The End is Nigh..............21/12/12

[imtommygunn]

I think we'll go "mad max" eventually.

We're basically stripping the planet of resources and not putting them back in. Eventually that will tell a sorry tale and probably long before the sun expires.

Whether that's friday or not well i wouldn't have thought so...

[Hardy]

I'd imagine we'll have built our own "planet" or mobile space home for humans by then, which we'll navigate to a suitable environment and park there.

[NetNitrate]

Some tempting odds being offered by the bookies. I'd say you could earn a nice bit of change if the Mayans are right. Would help pay the Christmas bills anyway.

[ballinaman]

END OF THE WORLD UPDATE*

The world hasn't ended.

Sincerely,

New Zealand

[Olly]

I wonder what God will look like.

[Hereiam]

If I wake up dead tomorrow there will be hell to pay for.

[Ulick]

The truth about the Maya 'apocalypse'
By Damian Thompson

Last updated: December 14th, 2012

228 Comments Comment on this article

Bloodthirsty scenes from the Classic Maya paintings at Bonampak, Mexico

The kings of the ancient Maya, gorgeously bedecked in multicoloured plumage, were carried on litters along avenues carved out of the Central American jungle towards temples of rare and sinister beauty. Nothing in the ancient Americas can rival the architecture of the Classic Maya, a civilisation that combined baroque delight in colour and design with bafflingly sophisticated mathematics and astronomy.

But then, around 800 AD, the most advanced Maya city-states – in present-day Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras – mysteriously gave themselves up to the jungle, which closed over them like water over the head of a drowning man.

Before they disappeared, however, Maya scholars had calculated that the world would end on December 21, 2012. Or so it is widely believed.

Friday marks the end of the 13th baktun of the Maya Long Count calendar. Each baktun lasts 400 years and, according to some sources, the end of the 13th cycle heralds doomsday.

Cue nervous breakdowns in the most unlikely places. There are reports of panic-buying of candles in Sichuan, China. In the New Age bookstores of America, old hippies shiver as the wind chimes tinkle. And a flat-topped mountain near the town of Bugarach in the French Pyrenees will be closed on Friday in case doomsday believers climb up and make a nuisance of themselves.

People expecting the end of the world have a habit of heading for the nearest mountain. I spent the night of December 31, 1999, on top of the Mount of Olives, which looms large in prophecies of Jesus's return to earth. The old City of Jerusalem was crawling with Israeli marksmen – you could see them on rooftops everywhere – worried that a bogus Messiah would trigger panic. (Muslims as well as Christians believe in the return of Jesus before the Last Judgment.)

I'd been sent out to Jerusalem by a magazine because I'd published a book on End Times prophecies throughout history. In the course of researching it, I visited the world's largest church, the Yoido Full Gospel church in Seoul, South Korea, which expected Christ's imminent return – but whose pastors still amassed a huge property portfolio. I also risked death from boredom by touring New Age centres in California and asking their seers to speculate about the End.

In May 1999 I travelled on a small boat down the Peruvian Amazon to the colony of an apocalyptic cult who called themselves the Israelites. They believed that in the year 2000 hidden Incas would awake from their 500-year sleep and establish a New Jerusalem in Peru. When the photographer Victor Balaban and I walked into the Israelites' jungle temple, they bowed down before us as if we were ourselves gods. We pretended to be embarrassed.

Alas, shortly after my visit the cult's prophet, an ancient illiterate shoemaker calling himself Ezekiel, died and failed to honour his promise to rise from the dead after three days. That cooled their excitement.

In the event, "Millennium Fever" failed to claim many victims. Wandering around Jerusalem on 1 January, 2000, I didn't spot anyone suffering from messianic disappointment; hangovers, yes. One possible reason for the non-event was that, by the time the date arrived, people were so sick of the subject that they blocked out silly prophecies.

The prospect of a Maya doomsday, in contrast, has sent a surge of electricity through an exotic assortment of groups. In the Kirov region of Russia, a Tibetan monk who endorsed the December 21 date in a letter to a local paper has triggered a run on kerosene. In South Africa, Twitter users are spreading alarm. One Soweto resident – displaying touching faith in the public sector – has issued an "extremely urgent" request to the Constitutional Court or an "investigative task team" to prepare for the end of the world on Friday.

For New Agers, the combination of Native Americans and doomsday predictions is proving irresistible – and, to spice things up, they've added a touch of bogus astronomy: the "rogue planet" Nibiru will collide with us. So popular is this prediction that Nasa has had to point out that Nibiru poses little danger to us because it doesn't exist.

According to Nasa astrobiologist David Morrison, gullible young people are so worried by a Maya doomsday that they can't sleep or eat – and some may be suicidal. "I think it's evil for people to propagate rumours on the Internet to frighten children," he says.

Ah, the Internet. In December 1999 there were 248 million people online, or four per cent of the world's population. Now the figure is 2.4 billion, or 34 per cent. History suggests that when an unregulated medium of communication is invented, two types of material flourish: pornography and prophecy. It happened with printing in the 16th century; it's happening again.

Also, compare the world in 1999 to the world in 2012. Dotcoms were flowering; the economies of the US and Europe were growing nicely; China was heading for economic lift-off. Now? Things fall apart: half of America hates the other half while the EU totters towards Armageddon. China, vastly richer than it was 13 years ago, is scared of the sort of internal convulsions that might be triggered by crazy prophecies.

Not just economies but billions of individuals struggle to cope with the acceleration of change; epidemics of addiction show how badly we're coping. As ethnic and religious tension increases, there's even a whiff of "helter-skelter", the apocalyptic chaos imagined by Charles Manson and his followers.

So, were the ancient Maya on to something? Could the end of the Long Count cycle be a portent of the end of the world, at least as we know it?

The answer is no. It's true that December 2012 coincides with the end of the 13th baktun, which had some sacred significance – we don't really know what – for the calendar-obsessed Maya. But the Long Count not only stretches back thousands of years into the past, to a date long before Maya civilisation existed. It also extends far into the future. Which is inconvenient for the doomsday merchants.

"The thing is, there are many more baktuns still to come," explains Dr David Stuart, an American Maya specialist who, as a young student in the 1980s, helped decipher the weird, almost comic-book glyphs in which the pyramid builders boasted of their deeds.

"It turns out their calendar was far larger than we believed just a few years ago, with future cycles well beyond the baktun that won't change or turn over for vast numbers of years – well beyond trillions, in fact."

Stuart adds acidly on his blog: "Of course the idea that no actual 2012 prophecy exists gets very little widespread distribution in the media. It hasn't a chance against the shameless doom-and-gloom, junk-science narratives of The History Channel or, even worse now, The National Geographic Channel."

In short, the so-called "Mayan apocalypse" is just the latest attempt by Western culture to appropriate the history of a remarkable people whose descendents survive in their millions and still speak Mayan languages.

When the monumental staircases and elegant ball courts of the Classic Maya were rediscovered in the 19th century, Americans speculated that their creators came from the Old World. (Mormons still cling to a version of this fantasy.) Then, in the first half of the 20th century, the Maya were portrayed as dilettante artists and astronomers – so unlike the vulgar, blood-soaked Aztecs.

Now, thanks to unnerving archaeological finds, we know that exquisite temples were consecrated by mass child sacrifice. Maya mythology was complex and subtle – but far darker than was once thought.

Stuart lectures his students at the University of Texas on "the grisly and fright-filled demons" known as wahy, "animate dark forces wielded by court sorcerers in order to inflict harm or disease on others ... they certainly aren't really the benign, shamanistic 'animal companion spirits' as we often described them a couple of decades ago".

It's scary sort of religion, and can't have offered much comfort to the occupants of the Late Classic Maya cities who watched them fall into ruin, probably as a result of over-farming. But one thing Maya shamans didn't do was terrify people by prophesying the apocalypse, a concept rooted in Judaism and early Christianity that would have made little sense to them.

So I have some simple advice for prophets who have announced to their devotees that something big will happen on Friday – whether in Guatemala, the Pyrenees, Szechuan or Surbiton. Get your excuses ready now.

A shorter version of this article appears in Saturday's Daily Telegraph

[Ulick]

Going Out With a Bang: Swimsuit Model Seeks Sex Before End of the World Tomorrow
Posted by Jammie on Dec 20, 2012 at 8:07 am


OK, I'm a believer now.



    Stop the world — I wanna get off!

    A sexy swimsuit model and countless other lusty New Yorkers say tomorrow's predicted Mayan apocalypse is a great reason to have sex, and are turning to social media and doomsday-themed parties in hopes of fully experiencing humanity's steamy climax.

    "If I die, I don't want to die on a dry spell!" declared model Niki Ghazian.

    The sexy fashion plate, who works in New York and Los Angeles, told The Post she'll attend a fashion party with friends tonight to celebrate Doomsday Eve — and, hopefully, hook up with someone hot.

    "Everybody should go out feeling satisfied," she told The Post. "If the world's gonna end, why hold back?"

    All the horny hubbub has been caused by a doomsday prediction made by the ancient Mayan calendar, which predicts the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012, at 11:11 a.m.

    While some people around the world are arming themselves and digging into bunkers, many New Yorkers are simply hoping for a hot time.

    "I will be looking for an end-of-the-world hook-up," Dennis Cintron, 29, a Lower East Side bartender, told The Post. "If you're going to go out, go out with a bang."

Ba dum bum.

[ONeill]

I suppose it's time to say things you wouldn't normally.

Stew, you complete me.

[Orior]

I suppose it's time to say things you wouldn't normally.

Stew, you complete me.

Ah thats so sweet.

I like wearing lipstick.

[brokencrossbar1]

I suppose it's time to say things you wouldn't normally.

Stew, you complete me.

How d'you do, I see you've met my faithful handyman
He's just a little brought down because when you knocked
He thought you were the candyman.

[ONeill]

I have a grudging admiration for Noel Thompson.

[thejuice]

IS there any website to go and watch these gobshites babble on while wait for the end of the world. Apparently when that jesus freak in the US this summer was rambling on there was a board you could go read them messaging each other. Apparently they were asking if earthquakes were happening in their part of town.

If you believe this crap you have been watching the wrong youtube videos. You still have to go to work tomorrow!!

[moysider]

Newfound Asteroid Buzzes Earth Inside Moon's Orbit
by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer
Date: 11 December 2012 Time: 02:10 PM ET

A newfound asteroid gave Earth a close shave early today, zipping between our planet and the moon just two days after astronomers first spotted it.

The near-Earth asteroid 2012 XE54, which was discovered Sunday (Dec. 9), came within 140,000 miles (230,000 kilometers) of our planet at about 5 a.m. EST (1000 GMT) Tuesday (Dec. 11), researchers said. For comparison, the moon orbits Earth at an average distance of 240,000 miles or so (386,000 km).

Astronomers estimate that 2012 XE54 is about 120 feet (36 meters) wide — big enough to cause substantial damage if it slams into Earth someday. An object of similar size flattened 800 square miles (2,000 square km) of forest when it exploded above Siberia's Podkamennaya Tunguska River in 1908.Asteroid 2012 XE54 also passed through Earth's shadow a few hours before its closest approach, generating an eclipse on the space rock's surface, researchers said. [Video: Asteroid 2012 XE54 Flies Closer Than Moon]

"Asteroids eclipsing during an Earth flyby are relatively rare," astronomer Pasquale Tricarico, of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., wrote in a blog post Monday (Dec. 10).

The first known case, Tricarico added, was "asteroid 2008 TC3 which was totally eclipsed just one hour before entering Earth's atmosphere over Sudan in 2008, and asteroid 2012 KT42 experiencing both an eclipse and a transit during the same Earth flyby in 2012."

2012 XE54 will be coming back to Earth's neighborhood before too much longer. The asteroid completes one lap around the sun every 2.72 years.

Scientists have discovered about 9,000 near-Earth asteroids to date, but perhaps a million or more such space rocks are thought to exist.

And some of them are potentially dangerous. Observations by NASA's WISE space telescope suggest that about 4,700 asteroids at least 330 feet (100 m) wide come uncomfortably close to our planet at some point in their orbits.

So far, researchers have spotted less than 30 percent of these large space rocks, which could obliterate an area the size of a state if they slammed into Earth.

But there are much bigger asteroids out there, such as 4179 Toutatis, a 3-mile-wide (5 km) behemoth that's in the process of flying by Earth now. Toutatis will remain 4.3 million miles (7 million km) away during its closest approach Wednesday morning, but it may come closer on future passes.

Toutatis would inflict devastating damage if it slammed into Earth, perhaps extinguishing human civilization. The asteroid thought to have killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was about 6 miles (10 km) wide, researchers say.

Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

I suspect a lot of big stuff skims off the earth's atmosphere - like a stone off water.

As a species we ve only been about for a heartbeat. Chances are we ll f**k ourselves up before the earth or sun malfunctions, as we know them.

Already 90% plus of lifeforms that have existed  are extinct. We re in our time. We might be smart and think we re in control but I suspect that the planet will be grand long after we re gone. Only tenants here after all. The planet will survve a hit - it has several - but we wont. The most developed people ever, the USA, could not cope with 'normal' weather events last ten years.

[muppet]

IS there any website to go and watch these gobshites babble on while wait for the end of the world. Apparently when that jesus freak in the US this summer was rambling on there was a board you could go read them messaging each other. Apparently they were asking if earthquakes were happening in their part of town.

If you believe this crap you have been watching the wrong youtube videos. You still have to go to work tomorrow!!

G'wan post a link. They are a fe hours behind us.
We could have a bit of fun there.

We could tell the our statues are moving.