The coming Armageddon could, it’s said, take many forms: a disastrous surge in solar activity, a reversal of Earth’s magnetic poles, a collision with a black hole, the close passage of a mysterious planet called – the list goes on. It’s all very entertaining, and pure nonsense.

The Mayans did keep a calendar, called the , based on a period of 1,872,000 days. It began in August 3114 BC, and so is due to click over to its next cycle late next year. However, there’s no evidence to suggest the Mayans saw the switch from one cycle to the next as apocalyptic. More to the point, even if they did, they had no way of foretelling the future.

On the other hand, it’s true that we are doomed. Our planet and everything on it won’t last. A billion years from now the sun will have brightened and swollen to a point at which the oceans will start to evaporate. A billion years after that, all Earth’s surface water will be gone and, with it, all life except for some hardy species that can survive on whatever moisture remains underground.

Incoming!

The finite lifespan of the sun guarantees the demise of planet three. But there are all kinds of other natural calamities that might kill off large swathes of us in the much shorter term – and we love to talk about them. Asteroid or comet collisions are a big favourite.

The Earth has repeatedly been used for target practice by big dumb objects in the past. An asteroid at least 10 kilometres across barrelled into us just over 65 million years ago and helped wipe out the last of the dinosaurs along with many other groups of animals and plants. A good thing, too, if you’re human, because it left mammals free to flourish.

In 1908 a blast with the strength of about a thousand Hiroshima atomic bombs flattened trees over a wide area around the Tunguska river in Siberia. The presumed culprit in this case was a fragment of a comet or a large meteoroid that exploded several kilometres above the surface. Had it happened over a populous city, the effect would have been disastrous.

Other nasty stuff has happened to the Earth. Supervolcanoes have erupted, blanketing vast areas with dust and lava, and plunging the globe into deep volcanic winters. Ice ages have come and gone, and very occasionally, during “snowball Earth” events, it seems that almost the entire planet has frozen over for millions of years.

These kind of events will happen again. We will be hit by asteroids and comets, large and small. More supervolcanoes will erupt. It’s inevitable, and some of these events are perfectly capable of decimating the human race, or even driving us to extinction virtually overnight.

Chances are…

The trouble is, the level of danger and the immediacy of the threat is often grossly overstated. Run-ins with asteroids as big as that which put paid to the dinosaurs happen . But that doesn’t mean they happen every 100 million years like clockwork. Much smaller impacts, like the Tunguska episode, occur on average about – a problem if they happen to maliciously target built-up areas, but not so alarming when you think of the great tracts of ocean and wilderness which are much more likely to be on the receiving end.

Speculation about upcoming disasters runs rampant when there’s a failure, or unwillingness, to grasp basic facts. It happened this year in connection with an innocuous little comet called . Google its name and you’ll find all kinds of hair-raising stories about how Elenin would come close to or even ram into the Earth, bringing death and destruction on a biblical scale. The hysteria started shortly after the comet’s discovery when a few armchair theorists mistook the size of Elenin’s coma – the glowing, almost vacuum-thin shiny fuzz of vaporised particles around the hard nucleus – for the size of the nucleus itself.

Word quickly spread on the internet, helped by the usual eagerness of tabloids and late-night chat shows to exploit a juicy yarn, that Elenin was as big as a planet and would cause chaos during its close passage of the Earth. In fact, as astronomers knew, Elenin was modest by cometary standards and never going to come any closer than 35 million kilometres, or about 90 times as far away as the moon. In the event, it disintegrated and was lost from view to even the most powerful telescopes.

Muddled science opens the door to tales of Armageddon. But it’s helped along by the fact that we love a scary story, for the same reason we enjoy a good horror or sci-fi flick – because it lets us escape the banality of everyday life. For some, there’s another reason to suspend disbelief – the expectation that some time soon the day of judgement will be upon us.

The 2012 phenomenon is alive and kicking, and will doubtless remain so until 22 December next year, when we wake up to find Earth hasn’t been knocked off its axis or suffered any other ill effects from obscure cosmic alignments, geomagnetic reversals or close fly-bys of unknown planets. If past experience is anything to go by, explanations of how we survived will quickly emerge, and new doomsday forecasts will replace the ones that didn’t quite work out. As always, these revised warnings will find an eager audience. And, as always, the scientific reality will take a back seat.

Yes, I know that if the Universe was not more or less the way it is then
there would be no one to reflect on such problems. But that is a comment, not an
explanation. The fact is, nothing could be simpler than nothing—so why is
there something instead?

Science has started delving into the minutiae of genesis. No one bats an
eyelid these days when cosmologists talk about what conditions might have been
like around one ten million trillionth of a second after the moment of creation.
And once we have got the tricky business of linking gravitation with quantum
mechanics sorted out, then maybe we can push things right back to the very first
instant of all.

Well, I’ve read the party manifesto on this and I didn’t buy it. I can go
along with the quantum foam stuff, the good news (for once) about inflation, the
quark soup and so on. That’s fine. I may not be able to imagine it—who
can? But, as far as I am concerned, the fact that the Universe was an incredibly
weird place 10^-43 seconds after “time zero” is no big deal. What is a big
deal—the biggest deal of all—is how you get something out of
nothing.

Don’t let the cosmologists try to kid you on this one. They have not got a
clue either—despite the fact that they are doing a pretty good job of
convincing themselves and others that this is really not a problem. “In the
beginning,” they will say, “there was nothing—no time, space, matter or
energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from which . . . ” Whoa! Stop right
there. You see what I mean? First there is nothing, then there is something. And
the cosmologists try to bridge the two with a quantum flutter, a tremor of
uncertainty that sparks it all off. Then they are away and before you know it,
they have pulled a hundred billion galaxies out of their quantum hats.

I don’t have a problem with this scenario from the quantum fluctuation
onward. Why shouldn’t human beings build a theory of how the Universe evolved
from a simple to a complex state. But there is a very real problem in explaining
how it got started in the first place. You cannot fudge this by appealing to
quantum mechanics. Either there is nothing to begin with, in which case there is
no quantum vacuum, no pre-geometric dust, no time in which anything can happen,
no physical laws that can effect a change from nothingness into somethingness;
or there is something, in which case that needs explaining.

One of the most specious analogies that cosmologists have come up with is
between the origin of the Universe and the North Pole. Just as there is nothing
north of the North Pole, so there was nothing before the Big Bang. VoilĂ !
We are supposed to be convinced by that, especially since it was Stephen Hawking
who dreamt it up. But it will not do. The Earth did not grow from its North
Pole. There was not ever a disembodied point from which the material of the
planet sprang. The North Pole only exists because the Earth exists—not the
other way around.

It’s the same with neurologists who are peering into the brain to see how
consciousness comes about. I do not have a problem with being told how memory
works, how we parse sentences, how the visual cortex handles images. I can
believe that we might come to understand the ins and outs of our grey matter
almost as well as we can follow the operations of a sophisticated computer. But
I draw the line at believing that this knowledge will advance our understanding
of why we are conscious one jot. Why shouldn’t the brain do everything it does
and still be completely unaware? Why shouldn’t it just process information and
trigger survival responses without going to the trouble of generating
consciousness? You only have to read the musings of Daniel Dennett, Roger
Penrose, Francis Crick and others to appreciate that we are discovering
everything about the brain—except why it is conscious.

No, I’m sorry, I may not have been born in Yorkshire but I’m a firm believer
that you cannot get owt for nowt. Not a Universe from a nothing-verse, nor
consciousness from a thinking brain. I suspect that mainstream science may go on
for a few more years before it bumps so hard against these problems that it is
forced to recognise that something is wrong. And then? Let me guess: if you
cannot get something for nothing then that must mean there has always been
something. Hmmm. And if the brain doesn’t produce consciousness . . . well, no,
that is just too crazy isn’t it?