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."

Comments

So then

[acrobg]

The apocalypse that won't happen Dec. 21, 2012 is now expected to not happen on Feb. 19, 2013...got it.

Re:So then

[The Wooden Badger]

Actually it is a year earlier than previously thought. December 12, 2011 is when my daughter can get her driver's license.

Math error plus translation problem

[Anonymous Coward]

December 21, 2012 is actually the Mayan "Year of the Linux Desktop."

So enjoy your couple of months on top.

In a way, the Mayans were correct.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

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.

Not really doomsday

[canajin56]

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.

Actually they didn't

[Moraelin]

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?

Re:Actually they didn't

[gaiageek]

I'm not a 2012 doomsday believer nor have I read a single book on Mayan calendars, but I do remember learning in intro astronomy that the Mayans made incredibly accurate astronomical observations and predications, including of solar eclipses well in the future. I find it pretty hard to believe that they could do this (I'd love to see anyone here predict an eclipse without using a computer), yet be unaware of the cycle which we call the solar year. From some brief research online it seems that in Mayan culture, Venus had more significance than the sun, and the 260-day period you mentioned was tied to the gestation period of women. Point being, it seems misguided to suggest that they were idiots (as you more or less do) when the Mayans were quite aware of what was happening in the skies, and when considering the fact that they must have choose the cycles they did based upon what was important within their culture.

Re:Worse

[thehostiles]

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?