DOOMSDAY 2012: DEBUNKING THE MAYAN MYTHS

Initially I did not want to write this post simply because I did not believe in it, and I'm sure there are like-minded readers who would not be bothered to write about it. But there are people - friends, neighbours, city folks, and the doomsayers in the internet - who still never let go of their conviction that the world will end in 2012. This is highly disturbing. Hence this post.

On 31 December 2011, the Gregorian calendar did flip from the year 2011 to 2012. What happened? And we are already six days into 2012, the year by the end of which we are supposed to witness a Mayan-predicted terrifying Apocalypse that will end the world. All we did see were the New Year celebrations and people getting on with their lives in a brand new year. Nothing more, nothing less.

Yet even now there are still people who continue to believe the prediction, churning up all sorts of religious, scientific, astrological and historic reasons why this calendar foretells the end of life as we know it. It has been ramped up for a few years, especially with the release of the movie 2012 in 2009 by Sony Pictures. It has even spurred an industry - more than 200 books and 1,000 Web sites purporting to explain various doomsday scenarios, History Channel documentaries, internet buzz, the hype from Mexican tourist agencies, doomsayers with YouTube accounts and producers with multi-million dollar budgets profiting from tales of doomsday, Sony Pictures' seting up an interlinked family of websites and Facebook pages to infuse a sense of reality to its fictional work...the list goes on and on. Many doomsayers are stilll hanging onto the idea that this ancient Mayan calendar is a ticking time bomb that signals our fast-approaching demise during the 2012 winter solstice.

Doomsday predictions are nothing new. We have all heard about such predictions before, in ancient times right until the present century, particularly when people see anything terrifying and foreboding in the sky and on earth. Did anything happen then? Global earthquakes? A planetary collision? Weird gravitational effects caused by an alignment with the galactic plain? A comet impact? Nothing! Nothing that toast the planet anyway. The people in ancient times were still there, we are still here, and the planet is still alive. True, there were two world wars, localized conflicts, political upheavals and natural and other disasters, but the stark truth is that the world never came to an end.

This Mayan prophecy is still alive and seemingly worrying people in all areas of society, in spite of the proliferation of books, articles, video documentaries and the like - most of them scientific - debunking it as nothing but a myth. Many such writings by scientists, scholars and experts are still appearing in the internet and in bookstores. The following short pictorial article is the latest. Let's read and judge for ourselves.

2012 PICTURES: 6 MAYA APOCALYPSE MYTHS DEBUNKED
By National Geographic, Updated 3 January 2012.

Myth 1: Space Strikes to Scramble Planet

Illustration courtesy Nicolle Rager-Fuller, NSF

The end of the world is near - December 21, 2012, to be exact - according to theories based on an purported ancient Maya calendar. Scientists, though, are tripping over themselves to deflate the ballooning hype as the new year dawns. (NASA itself recently felt compelled to issue a comprehensive 2012 fact check.)

In some 2012 doomsday prophecies, the Earth becomes a deathtrap as it undergoes a "pole shift," courtesy of an asteroid impact (illustrated above), a rare alignment with the center of the Milky Way, and/or massive solar radiation destabilizing the inner Earth by heating it.

The planet's crust and mantle will suddenly shift, spinning around Earth's liquid-iron outer core and sending cities crashing into the sea, the story goes. (Interactive: pole shift theories illustrated.)

Princeton University geologist Adam Maloof has extensively studied pole shifts, and tackled this myth in a 2009 National Geographic Channel documentary called 2012: Countdown to Armageddon (video).

Maloof says magnetic evidence in rocks confirms that continents have undergone such drastic rearrangement, but the process took millions of years - slow enough that humanity wouldn't have felt the motion (quick guide to plate tectonics).

Related Article: "End of World in 2012? Maya 'Doomsday' Calendar Explained."

- With reporting by Brian Handwerk.

Myth 2: Planet X to Crash Into Earth

Photograph courtesy NASA, ESA and H.E. Bond (STScI)

This 2002 Hubble Space Telescope picture of the star V838 Monocerotis and surrounding dust clouds has been said to contain evidence of a phantom world - alternately called Planet X and Nibiru - that is on course to collide with Earth in 2012.

But, said NASA astrobiologist David Morrison, "there is no object out there. That's probably the most straightforward thing to say."

The origins of this theory actually predate widespread interest in 2012 and the Maya calendar. Popularized in part by a woman who claims to receive messages from extraterrestrials, the Nibiru doomsday was originally predicted for 2003.

"If there were a planet - or a brown dwarf or whatever - that was going to be in the inner solar system three years from now," Morrison said, "astronomers would have been studying it for the past decade, and it would be visible to the naked eye by now."

Related Articles:
1. "2012 Prophecies Sparking Real Fears, Suicide Warnings."
2. "Apocalypse Pictures: Ten Failed Doomsday Prophecies."

Myth 3: Galactic Alignment Spells Doom

Photograph by Stephen Alvarez, National Geographic Stock

Some sky-watchers believe 2012 will close with a "galactic alignment," which will occur for the first time in 26,000 years (for example, see the website Alignment 2012).

In this scenario, the path of the sun in the sky would appear to cross through what, from Earth, looks to be the midpoint of our galaxy, the Milky Way. In good viewing conditions the Milky Way appears as a cloudy stripe across the night sky, as in the above, undated picture taken on Easter Island.

Some fear that the lineup will somehow expose Earth to powerful unknown galactic forces that will hasten its doom - perhaps through a "pole shift" (see first picture) or the stirring of the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's heart.

But, NASA's Morrison said, "there is no 'galactic alignment' in 2012," he said, "or at least nothing out of the ordinary."

A type of "alignment" occurs during every winter solstice, when the sun, as seen from Earth, appears in the sky near what looks to be the midpoint of the Milky Way. The December solstice, by the way, falls on the 21st in 2012 - the same day as the rumored Maya apocalypse.

Horoscope writers may be excited by alignments, Morrison said. But "the reality is that alignments are of no interest to science. They mean nothing." They create no changes in gravitational pull, solar radiation, planetary orbits, or anything else that would impact life on Earth.

Related Article: "Four Ways Your Phone Could Change How You Travel in 2012."

Myth 4: Maya Saw End of World in 2012

Photograph by Moises Castillo,

Don't ask Apolinario Chile Pixtun if the end of the world is coming in 2012. The Maya Indian elder, shown in Guatemala in October 2009, is "fed up with this stuff," he told the Associated Press.

Some archaeologists would agree. The Maya calendar, they say, doesn't end in 2012, as some have said, and the ancients never viewed that year as the time of the end of the world.

But December 21, 2012, (give or take a day) was nonetheless momentous to the Maya.

"It's the time when the largest grand cycle in the Mayan calendar - 1,872,000 days or 5,125.37 years - overturns and a new cycle begins," said Anthony Aveni, an archaeoastronomer at Colgate University.

During the empire's heyday, the Maya invented the Long Count - a lengthy circular calendar that "transplanted the roots of Maya culture all the way back to creation itself," Aveni said.

During the 2012 winter solstice, time runs out on the current era of the Long Count calendar, which began on what the Maya saw as the dawn of the last creation period: August 11, 3114 B.C. The Maya called that date, which preceded their civilization by thousands of years, Day Zero, or 13.0.0.0.0.

In December 2012 the lengthy era ends, and the complicated, cyclical calendar will roll over again to Day Zero, beginning another enormous cycle.

"The idea is that time gets renewed, that the world gets renewed all over again - often after a period of stress - the same way we renew time on New Year's Day or even on Monday morning," said Aveni, author of The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012.

See: Pictures of what the Maya Empire may have looked like.

Myth 5: Sun to Savage Earth

Photograph courtesy TRACE Project, NASA

It's also rumored that the sun (pictured with plasma arcing over its surface in a 2000 space-telescope image) will produce lethal eruptions of solar flares in 2012, turning up the heat on Earthlings.

Solar activity waxes and wanes according to approximately 11-year cycles. Big flares can indeed damage communications and other Earthly systems, but scientists have no indications the sun, at least in the short term, will unleash storms strong enough to fry the planet.

"As it turns out, the sun isn't on schedule anyway," NASA astronomer Morrison said. "We expect that this cycle probably won't peak in 2012 but a year or two later." (See "Sun Oddly Quiet - Hints at Next 'Little Ice Age'?")

Myth 6: Maya 2012 Predictions Clear

Mayan Dresden Codex scan courtesy Library of Congress

If the Maya didn't expect the end of time in 2012, what exactly did they predict for that year?

Many scholars who've pored over the scattered evidence on Maya monuments say the empire didn't leave a clear record predicting that anything specific would happen in 2012. (Related pictures: "Human Sacrifice Found in Maya City Sinkhole.")

The Maya did pass down a graphic - though undated - end-of-the-world scenario, described on the final page of a circa-1100 text known as the Dresden Codex (detail above). It describes a world destroyed by flood, a scenario imagined in many cultures and probably experienced, on a less apocalyptic scale, by ancient peoples.

The codex scenario is meant to be read not literally but as a lesson about human behavior, said Anthony Aveni, the archaeoastronomer.

He likens the long cycles Maya calendar to our own new-year period, when the closing of an era is accompanied by frenetic activities and stress, followed by a rebirth period, when many people take stock and resolve to begin living better.

"It's not about a fixed prediction about what's going to happen."

[Source: National Geographic. Edited. Top image added.]

Other Related Articles (these are just small samples; others can be accessed through google search):

1. Top 10 Reasons The World Won’t End on December 21, 2012. Video.
2. Top 10 Reasons Why the World Won't End in 2012
3. 2012 Mayan Calendar 'Doomsday' Date Might Be Wrong
4. What the Mayan Elders are Saying About 2012
5. No Mayan Apocalypse in 2012 … But There’s A lot of Other Interesting Stuff Happening
6. Research by UCSB Scholar Questions Accuracy of Maya Calendar Correlation, 2012 Prophecy, and Other Historical Dates.
7. 2012 Doomsday is a 'Marketing Fallacy'
8. May 21: Top Doomsday Predictions Gone Bust
9. No Doomsday in 2012

After reading all of the above, do we still believe in the prediction? Should we believe it when the Mayans themselves never claimed the world will end in 2012? I repeat, the Mayans never predicted doomsday in 2012. Most likely, they simply considered 2012 as a time for spiritual renewal or introspection. Does that sound terrifying or dangerous? What became the Mayan-predicted doomsday scenario appears to be a largely westernized misreading (or deliberate misrepresentation) of the significance of the Mayan calendar and Mayan beliefs associated with it.

Yet what could be the most frightening thing of all is that many people will still blindly believe that the Apocalypse is just around the corner, and no amount of science will convince them otherwise. There are real-world problems that we should be worried about - and presently there are many - so let's not get distracted by something that even the originator of the prediction never believe in. Most importantly, we should just get on with our lives.

In the final analysis - the finality to end all finalities - it's not for the Mayans or any human to determine when the world will end. That's the sole domain of God alone. The Mayans were mere mortals, so are we. The Mayans may not have been playing God, so we should never be doing the same. The world may end in 2012 or 10, 100 or 1000 years from now, but only if God so wills it. We should never rely on the predictions of human doomsayers.