"Everybody is freaking out about 2012 being the end of the world"
Really? I don't know anyone freaking out about it. I don't know anyone who's given it a second thought or even talks about it other than to laugh. The only place anyone even mentions it is here on Y/A. Are you freaking out about it? Why?
The world ends pretty much every year. People are always saying the world is going to end on such and such a date. I might have missed it, but I don't think it's happened yet. Not sure why you're concerned this 2012 thing is real. Once 2013 comes, another end of the world theory will come up. Don't freak out about that one either. It'll be false.
How would it end? Who knows? Zombies probably aren't a possibility though... An asteroid is probably most likely.
The Maya were a powerful central American nation right up until about the year 1600 and there are still something like 7 million of them. Their astronomer - priests found that they could predict the cycle of the seasons, the appearances of Venus as a morning or evening star and even eclipses by counting days. Several other civilisations have done the same in ancient times. This does not mean they could predict anything like the end of the world or whether little "Johnny" would grow up to be a farmer, a soldier or anything else. They might have tried stuff like that, but it has never worked for anyone except by sheer chance.
One result was that they counted days. They did not count days in tens and hundreds, they counted in 20s and 18s. Then from there on in 20s. That gave them a unit of 360 days which was close enough to a year. They knew the year was 365 days and probably about 365.24 . . . .days as well, but that was not important to the day count.
Twenty times twenty times 360 days was called a bak'tun, it's a bit short of 400 years obviously. They also believed that 13 was a lucky number. Now, as far as we can tell, the Maya believed that the world was created about 11 August 3114BC (by our count) and if you add 13 bak'tuns to that you get 21 December 2012 which is the solstice. This is an estimate made by modern scholars, it may not be correct but leap years have nothing to do with it.
Over the past 40 years, the late Dr. Jose Arguelles, one of the founders of "Earth Day" began to go off his rocker. He became obsessed with the Maya and their time counting system and started to claim he was a reincarnated Maya and a lot of other bizarre stuff. One of the claims was that there would be a great spiritual change on 21 December 2012.
Then in the 1990s Nancy Lieder began to claim she was abducted by aliens and told the Earth would be damaged by the close approach of a stray planet she called X. This was supposed to ben in May 2003 and cause a geographic pole shift which would kill 2/3 of the population, and it was supposed to happen in May 2003. She started web sites and so forth which attracted jokers and crazies. Some of the jokers were confidence men and started to make a bit of money selling books about impending doom and destruction.
When nothing happened in May 2003, the confidence men wanted to keep on making money so they postponed planet X to fit in with the existing nonsense started by Jose Arguelles years before. Another nine years of making money from the gullible and the paranoid.
Since then many other frauds and crazy theories that have existed for a long time have been added, alignments of this and that, solar flares, photon belts, Nostradamus, you name it. We saw much of the same stuff telling us the world would end in 1999 / 2000. The photon belt story was supposed to happen in 1958!
These people are in it for the money. They are selling books and DVDs. Their dot-com web sites make a fraction of a cent for them from advertisers every time someone opens them. They make schlockumentaries and sell them to the History Channel and any other TV outlet that will buy.
It's all about money.
http:/www.2012hoax.org
No.
All the believers of predictions should leave their property to make the poor people happy today and to prove their belief they should start to serve the needy people.
on for David Cameron. He's probably hoping for a zombie apocalypse actually.
No it's not but if it is the end it's been a great ride. There would probably be explosions, tsunamis, earth quakes, etc.
No it isn't. They say it's because the mayan calander will run out, but what do we do when our calander runs out every year? We buy new ones.
Hope this helped
Everybody is freaking out about 2012 being the end of the world. I know that the bible says "Only God Knows When The World Shall End" but everywhere i look it says it will really happen. If it does end in 2012 what would happen? Would the world just explode? Would a zombie apocolypse start?
