In late 1990’s every other day there used to be articles and books which claimed that the Earth would be destroyed in the year 2000. Some of them attributed the reason to the famous Y2K Bug in the then computers which they claimed would reset the computer clocks causing all Russian nuclear missiles to be launched leading to a world war. All those authors who wrote these stuff continue to live a great life today in 2010. Some of them have now postponed the destruction dates to 2012. The dooms day prophecies today have set the next doomsday date to Dec 21 2012. There are numerous websites dedicated to the destruction of Earth in 2012. Most of them cite the ancient Mayan Calendar that ends on December 21, 2012 and claim that a cataclysm will occur on this date when this ancient calendar ends. There are even websites and books which claim to be the survival guides for this prophetical dooms day.

Doomsday Claims

So? Is the Earth going to end in 2012, or will it be life on Earth that will be gone, or is it only the humans? Obviously, Earth will continue to be there, and so would numerous species like Cockroaches who can survive nuclear strikes and have seen both Dinosaurs and Humans thrive on this planet. So then it should be only humans and the larger species that would be gone in 2012. But yet the dooms day proposers would love to call this event, the End of Earth! Well, they forget the fact that Earth has been here for over 4.5 billion years compared to the tiny life span of human species which is just around 0.2 million years. In other words, if the history of Earth is written as a 24000 page book then Human genus would appear only in the last page of that book. And if we consider the period only after the last Neanderthal man died, then modern humans would appear only in the last line of the last page of this huge book!

So it would be not just silly, but foolish to say that Earth would be destroyed in 2012. Even if a third world war starts and all the nuclear power nations on this planet use all their nuclear weapons to destroy each other, humans would obviously be gone without a trace and a lot (but not all) of other life forms gone too. But just like the way new life forms evolved after dinosaurs were destroyed 65 million years ago when a giant asteroid hit earth, the evolution of life would start again from scratch on this beautiful planet. Fresh new life forms, dense forests, amazing new species, all would be back on Earth within the next few million years. All traces of the nuclear radiation due to the world war would be gone by then. And for any aliens visiting Earth after a few million years after the last world war, it would be difficult to find any trace of an intelligent life once having lived on this planet. They will have to start doing excavations to dig deep to find any traces of humans. And that too would be available only if some super volcano on Earth has not yet wiped out all human constructions.

The conclusion is that when we say silly things like Earth would be destroyed, Doomsday in 2012, Save Earth from Pollution etc what actually we mean is that save humans from these destructions because Earth would continue to live irrespective of what happens to Humans.

Mayan Calendar and the Doomsday

The Mayan Calendar that is said to end on December 21 2012 is the basis on which a date has been set for this doomsday. Let us see what this Mayan Calendar is all about. Firstly, this calendar was used not just by the Mayan civilization, but also by other ancient American civilizations like Incas, Aztec, Zepotec etc. But it was most widely used by the Mayans and hence the name.

Now, how does the Mayan Calendar work? First let us see the Mayan Numeral System. They used a base 20 system, like how we use the ancient Indian base 10 system in modern world today. So while we have 9 symbols (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) and a zero in our system, Mayans had 19 symbols and a zero in their system.

Mayan Numeral System – Source Wikipedia

And the calendar system they used was five base 20 numerals each separated by a dot (.)  which looked like x.x.x.x.x where x is some base 20 number. (Base 20 means it has 19 symbols for numbers from 1 to 19, just like our base 10 has 9 symbols for numbers from 1 to 9).

No months, no years, just numbers separated by dots is what the Mayan calendar system is.

For example the 10th day in this calendar is represented by 0.0.0.0.10

The 19th day is represented by 0.0.0.0.19 and being a base 20 system, the 20th day is represented by 0.0.0.1.0, and 21st day by 0.0.0.1.1 and so on.

A peculiar nature of this calendar is that while all digits are in base 20, the second number from the right is in base 18.

So the number after 0.0.0.17.19 is 0.0.1.0.0 and NOT 0.0.0.18.0 as one would expect if the second number were also in base 20.

This was designed so because by restricting the second digit from right only to base 18, the total number of days represented by the last two numbers in this five number calendar would come to 360 days which is approximately one solar year. So this would mean that the first three digits can be used as nearest approximation to the number of solar years in this calendar. For instance 0.0.12.0.0 can mean about 12 solar years.

Now the next thing to know here is that the Mayan Calendar is a long count calendar. The first digit from the left denotes the long count. As you can see, for the first count from the left to change the calendar has to pass 20x20x18x20 days ie 1,44,000 days. So from the day the calendar shows 1.0.0.0.0 till it becomes 2.0.0.0.0 the number of days passed would be 1,44,000 which is around 395 solar years.

A Mayan Calendar Long Count Date : Source WikipediaThe left most column represents the date of 8.5.16.9.7 (June 23, 156 BCE) 

Based on the ancient Mayan inscriptions we can see that the current Mayan calendar started on ie became 0.0.0.0.1 on Aug 12, 3114 BCE and currently we are running in the 12th long count ie the current dates according to the Mayan calendar are 12.19.x.x.x and the next long count ie 13.0.0.0.0 would start on Dec 21 2012.

So where does the Mayan calendar end on Dec 21 2012? It still continues in the 13th long count and still have many more long counts to go till 19.x.x.x.x gets completed. So why then do the doomsday prophets claim that  the Mayan Calendar ends on Dec 21, 2012? It doesn’t end on that day, just one long count ends. When all the long counts ends, the Mayan calendar restarts again with 0.0.0.0.1 in a repeating cycle. This is similar to the ancient vedic concept of repeating time cycles called Yugas which are again long counts. Well, vedic yugas also predict doomsday which are called MahaPralayas during which one creation ends leading to another creation cycle, and that is said to happen once in 4.32 million years  8.64 billion years!!

Why fear the beginning of 13th Long Count of the Mayan Calendar on Dec 21 2012?

So why are the doomsday claimers saying that the world will end when the 13th long count starts in the Mayan Calendar?

That is because the ancient Mayan’s said that the previous doomsday occurred when the previous 12th long count ended on Aug 11, 3114 BCE. In other words even though Aug 12, 3114 BCE was 0.0.0.0.1 of the current cycle of the Mayan Calendar, Aug 11, 3114 BCE was not 19.19.19.17.19, instead it was 12.19.19.17.19 of the previous cycle, and the Mayan’s say it was a doomsday, and so they started the next day with a new calendar cycle so that the calendar is in sync with the aftermath events after that dooms day.

To summarize, Mayan history says that the previous doomsday occurred when the 12th long count ended, and so the current doomsday prophets say that even this time history would repeat and so the world would end in 2012. But the Mayans have never said anything like that anywhere. Mayans have no where predicted that the next dooms day also would occur when the 12th long count ends in their calendar. If the world were to end every time after the completion of the 12th dooms day then they would never have had a calendar with 19 long counts in the first place. They would have simply had a calendar with only 12 long counts. After all what is the use of dates that would never come, isn’t it? :)

So what is the basis for the worldwide destruction predicted in 2012? It is just that the previous doomsday as specified in Mayan Calendar occurred on a similar date 5000 years back. But is that enough proof for the next doomsday? Just because something happened once in history mean that it will repeat every time on the same date?

Moreover, in its future predictions Mayans themselves have predicted events beyond 2012, but have never specified 2012 as having a doomsday.

“If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea. That the world is going to end? They wouldn’t believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain” says the famous Mayan archaeologist Jose Huchm.

Co-incidentally Dec 21, 2012 is also the day of winter solstice, the day on which night is the longest in the northern hemisphere. John Major Jenkins author of Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 claims that a rare Galactic alignment would occur on this date where in the Sun would align directly with the center of our Galaxy and this would cause the galactic forces to impact fields on earth and cause disastrous events like pole shift and destroy Earth.

Well, Winter Solstice occurs every year on almost the same date and the so called galactic alignment occurs every ….

More on this in the next article :)

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon