Читать книгу Apocalypse 2012: An optimist investigates the end of civilization - Lawrence Joseph E. - Страница 18

Righteous indignation was still pumping my brain when it dawned on me that the exchange between those two computer nerds on top of the Tikal pyramid probably wasn’t far off in spirit from the conversations that took place there originally. That very pyramid, in fact, was built specifically for astronomers to chart the heavens and keep track of celestial time.

Imagine two ancient Mayan astronomers, an elder and a younger, arguing about the stars on the eve of the vernal equinox. The elder observes that Polaris, the pole star of the Northern Hemisphere, is not in the same position it was on the vernal equinox thirty-six years ago, when he first started his observations. Over that time, Polaris has shifted in a westward direction, the elder declares, about the same distance as the width of the full Moon (roughly half a degree).

The younger astronomer recoils from the heresy. From time immemorial, an article of celestial faith is that, on any given day and date, the stars are supposed to be in exactly the same position from one year to the next. To say otherwise would mean that the great heavenly clock is not keeping perfect time.

Eventually the truth won out, and the elder’s discovery was incorporated into the Mayan cosmology. Perhaps as long as two and a half millennia ago, their ancient astronomers sussed out the astonishing fact that slowly, inexorably, the heavens crank westward at the rate of about 1 degree every 72 years, and complete a full circle every 26,000 Mayan solar years, a period equal to five Suns. A stargazer who lived for the next 26,000 Mayan solar years would see the polestar change from Polaris, also known as the North Star, to Vega, and then back to Polaris, as would a stargazer who lived from 26,000 Mayan solar years until now.

As we’ve been reminded over and over again since Copernicus, it’s not the heavens but the Earth that moves. In fact the Earth spins like a top on its axis. Watch a top spin, and you will note that its axis slowly describes its own tiny circle. That process is called precession and is entirely analogous to what we perceive as the rotation of the heavens in the sky.

Precession seems to have been discovered more or less simultaneously by a variety of different cultures. Traditionally, credit for first understanding that the heavens are in fact a giant clock that takes eons to move around goes to Hipparchus, an ancient Greek astronomer who lived in the second century BCE. However, it now seems likely that the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Sumerians had earlier grasped the concept.

Persian and Indian astronomers also knew of precession, perhaps via the ancient Greeks, and were so impressed with the fact that the heavens move ever so slowly in an incredibly huge circle that they attributed it all to a deity, Mithra. During the sixth century BCE, Mithraism spread rapidly throughout India, the Middle East, and Europe. At its peak in the second century CE, Mithraism was more widely embraced than Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. Its central doctrine sprang from the sacrifice of a sacred bull, from whose body all goodness sprang. Although Mithraism virtually vanished in the third century CE, with Islam eventually taking over in Persia later on, the Persian New Year is still celebrated on the vernal equinox, usually March 20, a festive holdover from Mithraic days.

Long-term cycles in the Earth’s orbit and spin have more than cosmetic importance, according to Milutin Milankovitch, the brilliant Serbian astronomer. He examined three cycles, now known as the Milankovitch cycles, for their potential impacts on climate and catastrophe on Earth. The first cycle, known as eccentricity, simply accounts for the fact that the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun changes from being almost perfectly circular to slightly more elliptical, over a cycle that lasts from 90,000 to 100,000 years. Right now we are at the most circular stage in that cycle, meaning that there’s only about a 3 percent variation in distance, and a 6 percent variation in received solar energy, between perihelion, the point where our planet is closest to the Sun, and aphelion, the point where our planet is farthest from the Sun. However, as the Earth’s eccentricity cycle proceeds toward the point at which our orbit is most elliptical, the amount of solar radiation our planet receives at perihelion will be 20 to 30 percent greater than at aphelion. This will make for sharper seasonal contrasts and profound climate change. Milankovitch and his followers believe that previous ice ages are largely attributable to the Earth’s eccentricity cycle.

Currently, perihelion occurs during the second week of January, shortly after the Northern Hemisphere’s winter solstice. This works out nicely, at least for those of us in the northern half of the world, because we are getting that extra 6 percent boost of solar energy right in the dead of winter. This cozy situation won’t last forever, Milankovitch observed. As the north polestar shifts from Polaris to Vega, the orientation of the Earth toward the Sun also changes, to a situation where perihelion will come during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer solstice, meaning that we’ll be getting our energy boost right in the dead of summer. And by then, 13,000 years from now, that energy boost will be two or three times as powerful as the boost we get today, because the Earth’s orbit will have become more elliptical, making for greater differences between the amounts of solar radiation received at different points of the year. All in all, the Northern Hemisphere’s summers will be hotter, and the winters colder, making Southern Hemisphere real estate a good long-term buy.

WE ALL WERE TAUGHT that the Earth tilts on its axis, although just why the Earth’s axis tilts at all rather than going straight up and down is still open to conjecture. Some believe that eons ago the Earth was bonked by an asteroid or another planet, knocking us cockeyed; others argue that the pull of the Sun’s gravitational field, which would be strongest at the Earth’s equator, where most of our planet’s mass is, causes the Earth to tilt, “stomachward,” to the Sun.

The tilt of the Earth’s axis is what causes the seasons, since at different times of the year different parts of the planet lean either into or away from the sunlight. When the Northern Hemisphere is receiving direct sunlight, it is summer here, and days are longer than nights. At that time the Southern Hemisphere is receiving indirect sunlight, its winter, when nights are longer than days. On two days every year, the spring and fall equinoxes, all parts of the Earth have equal day and night.

In a cycle known as obliquity, Milankovitch discovered that, over the course of about 41,000 years, the tilt in the Earth’s axis changes from 22.1 degrees to 24.5 degrees. Currently the Earth’s tilt is 23.5 degrees. The greater the tilt, the more exaggerated the contrast between seasons. Imagine yourself on a cold winter night, standing over a campfire. Now lean your face closer to the fire. It gets hotter and your butt gets thrust farther out in the cold. This is just what happens to the Earth as its axial tilt becomes more pronounced.

Although some contemporary scientists quail at the notion, a preponderance of evidence from archaeological texts and artifacts clearly indicates that the ancients had a rudimentary grasp of astronomical cycles such as precession, eccentricity, and obliquity. This knowledge gave astronomer-priests an exalted position in their societies, for they were felt to be in communication with the gods. Knowing, for example, when Venus would rise was impressive not just as a calculation but more as a transmission of information from gods to priests and then to their followers. Thus the ancient Mayan revelations concerning 2012 were considered to be of divine origin.

For millennia, the night sky was humanity’s readiest source of news and entertainment. The ancients watched the stars and the planets as avidly as we do television. Heavenly bodies were just that, bodies of the deities. Movements and changes in them indicated divine events. Ancient astronomer-priests took the art and science of sky-watching to the point where they could in fact predict the future—for example, lunar and solar eclipses. This required not only observation but also the mathematics necessary to correlate the movements of the Moon and Sun. Their sophistication gives lie to the condescending Hollywood gimmick wherein the white man, knowing that an eclipse is due, pretends to make the Sun disappear, thereby scaring the ignorant natives. The white men didn’t know half as much as the ancients and indigenous peoples did about the stars.

Van Gogh looked up into the starry sky and saw the swirls of God’s imagination. Three millennia earlier, Pythagoras listened to “the music of the spheres,” silent to the ears but not to the immortal soul. You know those rare and wonderful moments when you’re familiar with a composer but not the piece being played at the moment, and yet somehow you can sense where it’s going and how it will end? Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos are like that—listen to the first few, and the rest, though in no way derivative or redundant, just might unfold in your mind before the notes are played. Over the course of two dozen centuries of rapt connoisseurship, Mayan astronomer-priests developed an ear for how the music of the spheres played out, including the chords for disaster.

Prior to the 15th century, the Elders knew through the prophecies of the approaching invasion of the Spanish, which began on the first day of a cycle called the Belejeb Bolum Tiku (the Nine Darkness). This was a 468-year period consisting of nine smaller cycles of 52 years each, which lasted from August 17, 1519, until August 16, 1987 [the day of the Harmonic Convergence]. Because the Guardians of the Prophecies knew well in advance of the approaching invasion, they had ample time to prepare their communities. They informed the people about the effect the invasion would have on them, the sacred land and their traditional way of life. Part of the preparation included steps to ensure the protection of all the records, including the codices [sacred texts].

Most of the original Mayan codices, thousands of them, were burned during the first weeks of the Spanish conquest in 1519, by order of the Roman Catholic Church. Father Diego de Landa, who supervised the burning, was subsequently ordered by the king and queen of Spain to return to Guatemala and write a book summarizing Mayan beliefs. The resulting text, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Yucatán Before and After the Conquest), was full of cultural and factual distortions, not the least of which was the opening declaration that all Maya revered Jesus Christ, of whom few, at that point, had actually heard. Nonetheless, this book was the first text about the Maya in any Western language and therefore became the basis for virtually all Western scholarship on Mayan customs and beliefs, mistakes that have been compounded ever since.

It is widely written that only four Mayan codices survived the Spanish book-burning. What that means is that only four such codices are today known to be in Anglo-European hands. Many more sacred texts were saved by record-keepers and elders from different tribes who hid out in the mountains and remote areas. For more than twenty years, Gerardo Barrios visited villages in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico, searching out the descendants of these elders, some of whom still lived in the same caves in which their ancestors escaped the conquistadors. As they write in The Maya Cholqij, except for minor variations in language, “all of the calendars in use by traditional Mayan communities match up and continue the accurate record (count) of days that the Maya have been keeping for many thousands of years.” These texts were saved because the stars warned the Maya of the impending disaster headed for their culture. Now the Mayan calendar tells us that’s what’s ahead for the whole world.

On 12/21/12 our Solar System, with the Sun at its center, will, as the Maya have for millennia maintained, eclipse the view from Earth of the center of the Milky Way. This happens only once every 26,000 years. Ancient Mayan astronomers considered this center spot to be the Milky Way’s womb, a belief now supported by voluminous evidence that that’s where the galaxy’s stars are created. Astronomers now suspect that there is a black hole right at the center sucking up the matter, energy, and time that will serve as raw materials for the creation of future stars.

In other words, whatever energy typically streams to Earth from the centerpoint of the Milky Way will indeed be disrupted on 12/21/12, at 11:11 PM Universal Time, for the first time in 26,000 years. All because of a little wobble in the Earth’s rotation.

But why should a brief disruption of so distant a source as the center of the galaxy have any real consequences for our planet or its people? After all, we can go for days, weeks even, with no sunlight or moonlight without significant distress. The best analogy is the way that even a momentary disruption of electrical power can cause the clocks on VCRs and microwaves to go from keeping perfect time to blinking on and off meaninglessly until they are reset by hand. Our being even briefly cut off from the emanations from the center of the galaxy will, the Maya believe, throw out of kilter vital mechanisms of our bodies and of the Earth.

As I sidled gingerly down the steps of the Great Pyramid, I felt a pang for the chattering computer geeks. A sense of foreboding is in the air. We can all feel it, even those guys, and we can all find ways to deny those feelings, like by chattering nervously about anything but. Now it turns out that an ancient, obscure culture has for a good two millennia been predicting the date of apocalypse as 2012. There’s internal logic and precision to the Mayan thinking, and they’re sticking by the date. Denial has just become a little bit harder. Maybe a lot harder.