2012

At time of writing, we are now well over halfway through this fabled year of 2012. I think it’s safe to say, at least prior to the year’s beginning; there was an element of nervousness abound. That John Cusack movie had come out in 2009 and for the first time in history everybody was talking about the Maya people. In fact, a lot of anxious folk were basing all types of voodoo predictions on the idea that an ancient people’s calendar might be ending in 2012, and that this particular end just could signal the end of the world - because if there was one thing the mighty Mayan power rangers were good at, it was knowing what would happen thousands of years into the future, right down to the precise year.

[Silliness aside, it is widely accepted that the calendar didn’t merely end, but signalled the transition to a new state of being where the Samsung smart-phone truly came into its own as the rising market competitor of the Apple corporation’s iPhone.]

However, there are more groovy predictions about this particular year we are living through and the hellish nightmare it will bring.

Righteous hippie Terence McKenna decided in the 1970s that we would experience the singularity in 2012, with all existence meshing into one infinite possibility. He even had a great piece of complex software that proved it.

You see? Infallible.

Then there is the theory that the theoretical Nibiru or Planet X (or some other broadly specified galactic object – precision is not important) will collide or almost collide with the Earth and bring cataclysmic ruin to everything. This has been trumpeted by a certain Nancy Lieder since the mid-90s, who originally set a date for the world’s end in 2003. In preparation, she put down her pets and afterwards claimed that she had made the date up to fool the man, and that the real date was yet to come. Apparently, the discovery of the mystery planet has been covered up by the US Government and NASA.

Incidentally, old Nostradamus had supposedly busted out the following chestnut in one of his many epic ramblings:

Where all is good, the Sun all beneficial and the Moon
Is abundant, its ruin approaches
From the sky it advances to change your fortune
In the same state as the seventh rock

Now obviously he did forget to give us a date. But he was never one for specifics either, and many seem to have tacked his wisdom into the aforementioned scenario for a bit more historical clout.

Another theory postulates the oncoming arrival of massive solar flares, which would range in detriment from the general messing up of mobile phone communications and the destruction of satellites to bringing on a geomagnetic reversal, said to release the energy of 100 billion atomic bombs. That’s probably even more than America, Russia and China’s combined arsenals, and if that one is true then we should definitely murder animals as fast and efficiently as possible.

Now if you’re a sensible person, you’ll probably conclude that all of the above is nothing more than paranoid clap-trap. But where does that leave poor old 2012? Will it be as much of a fizzer as 2000 was after all the Y2K paranoia? Will the Hadron Collider experiments inadvertently create the world’s first manmade black hole and suck the entire universe into itself? Or were the Mayans right all along? Apparently December is the month to watch, the 21st to be precise. So if you’re feeling the sting in your wallet in the lead up to X-mas (<- you see? signs of the apocalypse are everywhere) then don’t worry, you can probably get away with not buying presents as there’s a good chance the world is going to end. Or should that be: get as many credit cards as you can and spend the rest of your life because it’s almost over? I suppose that’s just a choice we all have to make.