December 21st, 2012

I was watching what seemed to be a harmless documentary about prophecies on the National Geographic Channel today and it centered on the date you see in the title. Turns out that the documentary was not so harmless - as a matter of fact, it kind of impressed me! Have you seen this? "Google" this date and grab on to your seat. Apparently, the news aren´t so good.

You've heard all the prophecies about the fires of hell and rise of the oceans and famines and plagues... Nostradamus and the likes have all said that the earth would come to a tragic and apocalyptic end. But whether or not the world "should have" ended some 56 times by now, the fact is that I'm still here talking to you. We can sleep soundly, agree?

Well, this is where things get interesting:

The Ancient Mayan Calendar was and is one of man's greatest creations, still as accurate as our own computerized calendars today. It has 12/21/12 as its last day, when a cataclysm, the end of time, is predicted. So what, right?

What if I told you this same message appeared almost five millenia before that, and a few thousand miles away, in the chinese I Ching? The "Book of Changes", as it is also known, has been widely regarded as a sort of oracle. Believe it or not, it was written in a pattern that, when shown mathematically, comes to an abrupt stop on one specific date: 12/21/12. Strange, wouldn´t you say? You're still not impressed?

Merlin (yes, the medieval sorcerer) was not only real but also a prophet. Yes, you guessed it. More?

The native-american Hopi indians, who, by the way, have a rather impressive prophecy track record, have december 21, 2012 as their (and our) last day on earth.

Even the Holy Bible gets into this mess, saying that 2012 is the year of a new holocaust.

Ok, maybe you see prophecies as pure nonsense. Will science suffice?

This day, which corresponds to the summer/winter solstice, has a bit of a cosmic event in store for us. For the first time in 25,800 years, the earth, sun and moon will be perfectly aligned with the colossal black hole in the center of our galaxy, raising in the minds of some the question as to whether the earth's gravity and its magnetic stability will suffer.

Coincidentally or not, the earth's magnetic field periodically inverts itself, turning north to south and vice-versa, causing a "planetary migraine" (basically, all hell breaks loose for a while until things settle down again). Not only are we due for one of these but there are already minute signs that a shift is in progress.

Still, does this mean that we can expect some kind of spasm in our solar system? I'm not too worried about it. Seems a bit far-fetched to me. Who knows, maybe the show I watched was a little bit sensationalist (and I, a little naive!) and it was looking for fire where there was no smoke. TV ratings, you know how it is... In any case, a lot of anthropologists and scholars say that much of the information obtained from the works of these civilizations has been misinterpreted.

I'm not too sure. Who knows what is and what isn´t possible! What if?

The answer to that question is:
December 22nd, 2012.