Some strange stuff is happening to our physical life source- the SUN! Assuming you know that the sun has an ELEVEN year cycle which one half is a QUIET period and one half is an ACTIVE period, then you must be scratching your head about how cycle #23 came and went and how cycle #24 is beginning. The QUIET period of cycle #24 wasn't: it was 40% more active. Can you say Katrina as one example?
2000-1 was the PEAK of the last (#23) active cycle meaning 05-06 would be the LOW and then the infamous 2012 the PEAK again. However, things are way off schedule. What was to be the LOW-QUIET time turned out to have fierce and numerous sun spots which caused all manner of weather problems here on earth with a 40% increase over what's historically been the norm.
And now what should be the building time in sun spot activity, NOTHING is happening! What's up that?
As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we now possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
Astronomers who count sunspots say that 2008 was the "blankest year" of the Space Age. As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank (had no visible sunspots) on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times. "Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "We're experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle."
Deep minimum? Hmm. And what does that mean precisely? :-)
Could the sun be putting a damper on the Al Gore party? Might we be looking at something more akin to global COOLING than global WARMING? About all we know for sure is that we're in very different and strange times and with all the historical mystery attached to the date of 2012, things are going to become more than sensational. The 2012 movie is of course highly fictional and entertaining (somewhat), but sometimes art does imitate life way in advance.
I’ve tried not to exaggerate the glory of athletes. I’d rather, if I could, preserve a sense of proportion, to write about them as excellent ballplayers, first-rate players. But I’m sure I have contributed to false values—as Stanley Woodward said, “Godding up those ballplayers.”
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
Time will tell. :-)
As a spiritual-futurist, I have a BA degree majoring in history. One cannot know the future without knowing the past which holds clues to what is on the horizon. The world is in such a rapid expansion of knowledge that we are close to entering a tipping point that will forever change earth as we know it.