2012, the Mayans and today's doomsday prophets

What a load of codswallop. I've never read such a collection of disinformation, wild guesswork, uninformed blather, junk science and general gibberish as that surrounding the Mayan calendar cycle.

First, the Mayans didn't actually predict the end of the world - their calendar simply begins a new cycle on December 13 (the start of the fourteenth b'ak'tun), just like ours begins a new one on January 1. What the Mayans actually said was "Tzuhtz-(a)h-oom u(y)-uxlahuun pik (ta) Chan Ahaw, ux(-te') Uniiw. Uht-oom ? Y-em(al) (?) Bolon Yookte' K'uh ta (?)." Which roughly translates as, ""The thirteenth pik will be finished (on) Four Ahaw, the third of K'ank'in. ? will occur. (?) the Nine Foot Tree God(s) to (?)." Makes sense to me.

The doomsday idea seems to have come from writer José Argüelles in his 1987 book, The Mayan Factor*. Arguelles is described as "the man who is responsible for "turning the eyes of the world to the Maya." Bringing news of December 21, 2012 as being a sort of cosmic alarm clock that we can already hear ringing in our collective psyche." It seems to have snowballed from his initial New-Agey alarm-clock predictions into a full-blown apocalypse.

The calculators match up every 52 years. The last Mayan calendar cycle ended in 1960. December 12, 2012 is merely the latest in the series of calendrical events in their complex system. I don't recall the world ending in 1960. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention. I would have pegged it in 1970, when the Beatles broke up, but neither the Mayans nor Nostradamus ever mentioned the Beatles.

Thousands of Web sites are touting December 21, 2012 as either some sort of global apocalypse, or global epiphany. Utter nonsense. Most simply parrot one another without any reference to science or research that provides evidence to back their ludicrous claims. It's a tribute to to Internet's ability to spread memes, but not to spread intelligence or wisdom. But cut-and-paste is no substitute for critical thinking.

2012 is even subject of a new movie by that name. While many of us will see it for its entertainment value, there are those who believe it's another prediction of our doom. Like Independence Day.

People are attributing to the Mayans all sorts of eschatological claptrap usually attributed to Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, Jean Dixon and other hornswagglers of the self-professed-prophet ilk. For example, one site made this claim:

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The Mayans wrote of DNA? That would be pretty amazing, considering its existence wasn't even known until the early 20th century, and its importance in genetics wasn't accepted until the 1950s when Watson and Crick broke its code.

And money? The Mayans didn't use anything like our system of currency. They traded in cacao beans and chocolate, but they didn't have banks. They didn't use abstract objects to represent financial transactions. How could they talk about a financial system they didn't have any inkling of? In fact, given what little they left behind in written form, where did the author get her information to make such a claim?

Go beyond technology? The Mayans didn't even have the wheel. The most amazing thing about the Mayan civilization is that it built itself up without some common tools even the ancient Egyptians had invented, thousands of years earlier. How could they write about "technology"?

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More claptrap. First we simply don't know enough about the structure of the galaxy to pinpoint its plane (equator) with any precision, much less the exact date we will cross it. The Mayans had no concept of galaxies, about solar systems or our place in the galactic arm, so they couldn't begin to write about them. The sun oscillates through the plane of the galaxy on a slow cycle that means our solar system crosses the plane every 30 million years, give or take 3 million years (which means a cycle of roughly 60-66 million years). But that "plane" isn't a simple line; it's a region (the Milky Way is 1,000 light years thick!)and it takes us a long time to go through it. Most astronomical calculationssuggest we passed through the plane within the last 1-3 million years. Been there, done that.

Seen from the earth, the sun appears to cross the galactic equator on the Winter Solstice. Because the earth wobbled slowly on its axis, the the position of the equinoxes and solstices shift one degree every 71.5 years. Seen from the earth, the sun is one-half of a degree wide. This means it takes the sun 36 years to precess through the Galactic equator. From the earth, the sun was aligned with that equator in 1998, and will take another 18 years to shift to the far side (see diagram here).

Virgil Armstrong? is that the same Virgil Armstrong who wrote, "Following each period of 10,500 years of darkness, we then emerge into 2000 years of total light, which actually constitutes the Photon Belt. In review, we then have 21,860 years of darkness and 4,000 years of light (21,860 + 4,000 = 25,860 years, or one complete cycle/orbit)." That same Virgil Armstrong who wrote the book"ET's & UFO's - They Need Us, We Don't Need Them". Hardly a credible source!

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Argh. Time has NOTHING to do with the Schumann resonance. Or rather, resonances, because there are several distinct extra-low-frequency vibrations measured from the earth, ranging from 7.83Hz to 33.8Hz. Even if a particular Schumann resonance changed frequency (and I can find not one single shred of evidence that it has), it doesn't mean they all will, nor does it mean that things like the speed of light or atomic clocks are changing their speed. The resonances measured drift in a cyclic way, as shown on this site, but that's just the natural cycle that's been going on ever since we started to measure these frequencies. To quote the scientists: "The Schumann resonance frequency observed at this observatory does not exhibit any unusual change or drift since the start of observations by the BDSN in 1995. " Also read Skeptico's comment on the claims the SR frequencies are speeding up.

Among the worst hokum is the association between 2012 and the fictional planet "Nibiru." Nibiru is the ancient Akkadian/Sumerian name for the planet Jupiter. But many sites are predicting this planet, currently hiding outside the solar system, will make its appearance in 2012, passing close to earth and wreaking all sorts of havoc.

One such site noted that "...the Maya and Sumerians we're the two "Dawn of Civilizations", that spawned all other cultures thereafter. And yep, they of course lived on different continents and had No Idea each other existed." Well of course they didn't, you nincompoop. The classic Mayan culture ran from roughly 250 CE to 900 CE. The Sumerians has a long run, from around 5500 BCE to 1940 BCE. The Sumerians vanished as a culture more than 2,000 year before the Mayans. Neither spoke anything even vaguely similar. Not to mention that they were separated by more than 12,000 kilometers, most of it water that neither had the means to cross.

Nibiru is also known as"Planet X." One site comments that, "Earth is in for some massive and catastrophic changes as Nibiru approaches. Floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, a pole shift and other natural disasters will be so severe, Hazelwood says, that "only a few hundred million people will survive." Another site says the gravitational pull of Nibiru might even stop the Earth's rotation for three days, citing the "three days of darkness" predicted in the Bible. Some of the Nibiru researchers also cite the prophecies of Edgar Cayce..." Well, citing Edgar Cayce** is a sure-fire way of aligning yourself with charlatans and wingnuts, but it ain't science. For science, look at the articles on Universe Today.

Other sites proclaim a planetary alignment in 2012 that will spell the end of the world. Well, a little effort will show you what a thin tissue that is.

One article goes so far as to predict,

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Well, a simple run on any solar system simulator like this one will show you the planets don't line up at all on December 12, 2012. They're not even close to being aligned! See the image I took of that date, above.***

December 12 isn't the only date predicted for the world to end that year. One site says it will be May 27, 2012, because "The year 2008 marked the last of God’s warnings to mankind and the beginning in a countdown of the final three and one-half years of man’s self-rule... On December 14, 2008, the First Trumpet of the Seventh Seal of the Book of Revelation sounded, which announced the beginning collapse of the economy of the United States and great destruction that will follow." There are the-end-of-the-world predictions for 2010 and 2011, too. But there were also warnings about 2000, 2001, 2007, 2008 - and we're still here. Who can forget Hal Lindsey's predictions of world-ending doom in the 1980s in his bestselling book, "The Late Great Planet Earth"? Oops. Missed that one too, did we?

But these other predictions didn't have that New Age patina the Mayans seem to have garnered (nor did they have the Internet to spread them around like manure sprayed on fields), so people tend to forget them. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the same people who bought copies of The Late Great Planet Earth are subscribing to the latest Mayan-inspired end-of-the-world nonsense.

And is December 12, 2012 even accurate? Not all authorities agree - some, like Carl Calleman contend that the calendar actually ends October 28, 2011. Not to suggest one end-of-the-world date is any more valid than another.

There are many good attempts to debunk this 2012 nonsense (National Geographic has a good page), but unfortunately the scaremongers, New Agers, the Gullibles and assorted wingnuts dominate with their end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it rants by a large volume. And of course as with any snake oil, along comes a great opportunity to cash in on the gullible. Just like the false millennium in 2000. Ah, a fool and his money...

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*As noted on 13moon.com, "Dr. Jose Arguelles writes in Time and The Technosphere: "August 13, 3114 BC is as precise and accurate as one can get for a beginning of history: the first Egyptian dynasty is dated to ca 3100 BC; the first 'city,' Uruk, in Mesopotamia, also ca 3100 BC; the Hindu Kali Yuga, 3102 BC; and most interestingly, the division of time into 24 hours of 60 minutes each and each minute into 60 seconds [and the division of the circle into 360 degrees], also around 3100 BC, in Sumeria. If the beginning of history was so accurately placed, then must not the end of history, December 21, 2012 also be as accurate?" Well, the beginning of history is NOT accurately placed at all. The Mayans weren't around back then. They simply chose this date as their starting point for the current "long count" of their calendar (which is reset to day 0 every 1,872,000 days) and their date for the creation of the world (not the beginning of civilization). It's akin in validity to Bishop Usher's declaration that the world was created on October 23, 4004 BCE. History is generally defined by scholars as the time of writing (as opposed to prehistory which is what comes before). While written script is much harder to date, we have earlier dates for writing, starting with Jiahu Script, ca. 6600 BCE, Vinča script ca. 4500 BCE and Early Indus script, ca. 3500 BCE. Archaic Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs both emerged out of ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3200 BCE, but the earliest coherent texts date from about 2600 BCE. If the Mayans were so accurate, why didn't they date the world back 4.5 billion years - it's true age? And if we're to give any credence to the Mayan dating of the creation, why don't we also accept their creation myth that has the the gods create humans from corn? Can we accept one without the other? I note some authorities mark it as August 11, 3114 BCE.
** As a would-be "healer," Cayce Stearn (1967) "prescribed a serum made from the blood of rabbits for patients with "glandular," breast, and thyroid cancers." He also prescribed a woman apply the raw side of a freshly skinned rabbit, still warm with blood, fur side out, on her breast as a treatment for cancer. Another of his "cures" was "animated ash," produced by taking bamboo fibers and passing an electrical charge through them, thereby producing the right vibrations for "life flowing effects." Cayce was a charlatan. Period.
*** A much closer alignment happened on June 13, 2010, when Uranus, Jupiter, and Mercury lined up on one side of the Sun while Venus, Mars, and Saturn were lined up on the other side. If the world ended that day, I didn't notice it.