There are so many, many things to cover on this topic that I can’t even pretend to have heard of them all, let alone go through them, so lets just hit a couple and see what we can get done before we run out of time (ha ha).
First, lets reflect on the whole Y2K thing. Remember that? Remember how it ended? Not even a whimper.
So let’s get this out of the way now. There is nothing to worry about. People have been predicting the end of the world since they developed the concept of prediction and as individuals some of us may have seen the end of time but on the whole all predictions of the end have been wrong.
Does that mean it can’t happen? No. I am pretty sure an asteroid could wipe us out, destroy the whole planet, that kind of thing. Nuclear war could hurt us all pretty badly. Over population is looming on the horizon, pollution of the planet, on and on come the realistically based threats to life as we know it.
But lets talk about the unrealistic ones. 2012? Really? Why? Because a calendar ends? Did we all die after 1999? No, but a lot of people thought we would. See above referenced Y2K. Why do people think that the end of a calendar means the end of the world? Because it is an end. People tend to think of the end of something as a death, as an ending, and we personalize it, so it must be an end to the way our lives have been up to this point.
Some people have started to realize that a day passing by is pretty much the same as any other day passing by, regardless of who named, numbered, counted, or sorted that day in some intangible way. So now people are trying to come up with new ways to scare themselves.
Have you heard of Zero Point and Schumann Resonance? This one link I give has a bit of common sense in it (probably because it is at dailycommonsense.com, ya think?). But type it into your browser and be prepared to read the nonsense. Seriously. Let’s ignore all the stuff about how it is changing our DNA and will shift us into the fourth dimension, how it is the cause of fatigue, flu, lethargy, dreams, etc. Let’s look at the fun part of it! (And try to ignore that this is supposed to happen in -you guessed it, 2012.)
Time is slowing down? Time will end? Already a 24 hour day seems like a 16 hour day?
Riiiiight….
Okay, I tried to look into this Zero Point thing, and the actual idea of zero point energy aside, it is a ‘mystical’ term. It means whatever whoever is using it wants it to mean. It means the shifting of the Earth’s magnetic poles, the end of this age and the beginning of a new spiritual age, the end of the Mayan calendar…whatever the person using it wants it to mean. I suggest you throw the term away and don’t think about it anymore.
Next is Schumann resonances. Basically this is a measurement of the generalized activity of lightning around the planet. Think of it this way. We set up a microphone to measure echos in the Grand Canyon. When no one yells, we get nothing. When one person yells, all the way at the far end, we get a little tiny measurement. When a bunch of people are yelling, the echoes bounce all over the place and create a background noise. The level of the background noise is what we are measuring. So Schumann resonances are like the ‘echos’ of lightning strikes all around the world. The more lightning, the more resonances, the more ‘background noise.’
How does that apply to the end of the world as we know it in 2012? I have no idea. As near as I can tell these ideas trace back to a book by Gregg Braden, a spiritualist claiming to be a scientist. I know nothing about him and have no comments.
But I do want to point out, as the article at dailycommonsense.com also points out, nearly all of the information on Zero Point and Schumann Resonance seems to be cut and pasted from the same sources and offers no explanations or validations whatsoever.
In reality, days are actually getting a little longer all the time as the Earth slows. See the Scientific American article.
On a final note, if time is changing, and our 24 hour days are becoming 16 hour days, you won’t be able to tell. Time is subjective. As Einstein’s Theory of Relativity predicted, and as experiments have shown in very small ways, time passes differently, subjectively, anyway. (you get on a space ship and fly at light speed to the nearest star and back back, you would feel as though the trip only took you a few seconds, minutes at most, while the people here on Earth would perceive you as having been gone for a decade…)
Conversely, if time is ‘slowing’ and will eventually ‘stop’, you still won’t be able to tell. Perhaps you will be forever frozen, unmoving, and out of time, but you’ll never know it. You won’t have time to think about it.
No worries, then, right?