2012

2012 is significant in the popular imagination mainly because of the Mayan prediction that the world as we’ve known it will come to an end on December 21st of that year. Beyond this it appears from the perspective of the present as being a year in which “things which can’t go on forever” such as ever increasing consumerism, agricultural expansion, ever increasing consumption of energy resources, and so on, abruptly stop going on forever. It appears to be about the right time for the effects of global warming and planetary climate change to become universally undeniable. Alas by this year it will also be too late to stop the accelerating positive feedback loops which will intensify the changes to our biosphere. Put succinctly, 2012 appears to be a pretty good candidate for being the year that the shit hits the fan, the year that everything changed and so on.

My friend, author and political activist Marie D. Jones recently asked me to contribute a short essay for her forthcoming book (June 2008) entitled 2013:The End of Days or a New Beginning: Envisioning the World After the Events of 2012.
 
Marie wrote: “.…I would like to ask for your contribution to this book in the form of a brief essay describing what you, personally, think the year 2012 will bring, and what the world may look like in terms of changes you believe may be coming. This essay can be anywhere from one to five paragraphs in length….”

My contribution to her book appears just below:

2012 as I see it

By Michael P Byron

2012 will be a year of fundamental transformation due to the convergence of several factors, all being human-caused. As Shakespeare had Cassius say to Brutus in his play Julius Caesar: “The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves...”

The following trends will culminate in the epochal year 2012: Worldwide production of oil will certainly have peaked. Since our planetary civilization runs on oil, desperate measures will be taken by powerful nations to ensure that the wheels keep turning. Wars and rumors of wars will fill the news headlines. Crash programs to produce energy using coal and nuclear power will be hastily implemented without environmental safeguards.

Global climate change will have become both undeniable and irreversible in this fateful year. Due to the peaking of oil production, coal will be increasingly ripped from the ground and burned, thus releasing more carbon dioxide more rapidly into our planet’s increasingly unstable atmosphere. Flood, fire, drought, rising seas, crop failure, disease, and insect pestilence will be the result. Due to all of the above factors, the global economy will contract dramatically. Recession and then depression will ensue. Governments will fall as currencies plummet in value.

As chaotic and disastrous as all of this will be, it will also be a unique opportunity to reform ourselves, our values, and our civilization. With profound crisis comes great opportunity. As our present civilizational structures disintegrate, we can transform and reintegrate ourselves from desire for short-term gain at the expense of others and the planetary biosphere, to a just, humane and environmentally rational civilization which can endure for ages to come. 2012 will be the year that we act decisively to bring about this fundamental renewal of civilization.

All of this raises a deeper question. How did Mayan Indians living many centuries ago manage to identify this epochal year? Or did they?
 
As far as the astronomical significance of the prophecy is concerned, December 21, 2012 is the date on which our solar system crosses the plane of the galactic equator. The Maya were world-class astronomers. It is perhaps not surprising that such a rare event as this should be interpreted as being an indicator of momentous events. A celestial event of such rarity and significance ought to correspond with an analogous terrestrial event—such as the end of the world as we’ve known it. So there is nothing surprising about the Maya choosing this date for such a prophecy.

Yet the Maya also predicted that in what we know of as the year 1519, Quetzalcoatl, a light-skinned, bearded person, would return, and that his return would mark the end of Maya civilization. Amazingly, in 1519, on his way to invading México, Hernan Cortés a light-skinned, bearded man, did indeed land in the Maya heartland in the Yucatan peninsula of modern day México, exactly when and where Quetzalcoatl was expected to arrive. And the arrival of Cortés did indeed bring about the subsequent destruction of what remained of the Maya civilization.
If this is a coincidence, it is certainly an amazing one! The probability of two such random coincidences panning out in reality would appear to be astronomical.

So what are we to make of the 2012 Maya prophecy? Will it prove, in hindsight, to have been as prescient as the one about the return of Quetzalcoatl? If so, how can such a thing as foretelling the future exist?

While I do not really know the answers to these questions, I was intrigued to note a possible answer. In his latest book, The Intelligent Universe, James Gardner makes the case that our universe is designed to facilitate the emergence of intelligence. This intelligence in turn is needed to ensure the existence of the universe. How to reconcile the chicken and egg dilemma posed by this scenario? Gardner posits that the universe is an example of what physicists and mathematicians call a “Closed Timelike Curve”.
 
Gardner states:

"In 1997 Princeton astrophysicists J. Richard Gott III and Li-Xin Li posed this intriguing question: Could our universe conceivably have spawned itself? Beginning with the recognition that ‘a remarkable property of [Einstein’s theory of] general relativity is that it allows solutions that have closed timelike curves (CTC’s)—hypothetical configurations of space and time where gravity is sufficiently strong to bend the space-time continuum into a looping configuration that allows events to influence the past—Gott and Li pointed out that, absent some rule like the chronology protection conjecture proposed by Stephen Hawking (which states that the rules of physics conspire to forbid the actual manifestation of CTC’s, at least at the macroscopic scale) the ‘Universe can be its own mother.’ Under the CTC cosmological scenario ‘the Universe neither tunneled from nothing, nor arose from a singularity; it created itself."’i

This is pretty deep stuff! However, if we recall that our minds evolved to allow for us to survive and function in a world in which contemplation of the distant future and of the ultimate topology of the cosmos had little survival value, we should not be too surprised if the ultimate nature and configuration of our universe seems strange to us!

If we live in a universe which comprises a Closed Timelike Curve, the cosmological geometry would allow for information to move from past to future, and also, under some circumstances, from future to past. Time is not linear stretching from Big Bang, onwards, but is rather circular, stretching perhaps from Big Bang to Big Bang.
 
So one possibility is that the Universe is configured as a Closed Timelike Curve; and the Mayan prophecies of Cortés’s and/ or Quetzalcoatl’s arrival/return, and their prophesy of the world shaking events of 2012 are indeed valid.

Another possibility is as I’ve explained above: astronomically significant events (the Quetzalcoatl prophecy is apparently related to a transit of the planet Venus) such as Earth’s passing through the plane of the galactic equator are simply inferred to represent the occurrence of terrestrially significant events: “As above, so below,” in other words.

In both cases, we are given a warning concerning future events which threaten to seriously affect our existence. In both cases we are offered an opportunity to take action to prepare ourselves for the coming changes as well as to shape those changes in a beneficial manner.

It should be clear to anyone who has bothered to pay the slightest attention to contemporary events that the Earth’s nations, our global economy, our civilization, and our planetary biosphere are accelerating towards catastrophe. It should be equally obvious that we are the cause of these impending catastrophes. Ultimately our deepest beliefs and wants are proving to be maladaptive. We must change or face catastrophic consequences.

Perhaps the Mayan prophecy of 2102 represents a final warning from this onrushing future. Or maybe its seemingly prescient timing is a coincidence.
 
Either way, it serves as a compelling warning to change our world’s fate by changing ourselves, or face the consequences of our failure to change. Certainly we have no one other than ourselves to blame for what may happen in the near future.

That said, I hope that we actually have a future that extends until 2012. Events currently seem to be moving faster than that. So we’ll see.


(Michael Byron is author of The Path Through Infinity’s Rainbow: Your Guide to Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad, and Infinity’s Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization)

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i) Gardner, James, The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos, New Page Books, NJ, USA, 2007, p 218.