There’s been a lot of info on the History Channel about the “end of days”. I have no position whether it is coming, or when. But from watching a few of the shows I’ve a question that those of you who are more scientifically endowed than I could possibly check. It was a visual thing that struck me as odd. Here’s how it goes.
From one program they visited the “Rapture” which is supposed to happen before the end of days. That many people will be taken. It was the visual part of those people disintegrating that started me thinking.
On another show hosted by Morgan Freeman, he talks about a mathmetician who calculated the existance of “wormholes”. Don’t remember his name. Anyway his proposal was scoffed at because at the end of his calculations, he proposed that people would just “disintegrate” (my word, not his) .
Many people have said that we might be heading for collision with a huge asteroid and that’s what will bring about the end of days. No one has seen anything like that out there.
The Mayans and many others have looked to the sky for the end of days. What if instead of an asteroid it comes from the heavens in the form of a “wormhole” instead. Do we know enough about them to predict where large ones might be? Instead of being crashed into, might we be drawn “out of” our earthly home into the universe???
No, I’m not a believer of this, it’s just an idea to toss around.
Define “wormhole”?
To my limited knowledge, wormholes are tiny things which collapse in the presence of matter. They’re certainly not Deep Space Nine style passages which you can fly through. I admit freely that I’ve only peripherally read references to wormholes, though, and am happy to be corrected.
More importantly, no one has actually ever seen one. There’s some math which says that such a thing is possible, but that’s the extent of it.
And if they do exist, they’re smaller than an electron. They don’t form naturally on any larger scale.
And if you were “disintegrate” into one, you would just re-appear somewhere else in the universe, so unless you believe that some other planet in a distant solar system is Heaven, there’s not much Holy use of wormholes for the Rapture.
Well, if DtC were here he could go into the history of the Rapture. I know it’s fundamentalist Christian dogma, and I believe there is some basis in the Bible (from Revelations, IIRC). Trying to hook this into ‘real’ science is a bit problematic though.
As the other posters in the thread say, ‘wormholes’ aren’t thought (by the scientific community that actually know about this stuff) to exist on large scales in the universe except perhaps in very special environments (like perhaps in the singularity of a black hole, thought that’s highly speculative…plus, basically if you are close enough to a black hole the possible wormhole at it’s core is the least of your worries).
Most likely you are mixing up ‘wormhole’ with ‘black hole’, however. I’ve seen a couple of specials on Science this last week and one of them was talking about potential disasters that could befall the earth…and one of those was the highly unlikely possibility of a wandering black hole entering the solar system and doing Bad Things™ to the earth, sun and other planets. If that happened it would be curtains for everyone, no doubt.
Actually, there is a pretty big asteroid that, IIRC, will make a close pass to the earth (actually inside of the orbit of the moon) in 2029…and if that asteroid (it’s named Apophis btw, and factors in the game Rage, fwiw :p) hits what’s called a ‘key hole’ it could come back in another decade or so (don’t remember when exactly) and slam into the earth then. It would be a VERY bad day if that happens. IIRC, the odds are less than 1 in 1000 that it will hit that key hole though…and zero that it will happen with that particular asteroid in 2012. The only thing that might hit us in that time frame would be a really fast moving comet or a sunward and very dark asteroid that hasn’t been detected yet.
As for the Mayans, I wouldn’t fret too much. They make a big deal about the supposed end of days prophesy, but it’s mostly bullshit. Their long count calendar is basically like the odometer on your car. When it hits 999999 and you go one more mile, it just resets back to 000000. Your car doesn’t explode and the world doesn’t end. You just are interested because of the number change and how that plays on how humans are built and why dippy shit like that fascinates us. The Mayans didn’t have any special knowledge, contrary to popular cable/satellite TV belief. They certainly didn’t predict their own end, which happened centuries ago. And they certainly didn’t know what a wormhole was.
Finally, the odds of a wormhole suddenly opening up in our skies and dumping a big rock on a collision course with the earth are somewhat less than the odds of Ron Paul becoming president of the US…probably several orders of magnitude less probable than Paul becoming president actually. IOW, it’s such a remote chance as to be for all practical purposes zero. An alien invasion by rabid space kittens is more likely.
No worries. Just take what you see on those shows with a mountainous and non-wormhole fed grain of NaCl…
-XT
People scoff at everything, but blackholes are pretty well accepted today, if not wormholes. I don’t know what he meant by disintegration, but the gravitational gradient near a big black hole would tear anyone and anything apart pretty well, which would sure look like disintegration.
On the contrary, we have lots of evidence that a big asteroid crashed near the Yucatan Peninsula and probably helped wipe out the dinosaurs. We know of plenty of large asteroids, just none on a collision course. Yet.
It is a big universe and most black holes are small and have a limited lifespan. The giant one in the center of our galaxy is staying put. There is nothing impossible about a black hole wreaking damage, but no real reason to worry. We are much more likely to kill ourselves than for an asteroid or a black hole to do it for us.
You forget the possibility that the rabid space kittens will be the ones to open the wormhole and drop the asteroid on us, to soften us up in preparation for the invasion.
From the scientific texts I’ve been reading, rabid space kittens are much more likely to open up a wormhole and throw a really large ball of yarn (that would ‘soften us up’ nicely, at a guess) at us…and then chase it through the wormhole and pounce. So, I don’t think the wormhole/asteroid theory in conjunction with rabid space kittens is very probable. But…you never know…
-XT
There is a current theme among a number of Christian groups regarding the “Rapture.” While there have been various movements within Christianity over the last two thousand years that have discussed or predicted the End Times, the notion of the Rapture is actually a rather new invention, being fewer than 200 years old in its current form. While it is quite popular among some groups in the U.S. and Great Britain, it is actually not a long Christian tradition. A brief outline of its history follows.
Manuel de Lacunza (1731 – 1801), a Jesuit from Chile, exiled in Italy, suffered a number of personal setbacks when the Society of Jesus came under attack by the Spanish King, then the French king and the pope. He withdrew as a hermit from the community of Jesuit exiles with whom he had been living and began to view the world through his own misfortunes. Writing under the pen name: Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra, he wrote La venida del Mesías en gloria y majestad, observaciones de Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra in1790 and it was circulated throughout South America. After his death, it was published in 1811 and published in England in 1816. It was banned for various errors in 1819, and placed on the Index in 1824.
Edward Irving (1792 – 1834), was a Scot preacher who discovered Lacunza’s book and published an English translation in 1827. He, too, was caught up in the idea of applying biblical prophecies to specific events and Lacunza’s work provided a path for him to follow.
John N. Darby (1800 – 1882), was an Anglo-Irish priest who worked to convert Irish Catholic peasants to the Church of Ireland, turning them from “Rome.” He fell out with the Irish church when the bishop of Dublin ruled that his converts had to also swear that the British king was the rightful ruler of Ireland. He began to view an ordained priesthood as incompatible with Christian beliefs, then, influenced by Irving’s works, he joined with others who were dissatisfied with the Churches of England and Ireland to form the Plymouth Brethren. From Irving, Darby borrowed the ideas of Dispensationalism, (individual salvation moments), and millennialism, and from those ideas created the previously unknown notion of the Rapture.
There were extensive exchanges of religious thought and belief between the U.K. and U.S. during the nineteenth century, and Darby’s ideas began to show up in both newly formed religious communities and established denominations. Among those who followed his beliefs were Dwight Moody, (of the Moody Bible Institute), and C.I. Scofield (of the Scofield Reference Bible, 1909), ensuring that the notion of the Rapture was given a prominent place among American Christians, despite its recent creation.
As an incidental note, I gather the History Channel (and other channels) are embracing a lot of doomsday programming because it’s now possible and cheap to slap together CGI footage of continents crumbling and cities going up in flames and whatnot. Seriously, would anyone watch Life After People if it didn’t show the Eiffel Tower eventually succumbing to rust and disintegrating across the Champ de Mars? Such programming wouldn’t be possible (or at least 50 times more expensive) just a decade ago.
So what?
The current hoopla over the Mayan calendar is based on nothing. The Mayans worked out a calendar that could set dates for hundreds of years. They set out two of their complete cycles, then quit, (since they had to carve all the dates into stone and the end of the second long cycle took them hundreds of years into their future). Based on the Mayans not “publishing” a third cycle, some idiots have claimed tha the Mayans “predicted” the end of the world. They did no such thing and regardless whether they “looked to the sky” or stared at their navels, they never predicted an end to the world.
I’ve looked around and the stores are full of calendars for 2012 but have none for 2013! My God… will there be a 2013?!?!
No there won’t; it’s been cut for budget reasons.
Christo’s plan to make the earth look like a ball of yarn - cancel immediately!
Or, even more simply, there’s no such thing as prophecy.
I knew you were going to say that.
Astronomers have telescopes now; any pre-telescope astronomy is of only historical interest.
If the Mayans could predict the future, there would still be Mayans.
It always puzzles me why people think that The Ancients™ had some sort of special knowledge that is beyond us. I suppose it could have been the space aliens telling them secrets or something along those lines, but like HoboStew said, if the Mayans actually knew and could predict the future then, well, there would still be Mayans kicking about. If the space aliens didn’t clue them in on the little detail that they were going to be wiped out centuries before the end, well…that’s kind of a rip, no?
That said, I heard that there was a recent discovery on a remote island in the Pacific where, supposedly, the Ancient Mayans(aar) built what looked like a large naturally formed rock formation vaguely in the form of a crouching jaguar (and here is where it gets good), and if you really look hard at the top (and you are doing really heavy drugs at the same time) you can almost make out a name, written in Mayan (which is amazing, considering they didn’t have an equivalent alphabet to ours!) that says:
My name Poncy SilverKitteh…you keeled my fathah…prepare to die (in 2012 when I toss a really big ball of yarn at yoose an’ my kitteh horde pounces on yoose sorry dos leggedy asses!)
I’m not sure, but that sounds ominous to me. :eek:
-XT
Was it near a hidden wagon?
Nope, but a golden goat was definitely involved, FWIW. Scary stuff…
-XT