And here I was worried about space dingoes, who knew?
People are just really bad at risk analysis. Space dingoes are a pretty low order probability event, all things considered. MUTANT space dingoes are a slightly higher order of probability, but still far below rabid space kitteh.
-XT
As mentioned above, you seem to be confusing ‘wormhole’ with ‘black hole’.
But to expound a bit, a black hole is NOT like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up everything in its path.
If you were to instantaneously (ignoring the several impossibilities with the situation) replace the sun with a black hole that has exactly the same mass as the sun, then, gravitationally, Earth would pretty much keep on, keeping on.
Of course, we’d lose our source of light and heat and pretty quickly die out, but our planet would not be sucked up by a cosmic dust-buster.
In other words, being “drawn out of” the solar system into the universe isn’t going to happen. And if it did, it could just as easily be a massive star that does it as a black hole. It just needs to be a large gravitational body, not necessarily an exotic one.
There are still several million Maya living today. The people didn’t die out.
As for what happened to their civilization, I once met an Indian (and a Libertarian) whose theory was that the Maya (sensibly) decided civilization is more trouble than it’s worth, abandoned their cities and went back to the jungle.
[QUOTE=CurtC]
There are still several million Maya living today. The people didn’t die out.
[/QUOTE]
Sure, I’m one of them (well, a small part of me is). However, their civilization and culture died. That there are still people with Mayan blood today is on par with saying that Ancient Egypt is still alive and kicking because there are still Egyptians out there with the same DNA.
-XT
Well, some of their culture survives, I believe. Their language, at least, people in the Yucatan still speak it. (The ancient Egyptian language survives only in the liturgy of Coptic Christians.)
Well, this isn’t factual, but I’ve always wondered if the Dark Ages caused us to feel this way. There actually was a period of time when older civilizations knew more than the current ones – after the fall of Rome and Greece and before the rise of modern nations. This is especially true of average people – what knowledge persisted was not widespread, but the province of specialists. Eventually people re-discovered that their predecessors had been aware of things they had only just now cottoned to. Perhaps some distant echo of that awareness causes us even now to be predisposed to assume ancient cultures had special knowledge.
That’s not Armageddon – you’re thinking of the Kïttendämmerung.
However on December 21 2012 those computers based on the Mayan calendar that haven’t been updated we will be hit with the with the year 13 B’ak’tun bug. All ancient Mayan IT specialists should start making preparations now.
Technically, there will be a year after 2012, but they’re planning on rerunning 1994 until the labor dispute sorts itself out. I’ve already ordered a carton of slap bracelets in preparation.
Well, Armegeddon is not only a thing, it also is a place. Har Megiddo in Israel, means the Mount of Megiddo. You can visit it. Bring a hand basket.