Design Notes
December 20, 2012
Tomorrow is Just Another Day
December 21, 2012
It's all over the news. Tomorrow is the end of the world as predicted by... well, by the fruitcakes of the world.
Some say it has to do with the Mayan calendar. Some say it has to do with our alignment to the galactic ecliptic. Some say it has to do with aliens. Some say it has to do with a secret hidden planet populated by giants and angels that is going to brush up against ours. But happily, one thing upon which they can all agree is that tomorrow, December 21st, 2012 at 11:11 AM Server Time (EST) (CORRECTION: it was 11:11 AM GMT, which was 6:11 AM Server time) is going to be the end of the world...
...again.
And once again, "they" are wrong. Tomorrow is going to be just another day, like any other. I'm sure some crazy people are going to do some crazy stuff but crazy people fo crazy stuff every other day too. That's why I've been counting down to "Just Another Day" at the bottom of nearly all of my Design Notes posts since the very beginning of this year.
Seriously, you can go back and check.
Called it.
I expected some people and some media outlets would get all worked up about this and so I've been spending all year trying to send out this tiny, reassuring message to you guys. Let's take a look at some of the other doomsday prophecies that fizzled out:
1919 CE: Albert Porta, meteorologist at the University of Michigan, predicts that during the third week of December 1919, an alignment of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune could focus enough of a gravity line to cause a huge solar flare and make the sun EXPLODE. Wrong.
1921 CE: In 1910 Pulitzer Prize-winner Henry Adams works out a model of human civilization based on the dissipation of energy and states quite clearly that human civilization would wipe itself out in 1921. Wrong.
1982 CE: Back in 1974 astronomer John Gribbin and author Stephen Plagemann, in their book The Jupiter Effect, claimed that the alignment of seven planets in 1982 would cause the magnetic poles to shift, slow earth's rotation messing with gravity, cause earthquakes and tidal waves and basiclly everything that happened in the movie "2012". As it turns out the tide was 0.04 millimeters higher than average on that day in 1982. Nice try but Wrong.
Just in the past few decades we've seen the Heaven's gate cult try and catch a ride on a UFO trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet to try and escape the end of the world. The Y2K bug was supposed to send planes tumbling from the sky and send us back into the dark ages but failed to do anything more than make a lot of programmers half-blind from sifting through millions of lines of code. Either this year or maybe last year there was ANOTHER failed prediction of the biblical rapture (there have been THOUSANDS of these starting as far back as 200 CE) and, as always, bunkers and bunkers full of your standard tin-foil-hat-wearing individuals holding signs letting us all know that "The End Is Near".
Nobody knows the future. Not even me. I could be wrong. But I go by the numbers and there is NO reason to believe that tomorrow will be anything other than a lovely Friday in December. Here at the Lab we are working furiously, just like always, to get Part 2 of the End Of All Things ready for you to play because we may believe that earth will be here tomorrow but saving Lore is up to you.
Kezeroth has a point. All things DO end. But unless we do it ourselves, I believe that the earth will finally be destroyed when it gets consumed by the sun after it goes through it's change into a red giant. That will be a few BILLION years from now and by then I expect that we will have spread out through the galaxy (or further), colonizing other, fresher star systems.
If one of your friends or one of your family members is nervous or scared about the world ending tomorrow, just remind them of all the failed doomsday predictions and try to get them to laugh it off with you. Your courage will give them hope and hope is what tomorrow is built on.
1 day until Just Another Day