Dec. 12, 2012

 

"It´s too bad that we´re getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they´re too young to die," Martin said. "We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn´t live to see them grow up." These are in response to the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012.

But most archaeologists, astronomers and Maya say the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, Internet doomsday rumors and TV specials such as one on the History Channel which mixes "predictions" from Nostradamus and the Mayas and asks: "Is 2012 the year the cosmic clock finally winds down to zero days, zero hope?"

Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 B.C., marking time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and the 13th Baktun ends around Dec. 21, 2012.

"It´s a special anniversary of creation," said David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin. "The Maya never said the world is going to end, they never said anything bad would happen necessarily, they´re just recording this future anniversary on Monument Six."

"They´re really super-duper trying to find anything astronomical they can to fit that date of 2012," Plait said. Don´t use 2012 as an excuse to not live in a healthy, responsible fashion. I mean, don´t let the credit cards go up.

"No one who´s writing in now seems to remember that the last time we thought the world was going to end, it didn´t," says Martin, the astronomy webmaster. "There doesn´t seem to be a lot of memory that things were fine the last time around."