The World's Not Over Yet

Well, we're still here.

We have a right to be surprised: after all, there's been some degree of speculation that the world was supposed to end today. While looking through a mall bookstore, I recently came across a book in the history section entitled "5/5/2000." The book's thesis is that that today, May 5, 2000, is "the first time in 6,000 years" when "all the planets of our solar system will be arrayed in practically a straight line across space." This arrangement will cause the mass accumulated in Antarctic ice caps to topple, causing "a catastrophic shifting of the Earth's tectonic plates" that will plunge Boston to the equator amid volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and hurricanes. All of this, of course, was predicted by a "band of astronomer-stone masons" 6,000 years ago who built the Great Pyramid to warn us of the impending disaster.

Don't worry, though: there's no need to cash in your IRA quite yet. For one thing, today doesn't have the closest alignment of planets in 6,000 years; in fact, the alignment has often been closer, very much so in 1861. For another, the changing distance of the moon in its monthly orbit has many times the gravitational effect on the earth of all of the planets combined. One would thus expect this kind of "polar shift" several times a week.

But that's not the sort of argument that this book, and its promoters, are interested in. A quick Internet search for "5/5/2000" brings up a company called The Survival Center, which maintains a website for the author and sells copies, posters and videos as well as other books with contradictory cataclysmic predictions for the millennium. It also sells Y2K-era survivalist equipment--food, water, medical equipment, underground shelter kits--all the while telling readers how to survive the catastrophes by ordering "Basic Preparedness," which is $16.95 plus $2.95 shipping and handling.

Such companies and the charlatans who operate them seem always to have a ready and willing audience. They sell dreams and peddle fantasies to those eager to suspend disbelief--or, worse, as eager to corrupt a healthy skepticism into a self-serving prejudice as willing to decry an oppressive scientific establishment as to buy a silly story fabricated out of whole cloth. Who knows why the bookstore chose to classify this book as "History"--yet one can find an inkling of it when the author notes that history is just "the notions of the guy who's writing it. I've written enough history to know that."

One can understand why the purveyors of false wisdom gain a following: their stories are fantastic and gripping, not at all like the dull truth that says today, May 5, is likely to be similar to yesterday and tomorrow. We are, the book reminds us, "such stuff as dreams are made of," and we should stop looking at the world "through materialistic eyes" and start thinking big. Yet in these exciting fairy-worlds we loses the cool certainty that our thoughts have been subjected to some measure of scrutiny and have passed the test. We lose also the possibility of finding something else "out there," something perfectly reasonable yet so beyond our imagination that it does not even figure in our dreams and our invented fantasies. Is the universe that science has revealed, to be looked at with open eyes, really so devoid of wonder?

Luckily, we'll have time to ponder this question--because the world's not at an end yet.