It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it
and I feel fine. R.E.M.
I had not been to NJ in several years, and when I happened to be in town, some friends of my parents invited me to lunch. We sat down around the cluttered kitchen table, with tuna fish sandwiches on white bread. Hal then turned on the TV as if I was a regular who just happened to drop by. It hung suspended above the table, clearly the most important person in the room. As Hal asked about the family, he surfed the channels, until he settled on a rebroadcast of The Mummy. I was a little bemused, but figured it was a family habit to have the picture on in the background. Then he turned up the volume. Imagine the following conversation punctuated with screams, roars, gunfire, chase music and the occasional earthquake.
“Did you know that the world is going to end in 2012?” shouted his wife Kathy over the din. (On screen, the earth cracks open, spewing fire.) I froze in mid-bite. Somehow tuna fish eating Mummy movie fans didn’t seem like Doomsday followers.
“Where did you hear that?” I asked.
“On the History Channel,” she answered, “They explained the whole thing.” (Chase music)
“You mean about the Mayan Calendar?” I asked. (Girl screams as she falls out window)
“Yeah,” said Hal. “It says it all ends December 21, 2012. And other stuff, you know like the magnetic poles shifting. And the precession of the equinoxes. And the whole thing hits the fan end of 2012.” (Gunfire, boom! Boom!)
Hal’s major interests are deer hunting and making fishing poles so this turn in the conversation made me wonder if my red-neck neighbors had been replaced by pod people. “Never make assumptions,” says Don Miguel Ruiz in his famous book The Four Agreements.
As I tried to recover, their daughter Looli walked in, greeted me, looked up at the TV and said, “Oh cool, my favorite movie.”
“Your favorite movie?”
“Yeah,” she answered, “I watch it all the time.” I tried to imagine coming home from work and actually choosing to watch The Mummy every night.
“Why?”
Looli shrugged, “It’s cool.”
I had now been surprised three times in ten minutes: tuna on white for guests, the end of the world and a passion for the Mummy. My former neighbors had managed to defy my expectations. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book, The Black Swan, tells us to expect not what we predict, but the unexpected. He titled his book this way because for centuries people asserted that black swans did not, could not exist. And voila! They appeared in Australia. He says that the one thing you can count on is that things won’t turn out as planned. (This could put a big hole in positive thinking theory!) He’s pointed out that many predicted events did not come to pass, including of course, the end of the world, which has been predicted many times.
He cites many erroneous methods of prediction – from making conclusions based on the past, to the bell curve. Taleb explains what psychologists call the “disappointment effect.” It’s the feeling we have when things didn’t go as predicted. He says it’s because we can’t possibly understand the random nature of things.
All this got me thinking about the end of the world. I mean it is 2012. These end of the world predictions can’t be based on either historical evidence or the bell curve. You can’t average out the amount of times the world has ended, right? Can we truly trust the predictions of the History Channel?
The last time cataclysm was predicted was Y2K. I have friends who stored hundreds of gallons of water and batteries for Y2K, one even put in solar panels for her well, and then nothing happened. I do think some of them were just a little disappointed, probably because they never got to relish the “I told you so” effect.
Of course, that was just preparing for a massive power failure. How exactly do you prepare for the end of the world? I’ve given this a fair amount of thought and I’ve decided that either we are deeply intuitive, Mother Nature has a plan we are blindly following, or we are just brilliant. You see, we don’t have to prepare. We are already ready; Armageddon here we come. Following are some of the more popular end of times predictions and how humans have solved problems in advance.
Prediction:
The sun is going to position itself in front of a black hole in the Milky Way, causing massive climate change and natural disasters.
How we are preparing:
No problem! By destroying the ozone layer, we have already begun the process of preparing for climate change. Eye glasses have UV protection in them that change their color from indoors to outdoors. Sunscreens are now at SPF 50 or is it 80? As the temperatures rise due to global warming, our bodies will begin to adapt. Those Bikram “hot yoga” folks have the right idea. Any day now, its founder is going to claim credit for creating a new race of folks ready for our altered planet. Sure, when the planet bursts into flame, some of us won’t be able to take the heat. But those of us who have become addicted to chipotle sauce on everything should be dowsing with habanero sauce soon. And anyone consumed in flames can be consoled that the planet really needs more organic material to replenish the stores of oil that have been consumed in the last century.
As for the natural disasters coming our way; floods, tsunamis and cyclones everywhere are creating a booming industry for rescue products, emergency food packaging and portable medical kits. It will only be a short time before these new products will be at Target where every family can purchase enough supplies to get them through to 2013.
Prediction:
Sunspots will cause major flares that affect our magnetic poles. As the poles begin to reverse, the earth will lose its magnetic field. No one knows exactly what will happen, although (as usual) some doom sayers are already preparing to profit from predictions of disaster. Author Patrick Geyrl assures us that “…life after a polar reversal is nothing but horror, pure unimaginable horror. All securities you presently have at hand, like – amongst others – food, transport, and medicines, will have disappeared in one big blow, dissolved into nothingness. As will our complete civilization. It cannot be more horrifying than this; worse than the worst nightmare. More destructive than a nuclear war in which the entire global arsenal of nuclear weapons has been deployed in one blow.” Paradoxically, he calls his website survive2012.com – he’s either an optimist or a magician. I’m not sure what bell curve he is using to base his predictions. Or perhaps, this being a cosmic event, Mr. Geyrl is channeling wisdom from ancient civilizations. But he has neglected one important difference between 2012 and 25000 BCE (one of the times our poles reversed). The ancients were lacking technology.
How we are preparing:
Who needs a magnetic pole? Humans have ingeniously become their own magnetic fields. Cell phone use is now creating a global electromagnetic field large enough to save the entire solar system, maybe the entire universe. It’s a marvel we are not all glowing. (They say that Mars lost its atmosphere in one of the pole shifts. If only the Martians had had Verizon!). This combined with the emfs from our microwaves, halogen lights, HDTVs and of course computers should surely keep us magnetized till the earth re-organizes.
In addition, each human generates an electromagnetic field. This could explain the huge boom in our population. Mother Earth is planning to use all that energy to keep things spinning till the sun spots pass. Everybody hold hands now. Which leads right up to ….
Prediction:
As the precession of the equinoxes moves across the skies we are sitting at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. According to author John Major Jenkins, “A door into the heart of space and time will open.” Cool.
How we are preparing:
Granny dresses are back in fashion in NYC. As are peace sign earrings. Madonna has embraced the Kabbalah. Oprah had Eckhart Tolle on her show. The Love Guru is in town. I’m dusting off my Hair album and will be wearing flowers in my hair this spring. If the emfs haven’t made me bald that is.
Pascal once said, “We are so busy regretting the past and worrying about the future that we forget to be in the present.” And G.I. Gurdjieff said, “ It is only with the present that you can repair the past and prepare the future.” There is no point to building pyramids or nuclear shelters, storing food and stocking up on weapons. If Mother Earth is done with us, then she will, as the late, great George Carlin once said, “…shake us off like a bunch of fleas.” But at least if I live for this moment, living every day as if it were my last, it will be a life well spent.
I suppose there will be those who will be disappointed when they wake up on December 22, 2012 to find themselves still stuck on the blue globe, their expectations and preparations all for naught. I’ll be dancing and singing, “Let the Sun Shine In.” Hmm, I wonder if that song was a foreshadowing of the sun spots.