End of world may be delayed a bit
The world, it turns out, is not ending. I know what you’re thinking: “But how can that be? Surely Snooki is at least one or two of the horsemen of the apocalypse.”
Actually, that’s a fair point…
So while I can’t speak to that, according to the news story this week on DiscoveryNews.com, the popular belief that the Mayans predicted the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012 is not only completely baseless – it’s also not even the right date.
In case you’re unaware, some segments of the populace are nervously eying the December after this one because the Mayan calendar “runs out” and so it must be the end of the world. This week, however, a professor says that worrying about Dec. 21, 2012 is a tad silly since we’ve miscalculated the supposed “end date” all along.
According to the recent study by Gerardo Aldana, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, the Dec. 21, 2012 date is off by at least 60 days and may be off about 50 to 100 years. (Uh, oops.)
It turns out that because of errors in the conversions from the Mayan calendar to our Gregorian calendar (Probably forgot to carry the one, I bet.) In other words, Aldana believes the Dec. 21, 2012 date is completely wrong. Of course, Aldana is more interested in academic pursuits than predicting the end of the world. (The title of the book is “Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World.”)
So it’s a good time to point out that there’s no reason to believe that the Mayans could predict the end of the world. After all, the Mayans never had a calendar that was meant to predict the apocalypse – no matter what a John Cusack’s movie or a friend that totally read up on this stuff will tell you.
The Mayan civilization, which called southern Mexico, Guate-mala, Belize, El Salvador and some of Honduras home until some pesky Spanish guys showed up, used the calendar in question, the “Long Count,” to “document past and future events” outside the 52-year span covered by their other calendars.
That the Long Count will “run out” after 5,126 years – which we thought would be in 2012 – led to rampant speculation by the gullible, the people who read too much Dan Brown and those predisposed to conspiracies. But let’s be honest, isn’t it a tad absurd to believe a civilization could predict the end of the world when they couldn’t predict that the Spanish were bringing smallpox with them?
It all reminds me of a great “Bizzaro” comic that comments on the amount of gullibility needed to buy into the whole Mayan Doomsday thing. The strip depicts two Mayans and the Long Count calendar, with one Mayan with the calendar telling the other, “I only had enough room to go to 2012.” The other replies with a smile drawn on his face, “Ha! That’ll freak somebody out someday.”
And on top of that, to find out that even the 2012 “end date” is wrong, only underlines the absurdity of putting faith in the “predictions” of the Mayans.
Of course, the Mayans were an impressive civilization. At its peak, it was one of the most impressive cultures in the world. (For what it’s worth, my wife and I visited the impressive Mayan site Chichen Itza on our honeymoon and were blown away.)
But to trust in the 2012 date means we’re making assumptions about the intentions of a culture that no longer exists and whose religion we don’t even fully grasp and trying to decipher a calendar that functioned using a dramatically different means of documenting time than we do. (And, of course, the Mayans also cut out people’s hearts in order to appease the gods for good weather.)
Not exactly the sort of thing that inspires faith in the trustworthiness of their predictions of events a thousand years in the future.
Of course, don’t let silly things like reason stop you from prepping for everything to go kablooy next December. After all, this stuff was totally spot on the last time. You know, the last time the world was surely going to end? Way back in 2000. Man, whatever happened with all that Y2K stuff? I can’t remember.
As for the world ending on Dec. 21, 2012? Let’s just say you probably shouldn’t plan on skipping your Christmas shopping that year.
If you can sing all the lyrics to “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” by REM,
Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.