2012 : is the world ending? and what happens after that?

[colourmefashion]

^ orrrrrrr they became tired and decided to take a nap and then forgot to finish it

 

[sill]

But I'm a bit worried about the sun storm

You shouldn't be. The world have survived some massive solar flares (in 2003 for example)... this surely wont be any different.

I don't get it? How can people actually believe that the world is going to end just because the mayans calendar ends in 2012? It's just a bunch of bull****.

 

[papa_levante]

^You never know.

 

[Filipe]

nobody knows that's for sure. And I can't possibly think that people actually want to believe the world will end in 2012.

And if we could travel at the speed of light would be great, time would stop for me while traveling & if we could reach a higher speed than the speed of light we could travel in time But I think that's absolutely impossible at least with the tecnology we have right now, maybe in 2 centuries we will be able to ...

 

[Mary-Anne]

I'm not buying too much into all this... Whatever happens, there is no way of finding out until the moment comes, so there's no point in worrying about it as far as I'm concerned.

But this does make me think about how tiny we are and the universe so incredibly, infinitely big... Would it even matter on a large scale? Could us humans one day become an extinct species? Dinosaurs used to inhabit the same earth we are living on today, and they're gone...

 

[nijuyanah]

So, I think that we have nothing to worry about since we will ALL be f*cked.

Amen. Bp

 

[colourmefashion]

i think i would like to see who or what would find our fossils on the earth and how they would determine everything we do. like how/what we eat, how we lived, etc.

would there be another, maybe more advanced, race of humans ? or would we start from scratch again and go through what the earth already went though, the slow process of creating life with dinosaurs, ice ages, humans, etc..

 

[Filipe]

But this does make me think about how tiny we are and the universe so incredibly, infinitely big... Would it even matter on a large scale? Could us humans one day become an extinct species? Dinosaurs used to inhabit the same earth we are living on today, and they're gone...

Yes I know what you mean & scares me just to think about it. I think humans could become extinct as dinosaurs became.

would there be another, maybe more advanced, race of humans ? or would we start from scratch again and go through what the earth already went though, the slow process of creating life with dinosaurs, ice ages, humans, etc..

No, I think an other specie, more advanced than us, would take our place. Some people believe that we humans will transform into something different than what we are now,something more advanced not completely different but different, like, there's some species that went through a transformation over the years & became different, more advanced, like there's species atm that descend from prehistoric species.

 

[gius]

i saw in a movie that there were mammals, fish, birds and such (like those we have now but a different look) living with the dinosaurs. it doesn't make sense that the dinosaurs will disappear with the Ice age, and the mammals,et al stay living on the earth.

 

[tigerrouge]

What makes me laugh is when you real old science fiction stories written ages ago, where they place events in 1999, which was an impossible-to-imagine date in the future, and now it's been and gone, it's a decade ago.

At least when it's 2013, people might not be talking about the Mayan calendar anymore, they'll probably move on to some other numerological scare story.

 

[before]

A California spacecraft, bound for deliberate doom inside a crater on the moon, is scheduled to soar into space today, along with a lunar orbitersearching for safe landing sites where humans might one day establish Earth's first colony.
In early October, the spacecraft will send a heavy rocket crashing into the moon's south polar region on a mission to find water that could support future crews bound for Mars. With its mission finished, the spacecraft itself then will die in its own final crash into the lunar surface.

The water-seeking mission was conceived, developed and now is controlled by space scientists and engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View.
Their spacecraft bears the unwieldy name of LCROSS - the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite - and in a sense is merely hitching a ride on an Atlas rocket whose main job is to launch NASA's new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. That spacecraft will spend at least a year creating the most minutely detailed map of the moon's surface ever seen.
Flying over the moon's southern hemisphere, LCROSS will use its high-precision instruments, as well as close-up images of the terrain gathered by the lunar orbiter, to seek out a crater just shallow enough and dark enough to be a prime bombing target.
There, acting as what the Ames team calls its "shepherding spacecraft," LCROSS will guide an empty Centaur rocket weighing two tons toward its target. The rocket will crash into the crater at 5,600 mph, creating a new crater - perhaps as large as 5 miles wide. The crash is scheduled to occur Oct. 9.
Scientists on Earth expect the impact to blast out a huge cloud of dust, gas and vaporized water ice at least 6 miles high. The cloud will be clearly visible to astronomers at Earth-bound observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope's new planetary camera, allowing each to observe and collect data on its composition.
Astronomers have long thought that a rain of comets brought water to the arid, lifeless moon over billions of years. In the past few years, at least two American spacecraft reported the presence of water by detecting hints of hydrogen and oxygen - the constituents of water - frozen deep in the darkest recesses of craters around both the north and south lunar poles.
Because an ample supply of water could help provide unlimited fuel for any future moon base, seeking it out has been a high-priority mission for NASA leaders still bent on implementing former President George W. Bush's "vision for space exploration" that Bush said would start with "a foothold on the moon."
Whether the Obama administration pursues that goal with as high a priority remains an open political question.
But to Anthony Colaprete, a planetary physicist and chief scientist for the LCROSS mission, the brilliant burst of matter his crashing Centaur will eject is the ultimate goal of the current mission.
"In only a few seconds, we'll see the brilliant flash from the crash," he said Wednesday from Cape Canaveral. "The ejecta should show first as a single bright, shimmering star; we're calling it sunrise. Seconds later, even modest telescopes on Earth should see two blurry stars as the ejecta spreads wider and higher."
Those blurry lights would show as stars of the fourth or fifth magnitude, Colaprete said - possibly as bright as the Andromeda nebula. That spectacle may last only 60 seconds or so, Colaprete said, but it will signal that the Centaur's crash has created a fresh crater up to 5 miles wide at a carefully selected spot inside the larger target crater.
Within 10 minutes, dense material ejected from that crater should rise some 6 miles high, with the water ice - perhaps billions of years old, if it exists at all - turning instantly to vapor. And within an hour, detectable hydrogen and oxygen should rise as high as 60 miles, according to calculations by Colaprete's team at Ames.
After the Centaur rocket crash, LCROSS, its fuel spent, will slam into the lunar surface as well, its job done.
The lunar orbiter, meanwhile, will continue its looping flights around the moon from pole to pole, and as the moon rotates beneath it, the orbiter will eventually have mapped the entire surface. On the way, it will send back images of flat regions inside or beyond the craters - the flat areas to be listed as potential sites for future lunar bases, if and when those bases are to be built.
The launch from Cape Canaveral is scheduled for 2:12 p.m. PDT

SFgate.com

 

[fashionista-ta]

I don't understand why people are convinced the world is going to end just because an ancient civilization's calendar is ending. Our calendar ends every year and as far as I'm concerned, we're still alive...

I love this argument

 

[cesarcmma]

^

I haven't read all the thread yet but I read a while ago that our calendar actually skipped two or three years somewhere in the past when it was being internationalizated (don't know if that word exists)...and that's why the experts always laughed at how people were creeped out for the word ending at 2000 because the actual 2000th year had already passed...

 

[colourmefashion]

i think the scientists and all those others are just blowing it up out of proportion.
wasnt Y2K supposed to be this big thing that was supposed to happen, and it didnt.

so I think on Dec 22, 2012, we will all laugh at how silly we were to believe such a thing.
although, it is possible that the world will end, just maybe not on this date.

also, im surprised they didnt say that Dec 20 would be the date since it would be the 20th day of the 12th month

 

[Echoes]

wasnt Y2K supposed to be this big thing that was supposed to happen, and it didnt.

The only thing that was 'supposed to happen' was that older computers would not be able to recognize dates above 1999. It was thought some computers controlling banking systems and machinery would fail or calculate incorrect dates.

It 'didn't happen' because of behind the scenes efforts of programmers reprogramming and updating software.

 

[colourmefashion]

either way they made a big deal out of what ended up to be nothing

 

[sedirea]

It 'didn't happen' because of behind the scenes efforts of programmers reprogramming and updating software.

Lol no. Every computer, even ones that were not updated just switch over to 2000, it didnt reset. Even my old Macintosh (yes, I was outdated) went straight to 2000, just like the majority of the big computers in the world.

 

[Filipe]

I think Echoes is right! And my very old Windows 3.1 was affected by it & until today I still can't access to it, well I don't care to access to it though.

 

[iluvjeisa]

^Yeah. Probably bad things would have happened if people would not have put in a lot of effort to fix the bugs.

 

[Echoes]

I wish people would be a bit more realistic and open minded to the real threats. Things like the Mayan calendar are nothing more than prophecies in various disguises. But there ARE real threats that have real chances of having a significant effect on humanity.

Solar storms are known to have caused major damage. So far they've all been relatively small, but if we ever get a large one, it could be devastating.

Major volcanic eruptions are a fact of life on Earth. Vesuvius, Krakatoa and Pinatubo all had worldwide effects. Anak Krakatao ( rebuilt Krakatoa ) is said to be building strongly again. St. Helens, Ranier and a few others are showing signs of life and Montserrat is still actively venting. Then there are the Calderas previously mentioned.

Asteroids and meteors have a long history of impacting the Earth and the Moon. A direct strike on Earth would have immediate consequences while a major impact on the Moon might have effect on tides over a longer period of time resulting flooding like no one has ever seen.

Personally, I think our most imminent threat is already among us just waiting to break out. Bacteria and other microbes outnumber us several thousand to one. So far we've been able to contain and control them, but we're losing that battle. More and more strains are becoming resistant to anti-biotics and other control methods. When they finally get loose, we could all be in trouble. The Black Plague, AIDS, SARS, H1N1 and others could all be just practice runs for whatever is brewing.