 |
boytoy_84 said:
No. According to USA WEEKEND on the cover of the magazine, "THE END OF THE WORLD IS NOT NEAR"
Start with Nibiru, a rogue planet: This planet supposedly discovered by the ancient Sumerians is on a side-swiping course with Earth, says a Wisconsin woman who famously claims contact with aliens. No, says astrophysicist Tyson: "There's no planet Nibiru. We would have seen anything the size of a planet headed our way a long time ago." In fact, he notes that the most recently discovered dwarf planets reside in orbits farther away than Pluto, which is 40 times more distant from the sun than Earth is. Sumerians didn't even know about Uranus, which astronomers spotted in 1781.
OK, how about a killer asteroid? We mean like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs and threatened Bruce Willis' acting cred in 1998's Armageddon. But that "when" is sometime in the next 100 million years or so, not this month. Tyson notes that NASA estimates there are 4,700 "potentially hazardous" asteroids at least 330 feet wide within Earth's 5-million-mile neighborhood. "But those are mostly ones that threaten a city if they landed nearby, not the whole planet," Tyson says. "They whiz past us all the time."
Now, what about the Maya? Stuart was part of a Science journal team that in May reported the discovery of a scribe's hut that contained Maya calendar markings corresponding to dates after the year 3500--long after our 2012.The classic Maya civilization of pyramid cities in Central America collapsed around A.D. 850. It's elaborate calendar system starts a new "baktun," or 394-year century, this month. "For the classic Maya, 2012 would have been a noteworthy date on the calendar but not much more" Stuart says. Leaving aside the prophetic powers of rulers who didn't foresee their own downfall, Stuart casts doubt in in his book on the translation of inscriptions at the ruins of Tortuguero, Mexico, that partly inspired the craze. The inscriptions seem to be a ruler's boast about how long her dynasty would last.
|
|
