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Dr. Phil Plait wrote a book called
Death From The Skies,
in which he details the many ways the Earth could be destroyed by
astronomical events. But even he isn't worried about the world ending
anytime soon, because he knows the odds -they're "astronomical." So why
are people still talking about the December 21st apocalypse? Because
they misunderstand what the Mayan calendar actually says.
It
had as its basic units a day (called a k’in) and a 360-day period
called a tun. The Maya understood that a physical year was five days
longer than a tun, and had other calendars to deal with that. They had
longer units, too, like the ka’tun—just shy of 20 years—and most
importantly for apocalypse aficionados, the b’ak’tun—roughly 394 of our
years. The starting point for their calendar (Year Zero, if you like) is
3114 B.C., the date they figured the Earth was created.
Knowing
all this, we can match their calendar to ours and convert any date they
used to our more familiar system. If you do the math, you’ll find that
we are nearing the end of the 13th b’ak’tun. In fact, it ends on Dec.
21, 2012.
That’s this Friday. Cue the spooky music.
The
thing is, there is no suggestion, not even a hint, in Maya writing that
they thought the end of this current b’ak’tun had any connection to
doomsday. It’s entirely possible it may have even been thought of as a
time of celebration (just like we celebrate New Year’s Eve).
The
Maya also had bigger units of time, including the piktun (which was
either 13 or 20 b’ak’tun), and the alautun, which was—get this—63
million years! So it doesn’t sound like they were predicting the end of
the world ever, let alone by this weekend.
At Bad
Astronomy, Plait goes on to explain how other doomsday theories came
about and were debunked in the past -and present. And, of course, we'll
see more in the future. But as Douglas Adams once said, "Don't Panic."
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