u.f.o.s, page-21

re: u.f.o.s - seeing is believing! sartori

About the Mayan calendar ending in 2012....

"There is a great deal of nonsense that has been written about the Mayan long count. It has been claimed (most egregiously, in a Discovery Channel TV series) that it will 'come to an end' in the near future, and along with it will arrive a Mayan apocalypse, a pole shift, earth change, cosmic convergence, whatever. Given the completely cyclic nature of the long count, this is an idiotic characterization. Once any given cycle ends, another begins, endlessly. The full long count is currently only at baktun 12; there are still 8 baktuns (or about three thousand years) before it turns over. The current Katun will increment about ten years from now (13.0.0.0.0 will be on December 21st, 2012). However, there is no reason that date should be any more cosmologically significant than the end of the common era millenium was!

For one thing, this is a theoretical reconstruction of the Mayan calendar, since it hasn't been in use for hundreds of years. The Mayan epoch shown above was hotly debated by archeologists for many decades. The date shown is a consensus date, originally proposed by J.E.S. Thompson, and supported by carbon dating and other methods. However, this particular date for the Mayan epoch could still be off by some amount, possibly by years. Thus any eschatological theories based on this calendar would have to be adjusted accordingly. This is similar to the Christian era, which may be off by several years since we don't have Jesus' birth certificate in hand; so any predictions of the end of the world based on when that calendar ticks over were just as absurd. Furthermore, the assumption that some occurance of the Christian millenium marks the expiration date of the Universe is based on base 10 math: the fact that the Mayans adopted a base 20 system shows how arbitrary this assumption is. And anyway, last time I checked, the date is now 2000 and counting, and the universe is still here... "