Examining End Of The World Theories Philosophy Essay

Countless of ages ago in Earth’s Mesozoic history, there was a time when mammoth beings, both on land and sea, were common. These creatures reigned a supreme existence for a long period of time, only to succumb at length and disappear. Many species even within our own time have become extinct; can man then always hope to have the pre-eminence? Astronomy teaches that, just as our solar system had a beginning, so it must encompass an end, and that, there will come a time when man will no longer be able to exist. Science; cold and calculating, has foretold the physical end of the world. Substantiated with seemingly logical explanations from experts, never once was the notion of the looming ‘end’ denied, and prophecies of the world’s destruction are now more rampant, especially when the majority of these theories advocate that the year 2012 will be the de facto doom of our planet and it’s inhabitants.

The year 2012 is acting like a badly behaved celebrity. Frightful rumors and gossip are spreading. Already more than a half dozen books are marketing, to eager fans, astronomical fears about 2012 End Times. Opening in theaters on Friday, Nov. 13, will be 2012, a $200-million disaster movie that seems designed to break all records for disaster spectacles — with cracking continents, plunging asteroids, burning cities, and a tsunami throwing an aircraft carrier through the White House. The movie’s ominous slogan: “Find out the truth.” Two other major movies about the 2012 doomsday are also reported to be in the works.

The ancient Maya of Mexico and Guatemala kept a calendar that is about to roll up the red carpet of time, swing the solar system into transcendental alignment with the heart of the Milky Way, and turn Earth into a bowling pin for a rogue planet heading down our alley for a strike. What exactly is the Maya calendar about to do? On Dec. 21, 2012, it will display the equivalent of a string of zeros, like the odometer turning over on your car, with the close of something like a millennium. Scholars have deciphered how the Maya calendar worked from historical texts and ancient inscriptions, and they have accurately correlated Maya dates with the equivalent dates in our calendar. Just as we number our years counting from a historically and culturally significant event (the presumed birth year of Christ), Maya times were numbered from a date endowed with religious and cosmic significance: the creation date of the present world order.

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We”ve had similar scares in the recent past, but none quite like this. The last time the world got all worked up over the mystical turning of a calendar was the false Millennium of Jan. 1, 2000. Never mind the actual Y2K computer-date bug. True-believer authors (and their imitators) published scary and/or hopeful books about the moment’s prophetic potential to catch an immense cosmic wave and change everything for either good or ill. Borrowing a forecast from Nostradamus, the 16th-century French riddler, author Charles Berlitz predicted catastrophe in his 1981 book Doomsday 1999. Berlitz (fresh off books on Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle), warned that 1999 could inflict flood, famine, pollution and a shift of Earth’s magnetic poles. He also spotlighted the planetary alignment of May 5, 2000, and warned that it could bring solar flares, severe earthquakes, “land changes” and “seismic explosions.”

In the 1990s an entire “Earth Changes” movement swelled into being as the end of the century neared, with all sorts of Millennial expectations — earthquakes, plagues, polar axis shifts, continents sliding into the sea, Atlantis rising and more. In England, the Sun tabloid predicted a “marvelous millennium of joy, peace, prosperity.”

When Jan. 1, 2000, came and went with nothing worse than ski-lift passes printing the date as 1900, the focus shifted to “5/5/2000” several months later. Most believers in the power of planetary alignments forgot the failure of earlier lineups to induce disaster. The “Jupiter Effect” cataclysm predicted for March 10, 1982 (named for the 1974 book about it by John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann) commanded headlines but never materialized.

Throughout history, end-of-the-world movements missing their mark number in the “hundreds of thousands at the very least, says Richard Landes, historian at Boston University and director of its Center for Millennial Studies. But people eager for the world to end are not to be denied, and this time, of course, all will be different. Thousands of years ago the Mayans managed to calculate the length of the lunar moon as 329.53020 days, only 34 seconds out. The Mayan calendar predicts that the earth will end on December 21, 2012. Given that they were pretty close to the mark with the lunar cycle, it’s highly probable they’ve got the end of the world right as well.

Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the Large Hadron Collider is housed in an oval-shaped, 7-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border. Currently the world’s largest, most expensive scientific experiment in history, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was designed to smash atoms together to find out what makes the universe tick. However, the mega-gadget has caused serious concern, with some scientists suggesting that it’s properly even a bad idea to turn it on in the first place. They’re predicting all manner of deadly results, including mini black holes. So when this machine is fired up for its first serious experiment in 2012, the world could be crushed into a super-dense blob the size of a basketball. In an instant – about one-twentieth of a second – the entire Earth would simply vanish from space.

Less than two seconds later, the Moon would follow suit. Eight minutes later, the Sun would be ripped apart, followed by the rest of the planets in the solar system and onwards, a wave of destruction caused by a rent in the fabric of space itself, spreading out from our world at the speed of light.

Although it was designed to answer the fundamental questions of life, some people have claimed that it could end up destroying the entire cosmos.

This gigantic £4 billion-plus atom-smasher has been built under the Swiss-French border near Geneva, and is the most powerful device ever built for probing the secrets of the atom and the forces and particles which make up our Universe.

It is a staggering device, occupying a train-sized tunnel 18 miles long, buried 300ft underground, studded with gigantic, cathedral-sized ring-shaped detectors where collisions between packets of ‘heavy’ subatomic particles, ‘hadrons’, will take place in the hope that the innermost workings of matter and energy will be revealed.

The LHC is, arguably, the most impressive machine ever built by Mankind.

But a few people are convinced that it should never be turned on. A lawsuit has been lodged at the European Court For Human Rights by a small group of maverick scientists.

They claim there is a small – but not zero – chance that when the LHC is activated it will create either a mini-black hole which would fall into the ground and swallow the Earth from within (scenario one).

Or, even more bizarrely, trigger a catastrophic chain reaction in the very fabric of space and time itself, which would rip apart the entire universe like the skin of a bursting balloon (scenario two).

Bizarrely, this group, led by a German chemist called Otto Rossler, are using the European Convention on human rights to argue that, should the LHC destroy the entire Universe, it would ‘violate the right to life and right to private family life’.

In fact, since 1994, when the collider was first mooted by the multi-national European nuclear research organisation (CERN), a small number of doomsayers have claimed that by replicating the conditions pertaining at the start of the universe (Big Bang), about 13,700 million years ago, there would be a small but real risk an unstoppable cataclysm would take place.

Yellowstone National Park in United States is famous for its thermal springs and old faithful geyser. The reason for this is simple — it’s sitting on top of the world’s biggest volcano and geological experts are beginning to get nervous sweats. The Yellowstone volcano has a pattern of erupting every 650,000 years or so, and we’re many years overdue for an explosion that will fill the atmosphere with ash, blocking the sun and plunging the earth into a frozen winter that could last up to 15,000 years. The pressure under the Yellowstone is building steadily, and geologists have set 2012 as a likely date for the big bang.

Reason seven: Earth’s magnetic field

We all know the Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that shields us from most of the sun’s radiation. What you might not know is that the magnetic poles we call North and South have a nasty habit of swapping places every 750,000 years or so — and right now we’re about 30,000 years overdue. Scientists have noted that the poles are drifting apart roughly 20-30 kms each year, much faster than ever before, which points to a pole-shift being right around the corner. While the pole shift is under way, the magnetic field is disrupted and will eventually disappear, sometimes for up to 100 years. The result is enough UV outdoors to crisp your skin in seconds, killing everything it touches.

NASA’s Ask an Astrobiologist Web site, for example, has received thousands of questions regarding the 2012 doomsday predictions-some of them disturbing, according to David Morrison, a senior scientist with the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

“A lot of [the submitters] are people who are genuinely frightened,” said Morrison, who thinks movie marketers, authors, and others out to make a buck are feeding some of the fears.

“I’ve had two teenagers who were considering killing themselves, because they didn’t want to be around when the world ends,” he said. “Two women in the last two weeks said they were contemplating killing their children and themselves so they wouldn’t have to suffer through the end of the world.”

In an article in National Geographic, Norway has begun preparations for impending doom in 2012. It can be implied by the article that Norway believes there will be a major catastrophe to occur in 2012 and in order to preserve our current way of life, Norway has created a “doomsday seed bank”. Yes, thats correct… that is Norway’s official name for their global seed bank. The ultimate goal is for the continued survival of plant species if (or when) there is a global disaster. This storage of crops/seeds will ensure regrowing of plants after the disaster and ultimately lead to the continued survival of human beings.

How to survive after disaster- Dug deep into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, the “doomsday” vault (see photos) is designed by Norway to protect the world’s seeds from global catastrophe. If global catastrophes like asteroid impacts or disease pandemics were to strike, seeds stored in this first ever “doomsday” vault would ensure that humans could regrow the crops needed for survival.

The operation is financed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which was founded by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International, a Rome-based research group.These crops, researchers say, are the raw genetic materials needed for breeders to adapt the global food supply to survive climate change, water and energy shortages, and even shifts in food preferences.

The trust is the leading force behind the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a repository built by the Norwegian government to store backup copies of as many as three million different crop varieties.

Construction leader Magnus Bredeli-Tveiten said the vault has been designed to withstand earthquakes-successfully tested by a 6.2 magnitude temblor off Svalbard last week-and even a direct nuclear strike.

Even if power fails and cuts off the air conditioning, the permafrost insulating the vault would help keep the seeds “cold for 200 years even in the worst case climate scenario,” Fowler said.

He expects the vault’s life span to rival that of Egypt’s ancient pyramids.

Currently about 1,400 seed banks are in operation worldwide, each serving as a genetic library for anywhere from a handful to several thousand different crop varieties.

The Norway vault will collect samples from local banks in so-called black boxes. These packages will stay unopened in the Svalbard facility unless the need arises for a variety that is otherwise used up or wiped out.

The Mayan Calendar- end 2012

Yellowstone Park’s Supervolcano eruption.- every 64, 0000 years, next possibility 2012

CERN’s Particle Accelerator- black holes- full force activation on 2012

NASA’s theory of earth’s poles shifting- in motion by 2012

National Geography- Norway’s underground facility for doomsday.

Sun’s expansion to decay- global warming/iceberg melting/natural disasters

National Geography- Norway’s underground facility for doomsday.