*119812*
Usachev
V.A., Minchuk M.V.
Donetsk National University of economics and trade named after Mikhail
Tugan-Baranovsky
“Web-bot” technology has moved apocalyptic prophecy into the
internet age, predicting that the world will end on 21 December 2012.
Conspiracy theorists on the web have
claimed that the bots accurately predicted the September 11 attacks and the
2004 Boxing Day tsunami,
and that they say a cataclysm of some sort will devastate the planet on 21 December, 2012.
The software, similar to the
“spiders” that search engines use to index web pages, were originally developed
in the 1990s to predict stock market movements.
The bots crawl through relevant web pages, noting keywords and examining the
text around them. The theory is that this gives an insight into the “wisdom
of crowds”, as
the thoughts of thousands of people are aggregated.
However, the technology was
later appropriated for
another, more controversial– some say nonsensical – use: predicting
the future.
Its study of “web chatter” is said to give advance
warnings of terrorist attacks, and proponents claim
that it successfully did so ahead of 11 September 2001. George Ure, one of two
men behind the project, says that his system predicted a “world-changing event”
in the 60 to 90 days after June 2001.
Despite the vagueness of this prediction,
many believed it to be genuine. Now its makers claim that the
technology can predict natural disasters, and that it foresaw the earthquake that triggered the
2004 tsunami, as well as Hurricane Katrina and the devastation that followed.
Its latest and most sweeping prediction is that 21
December 2012 signals the end of the world, possibly through a “polar shift” – when the polarity of the
Earth’s magnetic field is reversed. Believers claim that as well as the bots,
the 2012 apocalypse is predicted by the ancient Mayan calendar, the Book
of Revelations,
and the Chinese text I Ching.
Sceptics have pointed out several major flaws in the theory.
First, the internet might plausibly reveal
group knowledge about the stock market or, conceivably,
terror attacks, as these are human-caused events. But, say critics, it would be
no more capable of predicting a natural disaster
than would a Google search.
Second, the predictions are so vague
as to be meaningless, allowing believers to fit facts to predictions after the
event: a blogger at dailycommonsense.com compares them to Nostradamus’s quatrains. They give the September
11 prediction as a case in point.
The polar shift theory is based on a
genuine scientific theory, “geomagnetic reversal”, which suggests the Earth’s
polarity shifts every few hundred thousand years. However, the theory in its
current form is not reconcilable with
the web-bot predictions of it taking place on a particular day in 2012:
best estimates suggest
each shift takes around 5,000 years to complete.
A film based on the predicted
apocalypse, by The Day After Tomorrow director Roland Emmerich and starring
John Cusack and Danny Glover, is due to come out in November, called 2012.