Teh Endzorz Is Nigh!

So there has been a lot of talk about this 2012 end of the world thing, and by talk I don’t just mean joking and making fun, it seems that some are taking this stuff seriously. Near as I can tell looking at it briefly, it seems to all be based on the end of the Mayan calendar which stops on December 21st 2012… a short three years away. I got curious the other day and started looking into this a little more and I have to say that I am fascinated to watch this unfold. It reminds me somewhat of the Cargo cults in the early parts of the 20th century. It looks to me like a case of mistaken causality combined with observation over what the Mayan culture was capable of (namely their astronomical achievements in predicting eclipses, planetary orbits, etc). Much of this is collected in their calendar and it is an admirable piece of work considering the source and time frame involved. To save you a trip to Wikipedia, I’ll inform you that the Mayans were at their peak at around roughly 600AD and were considered, by people really interested in things that happened around that time, to have been one of the most advanced… blah blah blah. I could drone on about agriculture and other boring things that may interest anthropologists, but I’m talking about something INTERESTING. So I’ve heard many people say something along the lines of “you know the Mayans had and still have the world most accurate calendar” and I’m sure that many of you have heard similar things. Unfortunately, it seems that people routinely make the assumption that accuracy has anything to do with breadth of acceptance. In reality, the scope over which your theory or idea is likely to be accepted has more to do with how loud and obnoxious you are (in this case religion played the according role) and to what extent you are willing to go to make people accept what you have to say (namely war and/or complete obliteration). Since the virgin sacrificing Mayans were so far removed from the white mans cooties, they were ripe for the picking by the time the conquistadores got the idea of raping the culture for everything it was worth (not much as it turned out… I wonder if they had date-rapers remorse after it was all said and done?). So let’s examine this claim of “most accurate calendar EVER” to some shallow extent. Mayans didn’t have telescopes so they could only note the planets one can see with the naked eye (turns out to be five if you pay close attention). So based on some keen observations, they made a calendar to suit their needs and which explained what they were able to see and understand at the time. So what are the important dates on a calendar if you have no presuppositions based on religious hand-me-down’s and a banking system looking for excuses to knock off for an early weekend? Well, there are 4 major ones that’ll be pretty important for growing things. Since the earth is off kilter a little bit compared to the plane in which we orbit the sun, we experience seasons. When the equator is in line with that plane of orbit, we call it an equinox and it happens twice in an orbit (namely Spring and Fall). When the angle of rotation is at a maximum for being out of line with the plane of orbit we call it a solstice, of which there are also two (namely Summer and Winter). Now, there is no reason that the number of times the earth rotates has any correlation to how long it takes to travel precisely once around the sun, we end up with a non-integer number for days in the year (it ends up being like 365.2424 days per year). Because of this the solstices tend to move a day or two each year depending on which calendar you use. In 2012, the winter solstice will be on December 21st at 11:11 am UTC (Coordinated Universal Time… it’s another French acronym so apparently order doesn’t matter). Sound familiar? As for why the calendar stops in the year 2012, lets take a look at some things. Lets pretend you’re the historical equivalent of an astronomy graduate student charged with doing the professors dirty work while he gets busy smashing skulls to appease the gods of maize. He’s figured out the essential formulas and you get to crunch the numbers that he’ll take credit for when he presents the new calendar at the semi-annual Yucatan Junior Science Fair and Book Signing (or stone chiseling… whatever the Mayan analog may have been). So you go to town chewing away at the numbers ever so diligently. After several months of grinding work, Professor Quetzalcoatl is impressed with the progress that you’ve made and delights in how good you’re making him look before telling you to wrap it up. You’ve come a very long way, much longer than you’d hoped, but it looks like you’re terminating your calendar far enough in the future that some fifty generations will pass before anyone needs to fiddle with it. The point is that the calendar couldn’t have gone on forever and had to stop at some point. Why not end at the finale of a full cycle, in particular the winter solstice of some year so ridiculously far in the future it makes your abacus finger hurt to think about it (and yes I know that ancient Mayans probably didn’t use abacus’** to tabulate, but I bet they used the same finger… **is it Abacuses, Abacus’, Abacii, Abaculengitis, Abacuphobia, Abacudabra…?)? So the fact that the Mayan calendar ends has only to do with the fact that it’s finite (a rather redundant statement) and doesn’t necessarily coincide with some big event like say… oh let me think of a cogent paradigm… the Apocalypse? Besides, the Mayan’s made absolutely no predictions about the end of the world (that we’ve been able to decipher anyway) and even if they had why would it occur on such a local maxima? Nevertheless, the theories are beyond abundant. There’s the nuclear holocaust predictions, the massive solar flare enthusiasts, the Planet X collision conspirators (a.k.a. Nibiru), the Alien Visitation guru’s, the earths magnetic pole shift/reversal junkies, the Large Hadron Collider corroborators, the Christian Apocalyptic society, the list goes on and on and on. One more instance of waking up the next morning and having to think REALLY hard about why you screwed up again and the world didn’t end when you SWORE it was going to. Coincidentally, if any of you wish to pursue this avenue of dystopian thought, I’ll make you an offer. I’ll pay you CASH today (for you to enjoy as you see fit) for your worldly belongings, AND I’ll even let you keep them until December 22nd 2012. When you wake up that morning to me rifling through your stuff and wonder for a moment if this is heaven and I’m your spiritual Richard Simmons, just remember that I get to keep everything…