The hype is
beginning to invade the cultural landscape like bio-engineered kudzu: the end
of the world is a mere three years away.
In late
December, 2012, thanks to an unusual celestial alignment — or maybe just the
expiration date of the Mayan calendar — our planet will be wracked
and ruined. Look on the bright side: you can blow off your estimated tax
payments for that year.
Hollywood
producers — never ones to miss a silver lining — are hoping to make some hay
with Earth's imminent quietus. A soon-to-be-released
film, bearing the inventive title "2012", will let you see just how
visually stunning doomsday can be.
The
brouhaha has got some people's knickers in a knot. Scientists have waded into
this sticky chiffon of pseudoscience and hyperbole, and told everyone to cool
it. The end is not nigh, guy. After all, the apocalypse is routinely
predicted, but always fails to appear.
This isn't
just a reference to the somber forecasts of the Heaven's Gate crowd, or other
dire warnings at the turn of the millennium — forecasts that were wildly
inaccurate. No, you have to consider the big picture: There's been life on this
planet for nearly four billion years, and nothing — not
asteroids, gamma ray bursts, shifting magnetic poles, or the occasional
supernova — nothing has managed to snuff it out. Life's tougher than a
leather sandwich.
The idea
that the Mayan calendar could tell you when the world is going to end is straight-out
goofy. Heck, if the Mayans were this good at divining the future, you'd think
their empire would still be around. As for cosmic alignments — well, they
happen all the time, and no one seems the worse for wear. And indeed, what
difference could they make? Work it out: even when Jupiter is closest to Earth,
the force it exerts on our world is 20 thousand times weaker than that exerted
by the Sun every day (and the influence of the other planets is far less than
Jupiter's).
So except
for those benighted souls who insist on confounding movies with reality, the
whole thing is a tempest in a teacup, right? Isn't that what all the science
types will be writing once the film hits the multiplex?
Of course
it is. But there's also this: doomsday for humans really will happen, at
least if a few hundred million extinct species are any precedent. It's been
estimated that 99.9 percent of all the critters that ever wiggled or waddled
across this planet are past tense.
In other words,
and despite the fact that we blithely think of ourselves as the crown of creation,
we're no more Nature's ultimate product than'56 Chevys were the last of the
cars. Our species will come to an end, and, presumably, be replaced by a new
model.
But not
yet. Not in 2012. And the reason is what I call the "why now?" factor, which is
really only a temporal version of the Copernican principle. Stated in simple
terms, today's not likely to be a special time.
Here's an
example. Many people are convinced that aliens have come to Earth to
abduct humans. But why now? Why is it that, given 10,000 generations of
human history, the aliens are bestowing their unwanted attentions on people today?
That's like winning the lottery, even if the prize is not as savory as a pile
of cash.
Princeton
physicist J. Richard Gott exploited this idea a decade or so ago to gauge everything
from cosmic timescales to the run of Broadway plays. A simplified Gott
calculation of Homo sapiens' tenure would go like this: Adopting the
"why now?" philosophy, we can say with 98 percent certainty that humankind is
neither in the first 1 percent of its existence, nor in its last 99 percent.
Doing the arithmetic, that implies our species has something between two
thousand years and twenty million years to go.
Those
numbers don't include ruin in 2012.
But of
course you might argue that the "why now?" principle doesn't hold because we're
making today special by wrecking the world. Just about any school kid can
rattle off schemes for turning humankind into exhibit fodder for the museums of
the future: climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, or just depletion
of essential resources.
As bad as
these contemporary troubles might be, it's hard to argue these threats could
wipe biology from the face of the Earth.
And in any
case, the type of doomsday scenarios examined in films such as "2012" aren't
destruction at our own hand. They are lugubrious calamities caused by external
factors (e.g., pernicious galactic alignments). For such external phenomena,
which take scant notice of humans, the "why now?" principle applies.
To think otherwise
is merely to assume that the cosmos revolves around us. And that idea was given
the boot more than 500 years ago.
Seth Shostak is the author of Confessions of an Alien Hunter.
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