2012 Mayan Calendar 'Doomsday' Date Might Be Wrong 144
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."
Old News (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Of course they're wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Actually they didn't (Score:5, Informative)
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:Of course they're wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Actually they didn't (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Worse (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Re:Actually they didn't (Score:5, Informative)