2012 Predictions Infographic
Filed under: All Infographics, Cultural Infographics | 26 Comments »
Everybody’s got one. A prediction about what the devil is going to happen during the winter solstice of 2012. That’s the end of the world, say some. Here we have a graphic, provided by InformationIsBeautiful.net, about various 2012 predictions and possible horrid scenarios. The most redeeming quality of this graphic in my opinion is that it shows both sides–that of the believers and the naysayers.
The believers generally fall into two camps: those who think the Earth’s population will collectively undergo a positive physical or spiritual transformation, and those who think civilization will be completely annihilated or, instead, transubstantiate into a living hell for all. Then you have the skeptics, who either believe that all 2012 doomsday theories are bollocks because they are completely made up or bollocks because quasi-scholars have misinterpreted the Mayan calendar and the beliefs of that highly intelligent civilization.
The believers have a number of varied theories, and I suppose some think they are mutually exclusive, while others believe they can overlap. Their theories range from geomagnetic reversal (extremely unlikely, according to scientists), pole shift (scientifically impossible), egregious solar storms that ravage the planet (if there are storms, they will do nothing more than disrupt cell phone signals), the earth passing through a “galactic plane” (kind of hard when there are none within 24 light years), a rogue planet smacking into the Earth (if this was going to happen, it’s the kind of thing astronomers would notice, and none are coming toward us), a great flood that will tear the planet to pieces (out of the blue, huh?), and a nuclear holocaust (at least this theory/prediction isn’t based on faulty science).
Many of ideas that believers hold onto are based on completely historically incorrect information. For instance, they think that the Aztecs and the Toltecs knew about 2012 and also believe something unusual is going to happen on that date. But this idea is completely made up, as there is no evidence to suggest that either civilization knew about the Mayans. Ok, have I torn the believers’ beliefs apart enough yet? Let’s move to the grading segment.
Design: B
This design isn’t winning many points in the creativity or “amazing use of colors” department. The overall design of the graphic is fine; the problem is that the creator choose to use a plain and boring color scheme. Color schemes should suck you in, not recede into the furniture.
Content: A-
An excellent research job by the graphic’s creators. The decision to show theories in one column and tear them apart in the other should please both skeptics and believers alike. And there is no shortage of theories and charts.
When I look at this graphic though, all I can think about is how much more enthralling it would be if more colors than the bland light brown shades were used. Maybe the creators could redo it with more colors, kind of like colorizing an old 1940′s film? Food for thought, as Sherlock Holmes would say. Oh, and while he never mentioned it, I’m fairly certain someone like Holmes would call the whole “2012 thing” bollocks.
Related articles
- Top 10 Reasons the World Won’t End on December 12, 2012 (toptenz.net)
I love this.
I would usually be considered a sceptic, agreeing with most on the sceptic side of this graphic. It could have gone even further and stated more information on the Mayan calendar and how it doesn’t actually end in 2012.
The infographic is riddled with inaccuracies making it impossible to trust any information. There are errors and mistruths everywhere.
What is more concerning, is those with a lesser knowledge than the infographic, will go around stating falsities as facts or claiming that certain events cannot happen. To me, as a learned person and one with interest in science, the author has violated everyone’s trust and should be made to retract his nonsense.
One such example is a solar flare that disrupted power in Canada two decades ago. I remember it well:
“”On March 10, 1989, a CME about the size of 36 Earths erupted from the sun’s roiling surface and ripped through space at a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) per hour. Two days later, the torrid gas cloud crashed against Earth’s magnetosphere — the magnetic field generated by the planet’s spinning molten iron core that helps deflect the solar wind and more potent solar jetsam. This blast from the sun severely disrupted the magnetosphere and set off a geomagnetic superstorm.
Most significantly, at about 2:45 A.M. local time on Monday, March 13, Canada’s Hydro-Québec power utility’s grid crashed when safety systems sensed a power overload caused by the currents pulsing through the ground. The failure knocked out electricity to six million people in northeastern Canada for as long as nine hours — the biggest outage ever caused by a geomagnetic storm.”"
Source: http://www.electricityforum.com/news/mar09/Massivesolarburstcanknockoutpower.html
It is a shame that excellent information like this is pretty much a total waste of the author’s time. Those of us who are capable of reason and rational thought didn’t need it, although the extra information is appreciated, and those who believe 2012 will bring some sort of cataclysm won’t stop believing it even after it fails to happen. They’ll just come up with some bizarre excuse for why it didn’t and then buy into some other unscrupulous author’s new line of bullshit of when the next apocalypse will occur.
I too believe that the world will not end in 2012, well thats unless there really is an asteroid going to hit earth.
I am both a believer and a skeptic. I can see changes happening to the ways that humans think taking place at an accelerating rate which coincides with our technology — an internal and external co-evolution of reality. Simultaneously, I don’t believe in predictions. I believe that if we continue to accelerate in our evolution, crazy shit will happen, but I don’t know what, when, or if it will actually take place.
baby don’t worry
bout a thing!
i do believe in the power of collective thoughts to change view of the world and bring on new paradigm or even global events.
i’m skeptic of all 2012 freaks believe.
so i believe something like “consciousness shift” AND/OR apocalyptic could happen. Not because of all the bull, but because too many people would believe in it. And so it would happen. Self-fullfilling prophecy you see…
I agree with Mercury´s comment about the power of collective thinking and it´s creative powers. Hovever we are far from developing a collective opinion on that matter either way as most of the worlds population is not informed or connescted. It is actually only a comparatively small part of global population that has the privilege of harressing itself with this kind of information, be it via internet, tv or other mass media. The majority is poverty struck, fighting for survival and more relevant things like food, shelter, medical care and such. I am not just talking about third world countries here. These are the global population estimates of today, source http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html World 6,893,426,077
09:31 UTC (EST+5) Jan 14, 2011
Of those the Global internet users: 1,966,514,816, source is http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Besides; we don´t need any apocalyptic event to destroy things as we know them. We´ll manage that alone if we do not pull our act together and treat this earth like the only place it is that we have to live on.
We are by far not the successful species on this planet. Any turtle has more generations of ancestors than we do. We´ve only been here for a couple of hundred thousand years, if that much, and most of that time as creatures capable only of monosyllabic grunting for communication.
We´ll be destroyed by our innate greed and not by some asteroid od sunburst.
Those most afraid of 2012 are those responsible by virtue of their access to information. -it is here that we should develop a collective “correct” attitude and change things for the good of the whole. The cancerous growth “greed” will ultimatively destroy itßs host and thus itself.
God bless us all.
Okay, none of this is in any way true… The closest asteroid that is on its way to collision is decades away, and the proposed collision will not happen until the 2030′s (about 2036 iirc.) Violent weather increase doesnt happen overnight, as MANY of you should know. Year after year, the weather will gradually become more violent, but the thing is, it isnt going to be apocalyptic. We as humans have lived through far worse, we are more than prepared to survive as a species through bad weather, even floods. 2012 will roll around rather uneventfully, and people will say “Well, whadya know? I really THOUGHT the world would end.” People will probably commit mass suicide or something, and then people will point and say “look, see, prophecy.” The speculation is absolutely ludicrous, and I facepalm every time 2012 is even mentioned as a disastrous year.
Exaggerated Facts…I don’t understand that some people why are so obsessed to bring an End to Earth,with or without any reason.They believe on Mayan who have calculated the Elimination time of Earth but couldn’t find the way of their survival,even I’ve never read about any prediction from Mayans of the dead end of Earth.Moreover the base of that obsessed count of Earth destruction “Long Count Calender” has further units of dates after “Baktun”.
I’m surprised you rated the content A-. It is a common mis-conception that the Mayans predict the end of humanity in 2012; reportedly, the Mayans have never prophecised and the long count referred to is a cycle in an ancient calendar, not a reference to life on Earth itself.
Pole shifts have happened numerous times in the geologic history of the planet. And Nothing postulated in the 2012 prediction happened. The atmosphere was not torn off of the planet. As far as I know, there were no mass extinctions.
Derpa durrr….
morons.
yep.. i was believing it at first but i just had to think about how stupid it sounds.. we still have a long way to go (as far as technology and peace and just humanity growing).why now? why would any higher power want to crush us all right now? the party’s just starting! and what about 2000 … everyone was freaking out about that too but nothing happened. everyone was scared for their lives.
I was always a skeptic…. even of the Y2K crap… It is so nice to see the sources for the skeptics side are all very legitimate and whole scientific organizations, like NASA, are behind them, while the believers side is full of sites that any one could have made up.
I love this but have to nitpick the first ‘skeptical’ point: “We do not believe anything significant, transformative or apocalyptic will happen in the year 2012.” This is a positive assertion, and would require evidence to show why nothing will happen, not just refutation of why apocalyptic predictions are wrong. Otherwise, this skeptical standpoint would commit the same error intelligent design proponents make when they attempt to refute evolution and not posit any real mechanisms for how ID actually would work. A more appropriate statement would be “We do not believe anything significant, transformative or apocalyptic will happen in the year 2012 with a likelihood greater than any other given year.” After all, something catastrophic could happen in 2012 just like every year in the future.
First of all, I would like to congratulate the author for using their time to create this marvelous piece- what does it matter about the colour scheme? They’ve produced an excellent piece of information that has dispelled most of the rather ignorant theories.
The people who came up with these theories simply want something to happen. Like me (although I am a strong non-believer), they are bored with life, and simply want something to happen. Like Y2K, the nuclear war between Russia and America in the 60s and the mini black hole a couple of years back, this is just another thing to keep bored people excited. After the due date, nothing will happen and we’ll all move on.
Unfortunately for these bored (and ignorant) people, the fact remains that there are so many different theories that disprove themselves just by there being so many. How can all of these things possibly happen? You can’t all be right! Plus, these theories are poorly formed and easily disproved each and every time, thus proving nothing will happen.
As for the concious shift, that’s already happening and has been (substantially at least) for 100 years or more. From being a strictly white straight middle class male western society, we have become a more accepting, happier, richer and more knowledgable world. And while I think we still have a very, very long way to go, our world has changed a whole lot in a really short time- but to keep changing for the better, we need our governments and ourselves to stop worrying about money (Honestly, can we eat it? Use it for shelter? Shut up about it!) and actually do something about the occuring problems today has brought us. Like overpopulation, constant warring, lack of money, pollution, energy sources and the like. Blah -.-
On December 22, 2012, the world will collectively experience the most hilariously awkward hangover in history.
The Mayans didn’t predict the end of the world to be on 12/21/2012, they simply ended their calendar on that date. There are millions of Mayans still living in Guatemala, and they don’t seem to be worried about it.
Wait, this is actually up for debate? wtf world?
Sure the Mayan calendar is going to end in 2012, but why panic about that? I mean, the at least as accurate Gregorian calendar will end on December 31st of this very year! Come on everyone, let’s start panicking! Panic!
My calendar ends on Dec 31rst! THE END IS NIGH!!! HUG YOUR CHILDREN, CALL YOUR LOVED ONES! THE PLANET IS GOING TO BE SWALLOWED BY A GIANT SPACE TURTLE!
My calendar ended on Dec 31rst 2010? The end of the world? Or time for a new calendar?
The real point: Is it going to take something horrible to bring us together as the spoiled greedy world that we are? That’s what Y2k and 911 seemed to do. (for a short sweet time) The minute we see doom is when we actually care. Give us peace and we abuse it and throw it away. Sad way to live human race.
Except for the fact that more people have died in natural disasters in the past 5 years than in a long long time, I think the doomsday scare is b.s. I hate to be alarmist but with Katrina, Indonesia, Chile, China, Japan, we’ve sure seen more “end times” weather than normal. Soure: http://www.whatwillhappenin2012now.com/
with the increase in world disasters its really hard not to ignore the fact that something is wrong. December 21 2012 is real and is happening as we speak..
with the shifting of poles, and planetary alignments we need to learn How to survive 2012 as the disasters are going to only get worse..
lets not stick our heads int he sand here people.. to survive what will happen in 2012 wont be an easy feat.. we need to prepare.
as we speak there was an after shock earth quake in japan.. things are not looking good.
with the increase in world disasters its really hard not to ignore the fact that something is wrong. December 21 2012 is real and is happening as we speak..
with the shifting of poles, and planetary alignments we need to learn How to survive 2012 as the disasters are going to only get worse..
lets not stick our heads int he sand here people.. to survive what will happen in 2012 wont be an easy feat.. we need to prepare.
as we speak there was an after shock earth quake in japan.. things are not looking good.