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Mayan Calendar

Brainache

Nasty Brutish and Tall
Brainache
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I suppose this has been discussed before and maybe this isn't the correct sub-forum, but I'm interested to find out what people think about this thing.

From what I've heard elsewhere 2012 is the year that the Mayan calendar comes to an end. I've heard it said that they saw 2012 as when the world as we know it will end.

I have no problem assuming that those Mayans knew a fair bit about astronomy (at least enough to make a very accurate calendar), but what I'd like to know is did they ever say why the world is supposed to end in 2012?

Is it something mystical about gods coming back or waking up?

Some sort of natural cosmological cycle like the precession of the equinox(?) whatever?

Or some great big rock about to splatter us back to the pre-cambrian?

Could it be that Mayan astronomers knew something about asteroids or comets that we haven't spotted?

I've only ever heard woos go on about it, so I suppose I should also ask: Does the Mayan calendar actually end in 2012 or did someone just make that up?
 
Brainache said:
Does the Mayan calendar actually end in 2012 or did someone just make that up?
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The Mayan calendar does end in 2012, in the same sense that your car's odometer ends after 999,999.9 miles. What happens next? They both roll over to 0 and start a new cycle, and both events have exactly identical effects on the cosmos.

FWIW, several of us on The Amazing Cruise picked up copies of the Mayan calendar while visiting the Mayan ruins at Cozumel. As I understand it, these are more-or-less "official" copies, published by a scholarly group dedicated to understanding the Mayan culture. I've gone through it, but it's a bit hard to understand, a wheels-within-wheels kind of thing (literally! There's a geared wheel that moves around the interior of a larger wheel).

I think the modern mysticism about it stems from the fact that its cycles are much longer than ours; IIRC, our calendar repeats itself every 13 years or so, while the Mayan calander takes several hundred years to get an exact repeat. Some people, I guess, see these longer cycles as unreasonable in terms of human lifespan, so it seems logical to them that there's some other kind of significance, something hidden. There's a certain superficial logic to this: Why should a calendar, which is a tool meant for human use, transcend human existence?
 
In 2013, the Mayan Calendar will just say they got the date a bit wrong and the world is still coming to an end.
 
There's a few helpful links [URL="http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61131]here[/URL].
 
Brainache said:
Does the Mayan calendar actually end in 2012
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No - the Mayan Long Count calender, which started on some date (I forget exactly which) in about 3000BC, covers several billion years.
or did someone just make that up?
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Yes. It's a fairly complicated subject - the Mayans actually used several different types of calenders, some of which incorporated planetary and steller astronomical cycles. The 2012 date refers to the culmination of one such cycle. You'll find more about it in this Wikipedia article, which also has several informative links.
 
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Thank you all for your very informative replies.

I guess I'll just have to get a job and stop running up huge debts in the belief that I won't have to pay them back after 2012.
 
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