It’s easy to see it as a coincidence when you take into account all the events that you might have counted as significant if they’d happened at the right time. How about the discovery of general relativity, the cosmic microwave background, neutrinos, the Sputnik launch, various supernovae, the Tunguska impact, etc etc?
Also all those dramatic technological developments of 6000 years ago, which seem minor now due to the passage of time and further advances in knowledge and technology. As no doubt the discovery of the Higgs Boson or the Voyager leaving the boundary of the solar system would seem in 8012. AD. If anybody even remembers these events then.
I agree that in themselves, the events I listed don’t much suggest that the world ends, the game reboots, or first contact occurs this year. The astronomical and historical propositions—that there’s something unlikely going on with calendars and the location of modernity within the precessional cycle—are essential to the argument.
One of the central ingredients is this stuff about a near-conjunction between the December solstice sun and “the galactic center”, during recent decades. One needs to specify whether “galactic center” means the central black hole, the galactic ecliptic, the “dark rift” in the Milky Way as seen from Earth, or something else, because these are all different objects and they may imply different answers to the question, “in which year does the solstice sun come closest to this object”. I’ve just learned some more about these details, and should shortly be able to say how they impact the argument.
You’re still cherry-picking. There have been loads of conjunctions and other astronomical events that have been taken as omens. You could argue that the conjunction with the galactic center is a “big” one, but there are bigger possible ones that you’re ignoring because they don’t match (eg if the sun was aligned with with CMB rest frame, that would be the one you’d use)
Upvoted because 10% as an estimate seems too high.
I especially can’t imagine why transhuman powers would have used the end of the calendar of a long-dead civilization (one of many comparable civilizations) to foreshadow the end of their game plan.
Also, even if the transhuman powers are choosing based on current end-of-the-world predictions, there’s no reason why they would choose 2012 rather than any of the many past predictions.
It’s easy to invent scenarios. But the high probability estimate really derives from two things.
First, the special date from the Mayan calendar is astronomically determined, to a degree that hasn’t been recognized by mainstream scholarship about Mayan culture. The precession of the equinoxes takes 26000 years. Every 6000 years or so, you have a period in which a solstice sun or an equinox sun lines up close to the galactic center, as seen from Earth. We are in such a period right now; I think the point of closest approach was in 1998. Then, if you mark time by transits of Venus (Venus was important in Mayan culture, being identified with their version of the Aztecs’ Quetzalcoatl), that picks out the years 2004 and 2012. It’s the December solstice which is the “galactic solstice” at this time, and 21 December 2012 will be the first December solstice after the last transit of Venus during the current period of alignment.
OK, so one might suppose that a medieval human civilization with highly developed naked-eye astronomy might see all that coming and attach a quasi-astrological significance to it. What’s always bugged me is that this period in time, whose like comes around only every 6000 years, is historically so close to the dramatic technological developments of the present day.
Carl Sagan wrote a novel (Contact) in which, when humans speak to the ultra-advanced aliens, they discover that the aliens also struggle with impossible messages from beyond, because there are glyphs and messages encoded in the digits of pi. If you were setting up a universe in such a way that you wanted creatures to go through a singularity, and yet know that the universe they had now mastered was just a second-tier reality, one way to do it would certainly be to have that singularity occur simultaneously with some rare, predetermined astronomical configuration.
Nothing as dramatic as a singularity is happening yet in 2012, but it’s not every day that a human probe first reaches interstellar space, the black hole at the center of the galaxy visibly lights up, and we begin to measure the properties of the fundamental field that produces mass, all of this happening within a year of an ancient, astronomically timed prophecy of world-change. It sounds like an unrealistic science-fiction plot. So perhaps one should give consideration to models which treat this as more than a coincidence.
Why pick out those events?
It’s easy to see it as a coincidence when you take into account all the events that you might have counted as significant if they’d happened at the right time. How about the discovery of general relativity, the cosmic microwave background, neutrinos, the Sputnik launch, various supernovae, the Tunguska impact, etc etc?
Also all those dramatic technological developments of 6000 years ago, which seem minor now due to the passage of time and further advances in knowledge and technology. As no doubt the discovery of the Higgs Boson or the Voyager leaving the boundary of the solar system would seem in 8012. AD. If anybody even remembers these events then.
I agree that in themselves, the events I listed don’t much suggest that the world ends, the game reboots, or first contact occurs this year. The astronomical and historical propositions—that there’s something unlikely going on with calendars and the location of modernity within the precessional cycle—are essential to the argument.
One of the central ingredients is this stuff about a near-conjunction between the December solstice sun and “the galactic center”, during recent decades. One needs to specify whether “galactic center” means the central black hole, the galactic ecliptic, the “dark rift” in the Milky Way as seen from Earth, or something else, because these are all different objects and they may imply different answers to the question, “in which year does the solstice sun come closest to this object”. I’ve just learned some more about these details, and should shortly be able to say how they impact the argument.
You’re still cherry-picking. There have been loads of conjunctions and other astronomical events that have been taken as omens. You could argue that the conjunction with the galactic center is a “big” one, but there are bigger possible ones that you’re ignoring because they don’t match (eg if the sun was aligned with with CMB rest frame, that would be the one you’d use)