Experts almost certain world not ending today
A previously undiscovered zombie planet will not crash into the Earth today, obliterating all human life and leaving the cockroaches to roam the desolate landscape, a drove of authorities said.
These authorities, ranging from rocket scientists to anthropologists to religious leaders, also said that the sun will not spout a flare 100 million miles wide that will char the Earth like a marshmallow dropped into a campfire.
Nor, the experts confidently claim, will a distant supernova send a concentrated laser beam of gamma radiation hurtling toward our homes at near light speed, annihilating any trace of our ever having existed.
Probably.
They cannot say for sure because the future is by its nature uncertain, despite science, despite our desires, despite what we may or may not have marked on next
week's calendar.
Like all civilizations, we use calendars to help us plan for that uncertain future. Over centuries, we have honed these calendars. We have nearly perfected them. The system we use now is capable of running for all eternity, or until the sun transforms into a red giant five billion years from now and envelopes our planet.
Other calendrical systems worked slightly differently.
The ancient Mayan civilization, for example, used a calendar system that ran in cycles, like a car's odometer. When one cycle ended, that calendar ended, and another one began.
But that civilization, though once vast and powerful, had begun its demise long before Europeans arrived in Central America. Its remnants were massive pyramids, decaying cities and a calendar that, to westerners, seemed to end abruptly many hundreds of years into the future.
It ended on today's date, Dec. 21, 2012.
Cue the creepy organ music.
SCIENTIFIC DECLARATIONS
The human psyche is a wondrous thing. It can ignore pain when necessary, invent ways to explore the origins of the universe, and fabricate fantastical explanations to ordinary phenomena.
It can put itself at the world's center, and then imagine that world ending, adjusting, of course, when the end does not come. There will always be a next time.
"The first time I heard about the end of the world I was 10 years old," says Bob Pippin, the manager of the planetarium at the College of Southern Nevada.
The planetarium is hosting a show this week that focuses on the Mayan culture. It has proved quite popular, though it takes pains to debunk the apocalypse rumors.
The whole Mayan apocalypse thing has proved quite popular worldwide.
In one survey, done by global research company Ipsos on behalf of Reuters News, one in every 10 people on the planet actually believes the world will end today. That belief is slightly higher, about 12 percent, in the comfortable United States.
People around the world have reacted. They've built bunkers. They've hoarded supplies. Some have even talked of suicide.
The world's leaders responded.
NASA has blogged the heck out of it. They even produced a slick video, which they've dated Dec. 22, 2012, and posted to YouTube. It's called "Why the World Didn't End Yesterday."
The Vatican weighed in, too.
The Rev. Jose Funes, the Vatican's top astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory, wrote in the Vatican's newspaper this month that the end of the world nonsense is "not even worth discussing."
The Vatican, you may remember, has not always found itself on the side of science. It condemned Galileo in 1633, for example, for correctly arguing that the Earth revolved around the sun. An apology came 359 years later.
PARTY LIKE IT'S 2012
To many Americans, this is nothing but a business opportunity. Twelve percent of 315 million is nearly 38 million. That's a whole lot of potential customers.
The Zombie Apocalypse Store, a local institution that specializes in survival gear, reports a brisk business.
There are scads of books covering the topic, and there was that big Hollywood movie a couple years ago.
And there are parties. Lots and lots of parties.
There are "End of the World" parties at all sorts of Las Vegas nightclubs tonight, including one where folks are encouraged to bring a can of food for the homeless. Presumably, only the homeless and the cockroaches will survive the apocalypse.
Pippin, from the planetarium, blames the Internet. He said there have always been rumors of a coming apocalypse - like the one he heard when he was a little boy - but the Internet spreads them wide now and allows them to flourish.
The Internet is also really good at debunking the rumors, though. Witness the NASA video, or the Vatican's denial, which spread rapidly.
The truth will win out. We will all die today, or we will not.
If we don't, rest assured that the rumors will not go away. There will be another prediction, and another, and another. Until one of them is correct.
There is a minute, tiny, nearly immeasurable possibility that the planet will, in fact, die a grisly death in our lifetimes, rendering all the experts wrong.
A star could explode, creating a supernova that blasts us to smithereens, or a black hole that swallows us whole. We could have a collision with another celestial body and end up as a ring of rocks circling the sun.
Or a monstrous volcano could erupt, triggering a nuclear winter that lasts for decades, blocking out the sun and turning us all into victims of rickets as we slowly, painfully die.
It's even possible, however remotely, that one of those things could happen today, despite science, despite our desires, despite what we may or may not have marked on next week's calendar.
Which brings to mind the immortal words of Lloyd from "Dumb and Dumber," the lovable doofus played by Jim Carrey in the 1994 movie.
"So you're telling me there's a chance?"
Yeah. There's a chance.
Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.
