2012, The End of the World: David Loftus

The world (as we know it) will not end in 2012. It won’t end in my lifetime or during the lives of anyone alive or born today. But it will end, and fairly soon, as measured by a slightly larger frame of reference -- say, the life of a tree.

Let’s dispose of the Mayan calendar schuck. Anyone who knows anything about Mayan culture and religion has been happy to tell the media that according to the Mayans, December 2012 is not a deadline for the end of the world but the turning point of a cycle of life. I am certain that nobody who worked on the film 2012 believes the world will end any time soon; they simply found a hook for yet another thrilling disaster movie in a long line, from When Worlds Collide to Millennium and The Day After Tomorrow.

What’s more interesting -- indeed, troubling -- is the readiness of so many Americans and “less civilized” people around the world to accord the slightest doubt or credence to the notion of “the end of the world” by some fateful or extraterrestrial design, whether aliens or The Rapture. If I may speculate, it probably comes from our sneaking suspicion of our own mortality and the simultaneous need to deny it. The world will indeed end for each of us when we die, and nobody wants that. The knowledge makes us feel that we don’t control our lives, and any time we don’t feel in control, many of us automatically want to shift the blame elsewhere.

Now, much of the time, we actually do have more control over the situation than we believe -- at the very least, over our responses to it -- but we choose to pretend otherwise in order to dodge the responsibility. In the case of death, it really is out of our hands. That knowledge is terrifying, so many of us find comfort in thinking it’s really out of our hands by telling ourselves that on the day we die, the world will end for everyone and not just for us.

But I did say the world as humans know it will end soon, didn’t I? I’d guess it will happen within the next 150 years. It will spark from either of the two historic sources of tension: scarcity of resources or an overabundance of waste (or a combination of both). On the one hand, diminishing amounts of sufficient energy, clean air and water, or food will heighten local violence and the frequency of wars; on the other, increasing amounts of plastic, PCBs, heavy metals, and nuclear waste in the environment will drive up disease and cancer rates (not just for us but for the domestic and wild animals that support the human diet).

It won’t be a bang, perhaps, but a series of small bangs all across the planet, accompanied by billions of whimpers.