Doomsday Obsession and the Carter Catastrophe

It is a fact that in the last 20 or so years we have been bombarded with Doomsday scenarios, usually handed down by our ancestors and revived with modern data. Not limited to that, several modern variations emerged, some serious, some wacky and religion-oriented.
The 2012 Mayan Calendar Doomsday scenario is just around the corner, with Hollywood already capitalizing on the anticipation, as it tried to do on the Millennium Doomsday-Y2K craze. Things are gearing up..

Let’s see what the actual Mayans have to say about that, their descendants, that is.

Apolinario Chile Pixtun is a Mayan elder from Guatemala. To him, there is no catastrophe waiting at the end of the Mayan Calendar, Dec 21, 2012. The whole Doomsday concept is a Western, not Mayan idea.
In his words : "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."
Several other scholars agree that contemporary Mayans have no beliefs of an impending End-of-World event, but, then again, maybe their ancestors did..

The Mayan time period that ends on Dec 21 2012, happens to coincide with an astronomical alignment that happens every 25.800 years (!). At that date the sun will rise and appear to be at the exact same spot as the center of our Milky Way galaxy… At the exact morning of the exact day, when the sacred, 13th Baktun ends. The Baktuns, 394 year time-periods of the Mayans, started on 3.114 BC and end on, well, you know when…

To finish the Mayan case, here comes Monument Six. A stone tablet discovered in the 60’s, looted and partially destroyed by paving equipment, it contains the date 2012 and..

..The inscription describes something that is supposed to occur in 2012 involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation… Archaeologist Guillermo Bernal of Mexico's National Autonomous University interprets the last eroded glyphs as maybe saying, "He will descend from the sky."

The Mayans surely predicted stuff fro 2012, but not the End of Days, since other inscriptions refer to dates far exceeding 2012, as far as 4772. Not that it proves anything, but it sounds strangely reassuring.

Now let’s move on to modern prophets of Doom, namely Brandon Carter, an Australian physicist who, in 1983, proposed the Doomsday Argument (DA), also called the Carter Catastrophe. The probabilistic argument it makes is that it can predict the end of the human species just by calculating how many humans have been born thus far, and the probability of an extinction level event…
The math is a bit obscure, but the point I am trying to make is that Doomsday as a concept is finely engraved in our genes, thought patterns, you name it. The bottom line is that WE WANT SOMETHING TO HAPPEN. As simple as that.
Overpopulation, hunger, resources, climate, the little lemming colony knows that something is wrong, and is desperately trying to find a cliff..

What the overfed Prophets of Doom don’t realize is that their predictions are already old news, and that Doomsday is Happening. It will not come in tidal waves or tectonic plate movements, not just yet.

We as a species will continue to predict that which is already upon us, not even realizing 1% of the implications.
As this article says, “Doomsday is already upon us; we haven’t gotten to the nasty bits, just yet.”
The Change is slow, and not easily perceived by the lemming colony, except maybe as a little restlessness.  The cliff is forming.