The End of the World?

Lo and behold! It's the day before the dreaded 21-12-12. What have you been up to leading up to the faithful day? Have you been stocking up on food supplies? Have you been building a bunker beneath your house? Or have you just been living out each day, not expecting anything extraordinary to happen? Whatever you've been doing, I'm sure you're well aware of tomorrow's date.

According to the Mayan calender, well, there are no more days after 21-12-12. I came by a comic somewhere, and it goes like this: a man was asking an ancient Mayan why he'd stopped carving the calender, and the Mayan replied that he had run out of stone. From this, you can tell that there really are many ways to look at it.

The most popularised and if not, frightening, interpretation of the termination of the Mayan calender is the termination of life on earth. This is just a theory put forward by modern scientists. Many sorts of cataclysmic events are predicted such as shifting of poles, a sort of celestial alignment that only happens once every 26,000 years, solar storms and horrific earthquakes and tsunamis. What makes this sound rather fantastical is that different people expect so many different things to happen on one single day.

Another way to look at this is, of course, that the ancient Mayans simply ran out of stone to carve on, as mentioned above. Besides that, we can take the concept of the Mayan calender like how we take our modern calender - the Gregorian calender or Western calender. In fact, the Gregorian calender ends on 31 December every year. Do we theorise an end-of-the-world event? According to an article on the National Geographic News, the Mayan calender ends so that it can start a new cycle, actually repeating it. The circular calender that is the image of the Mayan calender is called the Long Count. The Mayans called the day of creation as Day Zero, approximately in 3114 BC. Therefore, the end of the Mayan calender simply means the start of a new, lengthy cycle. In other words, the Mayans did not prophesise an armageddon.

While I think it's a good idea to be on the alert of disasters and to be ready at all times, I don't think you should panic over the coming of 21-12-12. Let's just hope for the best.


Cheers
zhusun


Further reading:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091106-2012-end-of-world-myths.html