- Mon
- Mar 4, 2013
- Updated: 5:25pm
Trending topics
Mayan doomsday 2012
According to the ancient Mayan civilisation, December 21, 2012, represents the end of a cycle in the Mayan long count calendar that begins in the year 3114 BC. It is the completion of 5,200 years counted in 13 baak t’uunes, a unit of time. One baak t’uune is equivalent to 144,000 days, or roughly 400 years. Doomsday believers expect a cataclysmic event to occur that day and end the world.
Nasa video debunks Mayan apocalypse prophecy
In Pictures
Editor's Pick
Huangpu is a district of pigeon fanciers and the skies over Shanghai have seen birds racing back to their coops for the best part of a century. Words and pictures by Jonathan Browning.
The date: December 22, 2012.
If you’re watching this, the world didn’t end yesterday, a Nasa video begins. The US space agency goes on to explain why the commotion over the purported Mayan prophecy is all for naught.
“The whole thing was a misconception from the very beginning,” Dr John Carlson, director of the Center for Archaeoastronomy, says in the video. “The Maya calendar did not end on December 21, this year, and there were no Maya prophecies foretelling the end of the world on that date.”
The video goes on to explain the cyclical calendar used by the ancient Maya. And if that’s not enough, Nasa scientists answer frequently asked questions for doomsday believers.
After reading this article, people also read
7:40am
First; it is well known that the Mayan/Aztec calendar is the most comprehensive and correct as any calendar appearing on Earth.
As a simple explanation: It is an Astronomical Calendar, sometimes noted as a type of "Tropical Solar Calendar", which uses the equinoxes as a base. But unlike simple Solar Calendars, they considered all the pertinent factors, regarding the Earths rotation as it travels around the Sun. You may have heard about the axial procession, which is the slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astral body. The resulting "polar shift" changes the equinox's and necessarily the Calendar. Modern world has only, in the last couple of hundred years, begun to realize that. 20 minutes a year, which equals 102,500 minutes /17,008 hours, in the Calendars 5125 years. I believe they chose the end of each Batun (5125 years mark) to adjust the Calendar. After over 5000 years, that starts to become an appreciably large discrepancy in accuracy of the calendar.
.Were the Mayan/Inca society still thriving, the "current" priests. or whomever was designated with that duty, would have been working on the new Calendar, so that the next 5000 + year calendar would be made ready for this Solstice.
