End of the world? Or Mayan Malarkey.

In a recent History Channel (two-hour) program, the "end of the world" was featured in terms of certain forecasts made by Nostradamus, and the so-called Mayan "end of the planet" prediction due to arrive on Dece. 21, 2012. All over the net, it seems, people are going bonkers worrying about what will happen, whether daylight will "disappear" and all humanity will come to perdition.

The main thrust of the program (which went on for two hours) appeared to be that there existed a concordance between certain quatrains penned by Nostrodamus, and the Mayans' own prognostications based on their astronomy. At the heart of both was that on the day of note (December 21, 2012) the Sun would dawn and its rays would be reinforced by the "dark rift" of the Milky Way galaxy.

As with astrology (see my earlier blog entry from two years ago) the error made is one of specious symbolic association. Because the Milky Way has a "dark rift" which the Sun will be aligned with on some occasions (about once every 100 million years) then it must follow if the Sun's light is aligned with the dark rift something awful must happen. Perhaps, as the introduction to the program suggested, there will be no dawn on that day and the end of sunlight as we know it!

Poppycock! This is no different from one's "birth sign" (say Leo or Cancer) having Mars in it, and facing a violent day (according to many astrologers) - merely because Mars is "blood red" in color. (Actually, Mars is not blood red in color, it is ochre or rust-colored, on account of the large amounts of ferrous oxide).

The program is clever, however, in that it really doesn't expatiate or concentrate on the "dark rift" alignment and wanders off instead to considering a whole raft of disasters that Nostradamus' quatrains might mean. Such as, accelerated global warming. Or, some disaster - like an asteroid or comet strike - which heralds a nuclear winter. (In this case, the Sun is indeed blotted out, but by the trillions of tons of dust hurled into the atmosphere following a collision with a 1-2 mile rock from space- which may last for years and result in mass starvation on accoumnt of crops dying worldwide)

In a way this is cheating, because the intro led the viewer to believe or accept a direct causal link to the Sun's alignment with the dark rift. But if global warming or an asteroid collision is responsible for our end, then clearly it has nothing to do with any alignments with a dark rift. This is simply an obfuscation. A distraction, a red herring.

Neither is tying in Nostradamus or his quatrains very helpful, since the way they were written left open a multitude of interpretations. I can think of no better examples of a kind of poetic Rohrschach blot than any of those quatrains. But dragging in Nostradamus has the beneficial effect of adding a layer of mystery.

The program also mentioned the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, which indeed could cause a lot of consternation - given our atmosphere would now be exposed to all the Sun's radiation and energetic particles (at the midpoint of reversal when the field ceases to exist or is at a minimum).

But again, this has absolutely nothing to do with any alignment of the Milky Way's dark rift with the Sun. To suggest such a connection is to practice unwarranted extrapolation which is not based on any credible astrophysical or astronomical data.

As I have said before, there are genuine threats to humanity out there, among which the two most prominent are a large asteroid collision, and the runaway greenhouse effect. The tragedy is that by focusing on fake catastrophes like the Mayan 'end of daylight', people will cease to attend to the real threats by taking actual actions now. Say like cutting back on consumption of fossil fuels to abate or delay the onset of the worst greenhouse gas warming.

Or, by writing letters and making calls to congressional representatives to get off their duffs and re-fund the 'Project Space guard' program which had attempted to develop improved methods of monitoring asteroids, and also implement ways to deflect them if they threatened Earth.