The Mayan calendar was created by a civilization whose
dominance ended 1100 years ago. Many people have been fascinated by the
apparent “prediction” of the end of the world on Dec 21, 2012 as their long
count calendar came to an end, and of the approximate correlation in time of
other ancient prophetic visionaries such as Nostradamus. And yet we all awoke
this morning to find the earth still here and pretty much undisturbed from the
night before. Were the Maya wrong? Not necessarily.
The Maya had an amazing grasp of astronomy and extremely
detailed celestial calendars based on extremely long periods of time and
ever-greater cycles. They knew something was up this year, and left us a clue
in their calendar. But as advanced as they were, they had no advanced
technology, including computers, with which to refine their predictions.
However, there is a civilization that came to dominance after the Maya, and
that has the tools available.
The current dominant civilization is not linked by a common
government or religion, but rather by a common pursuit of knowledge. This
civilization has produced computers, invented and expanded the internet,
developed particle colliders that peer into the structure of matter, cloned animals,
decoded DNA, built spaceships that have taken men to the moon and keep men in
orbit around the earth, sent landers to Mars, sent probes to every planet in
the solar system and even sent probes beyond the solar system. They have mapped
the cosmos in space and time, created telescopes that see back in time to the
early universe with clarity, created theories about the origin of the universe,
and have built the most precise time keeping devices ever conceived, accurate
to within billionths of a second over long periods of time. And, they have
predicted an end date to the world only 10 days later than that proposed by the
Maya.
On Feb 24, 1582, Pope Gregory XIII signed a decree
implementing the most widely accepted civil calendar, one that is now referred
to as the Gregorian calendar. Note that this calendar was implemented almost
700 years after the preeminence of the Maya in their region ended. The
Gregorian calendar adds a day every 4 years to keep aligned with the solar
equinoxes. A Gregorian year is actually 365.2425 days. The calendar has been
modified slightly over the years since its introduction, but the concept on
which it was based remains sound.
The technological civilization mentioned above has refined
the calendar to include leap seconds that allow the calendar and time keeping
devices to remain collated over extremely long periods, comparable to the Mayan
long count calendar. And this civilization has predicted an end of the world on
December 31, 2012!
In exactly the same way that the Mayan calendar ended on
December 21, 2012, the Gregorian calendar ends only 10 days later on December
31, 2012. Had the Maya had at their disposal the same accurate technology as
the current technological civilization, perhaps they would have modified their calendar
accordingly. One can only assume that this more advanced civilization has more
correctly predicted the end date.
As I write this, I have on my desk a copy of the current
long-count Gregorian calendar. In addition to 12 pictures of very cute puppies,
the long count begins on January 1, 2012 and – crucially –ends on December 31,
2012. There are no more entries after this date! Thus, only 10 days from the
1100 year old Maya prediction of apocalypse on December 21, 2012, the best
minds of the 21st century have scheduled the same event.
As I began to write this, I was convinced that this new
prediction was more accurate, and should therefore be heeded and revered. But I
did a little research that has shaken this belief.
It turns out that every year since its inception in 1582,
the Gregorian calendar has ended on December 31 of that year. In reading old
news accounts, I could not find any evidence of widespread concern over the end
of the world correlating to the end of the calendar, not even early on. In
fact, some individuals even made a joke of the so-called calendar end, even
making 2, 5 and 10-year calendars – mocking the very idea of a cataclysmic end.
The single exception I did find was minor panic over the end of the calendar
year denoted as 1999. Even though the
end of the year 999 did not produce similar concern. There is no real basis for
interpreting this fear, though some people blamed it on the very computer
equipment that allowed the predictions in the first place!
Clearly this year’s long-count Gregorian calendar end is
more critical than those in times past, due to its correlation with the Maya
and perhaps Nostradamus. I will prepare as well as I can – deferring bill
payments till the first of the next year, for example. But, given the fact that
the Gregorian calendar has incorrectly predicted the fall of civilization for
429 previous long count periods, I will not hold my breath, and I intend to
sleep soundly on December 31st, not even waiting till midnight to
watch the curtain fall.
