Subscribe"You know those scenes that play out in every action movie made since 1980? The ones where the bus jumps the broken bridge? Or a man falls over the edge and everyone thinks he's dead—but it's okay because a single hand suddenly appears, clinging to the cliff? Or how about the plane that's trying to escape from an explosion and gets enveloped in smoke – only to come bursting out with impossible speed? What about the eleventh-hour miscalculation that results in the timer speeding up towards impending disaster? Then there's the grandpa with regrets, the 'ultimate sacrifice' guy, the wormy scientist who makes good, the noble daughter who outlives the father, the divorcee who falls back in love, the evil rich dude, the ethnic stereotype village, the holy man on the mountain, the beauty queen with the handbag dog, the dude with two day's pilot training who must repeatedly fly everyone to safety at street level, through a collapsing city? What about the obligatory heroic kid, or the water escape scene, the tacked-on happy Hollywood ending where it's all sunshine and laughing and nobody really feels too remiss about the death of 5.9 billion people?Or, in a word, avoid.
And that's not even the half of it. Seriously. It goes on and on like this, piling on so much rehash that you will laugh. You can just sit there, switch off and let it wash over you like action-porn. In fact, perhaps that's exactly what 2012 is – the rebirth of action for the sake of action. To describe 2012 as the best 'rollercoaster-ride-with-a-story-attached' is about as much praise as we can muster for this production."
ERROL MORRIS: Did the Mayans really predict that the world would end on December 21, 2012?Incidentally, from what I've read about Mayan beliefs, they were pretty concerned about the possibility of the world coming to an end and they had some pretty interesting apocalypse scenarios. My favorite is that the mountains of the world are hollow inside and filled with water and that when the world ends the walls of the mountains will burst and the water inside will cover all land.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: No. It’s based on a false assumption.
ERROL MORRIS: Please explain.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: They are 208 years too early. [The correct date is December 21, 2220 – E.M.] I wrote a long article on various ways of solving this problem. I included in a footnote that you could almost get things to matchup correctly, if you used correlation 660205, the Julian day number of the base state of the Mayan calendar. Which is also the interval between the translation of the number in the Mayan baktun, katun date, if you add that number to that date you get what we would consider to be the equivalent date. Ha! A bit complicated but I think you can follow. The colonial Mayas, most of them didn’t have any clue about this. The ones who did were the calendar specialists and they made sure to keep their mouths pretty tightly shut because the Spaniards were burning people at the stake for maintaining pagan ideas of which the calendar was a major part. The calendar determined all the ceremonies and rituals, when people were sacrificed, all the nasty things and all the good things.
The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA NEO Program Office website (link to web site), so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.
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posted by freebird at 11:19 PM on November 11 [9 favorites]