Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 4

Poll #4 - In a multiverse filled with every possible timeline, there must be branches we're not on where some of the "End of the World" doomsayers throughout history were right. For our timeline, will 2012 be the real deal or just another Y2K-like fizzle?
(poll ended Dec. 13 2007)
A dead heat, split right down the middle on this one! 50% said "real deal" and 50% said "fizzle". I did get some flack on this poll for the way I worded the question: proponents of the Mayan calendar's accelerated consciousness approaching 2012, or fans of Kurzweil's predicted Singularity, object to being lumped in with doom and gloom end of the world predictions like Y2K, and I accept that. Persons familiar with my writing will know that I have used this example before, and that my song "The End of the World" also mentions positive predictions like "attaining our star bodies". The point here is not whether the prediction of an upcoming break or a Shift for our planet is good or bad, but rather that the multiverse scenario doesn't allow us to look at predictions that have failed in our own past and use that as the argument for why the latest prediction will never come true. I return to this idea several times in my book, here's what I say in chapter 6:

But eventually the deadline for all good predictions of the end has to arrive, and like the celebrated Y2K scenario, its promoters are then left looking a little foolish. In the anthropic viewpoint, we can imagine how those people also exist on different timelines where their predictions did come true. The reason we’re here on our current timeline to question what went wrong with their predictions is because on the timeline where they were right, we would no longer be here. Perhaps there were also people in Atlantis, or Mu/Lemuria, or in the ancient sunken ruins off of Cuba or south of Okinawa, who issued dire warnings of impending disaster, and who got to say one last “I told you so” before the end of their civilizations really did come to pass?

Next: Poll 5 - Do you believe each choice made creates parallel universes?