End of World "Possible"

On Dec 21, 8:39*am, Quadibloc wrote:
Oh, wait a moment.

If the last time the world ended was on December 4, 5874 B.C., why is
the Calendar Round starting on 4 Ahau 8 Cumhu, instead of 11 Ahau 3
Ceh?

But there are 20 Baktuns in a Pictun.

Oh, of course. If the world ends on December 21, 2012, then it's going
to take until October 14, 4772 A.D. to rebuild civilization from the
ashes, and start using the Mayan calendar again, now starting the
Calendar Round on 10 Ahau 13 Yaxkin... *not* 4 Ahau 3 Yax.

And it only took until the end of the world for me to figure this
out...

A while back, there was the famous book 5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate
Disaster by Richard Noone, claiming that ancient cycles predicted a
pole shift on May 5, 2000. That didn't happen, and the ancient cycles
that come to an end today, on December 21, 2012, are more
conspicuously known.

But if today does prove to be just another day - aside from the
possibility that the cycle ends one or two days later, or 260 years
later (there are other correlations for the Mayan calendar, after all)
- one possibility, I thought, was that since the Egyptians had their
different vague year, and the Aztecs had a calendar round, but with
different starting dates, one could say that the Mayans had only an
imperfect form of the original calendar that truly predicted the end
of the world - the calendar of Atlantis!

A web search, though, turned up the claim that the Atlantean calendar
was best explained, not in Ignatius Donnelly, but in a book by Charles
Berlitz...

entitled Doomsday: 1999.

Ah, well, maybe we still have Lemuria...

John Savard

Sam Wormley:
* *Most treat the Armageddon scenarios as somewhat silly, but with
* *unchecked climate change we might experience the human version of
* *the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event! That is realistic.

Quadibloc:
Oh, it's certainly true enough that sometime in the next 52 years, we
could indeed have a disaster if we don't mend our ways. But there will
be a reason for what happens, a causal chain. The Mayan calendar will
have nothing to do with it, so that's a distraction from what we
should be trying to change.

If by "human version" Mr. Wormley means the extinction of homo sapiens,
then that is not realistic at all.

Biologists, entomologists, oceanographers, and practically anyone who
studies life will tell tell you that we are in a mass-extinction event
/now/. Without the fireworks of a major impact, and with the species
that are disappearing often being remote from civilization or
essentially invisible to us, or both, this extinction is not obvious to
those who are not looking. See E.O. Wilson's HIPPO thesis.

--
I agree with almost everything that you have said and almost everything that
you will say in your entire life.

usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm

On Dec 21, 11:00*am, Davoud wrote:

Biologists, entomologists, oceanographers, and practically anyone who
studies life will tell tell you that we are in a mass-extinction event
/now/. Without the fireworks of a major impact, and with the species
that are disappearing often being remote from civilization or
essentially invisible to us, or both, this extinction is not obvious to
those who are not looking.

That's what he means by the "human version" - the human-caused mass
extinction event, comparable in its ecological impact to an asteroid
impact.

However, an asteroid impact would kill off something like 90% of
species - and 99% of living beings. So the human race might not become
extinct, since we pervade a wide range of ecological niches, and so
despite our large size, we might be as persistent as the cockroach...
but eventually, when our chickens come home to roost, presumably we
would be reduced to, say, a few dozen or a few hundred survivors.

Is the ecological damage caused by our current mass-extinction event
ever going to lead to that... or will humans continue to exist
comfortably, even dining on beef, and pork, and poultry, for the
indefinite future, with the planet's life-support systems enduring
even as the species inventory is impoverished?

I am inclined to agree that we should mend our ways rather than taking
our chances. However, worldwide effective population control continues
to appear to be a distant prospect - it's not favored by the
traditions of many cultures.

John Savard

On Dec 21, 10:12*am, Quadibloc wrote:

A web search, though, turned up the claim that the Atlantean calendar
was best explained, not in Ignatius Donnelly, but in a book by Charles
Berlitz...

entitled Doomsday: 1999.

Here is the web site on which I found _that_ tidbit:

http://www.dei-legacy.ch/?mid=TVRreg==

I cannot explain the strange form of the URL.

John Savard

On Sat, 22 Dec 2012 01:29:15 -0800 (PST), Quadibloc
wrote:
http://www.dei-legacy.ch/?mid=TVRreg==

I cannot explain the strange form of the URL.

The part or the URL after thé ? just assigns a Base64 coded value to
the parameter "mid". When decoded, the Base64 becomes "MTKz".

Quadibloc:
A web search, though, turned up the claim that the Atlantean calendar
was best explained, not in Ignatius Donnelly, but in a book by Charles
Berlitz...

entitled Doomsday: 1999.

Quadibloc again:
Here is the web site on which I found _that_ tidbit:

http://www.dei-legacy.ch/?mid=TVRreg==

I cannot explain the strange form of the URL.

Never mind that. How does one explain the pathetic mental state of
people who place importance on such nonsense?

--
I agree with almost everything that you have said and almost everything that
you will say in your entire life.

usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm

On Sat, 22 Dec 2012 09:00:40 -0500, Davoud wrote:
http://www.dei-legacy.ch/?mid=TVRreg==

I cannot explain the strange form of the URL.

Never mind that. How does one explain the pathetic mental state of
people who place importance on such nonsense?

Without them you would not have any working Internet. So even though
you look down at them, they are useful to you....

On Dec 22, 7:00*am, Davoud wrote:

Never mind that. How does one explain the pathetic mental state of
people who place importance on such nonsense?

I find it amusing, not important.

But, to me, the explanation is very simple. The moment a bunch of
former chimpanzees got clever enough to use sticks so as to be able to
outclass animals that were bigger than they were, they played that
trick for all it was worth.

It'll probably take at least another 20 million years of evolution
before H. sapiens develops to the point where its brains will finally
catch up to its (current) pretensions.

John Savard