I’ve been thinking about what might be tomorrow. I’ve talked about it with coworkers and friends and family and everyone is at least popularly concerned as I would expect. The natural assumption to make is the null hypothesis, that is, that tomorrow nothing remarkable will happen and the world will continue to spin on it’s axis and life will go on.

Except that the Mayans were so good at constructing really good calendar systems and they were so accurate. When the long count calendar expires, supposedly on the Winter Solstice, which is 12/21/12 at 6:14am it’s an event that is remarkable. What will happen? I’ve heard the most popular response that people have to this millennial event: “If anything will happen, it’ll be a huge move forward for people and those feeling good feelings will reap the rewards of those good thoughts and the others will end up elsewhere.”

I love this idea as it’s very tidy. I can’t help but think about some other possibilities that might come to be as well. The Mayans drew out their calendar and built in the terminal point (which is coming along) and I’ve read various theories, including an ancient astronaut theory that a Mayan God will return to earth when their exacting Calendar expires. I’ve found that my suppositions follow two distinct paths – a positive angle and a negative one.

Under the positive angle what may come of tomorrow?

1. Reappearance of Magic in our world. Imagination becomes easier to impress upon our material world, perhaps.
2. First Contact. This one actually has some feet to it. The Mayans were quite particular about their Gods returning someday and why not tomorrow?
3. Cures for modern plagues. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find the magic bullet that cures AIDS or switches off Cancer. This one could also go hand-in-hand with the previous point and be something we learn from First Contact.
4. Expansion of consciousness. We all see ourselves as individuals. Perhaps tomorrow will start a new spiritual development in humanity and help us connect to each other in more meaningful ways.

While the positive things are wonderful to think about, there are more entertaining and more dramatic negative events that may happen.

1. The Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts. This would change the shape of North America and put a serious dent in America.
2. The New Madrid Fault could break and release a huge amount of earthquake energy, although this would be really scary for just the southern states.
3. A nearby star could have undergone a violent supernova and that fact could be enroute to Earth and arrive on 12/21/12 at 6:14am. We’d see a new star in the heavens and if it was close enough, it could raise radiation levels across the planet. It may be that our Sun and our own planets magnetosphere protects us from the worst of it, if it’s inbound at all. The problem with this is that nobody would know, there really isn’t any early detection for an event like this that I’m aware of.
4. Captain Trips – There has been some talk about H1N1 and other super flu viruses that just would require some generations to spread to humanity and then only a few more to become airborne. What would be worse? A Captain Trips event, or perhaps a re-emergence of something as nasty as the Spanish Flu of 1918?
5. Failure of the magnetosphere. Earth is protected from a lot of nasty space-based radiations by our atmosphere and our magnetosphere, to say nothing of the more impressive magnetosphere of our Sun. What if these fields failed for some strange reason? There would be less to shield us from solar radiation to say nothing of the stray cosmic radiations that come from space all the time.
6. First Contact. Just because a Mayan God was nice to the Mayans when they were developing doesn’t necessarily mean that any first contact event will be a positive one. One of the big lessons that popular science has been saying for a while is that a future First Contact event may not be a peaceful event but one fueled by hunger or some resource conflict. Instead of civilized explorers making first contact with us, they could be carnivores looking for a new food source.

One of the biggest things I have noticed while thinking about these things has been that people have clustered their thoughts around this event. Some are rooting for it, some are afraid of it, and some have even let the event change their natural way of behaving. Preppers getting ready for an event that may be impossible to dodge while on Earth. We just don’t know the scale of the event, or if there even is one. One thing is definitely for certain, this is a fantastic source of dramatic storytelling. The fear and the hope that battle over what is coming, or not, in a few short hours in the future make for great smalltalk and water-cooler conversations.

So, as the inaugural post for my relocated blog I will post this entry and invite people to write comments to this post. What do you think may happen in a few short hours? Will it be good, will it be bad? What do you think?