Will 2012 be the end of the world?

Don't feel to bad, I only learned about it a couple of months ago when they previewed the movie.

Just start a political thread and we will see the end of the world. Nothing more certain to get the blood boiling.

 

People keep talking about the "other things" the Mayans were supposedly right about. What things? I would like to talk to you about a phenomenon called confirmation bias. It's a tendency for humans to remember things that confirm their expectations and forget things that don't. Confirmation bias is the only reason that pseudosciences like astrology can still exist, and it's the force at work anytime somebody says that the Mayans or Nostradamus or the ancient Chinese "prophets" were right about a lot of stuff.

Let's say that I brand myself a modern-day prophet. All I have to do is roll my eyes back in my head, shake around a lot, and make a lot of vague predictions for the next hundred or so years. The vaguer, the better, because if I say something like "There will be a great war between two large nations," I'm likely to be right, but if I say that "The United States and China will begin fighting a war on May 13, 2017, that will last for exactly 187 days," then I'm almost certainly going to be wrong. If I make enough of these vague predictions, a good number of them are likely to come true. Even if a particular prediction doesn't come exactly true, it might be CLOSE to the truth. If I've gathered up a band of faithful believers during my life, their descendents will gladly twist my words to make it seem as if I've predicted every major event that has happened in the intervening years. I can be wrong a thousand little times, but all I have to do is be right two or three BIG times and I'll be held in the highest regard by future generations.

That's basically what people are doing when they say that the Mayans got a lot of predictions right (or Nostradamus, or Chinese prophets, or the Bible code, or whatever else). They're taking very vague language (sometimes even language that was originally written in code) and translating it specifically to apply to events that have already happened. That in itself is bad enough, but now they're taking this supposed accuracy record of the ancient Mayans and using that to say that the Doomsday predictions for 2012 are a certainty.

They're all full of it. And you can tell 'em I said so.

First of all...the year 2012 is NOT the end of the the Mayan calendar. That's one oft-repeated myth that needs to die. It simply represents a roll-over date, sort of like when we rolled from the 20th century into the 21st. There is no conclusive evidence that the Mayans predicted ANYTHING for this date, except maybe a wild party (much like most of the world mistakenly had a year early for the rolling over of the new millennium). Secondly, even if the Mayan calendar DID end on December 21, 2012...so what? It starts from a mythological point far in the Mayans' past. In other words, that's like saying that the world is going to end in the year 2050 CE because it's exactly 10,000 years after 7950 BCE, and that's when you think the world started. There's no reason to attach any special significance to 12/21/2012 simply because it's a whole-number of b'ak'tun cycles from the mythological start of the Mayan calendar, whether the calendar "ends" or not.

So...to sum up: the Mayans haven't been right on other predictions unless you're willing to interpret their predictions specifically so it looks like they were right. If you make vague enough predictions, you will be right a good deal of the time, and people will forget the times you're wrong. The Mayans didn't predict the end of the world in 2012, and even if they did, it doesn't matter. The world isn't going to end because it is ruled by logical rules of physics and not by ancient superstition. I hope that helps. Now stop worrying and get some rest. Good luck!