Prophecy update

Hard as it is to believe, we're over halfway through 2025.  On the one hand, it seems like it's flown.  On the other, any amount of time spent living through the Trump regime is going to feel like having your feet in the fire, so it's a mixed bag.

Maybe there's something in Einstein's theory to explain this, given that he said "time is relative" and all.

I thought this might be a good point to check in on our psychic predictions for the year and see how the psychics were faring.  We still have a bit over four months left to go, and the final scorecard won't be certain till December 31, so think of this as being a bit of mid-game analysis.

Some of them, however, go right down to the wire.  Like the TikTok clip of a woman running up to a couple on the beach in Saint Augustine, Florida, shrieking, "I know what's coming!", pointing to the waves, and then running away.  The guy who posted it said the video is dated December 30, 2025.  How that's possible, I have no idea.  In any case, he advised us all to "flag this post in case anything weird happens."

Of course, it works the other way, too.  If you pinpoint a date, it's much easier to prove wrong.  Despite an alleged prediction by Alexa that there would be a "strong 8.2 magnitude earthquake in the Philippines, along with an eruption of Mount Pinatubo," April 23 dawned and nothing had happened.  So the take-home message for would-be prophets is "keep it vague so no one can say you're definitively wrong."

That's the approach of Nostradamus, who couched his prophecies in such arcane, weird, and symbolic language that you can interpret them to mean pretty much any damn thing you want.  The 2025 predictions from the mysterious Frenchman are supposedly for "global conflict, natural disasters, and shifts in environmental patterns," which are a pretty good bet in any year, but also supposedly we're in for a "large asteroid falling from the sky, followed by a great fire on Earth."  Which would be hard to miss.  Thus far I haven't seen any sign of it, and NASA has assured us that of the asteroids it knows about, none pose an immediate threat.

None it knows about.  Or is willing to tell us about.  Amirite?  *slow single eyebrow raise*

In any case, so far so good on the giant asteroid front.  Although I have to say if it targeted Mar-a-Lago, I might be in the pro-asteroid camp.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gunnshots (Don), Psychic reading, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Then there's Baba Vanga, the blind Bulgarian mystic who according to some sources left behind enough prophecies at her death in 1996 to last us until the year 5079.  This is also a smart tactic, because not many of us will be around for that long, so saying "In the year 4537, a freak hurricane will flatten Hoboken" falls into the "unverifiable even in theory" department.  But fortunately, we have her predictions for 2025, and they include a few doozies.  Aliens are going to "make contact during a major sporting event," which sure would add some spice to the halftime show.  Medical science will take a huge leap forward when researchers figure out how to grow fully-functional human organs in vitro.  Physicists will discover a new energy source that is "clean, limitless, and unlike anything we've seen before."  And human telepathy will become a reality, meaning that we'll be able to communicate with each other with no intermediate medium necessary.

I don't know about you, but I'm not thrilled about this last one.  Exposing some innocent person to the chaos that goes on inside my skull just seems mean.  I explored the whole "telepathy is not pleasant" idea in my Parsifal Snowe Mysteries series (currently out of print but hopefully back soon), in the character of the tortured psychic Callista Lee -- who describes ordinary existence as being trapped in a crowded, noisy bar 24/7.  Keep in mind, though, that this series is fiction.

In any case, Baba is batting a big fat zero so far.

Then we have John Sommers-Flanagan, whose predictions include Superbowl LIX ending with the Bills beating the Lions 36-30 (the actual outcome was Eagles 40, Chiefs 22).  Otherwise, he chose to play it safe, saying we'd have rising temperatures and food prices, falling economic strength and consumer confidence, and that Trump will continue to be an ignorant, racist, authoritarian fascist-wannabe schmuck.  (Not in those exact words, but that's the gist.)  In any case, those all fall into the "Who Could Have Predicted This Besides Everyone?" department.  

So the predictions thus far have kind of been a bust.  Of course, to be fair to the psychics, we do still have four months for all of it to happen.  Me, I'm hoping Baba Vanga's aliens do show up.  At this point, I don't particularly care if they're hostile:

Alien: Ha ha, puny earthling, we have come here to slaughter your leaders, subjugate your entire planet, and rule you for all eternity!

Me:  Okay, go for it

Alien:  ... wait, what?

Me:  You heard me.  Hop to it, lazy, we don't have all fucking day

But given their track record (the psychics, not the aliens), I'm thinking we're probably going to remain stuck with the "leaders" we have.  On the other hand, if you live in Saint Augustine, Florida, you might want to stay away from the beach on December 30.  You wouldn't want to throw caution to the wind if this turns out to be the one time the psychics nailed it, and get eaten by Cthulhu or something.  As my dad used to say, "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

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It's the end of the world, if you notice

I have commented more than once about my incredulity with regards to end-of-the-world predictions.  Despite the fact that to date, they have had a 100% failure rate, people of various stripes (usually of either the ultra-religious persuasion or the woo-woo conspiracy one) continue to say that not only is the world doomed, they know exactly when, how, and why.  (If you don't believe me, take a look at the Wikipedia page for apocalyptic predictions, which have occurred so often they had to break it down by century.)  

As far as why this occurs -- why repeated failure doesn't make the true believers say, "Well, I guess that claim was a bunch of bullshit, then" -- there are a variety of reasons.  One is a sort of specialized version of the backfire effect, which occurs when evidence against a claim you believe strongly leaves you believing it even more strongly.  Way back in 1954 psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter infiltrated a doomsday cult, and in fact Festinger was with the cult on the day they'd claimed the world was going to end.  When 11:30 PM rolled around and nothing much was happening, the leader of the cult went into seclusion.  A little after midnight she returned with the joyous news that the cult's devotion and prayers had averted the disaster, and god had decided to spare the world, solely because of their fidelity.

Hallelujah!  We better keep praying, then!

(Note bene: The whole incident, and the analysis of the phenomenon by Festinger et al., is the subject of the fascinating book When Prophecy Fails.)

Despite this, the repeated failure of an apocalyptic prophecy can cause your followers to lose faith eventually, as evangelical preacher Harold Camping found out.  So the people who believe this stuff often have to engage in some fancy footwork after the appointed day and hour arrive, and nothing happens other than the usual nonsense.

Take, for example, the much-publicized "Mayan apocalypse" on December 21, 2012 that allegedly was predicted by ancient Mayan texts (it wasn't) and was going to herald worldwide natural disasters (it didn't).  The True Believers mostly retreated in disarray when December 22 dawned, as well they should have.  My wife and I threw a "Welcoming In The Apocalypse" costume party on the evening of December 21 (I went as a zombie, which I felt was fitting given the theme), and I have to admit to some disappointment when the hour of midnight struck and we were all still there.  But it turns out that not all of the Mayan apocalyptoids disappeared after the prediction failed; one of them, one Nick Hinton, says actually the end of the world did happen, as advertised...

... but no one noticed.

Hinton's argument, such as it is, starts with a bit of puzzling over why you never hear people talking about the 2012 apocalypse any more.  (Apparently "it didn't happen" isn't a sufficient reason.)  Hinton finds this highly peculiar, and points out that this was the year CERN fired up the Large Hadron Collider and discovered the Higgs boson, and that this can't possibly be a coincidence.  He wonders if this event destroyed the universe and/or created a black hole, and then "sucked us in" without our being aware of it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lucas Taylor / CERN, CMS Higgs-event, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Me, I think I'd notice if I got sucked into a black hole.  They're kind of violent places, as I described a recent post about Sagittarius A* and the unpleasant process called "spaghettification."   But Hinton isn't nearly done with his explanation.  He writes:

There's the old cliché argument that "nothing has felt right" since 2012.  I agree with this...  [E]ver since then the world seems to descend more and more into chaos each day.  Time even feels faster.  There's some sort of calamity happening almost daily.  Mass shootings only stay in the headlines for like 12 hours now.  Did we all die and go to Hell?...  Like I've said, I think we live in a series of simulations.  Perhaps the universe was destroyed by CERN and our collective consciousness was moved into a parallel universe next door.  It would be *almost* identical.

Of course, this is a brilliant opportunity to bring out the Mandela effect, about which I've written before.  The idea of the Mandela effect is that people remember various stuff differently (such as whether Nelson Mandela died in prison, whether it's "Looney Tunes" or "Loony Tunes" and "The Berenstein Bears" or "The Berenstain Bears," and so forth), and the reason for this is not that people's memories in general suck, but that there are alternate universes where these different versions occur and people slip back and forth between them.

All of which makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

What I find intriguing about Hinton's explanation is not all the stuff about CERN, though, but his arguing that the prediction didn't fail because he was wrong, but that the world ended and seven-billion-plus people didn't even notice.  Having written here at Skeptophilia for over twelve years, I'm under no illusions about the general intelligence level of humanity, but for fuck's sake, we're not that unobservant.  And even if somehow CERN did create an alternate universe, why would it affect almost nothing except for things like the spelling of Saturday morning cartoon titles?

So this is taking the backfire effect and raising it to the level of performance art.  This is saying that it is more likely that the entire population of the Earth was unaware of a universe-ending catastrophe than it is that you're simply wrong.

Which is so hubristic that it's kind of impressive.

But I better wind this up, because I've got to prepare myself for the next end of the world, which (according to Messiah Foundation International, which I have to admit sounds pretty impressive) is going to occur in January of 2026.  This only gives us all a bit shy of three years to get ready, so I really should get cracking on my next novel.  And if that apocalypse doesn't pan out, evangelical Christian lunatic Kent Hovind says not to worry, the Rapture is happening in 2028, we're sure this time, cross our hearts and hope to be assumed bodily into heaven.

So many apocalypses, so little time.

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