Y2K

So in just a couple of weeks, the Mayan calendar will supposedly end, with many thinking that the world will "come to an end". Even though scholars have come forward claiming this isn't true and offering reasons why the calendar ends the way it does (even suggest that the calendar technically ended already), it doesn't stop those from panicking about the impending end of the world. I even saw a story a couple years back on a couple who financed furniture thinking that the world would end, and therefore not have to pay for it. But this kind of crap already happened 12 years ago, and for all the worry it brought, it came with a fizzle.

Toward the end of the 90s, there was fear that the upcoming year 2000 would screw up computers, since computers made at the time read years in only two digits. People feared that when January 1, 2000 came along, computers would treat the date as 1900, not 2000. Computer technicians scrambled to fix these issues in anything that used computers: from power plants to financial institutions and everything in between. If the "millennium bug" were to be as destructive as feared, everything that relied on a computer would fail to operate correctly, and potentially throw society into chaos.

But when the year 2000 came along, the funniest thing happened: nothing. No power was lost, no planes fell out of the sky, no computers exploded and everything electrical worked. The Y2K scare was blown completely out of proportion, thanks to the sensationalism caused by the media. This is happening again with 2012. We're always going to hear about what will cause disaster next, or when the next extinction level event would be. Remember that old crazy pastor from Family Radio that claimed the rapture was coming last year? Remember how he was WRONG at least two or three times? There are always going to be whack-jobs that come forward to scare people. As far as I see it, the "Mayan Apocalypse" is just another Y2K scare. The media hyped it up, but the so called "end of the world" will pass and go much like other "end of the worlds" from times past.