The world ending in 2012 or some shift to post-physicality involving ancient alien gods or the likes is a horribly misinformed meme which has been gaining in it’s scope of infection over the past decade. It’s ungrounded New-age dribble seeks to exploit and borrow from a culture it does not understand and makes claims of disastrous celestial events supported by a lack of astronomical understanding.

Let’s start with the what NASA has to say in a recent Q&A (the fact that NASA should be wasting any resources humoring loons & their theories is deplorable and of it’s self.)

Q: Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.

A: Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.

Q: Could a phenomena occur where planets align in a way that impacts Earth?

A: There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence.

Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?

A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history.

From H+ magazine’s article on 2012:

When I asked her what she thought of Pinchbeck’s invocation of Mayan beliefs, and of the 2012-ers’ use of the Maya in general, she was blunt. “What makes me angriest about Pinchbeck’s bogus, profiteering bullshit isn’t so much him, but the fact that that many people are racist enough to believe any asshole white guy who declares himself an expert in Mayan culture. Did it ever occur to anyone to ask practicing Maya priests out in the villages? [...] It absolutely enrages me that while people I know in Guatemala, traditional priests, are struggling to figure out how to provide clean drinking water to their families, how to feed their communities, how to avoid being shot by the gangs and thieves that plague the roads more than ever—while they’re struggling to survive and keep their communities intact, assholes like Pinchbeck are making a buck off of white man’s parodies of their culture.”

Daniel Pinchbeck, One of many ignorant authors spreading deadly meme-virus.

McKenna’s theories of mapping Novelty (via some odd I-ching oriented calculations and alot of presumption on his end about being able to actually map such an intangible quality) was never suggesting an apocalypse or even full-on transhumanist shift in 2012. He was predicting a point at which we supposedly reach peak novelty according to such rough calculations. These ideas hardly hold credence though, the gems of McKenna’s work is not the math involved in Timewave Zero but the philosophical insight his ponderings offer. Get better informed & don’t buy the hype so quickly, true believers.

Hence far, this meme’s only purpose has been the examination of the way mass-paranoia spreads along the same lines as Planet X & Y2K frenzies.

Related External Links