Читать книгу Apocalypse 2012: An optimist investigates the end of civilization - Lawrence Joseph E. - Страница 14

The thesis of this book is that the year 2012 will be pivotal, perhaps catastrophic, possibly revelatory, to a degree unmatched in human history.

1. Ancient Mayan prophecies based on two millennia of meticulous astronomical observations indicate that 12/21/12 will mark the birth of a new age, accompanied, as all births are, by blood and agony as well as hope and promise.

2. Since the 1940s, and particularly since 2003, the Sun has behaved more tumultuously than any time since the rapid global warming that accompanied the melting of the last Ice Age 11,000 years ago. Solar physicists concur that solar activity will next peak, at record-setting levels, in 2012.

3. Storms on the Sun are related to storms on the Earth. The great wave of 2005 hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma coincided with one of the stormiest weeks in the recorded history of the Sun.

4. The Earth’s magnetic field, our primary defense against harmful solar radiation, has begun to dwindle, with California-sized cracks opening up randomly. A pole shift, in which such protection falls nearly to zero as the North and South magnetic poles reverse position, may well be under way.

5. Russian geophysicists believe that the Solar System has entered an interstellar energy cloud. This cloud is energizing and destabilizing the Sun and all the planets’ atmospheres. Their predictions for catastrophe resulting from the Earth’s encounter with this energy cloud range from 2010 to 2020.

6. Physicists at UC Berkeley, who discovered that the dinosaurs and 70 percent of all other species on Earth were extinguished by the impact of a comet or asteroid 65 million years ago, maintain with 99 percent certainty that we are now overdue for another such megacatastrophe.

7. The Yellowstone supervolcano, which erupts catastrophically every 600,000 to 700,000 years, is preparing to blow. The most recent eruption of comparable magnitude, at Lake Toba, Indonesia, 74,000 years ago, led to the death of more than 90 percent of the world’s population at the time.

8. Eastern philosophies, such as the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, and Hindu theology, have been plausibly interpreted as supporting the 2012 end date, as have a range of indigenous belief systems.

9. At least one scholarly interpretation of the Bible predicts that the Earth will be annihilated in 2012. The burgeoning Armageddonist movement of Muslims, Christians, and Jews actively seeks to precipitate the final end-times battle.

10. Have a nice day.