2012, the end of the world, and the slow spinning down of the disk. A lecture by Prof. Adrian Minkowski.

(The after-lunch spot is always a difficult one. The buffet and networking seem to lull conference participants into a hypnotic state. But the professor’s talk is proving to be uncomfortable or crazy enough that the audience is far from dozing off. The clicker advances the PowerPoint presentation again, as the audience gets a little more uncomfortable.)

‘Now, bear with me on this. What if we are, as some philosophers and scientists have speculated, living in a simulation? And what if that simulation has come to an end, and we are now experiencing our simulated existence spinning down to a stop with all the inherent chaos and inconsistencies that an abandoned program might experience – think of your Windows operating system with no updates and lots of bugs creeping in.

Maybe the Mayans had it right, and everything came to an end in 2012, but we haven’t realised because the game doesn’t just stop when the architects of the simulation call time. Perhaps like a galactic version of The Sims or Animal Crossing, everything continues to play out in their absence until there is nothing left, and the hard drive finally comes to a stop.’

(The clicker advances the PowerPoint presentation, and an image of Plato flies in from the left.)

‘In the 4th century BCE, the legendary ancient Greek philosopher Plato advanced a simple thought experiment known as the Allegory of the Cave. This suggests that what we believe to be “reality” could be little more than shadows dancing upon a cave wall. Bring this forward to the 21st century, and scientists are pondering the same question, albeit in a more technological context.

In 2003, University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom put forward the idea that it was probably likely that what humans perceived as reality was actually a hyper-advanced simulation created by beings with almost infinite technological capability. In the decades since this famous formulation, scientists have pondered exactly how we could discover some evidence of this simulation or even escape the simulation altogether.’

(The clicker advances the PowerPoint presentation, and a book cover zooms in.)

‘In 2011, Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. What a hopeful book that was! It suggested that humanity was finally moving forward into a new age of enlightenment, where there was the possibility that the rising tide of reason would elevate all. Okay, it’s not perfect, but it did offer some reasons to be positive! And then 2012 happened…’

(The clicker advances the PowerPoint presentation, and an entry from Wikipedia wipes on, and he reads.)

‘There is a strong tradition of “world ages” in Maya literature, but the record has been distorted, leaving several possibilities open to interpretation. According to the Popol Vuh, a compilation of the creation accounts of the Kʼicheʼ Maya of the Colonial-era highlands, the current world is the fourth. The Popol Vuh describes the gods first creating three failed worlds, followed by a successful fourth world in which humanity was placed. In the Maya Long Count, the previous world ended after 13 bʼakʼtuns, or roughly 5,125 years. The Long Count’s “zero date” was set at a point in the past marking the end of the third world and the beginning of the current one, which corresponds to 11 August 3114 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. This means that the fourth world reached the end of its 13th bʼakʼtun, or Maya date 13.0.0.0.0, on 21 December 2012. In 1957, Mayanist and astronomer Maud Worcester Makemson wrote that “the completion of a Great Period of 13 bʼakʼtuns would have been of the utmost significance to the Maya.” In 1966, Michael D. Coe wrote in The Maya that “there is a suggestion … that Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final day of the 13th [bʼakʼtun]. Thus … our present universe [would] be annihilated … when the Great Cycle of the Long Count reaches completion.”’

‘Since the end of 2012, it’s all been a bit rubbish, subjectively… We race towards climate issues that we might not be bright enough to fix, even if there is theoretically time to fix them. Authoritarian rule seems to have come back into fashion – perhaps that’s the Strauss–Howe generational theory in action – with populism and the anti-expert/science movement leading the way. Pandemics are suddenly everything and then become some vague conspiracy theory where anti-vaxxers take on almost messianic roles. We finally head towards inclusivity, at least in the West, only to find that the pitchforks and burning brands are back out with a vengeance as “othering” becomes the flavour of the decade. And when billionaires can say that empathy is the enemy and get an audience of unthinking followers to believe them, you know there is something wrong!’

(The clicker advances the PowerPoint presentation, and a photograph of the Large Hadron Collider unravels from an origami bird on the screen surrounded by glowing green strings of computer code that fall like rain.)

‘I’m not saying that the world has ended, as was the case with Nick Hinton, who postulated that in 2012, the Higgs boson particle, courtesy of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), destroyed the universe via the medium of a black hole plunging us all into some between state purgatory. And I’m not suggesting that we are all copper tops in a Matrix-style world. It just feels a bit like the wheels have come off, and that we are quickly running out of re-dos. After all, who here imagined that America would play its own bad guy in some tragic sitcom about the collapse of civilisation, mass insanity and bare-faced lies in what began as a show about the world’s most successful economy?’

(The clicker clicks, but PowerPoint has bluescreened, and as the professor and his audience watch, it begins to pixilate in from the edges like the static on an old CRT TV, and as he looks out into the auditorium, it seems that it is doing the same.)

‘Oh, it looks like we might not have time for questions after all…’