21 December 2012. Will everything really come to an end??

Question

The end is near. Well, more specifically, it's five years from this Friday: Dec. 21, 2012 — or so the doomsayers would have you believe.

Answer 1

of corse not dur

Answer 2

not the world will end. but the world as we know may end, which possibly means a major lifestyle change. Maybe a series of major natural disasters across the globe or a massive drop in temperature or something like that.

Answer 3

Just think in the dozens of false prophecies about the end of the world, like that one that predicted the end of the world in year 2000 or the one which predicted it the 6th day of the 6th month of 2006, how many of them had come truth? none

Answer 4

no naver

Answer 5

The only thing that will end in 2012 is another tax season.

Answer 6

No.

Answer 7

doubt it

Answer 8

There are still people trying to sell what they stockpiled from the "millennium" doomsday!  :)   I know, I bought a piece of real estate in 2003 that 4 perfectly intelligent men bought together and built a complex on to take their families to when it happened... they took quite a loss on it financially!  LOL

Answer 9

no way, you remember when they said it would all come to an end in 2000 and many other times, if your so worried about the end coming to an end live every day like the last and dont take anything for granted, but if you ask some religions there are such things as the rapture and other stuff but do your research and dont take the skeptics too seriously.

Answer 10

When I was a kid it was the 4 minute warning and the paranoia of the nuclear bomb.

Now we're back to this old chestnut. It's part of human nature to be obsessed with doom and mortality, it is the inherent realisation that there are things out of our control.

Whatever you decide i wouldn't bother putting a bet on it. If they're right you wont get a pay out because there wont be anyone left to pay out; if you're wrong you'll just loose the money!

Answer 11

I remember the fuss about the world coming to an end when Skylab was to fall from space.  More died from heart attacks than from the falling space junk.  Then all the world was to end as year 2000 was inching closer... it's 2008 and we're still here.  Doomsday fanatics will always need to have something to rant about.  I think it would be wiser to spend our time alive on this earth trying to be as good a human being as we can be than to worry about doomsday.  

Better the world ends with us knowing we lived the best possible life we could have lived than it ending with us cowering in corners.

Answer 12

more than likely no!

Answer 13

No,I don't think so,bcoz i had b4 read in the newspaper that the world come to an end in1997,but nothing happened.

Answer 14

theres like 45000 of these questions stop asking them..

Answer 15

We will just have to wait and see - but I doubt it...

Answer 16

well why do I keep seeing questions like this,

Did you notice? In February 2001, the Sun did a magnetic polar shift. The next one is due again in 2012. NASA scientists who monitor the Sun say that our star's awesome magnetic field flipped 22 months ago, signaling the arrival of a solar maximum. But it wasn't so obvious to the average human.

The Sun's magnetic north pole, which was in the northern hemisphere just a few months ago, now points south. It's a topsy-turvy situation, but not an unexpected one. "This always happens around the time of solar maximum," says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "The magnetic poles exchange places at the peak of the sunspot cycle. In fact, it's a good indication that Solar Max is really here."

The Sun's magnetic poles will remain as they are now, with the north magnetic pole pointing through the Sun's southern hemisphere, until the year 2012 when they will reverse again. This transition happens, as far as we know, at the peak of every 11-year sunspot cycle -- like clockwork.

Earth’s magnetic field also flips, but with less regularity. Consecutive reversals are spaced 5 thousand years to 50 million years apart. The last reversal happened 740,000 years ago. Some researchers think our planet is overdue for another one, but nobody knows exactly when the next reversal might occur.

Although solar and terrestrial magnetic fields behave differently, they do have something in common: their shape. During solar minimum the Sun's field, like Earth's, resembles that of an iron bar magnet, with great closed loops near the equator and open field lines near the poles. Scientists call such a field a "dipole." The Sun's dipolar field is about as strong as a refrigerator magnet, or 50 gauss (a unit of magnetic intensity). Earth's magnetic field is 100 times weaker.

When solar maximum arrives and sunspots pepper the face of the Sun, our star's magnetic field begins to change. Sunspots are places where intense magnetic loops -- hundreds of times stronger than the ambient dipole field -- poke through the photosphere.

"Meridional flows on the Sun's surface carry magnetic fields from mid-latitude sunspots to the Sun's poles," explains Hathaway. "The poles end up flipping because these flows transport south-pointing magnetic flux to the north magnetic pole, and north-pointing flux to the south magnetic pole." The dipole field steadily weakens as oppositely-directed flux accumulates at the Sun's poles until, at the height of solar maximum, the magnetic poles change polarity and begin to grow in a new direction.

Hathaway noticed the latest polar reversal in a "magnetic butterfly diagram." Using data collected by astronomers at the U.S. National Solar Observatory on Kitt Peak, he plotted the Sun's average magnetic field, day by day, as a function of solar latitude and time from 1975 through the present. The result is a sort of strip chart recording that reveals evolving magnetic patterns on the Sun's surface. "We call it a butterfly diagram," he says, "because sunspots make a pattern in this plot that looks like the wings of a butterfly." In the butterfly diagram, pictured below, the Sun's polar fields appear as strips of uniform color near 90 degrees latitude. When the colors change (in this case from blue to yellow or vice versa) it means the polar fields have switched signs.

The ongoing changes are not confined to the space immediately around our star, Hathaway added. The Sun's magnetic field envelops the entire solar system in a bubble that scientists call the "heliosphere." The heliosphere extends 50 to 100 astronomical units (AU) beyond the orbit of Pluto. Inside it is the solar system -- outside is interstellar space.

"Changes in the Sun's magnetic field are carried outward through the heliosphere by the solar wind," explains Steve Suess, another solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "It takes about a year for disturbances to propagate all the way from the Sun to the outer bounds of the heliosphere." Because the Sun rotates (once every 27 days) solar magnetic fields corkscrew outwards in the shape of an Archimedian spiral. Far above the poles the magnetic fields twist around like a child's Slinky toy.

Because of all the twists and turns, "the impact of the field reversal on the heliosphere is complicated," says Hathaway. Sunspots are sources of intense magnetic knots that spiral outwards even as the dipole field vanishes. The heliosphere doesn't simply wink out of existence when the poles flip -- there are plenty of complex magnetic structures to fill the void.

Or so the theory goes.... Researchers have never seen the magnetic flip happen from the best possible point of view -- that is, from the top down. But now, the unique Ulysses spacecraft may give scientists a reality check. Ulysses, an international joint venture of the European Space Agency and NASA, was launched in 1990 to observe the solar system from very high solar latitudes. Every six years the spacecraft flies 2.2 AU over the Sun's poles. No other probe travels so far above the orbital plane of the planets. "Ulysses just passed under the Sun's south pole," says Suess, a mission co-Investigator. "Now it will loop back and fly over the north pole in the fall."

"This is the most important part of our mission," he says. Ulysses last flew over the Sun's poles in 1994 and 1996, during solar minimum, and the craft made several important discoveries about cosmic rays, the solar wind, and more. "Now we get to see the Sun's poles during the other extreme: Solar Max. Our data will cover a complete solar cycle."

To learn more about the Sun's changing magnetic field and how it is generated, please visit "The Solar Dynamo," a web page prepared by the NASA/Marshall solar research group. Updates from the Ulysses spacecraft may be found on the Internet from JPL at http://ulysses.jpl.nasa.gov.

Answer 17

No the world not to end the changes  are to accur in 2012 as eclipses but not the world lifestyle changes

no worry

Answer 18

Only this end of the world prophecy.Not to worry,we'll have another cooked up in no time.

Answer 19

Hope not im to young to die!

Answer 20

No. uh, what doomsayers?

Answer 21

Wait till 22 December 2012

Answer 22

No.  I can remember back in the 60's cults would walk around with signs saying the end is near.....and have lived through many more predictions of doom since then.  It can kind of give you an eerie feeling though.

Answer 23

No.  Nothing bad will happen on the 21st of December, 2012 - at least, nothing bad that relates to the end of the world.

Read here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerica...

To learn about the Long Count Calendar that various mesoamerican cultures used....

and here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerica...

To understand why that end of the world stuff is nonsense.