Question: why do people keep saying the world is going to end in probably 2012?

Jon Copley answered on 17 Jun 2010:

Because they are daft… In the year AD 999, lots of people thought the world was going to end in AD 1000. And in 1999, lots of people though the “Millennium Bug” (or “Y2K”) would cause major catastrophe and disaster on January 1st, 2000.

Guess what – we’re still here.

Notice what those two examples above have in common? People worry about “big” dates in their calendar, like the year 1000 or 2000. The worries some people have about 2012 come from the calendar of the ancient Mayans, which doesn’t use 1000-year cycles like ours, but rather a 5125-year cycle, which comes to an end in 2012 (supposedly). And all this has been given publicity by a recent disaster movie about it (but trust me, the people who made the movie are looking forward to still spending the money from it long after 2012 has passed!).

The “end of the world” (and by that I mean a mass extinction, and the end of human civilisation, because it’s pretty hard to physically destroy our planet) could actually happen anytime, if something called a “gamma ray burst” (aka GRB) were to hit us from a supernova somewhere nearby in our galaxy. And we wouldn’t see it coming, because it would arrive at the speed of light. But fortunately GRBs are very rare (and possibly even very unlikely) in our galaxy, and even then the supernova would have to be “pointing” in the right direction for the GRB to hit us.

But one thing’s for sure – the date of such an event won’t be conveniently marked in advance as a “big year” in one of our human calendar systems, because there’s no way we know of predicting it. It could happen this morning – or never. So I don’t think we should worry about 2012, or any other date, in particular. Instead, I personally like to try to make the most of every moment we have on this incredible planet.