Apocalypse, Schmocalypse

As the calendar turns over to a new year, people everywhere love to make predictions about what will happen over the course of the next twelve months. Who is going to win the World Series? What's going to happen in this year's elections? And in what horrific way will the world end in December? A zombie apocalypse? The rapture? Tim Tebow?

Most people's New Year's predictions have at least some chance of coming true (unless they predict the Cubs winning the World Series) but there's one thing we can be assured of going into 2012: the world isn't going to end in December.

The majority of comments about the so-called ‘2012 phenomenon' are hopefully made in jest, but the hysteria will only continue to grow as we approach the apocalyptic date of December 21st. NASA -- yes, that NASA -- has even had to publish articles in the past weeks assuring people that the end days are not upon us. There are so many wild theories involving ‘2012' that it's difficult to separate fact from fiction, so let's start at the very source: the Mayan Long Count calendar.

"The Mayan calendar ends in 2012." This has been parroted countless times, but how much does your average doomsayer actually know about Mayan datekeeping? The Mayans were pedantic enough to have three separate calendars, each serving different purposes. They had a 260-day calendar called the Tzolk'in, as well as a 365-day solar calendar. These weren't adequate enough for the Maya, however, and so they created a third calendar, called the Long Count, which allowed them to project dates far into the future, and this is the one that supposedly ends on December 21st, 2012.

The Long Count calendar doesn't "end," at all. What happens to it on December 21st is akin to a giant odometer rolling over. The date would have been cause for great revelry and celebration in Mayan society, not for fear. The Long Count calendar is made up of five numbers. On December 21st, the date in the Long Count will be 12.19.19.17.19. On the 22nd, the date will be 13.0.0.0.0, the first day of the fourteenth b'ak'tun. The calendar keeps on going, just like your calendar doesn't "end" just because we've entered a new year. In 2407, the fourteenth b'ak'tun will end, and the date will be 14.0.0.0.0, and so on, for thousands of years.

So the calendar doesn't end – but did the Maya predict that the world would end at the start of the thirteenth b'ak'tun? According to some Mayan creation myths, the world has been created and destroyed three times prior to this incarnation, and they say that the previous version of the world was destroyed at the dawn of the fourteenth b'ak'tun. There's nothing to indicate, however, that anyone in Mesoamerica thought that this incarnation of the world would suffer the same fate. We have no record of any such apocalyptic prediction by the Maya. Even if the calendar did end on December 21st, that's no evidence of a coming apocalypse or even a prediction of one. You can't expect the Mayans to keep writing out their calendar infinitely.

Even if there was an apocalyptic prediction, there still needs to be a mechanism by which we all die horribly. This is where things get really wacky. One ‘theory' that has been promulgated heavily (by the History Channel of all things) is that there will be a "galactic alignment" of the center of the Milky Way and the Sun. Well, that much is true. The Sun will align with the center of the galaxy, much as it does every year right around the Winter Solstice -- it happens every year, like clockwork, and it hasn't killed us yet.

A meteor? According to the NASA Near-Earth Object Program, there are no impacts predicted in 2012, and only a couple near approaches with no chance of hitting us. A reversal of the Earth's magnetic field? That's highly unlikely to happen in the next few million years, but even if it did, the effects on humanity would be negligible, apart from all of our compasses suddenly pointing South. A hidden planet called ‘Nibiru'? No evidence that such a thing exists. Jesus coming down from the heavens to rapture the true believers? You'll have to ask Harold Camping about that one.

Humanity has a long and storied history of predicting the end of the world and being wrong about it. Just in recent years, there were two failed raptures, Comet Elenin passed us without the world ending, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's 2010 apocalypse date passed without incident. Really, if you can't trust the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who can you trust?

There's only one apocalyptic prediction that you can hang your hat on: in five billion years, the Sun will enter its red giant phase, swelling to a size large enough to swallow the Earth. As a result, the planet may be too hot to support life as early as a billion years from now -- so make sure you cross everything off your bucket list some time before the year 1,000,002,012.

More information about '2012' from NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012.html