Hey! Hey you, guy in the bunker! Stop filtering your urine and fantasizing about a post-apocalyptic future where you’re free to shoot your neighbours and pay attention — turns out the world won’t be ending in 2012!
Now of course most intelligent/sane people already know that — the idea that the Mayan calendar “ending” in 2012 will cause the end of the world is silly, especially since it isn’t ending in 2012 at all. Just as today’s calendars have weeks/months/decades and so on, the Mayan calendar has it’s own repeating cycles. 2012 marks the end of a b’ak’tun, a Mayan time unit around 394 years long, but it’s not the end of the Mayan calendar. Once one b’ak’tun ends, another begins — there was never a specific ending point to the Mayan calendar any more than there’s one for our modern Gregorian system.
But just in case mere logic and knowledge of how calendars work isn’t enough for you, here’s some more concrete evidence — archaeologists have found a new ancient Mayan calendar that goes far beyond 2012. The calendar, discovered at the ancient Mayan archaeological site of Xultun, extends all the way to the year 3500. The wall this calendar was found on also contains tons of other complex astrological calculations proving the Mayans weren’t a simple superstitious people who thought the world was going to end at a set point, but keen observers and mathematicians who probably would have laughed at all this 2012 goofiness.
Not that any of this “conclusive evidence” stuff is going to convince most hardcore 2012 believers, but hopefully it’ll deter a few dumbass 14-year-olds who watched “2012” and think we’re all going to be destroyed by a giant volcano emerging from Yellowstone park.
via USA Today & Discover Magazine