Did the Maya believe the world would end in December 2012? With MAYA 2012: Lords of Time — a world premiere exhibition opening May 5 — the Penn Museum confronts the current fascination with the year 2012, comparing predictions of a world-transforming apocalypse with their supposed origins in the ancient Maya civilization.

In recent years, the media have been filled with claims that the ancient Maya predicted a cataclysmic event at the end of their calendar. Some believe that a celestial alignment will bring a series of devastating natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, impacts with galactic objects – such as meteorites, comets, or rogue planets – and other devastations. Proponents of this theory point to unusual planetary alignments, pole shift, the existence of an invisible binary blue star, or other theories.

While the end of the Mayan calendar seems to be the main prophetic piece of evidence for these cataclysmic events, there are others, including the Bible’s last book of The Revelation to St. John, the Chinese I Ching, the quatrains of Nostradamus and even the modern-day Web bot. Read More…

Written by Lori Henshey, source examiner.com

While many Chinese are determined to have baby in the Year of the Dragon, others have yet a different reason to procreate in 2012: They fear it may be their last chance.

All across China citizens are expressing the belief that in this year, the world may come to an end.

“Husband, the end of the world is drawing near, why don’t we have a baby. We have 10 months left,” said one user of the popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo. Her comment was only one of many in a thread that’s been started about the end of humanity.

What’s behind this belief? Look no further than “2012,” director Roland Emmerich’s 2009 film about a global disaster that brought the end of the world.

While the movie received a luke-warm reception in the U.S., Chinese audiences latched onto it. With $466 million in Chinese box office revenues, “2012″ ranks as one of Hollywood’s top-grossing films of all time in China, according to film industry research company EntGroup…Read More

Written by Laurie Burkitt, source Wall Street Journal

As a specialist in the study of time, I occasionally get asked about what I think of the so-called Mayan prophecy that the world will end in 2012. I guess people think that I’ll have some interesting insight into the cultural anthropology of time, and some special knowledge into the mysterious Mayan logics. Truthfully, it is not the Mayan logics that are mysterious, but our own. 2012 was almost a significant year in the cultural creation of time as we know it. Recently, those in charge of the global time system decided to defer to 2015 the ending of the time of Earth. Because of the timing of the debate over Earth’s time, it may come as a shock to those who expect some dismissive answer from an ivory-tower intellectual, but I think the Maya maybe were on to something.

The Mayan calendrical system consists of multiple cycles of different durations. Like a set of different-sized gears whirring together with gears completing their cycles at different times, it takes a long time for the Mayan system to return to a previous state. The Gregorian year 2012 marks a moment when this Mayan system will start over—the end of the old long count and the beginning of a new one. The Maya took such things very seriously, and as Professor Prudence Rice has demonstrated in her books, the ending of one cycle and beginning of a new one coincided with political transformations for the Maya…Read More

Written by Krystal D’Costa, Source http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/

The Nibiru collision with Earth in 2012 had been predicted for a while, but astrophysicists, cosmologists and astronomers around the world have come to a consensus that Earth will collide with the planet, which lies just outside Pluto.

Nibiru, in Babylonian Astronomy translates to “Planet of Crossing” or “Point of Transition”, especially of rivers, i.e. river crossings or ferry-boats, a term of the highest point of the ecliptic, i.e. the point of summer solstice, and its associated constellation. The establishment of the Nibiru point is described in tablet 5 of the Enuma Elish. Its cuneiform sign was often a cross, or various winged disc. The Sumerian culture was located in the fertile lands between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, at the southern part of today’s Iraq. Read More

Written by Frank Lake, Source http://weeklyworldnews.com

A huge sunspot unleashed a blob of charged plasma Thursday that space weather watchers predict will blast past the Earth on Sunday. Satellite operators and power companies are keeping a close eye on the incoming cloud, which could distort the Earth’s magnetic field and disrupt radio communications, especially at higher latitudes.

“Our simulations show potential to pack a good punch to Earth’s near-space environment,” said Antti Pulkkinen of the Space Weather Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

But, he added,

We’re not looking at an extreme event here

The front edge of the burst should arrive Sunday morning, said Joseph Kunches, a spokesman for the Space Weather Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo.

“At first glance, it was, ‘Oh my God, it’s at the center of the [sun’s] disk, it ought to go right to the Earth,’ ” Kunches said. But upon further review and “head-scratching” Thursday, NOAA’s space weather team calculated that most of the plasma blob should pass harmlessly over the top of our planet.

“It’s more of a glancing blow,” Pulkkinen said.

At their most intense, solar discharges, known as “coronal mass ejections,” candisrupt satellites, radio communications and the power grid, and force airlines to reroute transcontinental flights that pass near the North Pole. Solar activity can also generate dancing auroras, the northern and southern lights.

Spit out by the sun Thursday morning, the huge blob of charged gas spotted by NASA satellites is speeding toward Earth at more than 2 million mph. The most damaging solar discharges, which are very rare, can zoom at speeds more than twice that fast.

The ejection appears to be the most threatening since the sun spit out three large blobs in quick succession last August.

Such discharges shoot out of sunspots, which are dark areas on the sun’s surface where tangled magnetic fields sometimes discharge massive spurts of energy.

Solar activity ramps up and down on a roughly 11-year cycle. Over the past year, the number of solar flares has jumped up as the sun approaches its predicted maximum activity in 2013.

While the Earth appears to have dodged this particular solar bullet, the roiling sunspot could generate more activity over the coming week before it rotates out of the view of the Earth.

“We’re keeping a close eye on it,” Pulkkinen said.

Besides sparking pretty auroras, heightened solar activity has a more tangible benefit: It cleans up space junk. As the sun acts up, the Earth’s atmosphere expands, increasing friction on dead satellites, rocket parts and other trash in low Earth orbit, pulling them down.

The amount of debris in Earth orbit “actually decreased during 2011 as solar activity increased toward an anticipated maximum,” NASA’s chief space junk watcher, Nicholas Johnson, wrote in the January issue of the agency’s
Orbital Debris Quarterly Newsletter.

By Brian Vastag at The Washington Post

The Czech Astronomical Society (ČAS) and Academy of Sciences (AV ČR) have come out with a bold prediction that, if correct, will be easy enough to prove: the world will not come to an end on the 21st of December, the winter solstice, as some interpret the so-called Mayan calendar as forecasting.

The noted Czech astrophysicist Jiří Grygar, honorary chairman of the ČAS, told a news conference on Wednesday that countless predictions of an apocalypse, which pre-date the Bible, have come and gone — and, obviously, our planet remains intact. The last major one was connected to the turn of the millennium, while Nostradamus gave the human race more breathing room, setting the date at 2532.

Grygar noted there has long been a cottage industry of popular books about impending doomsdays. “In the year 2000 alone there were at least 25 false predictions, and among them are important names that you know from literature and the media,” Grygar said. “They too all survived … and continue to spread this nonsense.” Read Full Article

Written by Brian Kenety, Source http://www.ceskapozice.cz

From so-called biblical ‘prophets’ like Harold Camping and Ronald Weinland who predict the end of the world to their followers, to the supposed December 21, 2012, Mayan calendar prophecy, there is a segment of humanity obsessed with the end of the world from a supernatural perspective.

But it’s not just religious people who ponder the end of human life on earth. The University of Chicago maintains the so-called “Doomsday Clock,”…Read More

Source http://www.goddiscussion.com/

As humans, our seeking of a critical appreciation of just who were the Mayans, may very well be critical for averting a chain of events occurring in 2012, that may lead to an unspeakable global catastrophe. It appears that the Mayan civilization became infiltrated as a result of inter-dimensional alien entities who came through a stargate that was opened up by the Nazis… Read More

Source http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com

Depending on your conspiracy theory of choice, the world may end 11 months and change from now, give or take a few days. And just in case all of those qualified real scientists are wrong about the 2012 doomsday being complete hooey, we’ve got filmmaker Roland Emmerich’s 2009 opus2012 on hand to guide us for the potential cataclysm ahead. So grab a notepad and jot down the 18 or so essentials you’ll need to start stockpiling if you’re going to be ready to face down ultimate destruction, John Cusack-style.

The fictional 2012 opens as the Earth’s core is being heated by a freak solar flare, which accelerates a shifting of the Earth’s crust. The resulting shift triggers earthquakes and tsunamis across the globe, leaving humanity’s only hope in a series of massive arks constructed to hold survivors… just not everyone. But them’s the breaks. Look, none of us know if we’ll make it onto greedy Oliver Platt’s ginormous boat, so it’s best to come prepared… Read More

If you are wondering what the new year has to offer, in view of all the doomsday predictions being made about 2012, relax. The year is considered as a year of hope. And, if the predictions of the astrologers of Akhil Gujarat Astrological Society (AGAS) are to be believed, the year is going to be full of activity and positive developments for Gujara…Read More

*Sourced from http://www.dnaindia.com