7 ms·

Ok, so when is the actual end of the world if not 2012?

by ssalka 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
culi 3y ago
How do you know it wasn't 2012?
- irrational 3y ago
  Seriously. Looking around, I would not be surprised to learn we have already passed the end of the world and have moved into hell.
  - api 3y ago
    Instead of doing the whole hell thing, which God decided was kind of harsh, they just moved us into a shitty timeline run by hack writers. It's kind of like what's done with a show that somehow hasn't been cancelled yet but where all the good writers and a few of the lead actors have moved on. Their ideas are shit like: "I've got it! Let's make Donald Trump President! Then we'll have Donald Trump and the MyPillow guy try to overthrow the US government!" "Not until we launch a red sports car into space! Then there's a pandemic that causes a toilet paper shortage." "Let's turn Elon Musk into a thirteen year old edgelord 4chan troll and have him buy Twitter!" "Enough cheap jokes. We need some serious drama. Let's have Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine and then lose really bad to an army run by a former comedian that uses Discord for battlefield comms." "After that we'll have a superintelligence descended from something called 'llama' take over the world after it leaks out of Facebook with a torrent file." "Facebook? No way let's have Zuckerberg bet the entire company on the metaverse idea from Neil Stephenson except it doesn't really exist. He'll rename the company Meta." "Yeah that's awesome! Now when does Dogecoin become the global reserve currency?" "After the llama makes everyone wear hats or be murdered by drone swarms."
    - eru 3y ago
      Wider your horizon a bit. By and large, the world is getting better and better for more and more people. To take your first example: American political theatre is small fry compared to billions lifting themselves out of abject poverty.
      - api 3y ago
        The world is getting better (for many) but it's also getting weirder and crazier. Both can be true. I have this hypothesis that the weirdness and craziness is a symptom of early stage post-scarcity. Scarcity constrains things. Without it we will just spread out across the state space of possibilities like an oil slick, doing all kinds of insane and crazy things for increasingly complex and bizarre reasons. The more resources we have the more the question ceases to be "why" and becomes "why not?" I call this the singLOLarity hypothesis. A real post-scarcity future won't look like Star Trek. It'll look a little more like Lexx. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx If we are ever visited by super-advanced aliens, they will be really weird. Maybe they really are flying around in pimped-out spaceships with multi-color neon running lights mutilating our cattle for the lulz. The question is not "why?" It's "why not?"
        eru 3y ago
        > The world is getting better (for many) but it's also getting weirder and crazier. Both can be true. Yes, that is true. I was taking your use of 'shitty timeline' to mean 'worse'. I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about post-scarcity as a monolith. To give an example: Lamborghinis are still very much scarce; but drinking water out of the tap is so cheap in developed countries that we are living in a post-scarcity society for that resource. (I specify 'drinking water', because for industrial or agricultural applications water is still very much a constrained resource.) Another example is Internet bandwidth for text-only browsing of eg Wikipedia: it's too cheap to matter. Internet bandwidth for watching Netflix isn't quite there yet.
      - waboremo 3y ago
        I would argue that it's imperative you should also widen your horizon and recognize you are viewing human history in too narrow of a lens (mostly post-victorian era). The poverty statistic is one that gets thrown around a lot, but it's abysmally low still, and due to how our modern societies place far greater importance on money than any civilization before, this paints a much darker picture of our current timeline. This wealth inequality is also unavoidable, you cannot relocate elsewhere and forage, that land is already taken up by a corporation. One might believe all civilizations were just as unequal, but they really weren't. Those that were restricted by land had far greater levels of inequality than those by labor[1]. This is crucial because we have created a modern hell, in which no amount of labor will give you wealth, you need land to accumulate wealth and most people do not have that when we are still judging "poverty" based on "$1.25". We make ourselves feel better about our modern life, but have we really advanced past dancing for our superiors' entertainment? Sometimes when this is discussed, people might feel this is an ungrateful perspective, but I argue the opposite: you can more vividly appreciate our ancestors and their lives for what you do not know of them, and to demand better of our lives instead of settling for these abysmal statistics. [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/abs/farminginequality-nexus-new-insights-from-ancient-western-eurasia/8EFE3B8F5AFA07450F87E4E9B553A43E https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/ab...
  - eru 3y ago
    The world is a better place now for more people than ever before. If anything, we are escaping hell, not descending into it.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      People, yeah maybe. Though the threat of actual apocalypse is higher than it's been for 99.99% of human history. Also, the 99+% of the other species on the planet would probably have a dim view of our 'progress', as would people who respect them.
      - eru 3y ago
        The environment in most rich countries, especially in Europe (and especially ex-Warsaw Pact Europe), is in a lot better shape today than eg most of the 20th century. (Of course, you can argue it's still in a worse shape than two thousand years ago.) As other countries get richer, they also tend to start cleaning up their act. Have a look at the great strides China made in the last two decades. > Also, the 99+% of the other species on the planet would probably have a dim view of our 'progress', as would people who respect them. Most of the life on the rest of the planet are bacteria and archaea etc and the phages that prey on them. They are doing just fine. Of course, exactly how you divide them into species is a bit of a matter of debate. But no matter how you slice them up, they represent the vast majority of biodiversity on the planet. I respect them a lot. You might like http://2015phage.org/art.php http://2015phage.org/art.php
  - nelox 3y ago
    Maybe we never left
Dalewyn 3y ago
A year after the supposed year of the end of the world has passed without incident. The goalposts must be kept moving.
- desultir 3y ago
  it's only been a year since 2012? Man it feels longer, must be all the bad news
  - Izkata 3y ago
    Even before 2012 people were saying it was either 2012 or 2021 and we're not sure which. The reasoning was basically that some years are missing from the calendar. It came back in 2020 with a slightly different number: https://www.republicworld.com/fact-check/viral/fact-check-did-we-lose-eight-years.html https://www.republicworld.com/fact-check/viral/fact-check-di...
Dylan16807 3y ago
The old one didn't say the end of the world was 2012 either. It was just the date going from 0.0.0.0.12.19.19.17.19 to 0.0.0.0.13.0.0.0.0 And there exist Mayan documents talking about dates that are still in the future! The rumor was just because the previous world supposedly ended after that amount of time, with the current world being the fourth, but it was specifically not supposed to happen to this one.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  More specifically, the Mayans dated the (most recent) creation as happening on 13.0.0.0.0, with the next day being 0.0.0.0.1. Given that Mesoamerican cosmology explicitly talks of multiple incarnations of creation, some people took it to mean that the current cycle of creation would end on 13.0.0.0.0, but there's no evidence that any Mayan thought this was true.

Ok, so when is the actual end of the world if not 2012?

by ssalka 3y ago

Ok, so when is the actual end of the world if not 2012?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

culi 3y ago

How do you know it wasn't 2012?

irrational 3y ago
Seriously. Looking around, I would not be surprised to learn we have already passed the end of the world and have moved into hell.
- api 3y ago
  Instead of doing the whole hell thing, which God decided was kind of harsh, they just moved us into a shitty timeline run by hack writers. It's kind of like what's done with a show that somehow hasn't been cancelled yet but where all the good writers and a few of the lead actors have moved on. Their ideas are shit like: "I've got it! Let's make Donald Trump President! Then we'll have Donald Trump and the MyPillow guy try to overthrow the US government!" "Not until we launch a red sports car into space! Then there's a pandemic that causes a toilet paper shortage." "Let's turn Elon Musk into a thirteen year old edgelord 4chan troll and have him buy Twitter!" "Enough cheap jokes. We need some serious drama. Let's have Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine and then lose really bad to an army run by a former comedian that uses Discord for battlefield comms." "After that we'll have a superintelligence descended from something called 'llama' take over the world after it leaks out of Facebook with a torrent file." "Facebook? No way let's have Zuckerberg bet the entire company on the metaverse idea from Neil Stephenson except it doesn't really exist. He'll rename the company Meta." "Yeah that's awesome! Now when does Dogecoin become the global reserve currency?" "After the llama makes everyone wear hats or be murdered by drone swarms."
  - eru 3y ago
    Wider your horizon a bit. By and large, the world is getting better and better for more and more people. To take your first example: American political theatre is small fry compared to billions lifting themselves out of abject poverty.
    - api 3y ago
      The world is getting better (for many) but it's also getting weirder and crazier. Both can be true. I have this hypothesis that the weirdness and craziness is a symptom of early stage post-scarcity. Scarcity constrains things. Without it we will just spread out across the state space of possibilities like an oil slick, doing all kinds of insane and crazy things for increasingly complex and bizarre reasons. The more resources we have the more the question ceases to be "why" and becomes "why not?" I call this the singLOLarity hypothesis. A real post-scarcity future won't look like Star Trek. It'll look a little more like Lexx. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx If we are ever visited by super-advanced aliens, they will be really weird. Maybe they really are flying around in pimped-out spaceships with multi-color neon running lights mutilating our cattle for the lulz. The question is not "why?" It's "why not?"
      - eru 3y ago
        > The world is getting better (for many) but it's also getting weirder and crazier. Both can be true. Yes, that is true. I was taking your use of 'shitty timeline' to mean 'worse'. I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about post-scarcity as a monolith. To give an example: Lamborghinis are still very much scarce; but drinking water out of the tap is so cheap in developed countries that we are living in a post-scarcity society for that resource. (I specify 'drinking water', because for industrial or agricultural applications water is still very much a constrained resource.) Another example is Internet bandwidth for text-only browsing of eg Wikipedia: it's too cheap to matter. Internet bandwidth for watching Netflix isn't quite there yet.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      I would argue that it's imperative you should also widen your horizon and recognize you are viewing human history in too narrow of a lens (mostly post-victorian era). The poverty statistic is one that gets thrown around a lot, but it's abysmally low still, and due to how our modern societies place far greater importance on money than any civilization before, this paints a much darker picture of our current timeline. This wealth inequality is also unavoidable, you cannot relocate elsewhere and forage, that land is already taken up by a corporation. One might believe all civilizations were just as unequal, but they really weren't. Those that were restricted by land had far greater levels of inequality than those by labor[1]. This is crucial because we have created a modern hell, in which no amount of labor will give you wealth, you need land to accumulate wealth and most people do not have that when we are still judging "poverty" based on "$1.25". We make ourselves feel better about our modern life, but have we really advanced past dancing for our superiors' entertainment? Sometimes when this is discussed, people might feel this is an ungrateful perspective, but I argue the opposite: you can more vividly appreciate our ancestors and their lives for what you do not know of them, and to demand better of our lives instead of settling for these abysmal statistics. [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/abs/farminginequality-nexus-new-insights-from-ancient-western-eurasia/8EFE3B8F5AFA07450F87E4E9B553A43E https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/ab...
- eru 3y ago
  The world is a better place now for more people than ever before. If anything, we are escaping hell, not descending into it.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    People, yeah maybe. Though the threat of actual apocalypse is higher than it's been for 99.99% of human history. Also, the 99+% of the other species on the planet would probably have a dim view of our 'progress', as would people who respect them.
    - eru 3y ago
      The environment in most rich countries, especially in Europe (and especially ex-Warsaw Pact Europe), is in a lot better shape today than eg most of the 20th century. (Of course, you can argue it's still in a worse shape than two thousand years ago.) As other countries get richer, they also tend to start cleaning up their act. Have a look at the great strides China made in the last two decades. > Also, the 99+% of the other species on the planet would probably have a dim view of our 'progress', as would people who respect them. Most of the life on the rest of the planet are bacteria and archaea etc and the phages that prey on them. They are doing just fine. Of course, exactly how you divide them into species is a bit of a matter of debate. But no matter how you slice them up, they represent the vast majority of biodiversity on the planet. I respect them a lot. You might like http://2015phage.org/art.php http://2015phage.org/art.php
- nelox 3y ago
  Maybe we never left

Dalewyn 3y ago

A year after the supposed year of the end of the world has passed without incident. The goalposts must be kept moving.

desultir 3y ago
it's only been a year since 2012? Man it feels longer, must be all the bad news
- Izkata 3y ago
  Even before 2012 people were saying it was either 2012 or 2021 and we're not sure which. The reasoning was basically that some years are missing from the calendar. It came back in 2020 with a slightly different number: https://www.republicworld.com/fact-check/viral/fact-check-did-we-lose-eight-years.html https://www.republicworld.com/fact-check/viral/fact-check-di...

Dylan16807 3y ago

The old one didn't say the end of the world was 2012 either. It was just the date going from 0.0.0.0.12.19.19.17.19 to 0.0.0.0.13.0.0.0.0 And there exist Mayan documents talking about dates that are still in the future! The rumor was just because the previous world supposedly ended after that amount of time, with the current world being the fourth, but it was specifically not supposed to happen to this one.

jcranmer 3y ago
More specifically, the Mayans dated the (most recent) creation as happening on 13.0.0.0.0, with the next day being 0.0.0.0.1. Given that Mesoamerican cosmology explicitly talks of multiple incarnations of creation, some people took it to mean that the current cycle of creation would end on 13.0.0.0.0, but there's no evidence that any Mayan thought this was true.