tagged w/ World Ends
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Maya prophecy (2012)
http://www.skepdic.com/maya.html
The world will not end on 12-21-2012, at least not according to the Maya, who knew about as much about our planet's future demise as Gordon-Michael Scallion, St. Malachy, Edgar Cayce, Zecharia Sitchin,or Nostradamus, namely, nothing. The Maya had zero, zilch, nada, mix bá'al to say about the hoax planet Nibiru or the end of the world.
Maya urban culture, known as the Classic Period, flourished from about 250 CE until around 900 CE in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and parts of Central America. During this period the Maya built temples and monuments, created numerous works of art and writings, continued their astronomical observations, and built a network of cities. These cities lay buried under jungle growth for centuries. Excavation is Guatemala indicates Maya culture was quite advanced as early as 200 to 150 BCE.
One of the important discoveries from the Yucatan ruins is that the Maya had several calendars. One is known as the Long Count calendar, which is reset to day 0 every 1,872,000 days, a period known as The Great Circle (Diamond 2005: 167). The next reset date, by some calculations, is December 21, 2012. Obviously, this calendar is of no interest to the Maya any longer, since their civilization collapsed over a thousand years ago. (Though there are people today who are the descendants of the Maya and the culture lives on through them.*) Nevertheless, this date is of enormous interest to certain doomsday prophets and New Age astrologers, such as John Calleman, who are spreading the good news either that the Maya knew the date when the world would end or they knew the date when a New Age of Transformation would begin.* (The Mayan glyphs and hieroglyphs aren't crystal clear about what the calendar means.) Too bad they couldn't predict their own collapse.
According to Jared Diamond,
The famous Maya Long Count calendar begins on August 11, 3114 B.C.--just as our own calendar begins on January 1 of the first year of the Christian era....Presumably, the Maya...attached some significance to their own day zero, but we don't know what it was. (Diamond 2005: 167)
There was no writing in the New World until 2,500 years after the Maya year zero but there is evidence of agriculture in Mesoamerica from about the time of day zero on the Maya calendar. This could be just a coincidence, since the areas where agriculture first emerged were not the areas where the Maya would eventually build their cities.
The Maya Long Count calendar is based on a complex system of units ranging from days (kin) to 144,000 days (baktun).
Whatever virtues the Classic Maya culture might have had, predicting the future seems an unlikely one. This fact has not stopped some very bizarre speculation about Maya astronomy. The speculators should ask themselves: what is the likelihood that a civilization that couldn't use its vast knowledge to save itself from self-destruction was concerned with predicting what would happen in a future millennium? The Maya leaders couldn't see far enough into the future to plan for and solve the human problems they faced: too many people on too little land, destruction of their own environment, farming techniques and deforestation that depleted soil nutrients, droughts (partly brought on by their deforestation programs), and so on. Why should we think the Maya prophets would be any better at seeing the distant future than the Hebrew prophets or Nostradamus?
the "Cosmic" Maya
Dee Finney's Maya prophecy website promotes the idea of the "Cosmic" Maya. Finney's source for much of the prophecy speculation is Charles Gallenkamp's book Maya: The Riddle and Rediscovery of a Lost Civilization. On December 21, 2012, there will be an "alignment between the galactic and solar planes." The winter solstice sun will "conjunct the Milky Way." This is supposed to open up some sort of "cosmic sky portal." You can see a picture of this alignment here. But the picture can only be properly explained by an astrologer, such as John Major Jenkins:
If we make a standard horoscope chart for December 21st, 2012 A.D., nothing very unusual appears. In this way I was led astray in my search until Linda Schele provided a clue in the recent book Maya Cosmos. Probably the most exciting breakthrough in this book is her identification of the astronomical meaning of the Mayan Sacred Tree. Drawing from an impressive amount of iconographic evidence, and generously sharing the process by which she arrived at her discovery, the Sacred Tree is found to be none other than the crossing point of the ecliptic with the band of the Milky Way. Indeed, the Milky Way seems to have played an important role in Mayan imagery. For example, an incised bone from 8th century Tikal depicts a long sinking canoe containing various deities. This is a picture of the night sky and the canoe is the Milky Way, sinking below the horizon as the night progresses, and carrying with it deities representing the nearby constellations.
The incredible Mayan site of Palenque is filled with Sacred Tree motifs and references to astronomical events. In their book [A] Forest of Kings, Schele and Freidel suggested that the Sacred Tree referred to the ecliptic. Apparently that was only part of the picture, for the Sacred Tree that [the Mayan king] Pacal ascends in death is more than just the ecliptic, it is the sacred doorway to the underworld. The crossing point of Milky Way and ecliptic is this doorway and represents the sacred source and origin. [Apparently, Jenkins is interpreting Pacal's sarcophagus, which depicts the Sacred Tree emerging from what has been called an umbilical cord.*]
While it is true that the sun conjuncts the Sacred Tree on December 3rd in the year 755 A.D., over the centuries precession has caused the conjunction date to approach the winter solstice. So, how close are we to perfect conjunction today? Exactly when might we expect the winter solstice sun to conjunct the crossing point of Galactic Equator and ecliptic - the Mayan Sacred Tree? Any astronomer will tell you that, presently, the Milky Way crosses the ecliptic through the constellation of Sagittarius and this area is rich in nebulae and high density objects. In fact, where the Milky Way crosses the ecliptic in Sagittarius also happens to be the direction of the Galactic Center.
Any astronomer will probably also tell you that an alignment between our sun and any particular point in the Milky Way will just bring another day in paradise here on planet Earth. In any case, Jenkins is not alone in his interpretation of the mysterious Maya Long Count calendar.
A Guatemalan anthropologist and student of Maya history and calendars, Carlos Barrios, has a similar interpretation. It is true that the Long Count calendar ends in December of 2012, but the world will not. According to Mr. Barrios, the end of the calendar signals a transformation of some sort, but not the end of the world. Barrios does not deny that the Maya were prophets, however. According to him, their calendars predicted the coming of Cortez in 1519.Maya prophecy (2012)
http://www.skepdic.com/maya.html
The world will not end on... more
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Turn Out the World isn't going to end on 2012! Good for us!
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Remember the Y2K scare? It came and went without much of a whimper because of adequate planning and analysis of the situation. Impressive movie special effects aside, Dec. 21, 2012, won't be the end of the world as we know. It will, however, be another winter solstice.
Much like Y2K, 2012 has been analyzed and the science of the end of the Earth thoroughly studied. Contrary to some of the common beliefs out there, the science behind the end of the world quickly unravels when pinned down to the 2012 timeline. Below, NASA Scientists answer several questions that we're frequently asked regarding 2012.
Question (Q): Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.
Answer (A): Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.
Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?
A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012. Then these two fables were linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 -- hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.
Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?
A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then -- just as your calendar begins again on January 1 -- another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.
Q: Could a phenomena occur where planets align in a way that impacts Earth?
A: There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence.
"There apparently is a great deal of interest in celestial bodies, and their locations and trajectories at the end of the calendar year 2012. Now, I for one love a good book or movie as much as the next guy. But the stuff flying around through cyberspace, TV and the movies is not based on science. There is even a fake NASA news release out there..."
- Don Yeomans, NASA senior research scientist Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?
A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012.htmlTurn Out the World isn't going to end on 2012! Good for us!... more
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