Armageddon 2012?

I was watching the film Armageddon with Bruce Willis a few days ago - as happens with these matters, it came to a freesat channel, doing the rounds, and I managed to record it. It is all about an asteroid hitting the earth, and mankind facing the prospect of mass extinction. That is, of course, quite a feasible scenario, although with NASA budget cut backs, the chances are slim indeed of any kind of drilling operation to split the asteroid asunder - even if it was possible to do this so that the pieces didn't hit the earth, as happens fortuitously in the film.

In fact, the film is in part about rough edged human beings, thrown into a wilderness to fend for themselves - the asteroid is a surrealist nightmare of craggy rocks, sharp and pointed light cathedral spires. Although the setting is space, the theme in part is the frontier spirit of America, the explorers trekking off into the outback and facing a sometimes hostile environment. I won't spoil the denouement, except to say that as expected, the project succeeds.

There's a token Russian for comedy effect from the Russian space station, and he has some of the best lines. Starting a jammed fuel line with a spanner, he says - Russian systems, American systems - all made with parts from Taiwan! And Paris gets wiped out - someone in the movies didn't like the French!

But the end of the world is often on the horizon in other ways. The Christian Harold Camping had predicted the end of the world, or at least the start of it, with the "rapture", a supposed moment when Christians are snatched away from an earth that will be dominated by the antichrist. This started with J.N. Derby, was very popular in the 1980s with Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth (the EU was the empire of the antichrist, the beast with many heads!) and continues to this day with the "Left behind" series of Tim LaHaye which presents it in a fictional form. It seems to be a peculiarly American phenomena, for while there are no doubt Christians in Britain and Jersey who believe it, it has never dominated the Christian mainstream, but remained resolutely on the margins, for fringe sects, and University student fundamentalism.

The New Age has its own take on the end of the world. According to a reading - actually a misreading - of the Mayan calendar, the end of the world will happen in 2012. Nonsense is also disseminated about the start of the Mayan calendar, which recent studies have pinned down not to tens of thousands of years BC, but to around  August 11, 3114 BC - based on archeological evidence from the date used on inscriptions, astronomical events recorded which tie in with the calendar in inscriptions, and historical documentary material (such as the Chronicle of Oxcutzkab). 4004 BC for the Usher Chronology of the Bible is actually earlier!

The "great cycle" of the calendar is 13 Baktuns, or 1,872,000 days, which neatly brings us to  December 20, 2012 but on a west panel at the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque, a section of the text projects into the future to the 80th Calendar Round, which would be 13 October 4772. There is no evidence the Maya thought the world would end in 2012, but rather the contrary.

One significant matter is the length of years, just over 5,000 in a "great cycle", and I've heard it said in all seriousness that meant that the Mayans computed time in much vaster periods than other peoples. But a 5,000 year cycle is hardly large. Even 100,000 years, which would take us back to the Paleolithic, is barely something like 20 seconds to midnight on a clock which had all the age of the earth compressed to one 12 hour period. Or as another geologist said:

"Consider the Earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history"

No ancient calendar came anywhere near estimates of the age of the earth. Eternalists like Aristotle thought it had no beginning, but the notion of deep time of an age of the earth of 4,540 000 000 years old was beyond them. If the Mayans had a calendar which could put the creation of the earth back then, I think their calendar would have a bit more credibility for 2012 end of the world.

And of the mass extinctions which have taken place - and there have been five significant ones - one was almost certainly set off by an asteroid impact on the earth around  65.5 million years ago, which led to the end of the dinosaurs. That remains the one real possibility, but I don't think it is that likely on the exact date of 20 December 2012.

What will happen after? Harold Camping has "recalibrated" his date, recalculating after he missed his date. I suspect strongly that the Mayan end of the world theorists will do the same!

Life on Mars?

Some Jottings on my reading!

Edgar Rice Burroughs had life on Mars, but basically an oriental Arabian nights setting transported across the distance of space, where John Carter fought exotic beasts and saved Princesses; the stuff of fairy tales with a science fiction coating. I remember being somewhat bored with the repetitive nature of the plot.

H.G. Wells was much better, where his Martians were the dying evolved creatures of "vast unsympathetic intellect" who looked at this young Earth "with envious eyes", and invaded. Their war machines defeated Victorian armies and navies, and they were set to blight the earth with their red weed, a survival of the fittest, but they were defeated by a lack of immunity to viruses, and the common cold - Wells cleverly playing the evolutionary game both ways.

John Wyndham's early depiction of Mars was a dying planet, where most of the population had been frozen in cryogenic capsules to await the result of the engineering of the canals; but this had failed, and they had been left by the few (elite) who had betrayed them. Very pulp written, under the name of John Beynon. His later work in "The Outward Urge", had a much more realistic Mars, an airless desert, in which an exhibition (because of lack of preparation) crash lands, and the crew die of madness and accident in the bleak inhospitable land.

C.S. Lewis' Mars had the canals, great feats of engineering to stave off a cosmic disaster which would eventually wipe out life on Malacandra (the natives name for Mars). Mars was by then almost known to be devoid of life, but Lewis mythology and creatures (with their own language) gave a picture of a very alien planet, of often very different values from our own, especially of the scientist who wants to seek the survival of humanity by colonising other worlds (at the expence of the natives).

By the time the trimvirate of Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke tackled Mars, the picture was that of a barren land. Asimov (in his Lucky Star series) has a colony, growing special Martian plants for food, but living in bubble cities; the mostly hidden Martians are beings of thought, long since dispensed with bodies. Heinlein (in Red Plant, Podkayne of Mars) has a colony which is involved in an "atmosphere project" to restore Mars to habitation suitable for humans; he has exotic Martian creatures, fauna and flora, drawing on the pulp heritage, but the bulk of the story is to do with the colonists fight for independence from a distant earth company (shades of the Boston Tea Party and American Independence!). Clarke presents the most realistic picture in "The Sands of Mars", where Mars is given an artifical nuclear sun by igniting a moon, to give sun for plants to grow and the cycle of photosynthesis to produce oxygen for future colonists.


Water flows on Mars, before our very eyes

Liquid water has flowed on the surface of Mars within the past five years, leaving behind new deposits in gullies monitored by the now-lost Mars Global Surveyor, new images reveal. The results seem to boost the chances that Mars could harbour life.

Many scientists believe the gullies were carved by liquid water, although others have argued they may be due to avalanches of carbon dioxide gas or rivers of dust.


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