About two years ago, I was quite passionate about the next predicted apocalypse. There were a lot of people talking very loudly about ways in which the world was expected to end come 21 December 2012, and I (along with much of the online scientific community) devoted many pages to refuting some of these claims. I suspect however that the only reason so many people took the issue seriously in the first place was that Michael Bay made one of his explosion-heavy movies about it, and Sony Pictures did their best to get some viral marketing mileage out of the subject. As the months passed after the film, fewer and fewer people in my daily life seemed to even remember that we were all supposed to die soon, and the meme seemed to be dying out.
But recently, as I look at my web traffic stats, I see that people are beginning to read my 2012 articles again. I guess that with D-Day only 4 months away, people are starting to get a bit worried. Let me take this opportunity to invite you to go through and read everything I’ve written on the subject. I’ve looked at various ways that the 2012 prophets think the world will end (Reversal of the Poles, being blasted by the Sun, Galactic Alignment, collision with a hidden planet), and examined the calendar systems of the ancient Mayans and belief systems of the ancient Babylonians which are supposed to have given us these prophecies. I had a lot of fun researching and writing them, and I hope you enjoy reading them.
But it’s time to step back, put all these arguments aside and say to the false prophets “Hold on. You’re telling me that the Mayan people of ancient times could see the future? You want me to believe that they could actually look forward and pinpoint the day when the Earth would come to an end?”  Well they couldn’t. History is littered with end-of-days prophecies, based on dodgy interpretations of ancient writing by people with more imagination than skill. Not one of these have ever come true, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Why did I stop writing on the subject? Why am I not engaging in any more debate on what makes the specifics of these individual predictions invalid?   Because they all rely on an ancient people being able to see the future in a literal and very precise way. And I don’t buy that.