The world will end in 2060, according to Newton

The world will end in 2060, according to Newton

Published: 18 June 2007

His famously analytical mind worked out the laws of gravity and unravelled the motion of the planets.
And when it came to predicting the end of the world, Sir Isaac Newton was just as precise.
He believed the Apocalypse would come in 2060 – exactly 1,260 years after the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire, according to a recently published letter.


Luckily for modern scientists in awe of his achievements, Newton based this figure on religion rather than reasoning.

In a letter from 1704 which has gone on show in Jerusalem's Hebrew University, Newton uses the Bible's Book of Daniel to calculate the date for the Apocalypse.


The famous scientist

The note reveals a deeply spiritual side to a man more usually regarded as a strict rationalist. Newton, known as the founder of modern physics, secured a royal exemption from ordination in the Church of England – something normally expected of academics in his day – so he would not have to follow its teachings.

But he confidently stated in the letter that the Bible proved the world would end in 2060, adding: "It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner."

Continuing in a decidedly sniffy tone, he wrote: "This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail."

The exact words from the Book of Daniel that inspired his prediction are not clear.

But he got at least one thing right – in another document, he interpreted biblical prophecies to mean that the Jews would return to the Holy Land before the world ended.

Scroll down for more...

The letter is on public display for the first time
The letter is on public display for the first time


Newton, who died 280 years ago, wrote that the end of days would see "the ruin of the wicked nations, the end of weeping and of all troubles, the return of the Jews (from) captivity and their setting up a flourishing and everlasting Kingdom".

Yemima Ben-Menahem, one of the curators of the exhibition, said: "These documents show a scientist guided by religious fervour, by a desire to see God's actions in the world."

 

NOTE: this article has no references i wrote it long ago [decades] and is the result of many diverse sources of info ... i cannot 40 years after the fact take time to 'back-engineer' the references i have found such requests in past posts on other forums to be too time consuming, my research is going forwards not 'back-engineering' what i have already written, just one article can take sevaral days, i dont have that kind of time. I am not attempting to prove anything in my writing ! you take it or leave it as is ... and if truely interested one might do their own homework on the subject. I started in 1971 as an interest with no exapectation of haveing to documant all sources. It remains copyrighted under the title 'cricket songs' 2003 never published. Experts on popualation/climate change can provide details but I will be honest it is for me a hassle to backtrack on anything I write ... i have been asked by a mod to provide details on this article, there is no copyright infringment on my posts as I am the author of much of what i post holding the copyrigts in my name. Again an interested person will find their own sources the MIT study I refer to I heard of back in 1978 ... there is no link i can find online and though population was a major concern in 1971 with the united nations it has become a non issue in politics since then ... draw your own conclusions there !

Overpopulation - Why The Maya Fell


The basic scientific truth and physical reality about life is that everything consumes energy and discharges waste ... one scientist likened humnas to a bacterium in a petri dish ... the dish representing the limited space and resources on eartrh the stratum [glucose] representing the resources ... the bacterium eats all the glucose until its gone and then it dies, once it dead another organsim comes [mould] to eat the dead bateria.

Most texts on archeology state clearly, with insurmountable evidence, that the reason for the downfall of all the major civilizations on earth was “overpopulation”. The result of overpopulation is pollution ... water-pollution, ground-pollution, air-pollution, .... noise-pollution; including; radio-frequency, sonar-frequency, thought-wave frequency, .... neon-light pollution, and space polluting which now reaches into heaven itself ...

One of the travesties of this earth's demise is light pollution ...
peoples minds need to understand how important the night sky
is to our development as spiritual beings ... shamans and Christ alike told of us the importance of the night sky and star-gazing ... Christ said when the end comes we must watch the sky because from there will come our salvation.

The overpopulation of the earth is the planet's single greatest threat to specie survival, and reducing human-population would solve many of the problems that so many attempt to solve without acknowledging the underlying cause of all the worlds ills. A study of a computer-model of the globe (done at M.I.T.) reveals that the maximum occupancy of the planet is 3.1 billion. The population will soon reach 8 billion, that is the problem. This study examined how much "inhabitable land is available for human development .... inhabitable lands means excluding polar regions, mountain-tops, deserts, and any other land "not inhabitable" by humans, while leaving room for all other species of life on earth ... many of these species requiring vast tracks of land to survive as did the buffalo which were exterminated to make way for agriculture. We need to be aware that at least 2/3rds of lands inhabitable to man need to be set aside for wildlife to survive.

Accordingly the social impact of overpopulation it seems is perhaps that as (human) population increases the value of life goes down, and social ills, violence, and abuses increase.
When people had to walk 5 miles to their nearest neighbor weren't they more appreciative when they got there after risking life and limb in a snowstorm to make it?
Historically War, Pandemic, or "Soy-lent Green" (Cannibalism) is where over-population leads ...... There seems no other way out, except not to go there in the first place ... "preventative medicine".

The pictures of animals stacked together in cages like sardines are disgusting! The physical torture and abuse ... Do people realize that this is a reflection of "US" ? .............. We are also animals staked together like sardines in urbanized high-rise settings ... the condition of factory-raised animals is only a symptom of our own condition.
Still worse (in my mind) than the ill-treatment of domestic-animals is the extermination of "wild" species as human population swells removing habitat needed for their survival. Archeology teaches us that overpopulation has been the doom of every civilization which preceded this one, for me this is the most powerful truth,.

If we are all ONE being ... and those animals stuffed together in cages represent US in our high-rise apartments, condos and townhouses. In Canada the population issue is almost invisible, being the most sparsely populated country on earth, but dare to step out into the world and it's just like those animal cages. In Mexico drinking water wells are often dug only 5 feet from sewage tanks due to the proximity limitations of property lines.


I invite the world to do the math (as I did) … only 2 people on earth turns into 2.1 Billion after only 20 cycles of procreation, at 8 children per family.
2 x 8 = 16 ...... 8 male 8 female, ..... 8x8= 64 ... 32 x8 = Etc. = 17 billion in as little as 400 years.
I chose the number 8 realizing this is a middle number as many families in developing nations (without contraception) have up to 14 children. In 21 cycles the number is almost 17 billion. This can take as little as 400 years without contraception.
My grandmother had 13 children, when asked why she had so many, she answered, "I didn't know how to stop". Contraception was illegal (in Canada too) until very recently.
30 million people in Mexico City, the entire population of Canada .... take all the people stacked on top of one another and spread them out FLAT on the land and one source (of pop-stats) claims that (in 1994) there was less than one square foot of inhabitable land per person.


The instinct to procreate needs to tempered with the intelligence to control population.

In the book of Enoch, Enoch states that the reason the world needed to be destroyed with a Biblical "FLOOD" is not too much "EVIL" but rather too many people (OVERPOPULATION), he says there was no room left on earth for the wild animals. Sumerian tablets give the same reason for global destruction; saying that population became so great that the Gods could no longer sleep due to the noise of mankind. An echo of our present day situation. Jesus said that the days would come when people would say "BLESSED ARE THOSE WOMEN WHO NEVER GAVE BIRTH" (Mat. 24:19, Luke 21:23). It is most likely that Christ was also referring to OVERPOPULATION when he said this.

To some extent industry has actually HELPED the earth support such massive populations as we have today ... making available materials for building upwards instead of horizontally ... the industrial mining of steel and metals, & the excavation of rock for concrete have made it possible to stack people on top of each other rather than spread out upon the earth as it would be with natural materials like wood, which would quickly deforest the entire earth to support a population like today's.

Vegetarians claim that if everyone (8 billion) were vegan it would create more land for agriculture because of all the land needed for livestock feed ... they do not say where to put all the displaced animals which are part of the creator's extended being and (I believe ) integral to our own fulfillment.
More over much of the data they present seems erroneous in many other ways as well ... the very "factory" farms they complain about are NOT taking up MORE land .... but less, much of the feed which animals are fed with is not desirable for human consumption and would be discarded as waste if not fed to animals ... this is especially true in undeveloped countries where the ONLY feed these animals get is what we call garbage ... if the hunter-gatherers that are left in countries like Africa converted to Veganism they would have to deforest more jungle to grow crops just as white people exterminated buffalo to grow wheat on the prairie plains .... more species would be driven to extermination.


Some New Age Spiritualists claim that this industrial Society is toxic .... yet any overpopulated society creates toxic waste, a mountain of excrement is as toxic as a mountain of lead, moreover the natural world has many toxic dangers .... tribes which lived in areas with high lead content in the soil had high birth-defect rates ... many plants contain the same cyanides which factories emit ... mercury, strychnine, a multitude of organic medicinal plants containing many potential poisons, volcanoes (like Krakatoa 1883) which emit more toxic gasses (same as industrial types) than an industrial society can in many decades, same with forest fires, and a myriad of other natural sources of pollution .... which can easily far outweigh any industrial society, the one thing these disasters do is to control human population.

Two "New Age" friends of mine said they don’t contribute to the world’s evils cause they use wood stoves instead of being on the power grid ...
yet all the data sources I have encountered (David Suzuki as well, I believe) all say that the #1 source of toxic air pollution is wood burning for heat and cooking this constitutes (remembering ,,,,,,) about 60% of all air pollutants and contain the worst toxic elements Creosote, Sulphuric/Di-Sulphuric Acids, Cyanides, Etc.
So these wood burners are not part of the solution statistically they are part of the worst cause of the problem, hydro-electricity is CLEAN energy and Canada is blessed with an abundance of it.

I often think that perhaps the best way to ensure specie survival of earth's animals would've been to reduce human population to less than 3 billion by the year 1950. Preserving and studying Mayan Codices when America was discovered rather than destroying them (gold Leaves melted down by Vatican) would’ve given this world a better chance a realizing what needed to be done, in time to do it.

About 1981 I was in Palenque during a conference called “La Mesa Redunda” a meeting of archeologists/anthropologists working on the Maya culture, during which a revelation hit everyone, the US government has released aerial photos of the whole Yucatan/Chiapas area taken with new technology which can see right through jungle foliage and through a certain amount of soil as well.
The pictures shoed ruins everywhere, not just around temple areas but everywhere from the edge of the mountain range all the way to the coast, it was one big city. Overpopulated to the max. a city which dwarfs the Los Angeles megalopolis by far. This to me was reproof that overpopulation was the major cause of their demise, later I also found evidence of severe climate change around the same time. So famine resulting from population and crop failures were the likely cause of their fall.
Before this I had been suspicious that the white man’s genocide was the cause, but now I lean more towards the cause being the same dilemma humanity faces today … too many people.

 

Damn i read 3 or 4 paragraphs of that last post before thinking where the hell are the mayans...then i went back to the heading and saw it was maya not mayan

 

Nah, in 2060 all the Mayans just get wiped out again

 

Over population is maybe the biggest single problem, I agree with that.
However, it isnt one that gets talked about much, or that those in power are interested in even discussing.

The difficulty is how to reduce the burden of over population in a humane way. We cant just have a cull of human beings, as we are having in the UK at the moment of badgers.

The only answer I can think of is to restrict the number of children people have. The Chinese have been doing that for some time. But as soon as you mention it to a lot of people, they get very uncomfortable. We even spend billions and invest scientific rescources in helping those who cant have children naturally to become pregnant. Largely on the grounds that everyone has the right to reproduce.
It would only be in an authoritarian state that any control could be introduced. No one in a democracy would stand on a ticket of restricting human breeding. Not yet anyway.

Unless people can be persuaded to voluntarily limit the number of kids thay have, it doesnt seem likely that any steps will be taken to solve this.
Its a tricky problem.
But maybe nature will intervene, or even man made disaster.

 

people are always coming up with another one of these aren't they.
it is one of those persistant urban myths, principally perpetuated by folowers of christianity who are more ardent then knowledgable. that there will come some epic moment when they have pushed their infallable all powerful god, to such despiration as to find no other solution to the harm their own imperfections have caused.

christians are so full of this ego, that they can't possibly mistake gods chosen messanger, the way their predicessors did, that they are completely blinded to the possibility, even probability, that they not only can but have, and have more then once.

a date is found in some forgotten tomb, it comes and goes, and another dusty forgotten tomb is found, that sets forth a formulae, that comes up with yet another date.

all these words, all these distractions, they have little or nothing to do, either with true spirit, nor the workings of reality.

 

in 1971 it was top of UN agenda after a study at MIT
saying max pop is 3.1 after that all bio-systems crash into mass-extinction.


:2thumbsup:

 

The estimated number of people our planet can sustain varies greatly, but around 10bn seems to be the most commonly accepted number.

It seems to me that in a world of 7bn people, there sure is a lot of unused space, even in countries with very dense populations. I never expected there to be so much untouched nature in Japan, for example.

If we could stop being such assholes to each other and tried to focus our energy on how to sustain ourselves rather than kill each other, we should be able to comfortably sustain a very large population. Just look at what they are doing with technology; making barren areas fertile, building islands.. Imagine all that money spent on bombs and drones and development of new weapons being spent on projects to improve the quality of life for all.

Of course, that would be boring, unprofitable, and not apt to get anyone elected..

 

lol

 

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/sep/10/david-attenborough-human-evolution-stopped

 

it is true that there are too many of us. it is even true that climate change is one of many aspects of the breakdown. what people don't get, is that there isn't some spectacular entertaining short term event. some bell isn't going to sound and we all fall down dead. it all simply grinds down and down and down, as has already begun.

its one of those boiled lobster things, where the water is heated so slowly they just think they're in a nice hot tub. so dates, even as broad as a whole year, are almost meaningless.

the end began in the 50s and 60s, when transportation planners chose the private automobile to become the primary means of transportation. it began in america's post ww2 prosperity, when it adopted the mafia doctrine of world dominance.

it will end, not in spectacular goephysical events, nor gods decending on clouds out of the sky, but long, slow, agonizing disease and starvation. until the raggle taggle remnants of humanity are again few enough in number to be mostly harmless.

this "end process" will take more then a decade. though perhaps not very much more then one.

will 2060 be that decade? it could. might the whole process be avoided, or at least made by things we could still do to change it? yes. but will we? doesn't look too much like it, but we have all the alternative technologies we would need to do so, and some things are attempting to be changed appropriately. the resistence to doing so makes itself very public though, so it is difficult to be sure.

most likely it is too late to avoid all of the pain, but not too late to reduce it somewhat. of course almost no one is considering what would be a fair and fairly painless way to avoid the problem. the impartial non-voluntary lowering of human fertility.

and yes there are still more parts of our planet that look empty then those where we cluster together into obviously overcrowded places. it would be easy to imagine, wrongly, that there is plenty of room for more of us because of this.

but just because a place isn't somewhere a lot of people go or are often, doesn't mean it hasn't been negatively impacted by how many of us there are.

"we're all going to die, aren't we?" well yes. sort of. but we all have been ever since we were born too. i suspect i'll personally have to take a rain check on 2060, as i rather imagine i will have 'aged out' by then. owing to as i'm 65 now. (if, by some miracle, i should happen to be alive in 2060, i would 112 years old)

but if 2060 begins the time of slow agonizing implosion, i'd love to see this planet several decades later, when humanity is a tiny fraction of its current numbers, and nature is once again reclaiming its own.

 

I mostly agree with the points you make in your post, but I dont know what you mean by impartial lowering of human fertility. Do you have some actual scheme in mind..

 

Yet another untrue End Times prophecy that will fail just as the others have.

 

You are very likely right about that.

Newton was maybe the single most important figure in the history of science, also mathematics. Shame he had to try his hand at prophecy. But note that Sir Issac sets the date far in the future for his own era.

 

yes. self sustaining bio-chemical agents in the air or water. thus an automatic mechanism that would play no favorites.

 

Not happening. More people--more customers for plastic shit. Mad Max scenarios for us "unwashed" masses, enclaves for the powerful. Hate to look at the world like that, but those that could affect another way to "run" the planet have no incentive to worry about such things as over population or the effects of pollution. They seem to think they're above the coming clusterfuck. Short term thinking is manifesting already from such as the radioactive plume.

 

The world will only end if its financially profitable for the powers that be. Otherwise life goes on.

 

nature is not dependent on what people can or will or wont do. it still works the way it does regardless. and its completely not impressed by governments and little green pieces of paper. people can make things more comfortable for themselves. people can screw things up. the can do both at the same time. or neither. nature is affected. but how it works isn't. no economic situation can insulate anyone from a flood they are in the path of, or being infected by a disease no one yet know exists.

when people say world ending, i have to question what they are talking about. but conditions we take for granted because we've had hundreds of years or longer to become accustom to them ending, sure. that, to some degree happens all the time, and there is a point at which population and atmospheric carbon levels and increased difficulty in extracting remaining resources because they have been so long consumed at faster rates then nature replenishes them, such a point may pass long before we begin to feel its effects and may already have, and result in a long slow and rather painfully agonizing decline, in conditions all of us experience, no one is completely isolated from, and which will eventually result in human population being reduced to where it is no longer a problem. just because nature has not yet hit on this combination of factors that will reduce human fertility, and do so before medical science can track down and isolate all of them, because of their being too many and too diverse, hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it can't or won't.

yes 'mad max' may hit the 99% first, but that doesn't mean the 1% will remain the 1%, or able to ride it out unscathed.

i agree that doesn't mean a bell is suddenly going to sound on some particular date, and we're all going to fall down dead.

also this isn't a religious thing at all. it is entirely a matter of the physical universe and how it physically works.

 

　
　
Overpopulation - Why The Maya Fell
　
The basic scientific truth and physical reality about life is that everything consumes energy and discharges waste ... one scientist likened humnas to a bacterium in a petri dish ... the dish representing the limited space and resources on eartrh the stratum [glucose] representing the resources ... the bacterium eats all the glucose until its gone and then it dies, once it dead another organsim comes [mould] to eat the dead bateria.
Most texts on archeology state clearly, with insurmountable evidence, that the reason for the downfall of all the major civilizations on earth was "overpopulation". The result of overpopulation is pollution ... water-pollution, ground-pollution, air-pollution, .... noise-pollution; including; radio-frequency, sonar-frequency, thought-wave frequency, .... neon-light pollution, and space polluting which now reaches into heaven itself ...
One of the travesties of this earth's demise is light pollution ...
peoples minds need to understand how important the night sky
is to our development as spiritual beings ... shamans and Christ alike told of us the importance of the night sky and star-gazing ... Christ said when the end comes we must watch the sky because from there will come our salvation.
The overpopulation of the earth is the planet's single greatest threat to specie survival, and reducing human-population would solve many of the problems that so many attempt to solve without acknowledging the underlying cause of all the worlds ills. A study of a computer-model of the globe (done at M.I.T.) reveals that the maximum occupancy of the planet is 3.1 billion. The population will soon reach 8 billion, that is the problem. This study examined how much "inhabitable land is available for human development .... inhabitable lands means excluding polar regions, mountain-tops, deserts, and any other land "not inhabitable" by humans, while leaving room for all other species of life on earth ... many of these species requiring vast tracks of land to survive as did the buffalo which were exterminated to make way for agriculture. We need to be aware that at least 2/3rds of lands inhabitable to man need to be set aside for wildlife to survive.
Accordingly the social impact of overpopulation it seems is perhaps that as (human) population increases the value of life goes down, and social ills, violence, and abuses increase.
When people had to walk 5 miles to their nearest neighbor weren't they more appreciative when they got there after risking life and limb in a snowstorm to make it?
Historically War, Pandemic, or "Soy-lent Green" (Cannibalism) is where over-population leads ...... There seems no other way out, except not to go there in the first place ... "preventative medicine".
The pictures of animals stacked together in cages like sardines are disgusting! The physical torture and abuse ... Do people realize that this is a reflection of "US" ? .............. We are also animals staked together like sardines in urbanized high-rise settings ... the condition of factory-raised animals is only a symptom of our own condition.
Still worse (in my mind) than the ill-treatment of domestic-animals is the extermination of "wild" species as human population swells removing habitat needed for their survival. Archeology teaches us that overpopulation has been the doom of every civilization which preceded this one, for me this is the most powerful truth,.
If we are all ONE being ... and those animals stuffed together in cages represent US in our high-rise apartments, condos and townhouses. In Canada the population issue is almost invisible, being the most sparsely populated country on earth, but dare to step out into the world and it's just like those animal cages. In Mexico drinking water wells are often dug only 5 feet from sewage tanks due to the proximity limitations of property lines.
　
I invite the world to do the math (as I did) … only 2 people on earth turns into 2.1 Billion after only 20 cycles of procreation, at 8 children per family.
2 x 8 = 16 ...... 8 male 8 female, ..... 8x8= 64 ... 32 x8 = Etc. = 17 billion in as little as 400 years.
I chose the number 8 realizing this is a middle number as many families in developing nations (without contraception) have up to 14 children. In 21 cycles the number is almost 17 billion. This can take as little as 400 years without contraception.
My grandmother had 13 children, when asked why she had so many, she answered, "I didn't know how to stop". Contraception was illegal (in Canada too) until very recently.
30 million people in Mexico City, the entire population of Canada .... take all the people stacked on top of one another and spread them out FLAT on the land and one source (of pop-stats) claims that (in 1994) there was less than one square foot of inhabitable land per person.
　
The instinct to procreate needs to tempered with the intelligence to control population.
In the book of Enoch, Enoch states that the reason the world needed to be destroyed with a Biblical "FLOOD" is not too much "EVIL" but rather too many people (OVERPOPULATION), he says there was no room left on earth for the wild animals. Sumerian tablets give the same reason for global destruction; saying that population became so great that the Gods could no longer sleep due to the noise of mankind. An echo of our present day situation. Jesus said that the days would come when people would say "BLESSED ARE THOSE WOMEN WHO NEVER GAVE BIRTH" (Mat. 24:19, Luke 21:23). It is most likely that Christ was also referring to OVERPOPULATION when he said this.
To some extent industry has actually HELPED the earth support such massive populations as we have today ... making available materials for building upwards instead of horizontally ... the industrial mining of steel and metals, & the excavation of rock for concrete have made it possible to stack people on top of each other rather than spread out upon the earth as it would be with natural materials like wood, which would quickly deforest the entire earth to support a population like today's.
Vegetarians claim that if everyone (8 billion) were vegan it would create more land for agriculture because of all the land needed for livestock feed ... they do not say where to put all the displaced animals which are part of the creator's extended being and (I believe ) integral to our own fulfillment.
More over much of the data they present seems erroneous in many other ways as well ... the very "factory" farms they complain about are NOT taking up MORE land .... but less, much of the feed which animals are fed with is not desirable for human consumption and would be discarded as waste if not fed to animals ... this is especially true in undeveloped countries where the ONLY feed these animals get is what we call garbage ... if the hunter-gatherers that are left in countries like Africa converted to Veganism they would have to deforest more jungle to grow crops just as white people exterminated buffalo to grow wheat on the prairie plains .... more species would be driven to extermination.
　
Some New Age Spiritualists claim that this industrial Society is toxic .... yet any overpopulated society creates toxic waste, a mountain of excrement is as toxic as a mountain of lead, moreover the natural world has many toxic dangers .... tribes which lived in areas with high lead content in the soil had high birth-defect rates ... many plants contain the same cyanides which factories emit ... mercury, strychnine, a multitude of organic medicinal plants containing many potential poisons, volcanoes (like Krakatoa 1883) which emit more toxic gasses (same as industrial types) than an industrial society can in many decades, same with forest fires, and a myriad of other natural sources of pollution .... which can easily far outweigh any industrial society, the one thing these disasters do is to control human population.
Two "New Age" friends of mine said they don’t contribute to the world’s evils cause they use wood stoves instead of being on the power grid ...
yet all the data sources I have encountered (David Suzuki as well, I believe) all say that the #1 source of toxic air pollution is wood burning for heat and cooking this constitutes (remembering ,,,,,,) about 60% of all air pollutants and contain the worst toxic elements Creosote, Sulphuric/Di-Sulphuric Acids, Cyanides, Etc.
So these wood burners are not part of the solution statistically they are part of the worst cause of the problem, hydro-electricity is CLEAN energy and Canada is blessed with an abundance of it.
I often think that perhaps the best way to ensure specie survival of earth's animals would've been to reduce human population to less than 3 billion by the year 1950. Preserving and studying Mayan Codices when America was discovered rather than destroying them (gold Leaves melted down by Vatican) would’ve given this world a better chance a realizing what needed to be done, in time to do it.
About 1981 I was in Palenque during a conference called "La Mesa Redunda" a meeting of archeologists/anthropologists working on the Maya culture, during which a revelation hit everyone, the US government has released aerial photos of the whole Yucatan/Chiapas area taken with new technology which can see right through jungle foliage and through a certain amount of soil as well.
The pictures shoed ruins everywhere, not just around temple areas but everywhere from the edge of the mountain range all the way to the coast, it was one big city. Overpopulated to the max. a city which dwarfs the Los Angeles megalopolis by far. This to me was reproof that overpopulation was the major cause of their demise, later I also found evidence of severe climate change around the same time. So famine resulting from population and crop failures were the likely cause of their fall.
Before this I had been suspicious that the white man’s genocide was the cause, but now I lean more towards the cause being the same dilemma humanity faces today … too many people.
　
Overpopulation = Deforestation = Animal habitat Loss = Climate Change =
Alternative Nuclear Power, = Ozone Depletion = Increased Solar Radiation =
Increased Climate Changes = DNA Damage = Factory Farmimg of Humans =
Factory Farmimg of Animals to Feed Humans =
Humans squeezed in Sardine Cans = Increased Stress & Conflict = Increased wars for resources =
=
　
　
　
　
NASA - The Fall of the Maya: "They Did it to Themselves"
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009 ... ist1100868
October 6, 2009: For 1200 years, the Maya dominated Central America. At their peak around 900 A.D., Maya cities teemed with more than 2,000 people per square mile -- comparable to modern Los Angeles County. Even in rural areas the Maya numbered 200 to 400 people per square mile. But suddenly, all was quiet. And the profound silence testified to one of the greatest demographic disasters in human prehistory -- the demise of the once vibrant Maya society.
What happened? Some NASA-funded researchers think they have a pretty good idea. "They did it to themselves," says veteran archeologist Tom Sever.
Image
Mayan ruins in Guatemala. Photo copyright Tom Sever.
"The Maya are often depicted as people who lived in complete harmony with their environment,' says PhD student Robert Griffin. "But like many other cultures before and after them, they ended up deforesting and destroying their landscape in efforts to eke out a living in hard times."
A major drought occurred about the time the Maya began to disappear. And at the time of their collapse, the Maya had cut down most of the trees across large swaths of the land to clear fields for growing corn to feed their burgeoning population. They also cut trees for firewood and for making building materials.
"They had to burn 20 trees to heat the limestone for making just 1 square meter of the lime plaster they used to build their tremendous temples, reservoirs, and monuments," explains Sever.
He and his team used computer simulations to reconstruct how the deforestation could have played a role in worsening the drought. They isolated the effects of deforestation using a pair of proven computer climate models: the PSU/NCAR mesoscale atmospheric circulation model, known as MM5, and the Community Climate System Model, or CCSM.
"We modeled the worst and best case scenarios: 100 percent deforestation in the Maya area and no deforestation," says Sever. "The results were eye opening. Loss of all the trees caused a 3-5 degree rise in temperature and a 20-30 percent decrease in rainfall."
The results are telling, but more research is needed to completely explain the mechanisms of Mayan decline. Archeological records reveal that while some Maya city-states did fall during drought periods, some survived and even thrived.
Image
Above: Deep in the Guatemalan jungle, Sever and Griffin study a crumbled "stele," a stone pyramid used by the Maya to record information or display ornately carved art. Sever and Griffin found the stele and other ruins hidden for more than 1,000 years during an expedition that relied on NASA remote-sensing technologies to pinpoint sites of ancient settlements. (NASA/T. Sever)
"We believe that drought was realized differently in different areas," explains Griffin. "We propose that increases in temperature and decreases in rainfall brought on by localized deforestation caused serious enough problems to push some but not all city-states over the edge."
The Maya deforested through the use of slash-and-burn agriculture – a method still used in their old stomping grounds today, so the researchers understand how it works.
"We know that for every 1 to 3 years you farm a piece of land, you need to let it lay fallow for 15 years to recover. In that time, trees and vegetation can grow back there while you slash and burn another area to plant in."
But what if you don't let the land lay fallow long enough to replenish itself? And what if you clear more and more fields to meet growing demands for food?
"We believe that's what happened," says Griffin. "The Maya stripped large areas of their landscape bare by over-farming."
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A deadly cycle of drought, warming and deforestation may have doomed the Maya. [larger image]
Not only did drought make it difficult to grow enough food, it also would have been harder for the Maya to store enough water to survive the dry season.
"The cities tried to keep an 18-month supply of water in their reservoirs," says Sever. "For example, in Tikal there was a system of reservoirs that held millions of gallons of water. Without sufficient rain, the reservoirs ran dry." Thirst and famine don't do much for keeping a populace happy. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
"In some of the Maya city-states, mass graves have been found containing groups of skeletons with jade inlays in their teeth – something they reserved for Maya elites – perhaps in this case murdered aristocracy," he speculates.
No single factor brings a civilization to its knees, but the deforestation that helped bring on drought could easily have exacerbated other problems such as civil unrest, war, starvation and disease.
Many of these insights are a result of space-based imaging, notes Sever. "By interpreting infrared satellite data, we've located hundreds of old and abandoned cities not previously known to exist. The Maya used lime plaster as foundations to build their great cities filled with ornate temples, observatories, and pyramids. Over hundreds of years, the lime seeped into the soil. As a result, the vegetation around the ruins looks distinctive in infrared to this day."
"Space technology is revolutionizing archeology," he concludes. "We're using it to learn about the plight of ancients in order to avoid a similar fate today."
Author: Dauna Coulter | Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA
Maybe if the Mayan and Nazca great minds had their focus out of the heavens and more down to Earth where they lived then they wouldn't have been wiped out. Ahhh... we did a number with that dust bowl in the '30s.