Just wondered what people opinions on 2012 world ending are. Is there actually any real evidence? I heard that the calender doesnt actually end in 2012 at all and ends in about another 1000 years or so. Not that the ending of the calender means the end of the world

1912-Titanic sinks
2012-London holds the Olimpics.

something's definitely up.

I assume dirty_g that you are talking about the Mayan calendar. It ends as much as our calendar ends at December 31, 2006 (which is followed by January 1, 2007). Anything more is bunk. If you seach around the threads here you will find a bunch of 2012 stuff.

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The Mayans don't seem to worried about the world ending in 2012. They're still around. 'Course, now they wear blue jeans and drive pickups and such.

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I do not beleive it will end at all but you must admit these people are not anything like original Maya at all. It's like comparing me to my far gone distant relations of Vikings maybe mixed with the Roman invaders of England and also the French whe they invaded. I dont care about the Vikings and I dont think that I will end up in the Hall of Valhalla with Thor or anybody else when I die. I dont think anything of Roman Gods and lastly I cant stand Garlic!! I doubt these maya have much of a spiritual connection with their own very far gone distant relatives either or would actually care much about an old calender.

Just curious (not speciifically to dirtyg), why then, does anyone care what the Mayans calender says now? We have about several different calenders that we use (Chinese, Jewish, standard, I don't know of more..sorry). Why does anyone care about the Mayan calander at all?

Pete

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

Because, they tried to go by the PC version of the calander that "ended" at the year 2000, but we're still alive so they're moving on to the next one that "ends" lol. But it's just hysterical to put stock in an arbitrary calander date. As mentioned earlier, my wall calander ends on Dec 31st, but I have an inkling that there will be a January 1st 2007 anyway.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Theory of Zombie Relativity:
1) Everyone Else is a Zombie relative to You
2) Whether or not it matters is related to the inverse square of the distance between their teeth and your brain
(Quoted from Demigrog)

Mmm. My understanding is that we're looking at a fairly complicated situation, here. I believe that certain rituals of certain of the native Mexican peoples have carried on lo these many years, just a bit . . . quietly. They consider themselves Catholics, but there are traditions and superstitions that have carried over. And, no, they don't care about the calendar. But if it really showed the end of the world, you'd think they would.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The fact that you made that connection makes me wonder about you.

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Let's not forget:

1812--France invades Russia, loses disastrously, inspiring (70 years later) a bombastic (literally!) overture by Tchaikovsky.

1712--Johann Sebastian Bach visits western Massachussetts with his son PDQ in order to tune an organ, inspiring a bombastic overture by PDQ!

There must be something to it, so there, Dragon Star!

But seriously, the doomsday crowd will just find a new date. Always have, always will.

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The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

I actually noticed a book in the library that was on the 2012 upcoming end of the world. I was sad to see that it's library of congress number put it right in the astronomy section of the science section. Which is why I saw it, I was scanning the shelf for anything new.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

So the Mayans could predict the end of the world but were blindsided by the end of their own civilization, huh? That makes me put lots of faith in their predictive abilities. If only they could have foreseen the steam engine and the repeating rifle and representative government, their civilization might still be around today.

It might be fun if you were to take a vacation down in Yucatan or Guatemala and talk to some of them. They are nice intelligent people. They switched over to the European style calendar some time back and they use a base-10 number system now. Their leaders don’t cut people’s hearts out any more, and I was glad of that when I first met them. I’ve got a book here about their old calendar system. It rolls over to a new big number every 600+ years, and it will do it again in 2012 then again in another 600+ years. It's designed to roll over like that. An interesting thing about their old calendar is that it can be made to turn over new dates and numbers with a system of gears, much like our clocks turn over to “12” twice a day. We could probably gear up our calendar to do the same thing, if we wanted to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar

best thing for explaining the workings of the Calender. Looks very well thought out and it is well written.

That does seem to be a pretty good article (comparing to other stuff I read and a college history of astronomy course 25 years ago). One bit that is important to the whole 2012 thing....
In other words, it is not completely established that 2012 is even the magic roll-over year.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Here is a Maya calendar chart from an old book I have. Looks like the roll-over takes place about every 394 years. It clearly shows that the last roll-over was in 1618, so the next roll-over will be in 2012.

http://i12.tinypic.com/29uyp78.jpg

Y'mean, the world didn't end in 1618? Bummer.

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Actually, the world ended in 1984, due to an alignment of the planets. I'm sorry if you didn't get the memo! ~Michael

It also aligned on May 5th 2000 didnt it??? Some guy called Doctor Salt was going mad about mile high tidal waves etc....

This statement has just declared us undestroyable. MU-HA-HA!

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