Considering I haven't heard much about it lately, I'm assuming that we've all come to the general consensus that the world isn't going to end on December 21, 2012. I'm glad that the hype around it has died down, but it still really bugs me that there was ever hype around it at all.
If you don't know much about this 12/21/12 phenomenon it's ok, because honestly I don't either. So you're no worse off than I am (rejoice or panic accordingly). I think all you really need to know is that the Mayans were allegedly a really smart and advanced society and they stopped tracking their calendar on December 21, 2012. This automatically means the world is ending.
I'm sure there's a few other details in there that made the story a lot more compelling and scary. Maybe Nostradamus predicted it too or something? I don't really know.
But the bottom line is that if we can't even predict the weather for a single town tomorrow, I'm pretty confident that no one can predict the end of the entire world thousands of years in advance.
People are always trying to convince others that they have the exact right idea about the way things work. How many different life philosophies have you heard?
And they all conflict. "You only live once" but "Life is fragile" "In the grand scheme of things nothing matters!" but "The wings of a single butterfly beating thousands of miles away can change the course of life as we know it." ...or however that one goes.
Science is the exact same way. The world was absolutely flat until it was round. Babies should always be put to sleep on their backs until they must always be put in creepy straitjackets. Sinus infections could only be cured by antibiotics until the antibiotics did nothing to help sinus infections.
No one wants to admit that something they've done a lot of work and research for is only probably true. But honestly, life is a pretty complicated thing if you look at it scientifically. The fact that any of us could ever understand the ways of the body, the world, or the universe thoroughly and completely is pretty ridiculous.
We're only human, and a lot of things are going to be beyond our comprehension. We've made a lot of great advances over the years, don't get me wrong...but it's pretty presumptuous of us to think we could predict the end of something as complicated as the world. Those Mayans sure were arrogant! (I say that jokingly...I have never met a Mayan but I'm sure they're really great people.)
"When they discover the center of the universe, many people will be disappointed to discover they are not it."
-Bernard Bailey
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