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APOCALYPSE 2012
AN OPTIMIST INVESTIGATES THE END OF CIVILIZATION
Lawrence E. Joseph
To Phoebe and Milo. I love you.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
GUILTY OF APOCALYPSE: THE CASE AGAINST 2012
SECTION I: TIME
1. WHY 2012, EXACTLY?
2. THE SERPENT AND THE JAGUAR
SECTION II: EARTH
3. THE MAW OF 2012
4. HELLFIRES BURNING
5. CROSSING ATITLÁN
SECTION III: SUN
6. SEE SUN. SEE SUN SPOT.
7. AFRICA CRACKING, EUROPE NEXT
SECTION IV: SPACE
8. HEADING INTO THE ENERGY CLOUD
9. THROUGH THE THINKING GLASS
SECTION V: EXTINCTION
10. OOF!
SECTION VI: ARMAGEDDON
11. LET THE END-TIMES ROLL
12. HAIL THE STATUS QUO
13. 2012, THE STRANGE ATTRACTOR
CONCLUSION
EPILOGUE
NOTES
REFERENCES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
On the first day of freshman writing class, the instructor told us that good writing was all about emotions—portraying them, eliciting them, unraveling them, being true to them. I stuck up my hand and stammered out something to the effect that, to me, emotions were just the details, and that what really mattered was whether or not people got to stay alive in order to have any. Happy, sad, angry, diffident, deep or shallow, shared with a loved one or burning from within—that’s all very interesting, but of secondary importance compared, say, to whether or not one is poisoned to death, or burnt to a crisp.
So when I first heard about how the world might end in 2012, I took to the idea right away. Except that no one in his right mind believes the world is really going to end. That’s the kind of thing weird men wearing sandwich boards and giving out smudgy pamphlets with lots of exclamation points on them like to claim. Theoretically, of course, the world must burn, freeze, crumble, or existentially wig out one day, but that’s billions of years down the road, right? Who knows, maybe by then we’ll all have moved to another planet, or even figured out a cure for time. But for all practical purposes, the unfathomable concept of the world coming to an end is used mostly to put things in perspective, as in “it’s not the end of the world” if your pants don’t get back from the dry cleaners until Monday.
There are any number of end-time scenarios, from Hitler/bin Laden/Pol Pot getting his finger on the button, to an asteroid the size of Everest cracking the Earth like an apple, to the Lord God Almighty saying enough is enough. But our planet does not have to literally disintegrate, or all its inhabitants perish, for our world to come to an end, or close enough. If civilization as we know it, that burgeoning and magnificent social, political, and cultural entity, were damaged to the point where its evolution was retarded, where normal relations between nations were disrupted, where a significant percentage of human beings lost their lives and most of the rest faced a future of hardship and horror—that would count.
Since the early 1990s, I have been involved with a company that has sought to help save the world from poisoning itself. Aerospace Consulting Corporation (AC2), of which I am currently chairman, has begged, borrowed, and blood-from-stoned about $10 million to develop the Vulcan Plasma Disintegrator, U.S. patent #7,026,570 B2, a portable, ultra-high-temperature furnace that will completely dissociate highly toxic wastes, including but not limited to lethal biological and chemical weapons that cannot otherwise be disposed of. The Vulcan, when it is finally produced, will be a fifty-yard tube with a robotic arm sticking out at one end. The arm grasps a fifty-five-gallon drum of hazardous, nonnuclear waste, samples its contents to prepare the right settings, sticks it inside the tube, which then heats up to 10,000 degrees, and zaps that sucker, container and all, into nothing: zero toxic residue.
There was always plenty of office space available at the Inhalation Toxicology Laboratory, out on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For next to nothing, our company had a nice suite and complimentary coffee station in the building out behind the kennel with the hundred identical dogs. True, the commute was an ordeal. After going through various security checkpoints, you had to drive all the way around the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Testing Center, a giant wooden platform held together without a single metal nail or screw, on which they would zap, say, a specially shielded 747 jumbo jet, to see if its instruments would fry. Next was the Big Melt Laser Laboratory; no one would ever tell me what it was they melted. Then mile after mile of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in their silos, dug into the hillside. The temptation to speed past them all had to be resisted because that part of the base is shoot-to-kill for vehicles violating the 30-mile-per-hour speed limit or any of the other traffic laws.
Over the past five years we have received considerable support and encouragement from Kirtland Air Force Base, a Department of Defense facility, and from Sandia National Laboratories, a Department of Energy facility responsible for, among other things, the construction and maintenance of every nuclear warhead in the United States.
For the record, neither AC2, Kirtland Air Force Base, nor Sandia National Laboratories, nor any employees or contractual workers associated with those entities are known to take any position whatsoever on predictions concerning the year 2012.
YOU