Geeks in Space: Things That Make You Go Hmm
I’m sure by now everyone with television and internet access has seen or read about the doomsday prophecies regarding the supposed end of the world which is due to take place on December 21, 2012. These predictions range anywhere from total annihilation of the Earth to a general paradigm shift where future generations will point back at the time and say, “Yes, that was when things changed for us.”
The Mayan Calendar
Personally, I don’t believe in it, mostly because the date is the last day of the Mayan calendar. The Mayans were a very sophisticated people who were obsessed with time. They spent centuries studying the heavens and creating a detailed cyclical calendar. Actually, a calendar within a calendar within a calendar, the broadest of which ends, like I said, on December 21, 2012.
However, what most of these prophets of doom who point to the Mayans as the source of their prophecies don’t tell you is that the only thing we have left of the immense body of work the Mayans produced explaining why they were so interested in time and the stars and calendars are four simple books. That’s it. The rest were burned in the righteous bonfires of the Spanish priests who felt they were doing God’s work in destroying the evil hieroglyphs of the heathen.
Four books. That’s like some future civilization trying to figure us out by looking at four websites. Hmm, maybe Geek-life.com will be one of them; can you imagine what they’d infer from that? In any case, I sit back and smile at the all the doom and gloom on the TV and shake my head at the idea of how worse the hype is going to get in the next year and a half. But every now and then something happens that makes me wonder if there might be some shred of possibility that something is going to happen next year. Yesterday, I had one of those moments.
I’ve been reporting on the Voyager probe in this column for a while now and if you’re a steady reader you know that they are at the edge of the solar system ready to pop out into interstellar space. A few months ago, I said that the probes might leave us as early as 2014 or as late as 2020, which gives the probes plenty of juice left to keep on transmitting data back to Earth. However, yesterday I read an article on the NASA site that made me go, “Hmm.”
Seems like scientists have figured out, thanks to new data from the Cassini probe on exactly how big the heliosheath is, that the probes will probably leave the solar system a lot earlier than previously thought. How much earlier? Why, as early as December of next year.
Hmm…
Perhaps future generations will be able to point back and say “Hey, guess what. Roddenberry got it wrong. It wasn’t the development of warp drive; it was us leaving the solar system.”
Have a great week!
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