absofsteel

I don't buy into it, especially after Roland Emmerich's latest disaster-fest; does anyone have a strong opinion either way/?

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Remember, no matter where you go...there you are

pan6467

I think there are a lot of different things socially and environmentally that point something is happening.

It is in an election cycle and a time when the country has not been this divided in almost every aspect since the Civil War. We have economic and political unrest almost everywhere and it is getting worse almost daily. We have a serious and widening gap between the haves and have nots. So politically/socially/economically there is serious problems that are going to have to be resolved and yet no resolutions seem to help because there is too much animosity.

We won't even get into the multitude of new diseases such as mad cow, swine flu, bird flu, etc. that seem to be springing up.Whether man created or natural there are a lot of them and the news just makes the stories about them disappear, but they are still ther.

Environmentally, we see tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes and serious changes in weather pattern s, high sun activity and so on that I do not believe are the cause of global warming but symptoms of serious issues the Earth is having. Is it man made, natural a cycle, etc? Who knows, but there are signs the Earth is having issues.

Then there's the oil spill where everyone has taken their sweet assed time to do anything about. All that oil has to go somewhere. If there is a hurricane and it gets up into the atmosphere what can and will it do? No one knows for sure, lots of theories from raining fire, to polluting the soil to so dispersed no damage will be done (which I find hard to believe). This is going to seriously affect the Gulf's food chain and if it keeps coming out the bordering countries for miles inland, possibly the Atlantic Ocean and who knows what. It's all theory.

So, yes, I think there are serious issues that will be coming to a head around that time. It's amazing the Mayan calendar was so precise on the exact date 12/21/2012. However, I never heard of this 2012 theory until a few years ago and for me it was on Coast to Coast, which is a great scare/conspiracy show. I would have thought people would have heard of this far earlier than that.

What do I foresee as possibilities? I don't see the Earth ending or man dieing off totally, but I can see man being seriously decimated. I can see Earth and the sun having issues that affect the planet as a whole. I wouldn't make plans too far past then but I am not going to live in fear either.

I do believe the possibility of a great awakening is possible. So it may be a good event rather than an evil bad event. We just have to wait and see. We'll find out soon enough.

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I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

Bagezio

I'm not one to buy into conspiracy theories too much, but there does seem to be a disproportionate amount of bad things happening lately. Now I don't think the planet is going to explode or aliens are going to wipe us out with their phasers or any nonsense like that. However given the political and economic instability around the world at this time, any sort of widespread ecological disaster could certainly push desperate people over the edge and cause mass hysteria which would certainly threaten global security.

And Honestly, it would not take much for it to be THE END OF THE WORLD (as we know it). The fall of Rome was pretty much the end of the world for you if you happened to live there. The Revolutionary War certainly changed the world, as seen by the people living at the time. It would not be unfair to assume that some major event in the near future could cause the United States to cease being the most powerful nation in the world and have that title go to China, or some other developing nation. The world would certainly be over as we know it. Things would be very different.

Wes Mantooth

Sorry I don't buy it. I have no reason to believe the Mayans knew anything more about the future then the homeless guy raving about the end of the world does. Its bunk and I'm surprised it's gained so much traction in the mainstream to be perfectly honest.

Its funny I've spent my whole life listening to tired crap about the end of the world (although I guess this one isn't so specific) . When I was a kid in the early 80's the godless Soviets where going to wipe us off the map...just because. In the 90's it was all about millennium "The bible and Nostradamus (or something) says stuff about millenniums and earthquakes and floods and hurricanes and wars are all happening!!!..yup bad stuff is goin' down I tells ya!". The Y2k bug was next (along with the millennium garbage)and now its 2012...I'm sure after 2012 another scare will pop up and take its place followed by another and another.

Anyway I can certainly believe that significant events could happen anytime, given the state of the planet, that could have dramatic effects on the world as we know it but I have no reason to believe the Mayans had prior knowledge of when its going to happen...that takes a pretty large leap of faith in my opinion.

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haywoodu

Does anyone remember Y2K?

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I hide my tears when I say your name, for the pain in my heart is still the same.

Leto

i remember Y2K. I made a lot of consulting money out of repairing/prepping mainframe applications to be able to deal with the calendar issue. It was not a phantom issue. Some of the things that I worked on would have been real disasters. I mean financially, liability-wise if not the "planes falling out of the sky " way. Back in 1999, we had a whole slew of systems that were a mix of old legacy mainframes and newer distributed systems. Year 2000 issues were real and needed to be attended to. The fact that there was no real issue as a result can be partly attributed to the amount of work that went on prior to the calendar turning over. Similar to the recent H1N1 non-emergency.

The 2012 thingy, however, is not the same as the real Y2K scenarios. It simply synchronizes the time on the Gregorian (our) calendar to the end of the calculated Mayan calendar. The planets will still orbit the sun after Dec 2012. We should all still be here.

The Mayans now use the Gregorian calendar, so I suspect that they will buy new ones that start on Jan 1, 2013. If they are using the old Mayan calendar, they may just restart it with V 2.0 added on. Along with the Mayans, I think that Christians believed that there was to be a second coming of Christ in the year 2000. A lot of folks assign importance to certain numbers or groups of numbers which just isn't there.

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You said you didn't give a fuck about hockey
And I never saw someone say that before
You held my hand and we walked home the long way
You were loosening my grip on Bobby Orr

http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Leto_Atreides_I

Baraka_Guru

Divination isn't real.

At best, we can predict the future based on probability.

Like the weather, and earthquakes.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Wes Mantooth

Yeah Y2k certainly could have had real consequences I was referring more to the "OMG were all gonna die!!!" aspect of it that seemed to be prevalent in the late 90's (planes falling from the sky, nuclear weapons launching). I'm sure if not dealt with it could have been very bad. I just seem to remember a LOT of, what seemed like to me, needless hysteria surrounding it...couple it with happening on the millennium and, well you get the picture.

I didn't mean to derail the thread though.

Anyway the odd thing about 2012 is that in order to believe it you have to accept that the Mayans had some sort of ability to see the future (Maybe aliens told them?) and I just can't accept that without some sort of concrete evidence to back that up...which would be, in my opinion, quite a scientific discovery.

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Jetée

Divination is real, but at best, most or all practies of it, as a whole, have been disproven, or yet not tested fully enough under very stringent conditions to work (or convince skeptics). To say it isn't real is just simplifying something that can never be understood so simply (also, the realist in me says if it wasn't real, why would we have a word for it? All reality is subjective, or so I've heard).

And to the point of the OP: just wait some two-odd years and judge for yourself what will happen. Your opener in stating you now disbelieve the rumours and media anticipatory-hoopla because of a movie you saw doesn't bring much - or anything, really - towards your argument, either for or against, whatever the hell is supposed to happen in 2012 (which, for those in the know, already happened last month).

Believe what you want to believe, but don't take years-(decades,centuries-)old nebulous predictions and try to make something concrete of them. Unless you alone are capable of fulfilling them, natural probability will dictate that the future cannot be predicted because it is a blanketed and randomized set of billions of interconneted events, so good luck in seeing anything at all come to pass whenever it is supposed to happen.

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Idyllic

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/tilted-...eneration.html

Humankind's love/hate relationship with its own existence and the world wants to end, again, but the earth will defy us all, Yeah Earth, until the sun explodes or the black hole eats us all, or the poles change places, or the black plague resurfaces on the death masks of maypoles and incinerates religious crusades as we fight off dinosaurs between our tribal wars and wars and wars...... yeah, because life is worse now than it was before, when again was it worse than now, I can't remember and the only history I have is the archeological finds that depict the realities of life before science, scary, and the studies of natural disasters that have occurred over and over in the history of our world.... worse when?

It's the end of the world as we know it, but you all know how I feel.

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you can tell them all you want but it won't matter until they think it does

p.s. I contradict my contradictions, with or without intention, sometimes.

Lucifer

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- Job 30:29

1123, 6536, 5321

Baraka_Guru

It's all about attaching meaning to the meaningless via the unknown and unknowable. It doesn't always happen to be meaningless, but it is often meaningless with regard to what you had hoped it to mean.

Myth has probably existed for as long as humans have had language.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

MSD

The Mayans didn't divide their calendar up in decimal like we did. The longest measurement of the long count was that b'ak'tun, the current (13th) one of which ends on 12/21/12, or 144,000 days since it started. There is no evidence that they would have associated the end of this b'ak'tun with anything but a cause to celebrate like we did to ring in the new millenium. Dates past the end of the 13th count are referenced in Mayan writings, and a lack of calendars for the 14th count can be attributed to the downfall of their civilization before anyone got around to making one for an era that wasn't going to happen for hundreds of years. Also, considering their calendar set the creation of earth at the beginning of the first long count in 3112 BCE, even if they did predict the end of the world in 2012 I don't see why we should give the prophecy much consideration.

robot_parade

The 2012 hysteria...proof that there's a sucker born every minute.

Jetée

Actually, just by happenstance before falling into a faint after working for 20 straight hours, and just noticing sometime this morning I was in the midst of a '2012 marathon', I learned that the current long count calendar that the Mayans and all other scholarly experts are making much ado about whatever, is not the first. It's just the most current, last, and whole calendar they have have encountered, as well as the only one that was actually made during this count down towards this next cosmic event. It's basically a calendar for this era, or Age's cycle in-between the dark rift surge / galactic alignment event, which happens at an interval of 25,625 years a clip, or when the Earth's regular spin on its axis completes its next "wobble".

History shows the Mayans created at least three different era long count calendars, and upwards of five, perhaps going back as far as they might have thought civilization had endured here on Earth ; (which if you add it all up, is too long of a time to even comprehend humans living together intelligibly: 100,000+ years of backtracking the stars and constellation events through time) though I don't see much of the point, seeing as the Mayans own empire lasted somewhere in-between the 5th (as early as) and the 9 baktuns, (where archaeologists agree the civilization was in decline and vanishing) so there would be no need, in my own estimation, to make more than one long count calendar, unless it were to be necessary in order to realize something I'm not even nearly close to realizing, but the Mayans did, of some kinds of astronomical events that might have occurred in the past, before they became so dedicated to stargazing.

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

floe206

With all the stuff going on now, who knows how long we'll last. Mother nature is very forgiving , but with everything we do to this beautiful earth..........I could definitely see some very crazy things happen in my lifetime...Not necessarily 2012.

Xazy

Article
According to Gerardo Aldana, says our calculations of their calendar might be off by years!

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Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

Tully Mars

For the record the Maya did not and do not believe the world will end in 2012. The Maya calendars, yes there's two of them, are complicated to say the least. They both terminate in 2012 which many researchers in the past saw has a prediction of "end times." Most of what the Maya knew about math and time calculations were destroyed by the Spanish in the 16th century. Most researcher today have interpreted, through new finds and digs, the termination of the calendars as a roll over event and and not an end times event. Kind of like the way your cars odometer rolls overs.

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I used to drink to drown my sorrows, but the damned things have learned how to swim- Frida Kahlo

Vice President Starkizzer Fan Club

raging moderate

i think people get off on the idea that the world would come crashing down and they'd be one of the few survivors, left to repopulate the world, start anew, raid the shopping centers, etc. I think the reality would be a lot smellier and depressing than the idea that people have about surviving the apocalypse.

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These are the good old days...



formerly Murp0434

Cimarron29414

I wonder if Hicachu, the Mayan stone mason responsible for his village's calendar realized what a fuss he would cause when he ran out of stone to carve upon? Did it go something like this:

<bob walks into the hut and sees Hicachu's work. Looks over his shoulder>

"Hey, Hic, whatcha doin?"
"Ah, the fuckin' elders got me making another calendar. I picked a stone that was too small and it only went to Dec 7, 1941. They made me re-do it. Then I got a bigger stone, and it only went to Sept. 11, 2001 - and they made me re-do it. So I went out and got the biggest fucking stone I could find. If this isn't long enough, they can shove it up their asses because Fred's calendar in the village over the hill only runs to 12/21/12. If it's good enough for them, it should be good enough for us!" <Cue studio laugh track>


____EDIT________

Shit, look at that cartoon up there. It's exactly what I wrote. Guess I should read the above before posting instead of going straight to the "add a comment" section. :LOL:

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DRP976

I dont believe in 2012 but i dont dismiss it either. Only time will tell...