:: Shekhar Bhatia

Preparing for Dec 21, 2012?

Shekhar Bhatia

May.16 : Scientists have predicted that intense solar storms are likely to occur in 2012. These storms — massive eruptions of energy from the sun — do not always hit the earth, but to give you an idea of what can happen if they do, the one in 1989 left six million people in Quebec without power for nine hours. The one in 2012, they predict, will be stronger.

Now a study funded by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) to assess the "societal and economic" impact of such a storm says "almost nothing" is immune from it — "not even the water in your bathroom". It says a "super solar flare" could damage satellites, destroy power grids and disrupt communication and financial services. The cost to the US alone will be trillions of dollars and recovery could take 10 years. "That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages".

Wired Magazine calls it "geomagnetic apocalypse". And this is how New Scientist put it: "It is midnight on September 22, 2012, and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light… Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power. A year later millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation".

This is not some prophet of doom trying to scare you; it’s a scenario based on a study conducted by a team of eminent scientists. This is, of course, the worst-case scenario of a massive flare entering the earth’s atmosphere, but the threat is real.

Soothsayers have been quick to link this with the supposed Mayan prediction. "We told you so", they are saying. But did the Mayans predict that the world will end on December 21, 2012? Is there really something to 2012? Or is it just a coincidence?

The Maya civilisation existed between 400BC and 900AD in s, a region that extends from central Mexico to Guatemala and Honduras. They built a network of cities and pyramid-shaped temples, and were known for their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy. They had accurately calculated the length of the solar year — the time taken by the earth to make one complete revolution around the sun — to the last digit.

The Mayans were truly ingenious. They had devised three different calendars for different purposes: a 260-day, a 365-day and a third called the Long Count calendar for longer periods to calculate the passage of years. It’s this Long Count that is the source of doomsday predictions: there are no dates in this calendar beyond December 21, 2012.

Now why would a perfectly scientific calendar, in use by an intelligent civilisation for hundreds of years, suddenly end on a particular date? Why did the Mayans do this? An explanation that I have often come across — and find convincing — is that they perhaps treated the calendar like a stopwatch — or more like the odometer in your car that you reset at the start of a long journey. If the civilisation had not collapsed, wiped out by the Spanish, they would probably have extended it further into the future.

But that does not stop the talk of apocalypse: some believe 2012 will be the end of life on earth, others say it will be the beginning of a new age and new consciousness.

What we know for sure is that in 2012, the Olympics will take place in London; if Queen Elizabeth II is still reigning, she will celebrate her diamond jubilee; there will be a solar eclipse in May; a 13-km wide asteroid will pass within 27 million km of the earth; and the next US presidential election will be held that year.

What we also know is that December 21, 2012 will be the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, and for the first time in about 26,000 years, the earth will be aligned with the Milky Way’s centre. And now we also know that there will be strong solar storms.

There are simple scientific explanations for these phenomena. But taken together and mixed with the Mayan calendar, there is enough fuel here for the apocalypse types. And now they also have Nasa’s rather alarming damage assessment report.

When Wired asked Lawrence Joseph, author of Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization’s End, about the solar storm, he said, "I’ve been following this topic for almost five years. It wasn’t until the (Nasa) report came out that it began to freak me out. Up until this point, I firmly believed that the possibility of 2012 being catastrophic in some way was worth investigating. The report made it a little too real".

Scientists, however, strongly disagree with this view. "The whole 2012 disaster scenario is a hoax", they say. But still, shouldn’t we worry about the solar storms? Just in case a really strong one hits the earth?

The key, says the Nasa report, is infrastructure that can withstand the impact of the flares, and accurate forecasting so that you have time to switch off power from the entire grid. It’s like the tsunami of 2004: had there been an early warning system the coastal areas could have been alerted and many lives saved.

What we can predict with a fair amount of certainty is that the release of this Nasa report will generate an increasing interest in the "twenty-twelve phenomenon" over the next three years: Hollywood movies, books on the Mayan prophecy, and many more 2012-related blogs and websites. I have already seen one that tells you how to survive apocalypse — build bunkers, store seeds and make steel — and start life all over again.

And going by how some TV channels covered the underground experiment to find the "God particle" (the black holes will gobble up the earth, they said), imagine the coverage on the run-up to twenty-twelve.

Different matter the Mayans never said anything about the end of the world on December 21, 2012.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com