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2012 Mayan Calendar 'Doomsday' Date Might Be Wrong
astroengine writes "A UC Santa Barbara associate professor is disputing the accuracy of the mesoamerican 'Long Count' calendar after highlighting several astronomical flaws in a correlation factor used to synchronize the ancient Mayan calendar with our modern Gregorian calendar. If proven to be correct, Gerardo Aldana may have nudged the infamous December 21, 2012 'End of the World' date out by at least 60 days. Unfortunately, even if the apocalypse is rescheduled, doomsday theorists will unlikely take note."
The apocalypse that won't happen Dec. 21, 2012 is now expected to not happen on Feb. 19, 2013...got it.
Jan. 1, 2000, 00:00 GMT
December 21, 2012 is actually the Mayan "Year of the Linux Desktop."
So enjoy your couple of months on top.
Indeed, no one seems to be able to calculate this. When they first tried it came to sometime in 2013. Then it got moved to 2012 for about 15 years. Then for five it was 2013 again; but no one seemed to pay attention to that five years. Then as you said, they recalculated and found it to be off by 4,000.
I strongly get the feeling that the people who work on this to make these publication tend to ignore most of the work before them and just fail to do any sanity checks with any developments on the subject since the late eighties...
Code softly but carry a big magnet.
so this means another 60 days of total debauchery? cool
But now it turns out the date was off! Great news! Finally news anchors have a real story to report.
They predicted the end of the world,
If by they you mean the Maya, then, no, they didn't predict the end of the world.
They had a calendar which has a cycle expire at a particular time. The assignment of the "end of the world" or similar apocalyptic significance to that cycle expiration is something that was done in the 20th Century by New Age writers.
In a way, the Mayans were correct. After all, whether the date is 2012 or 2013, the Maya did correctly predict that by that time the Maya would have no further need for a Mayan calendar.
The most damning evidence against the "doomsday" is the fact that at least one Mayan king wrote about how he hoped people will still celebrate him in, then he gave a date, a date several thousand years after the end of the Mayan long calendar. So, did he not get the memo that the world would have been destroyed thousands of years before that date? Was he just oblivious? Seems contrary to assume he was clueless, since the only reason we think the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world is the assumption that they were all-knowing and all-seeing, by virtue of not being us.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Actually they didn't. There is _no_ mayan prophecy for the end of the Baktun. None whatsoever. On the contrary, on their monuments you find dates up to trillions of year into the future. Dunno what was supposed to happen then, but it would make no sense to prophecise it if the world is supposed to end now.
_All_ that happens in 2012 (ok, 2013) is the end of a baktun.
Let's start from the start. The Mayans didn't count in base 10, but in base 20, presumably because they could count on their toes too. (No, really, look at their digits.) Thank goodness they didn't come up with a male-only maths, eh?
So they started with a year based on 260 day years, the so called Tzolkin calendar. If now you went "wait, that can't be right, it would skip through the actual year like crazy", congrats, you'd be smarter than the Mayans.
Then came the Long Count calendar, which was 360 days long, or 18 months of 20 days each. (Told you they were big on 20.) This is actually the calendar used in the 2012 (non)prophecy.
Yes, that's right. Those poor idiots are actually trusting a civilization to tell them about galactic alignments... who isn't even advanced enough to figure out the length of the year. Nor had the smarts to reset it to some equinoxe or such each year, like the lunisolar calendars used around here by even the most primitive ancient cultures. Yeah, that's the guy to trust with galactic calculations, right? ;)
To make it more stupid, even the Mayans eventually got a better calendar than that, the Haab calendar. Which finally padded the year to 365 days long, putting them finally on par with what the Egyptians had had, oh, only a couple of millennia before them. But anyway, a doomsday calculation based on the Long Count is already based on a calendar which is obsolete and crap even by Mayan standards.
So, anyway, a Long Count year was 18 months of 20 days each.
From there it went kinda like for us with decades, centuries and milenia, except in base 20.
So for us a decade is 10 years, for them a katun is 20 years.
For us a century is 10x10 years, for them a baktun is 20x20 years.
For us a millennium is 10x10x10 years, for them a piktun is 20x20x20 years.
All that happens in 2012 or 2013 is the end of a baktun. Yes, it's not even millennialism. The piktun (base-20 millenium) won't end for another 4000 years or so.
That scare isn't even like Y2K, it's more like being scared of the rollover from 699 AD to 700 AD. I mean, WTF, it's not even running out of digits or anything.
And again that's _all_ there is to it, because there is no actual Mayan prophecy for that date.
But I guess that won't stop the doomsday idiots from waiting for their Rapture on that day. What else is new?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The Mayans had a Long Count calendar which was based on how many days since the day they believe creation started. They believed that this age was the fourth world and the fifth would start at the end of the Long Count. Now I'm not up to speed on the specifics but I don't think scholars have figured out what the Mayans thought would happen at the start of the fifth world. It might have been written down but the Spanish destroyed many Mayan texts labeling them as "heresy"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Transitions from one age to the next, especially in mythological terms, tend to be violent and filled with hardship.
Given that the calendar is based on the winter solstice and the rollover occurs on every winter solstice. The Gregorian calendar is flawed in tracking the solstice because it floats just enough because it's not based on a perfect solar year but it's close enough. 60 days off is kind of absurd since it would put it no were near the soltices or equinox that were used. I'd believe that they had the wrong year 2011 vs 2013 or 2012 but wrong astrological event? hardly
Correct.
The first half is correct. The Maya did believe that this was the fourth -- and only successful -- creation, that followed three prior, failed attempts at creation.
The second half is less correct. First, the Long Count doesn't end (or at least not in the currently-expected lifetime of the universe and several orders of magnitude more; the abbreviated expression that was all that was needed to record current dates does 'run out', similar to the Y2K problem, but the Long Count has many higher positional cycles that were used in writing future dates, and occasionally used in writing current dates in ceremonial contexts.)
Second, there is no evidence that the Maya expected the current creation to end at any particular time; and there are concrete indications (in the form of predictions of events in the current creation that did require the use of higher-order cycles) that if they did expect the current creation to end, it wasn't at the point where Long Count dates counted from the beginning of the current creation would begin to need to use the higher-order cycles that weren't conventionally used to express current dates.
actually, they have a circular calendar. Just that most people don't quite get the concept that once it reaches their "last" date, it just goes back to the first date and keeps going.
And the people who do get it are riddled with nutjobs that believe that a new age is upon us or something like that.
I could care less unless the heiroglyphics depict fire reaining down upon the world... they don't do they?
Not the end of the planet, solar system, galaxy, universe, time or whatever is supposed to occur in 2012 (of course, those things will inevitably end, as well). However the inevitable end that I'm referring to is the end of a period of time that can be represented by a calender. I have never understood why the end of the Mayan calendar has to be the end of anything... I mean, The Dilbert calender on my desk ends on December 31st of this year... I wonder if I should attach any cosmic significance to that?
New calculations will push it further to April 1st, 2013