The End of the World?

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The Maya who developed the Long Count calendar believed the end of one cycle would simply signal the beginning of another. According to this logic, a new Grand Cycle will start on December 22, 2012. However, some people in the U.S. and Europe have come to believe that the calendar will not reset itself. Instead, they say, the end of the cycle will bring the end of the world. Some of these doomsayers claim that there is a scientific explanation for their prediction: On December 21, they say, the winter solstice and the Milky Way's equator will align. (For their part, scientists point out that the coincidence of these two events will actually have no effect on the Earth--and furthermore, without 20th-century radio telescopes the Maya could not have known that the galactic equator even existed, much less where it would be in 2,000 years.) Other prognosticators have more outlandish theories.

Some believe that the Maya were following extraterrestrial instructions when they developed their calendar, for instance, while others fear that aliens will use the Long Count calendar to time their takeover of our planet. Either way, this vision of the future is an unpleasant one, combining Biblical plagues like fires and floods with more cinematic catastrophes like planetary collisions, extreme global warming and mass extinction, and explosions large and small.

Today, there are more than 6 million Maya in Mexico and Central America, and very few of them are expecting Armageddon in 2012. (In fact, scholars say that Mayan communities call the end-of-the-world stories “gringo inventions.”)

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