So Hollywood has discovered the shift in the mayan calendar:

2012

A.

I have no doubt in my mind that the world will end. But, God said he would judge the world in fire, and he said that he will come like a thief in the night - not even the Son (Jesus) would know the day of his arrival. Therefore, December 21, 2012 cannot be the day the world will end. I also would like to respectfully disagree that the Mayan civilization is the earliest civilization of man.

Makes for a good story, though.

"Mayan Tech Support reporting as ordered oh great god king. I can see your busy with that sting ray so i'll come back....."
"Hey just a moment you, I was looking at that calendar you came up with, fine piece of work there. I gotta say though being the forward thinking god king I am i'm a bit concerned about roll over and some sort of Y2012k conversion isssue. We get a few more tons of stone in here we could get this licked ahead of time."
"With all due respect your majesty by then i fully expect our great civilization to have invented computers and rendered the whole thing moot"
"Ah yes an excellent thought, and showing great foresight, greater then your king perhaps. Report for sacrifice underling"
*sighs* "Yes my leige"

Yea, that's how i always envision it, so to say the least i'm not particularly worried and the mayans arn't around to tell me "We told you so" in the event they were right.

I wonder will the companies who start making that 2012 end of world stuff have a money back guarantee?

I'll pass on the movie. If the apocalypse comes, I'll deal with it then. I have to delegate my energies elsewhere.

I remember that five years ago people were saying that the Mayan had foreseen the "end of the world" in 2005.
Anyway, I don't know if the Shadowrun world (magic back to the world) would be a good thing.

Maybe instead of end of the world something like Awakening happens...

Actually its just the end of the 4th cycle... You know what comes next? The 5th cycle... IIRC each cycle is about 5k years (been awhile since I studied Mayan history). So they have been recording the cycle of the stars and planets for 20k years.

The only thing that I find rather intriguing about the whole thing, and one of the more plausible disaster theories is the hypothesis surrounding Sagittarius A, a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

The coles notes version of the theory is that according astronomical projections, sometime in late 2012 we will have an astronomical event where the sun, the earth and Sagittarius A converge, basically it would be like a solar eclipse, but with the sun eclipsing the black hole. The theory goes that this will basically be like crossing the equivalent of the galactic equator, something that could in turn cause the earths magnetic field to flip and make the North pole become the South pole and vice versa.

It probably won't cause an apocalypse, after all the poles have switched back and forth many times in the past but it could cause some major weather disturbances, not to mention cause absolute chaos with our navigation and computer systems. Not doomsday, but still a hell of a mess.

So we are still 5003 years away from awakening? Dang, was hoping to see it already but guess will have to reincarnate few more times before that...

yay for modern computer rendering abilities, as it allows them to stuff all kinds of heavy hitting symbolism into their movies...

thanks, but i think ill pass on this one...

Have you ever heard of 'Dark Star'?

sounds familiar...

Actually this is the end of the 5th Cycle...

If I remember correctly the actual calander just says that there will be massive changes and that society will never be the same.

Still, personally I'm going to see the movie once it comes out on pay-per-view. ( I HATE "going to the movies" and only do so while on a date. )

Problem is this solar system is nowhere near the center of the galaxy, we're out on one of the spiral arms. There's a lot between us and it.

I've read somewhere that Mayans didn't say that it was going to be an Apocalypse, but it's just that an end of a Cycle isn't something you see everyday, so it's a great pretext for a big party. (Which I expect to have, to express my deep respect for the Mayan culture). It's as much Doomsday as the end of the Unix Timestamp is going to be a Doomsday.

As for the galatic alignement, it occurs regularly and the most precise had been in 1998... I'm not sure if France winning the FIFA World Cup qualifies as doomsday.

The history of the long count is each prior age, man was made of a different material. Since man failed to perform, the world was destroyed by different things, such as rain, fire, or getting eaten by a giant, space jaguar. This is indeed the fourth age, and we're closing in on the fifth age.

I've heard mixed reports on what will happen when the Mayan long count turns over. The most compelling one is that it won't be the end of the world, but the end of an era. This meshes well (well being a few centuries difference, depending on who you ask) with Western astrology, which says we're soon to enter the age of Aquarius. It's a shift in ideologies, in the basic functionality of the world and the spiritual nature of man.

Of course, looking at the Mayan creation myth, we have to wonder, 'if we don't meet the gods expectations, will we follow those humans who came before, and were wiped from the Earth'? But that's hard to speculate on.

While I was visiting Tikal, I asked our guide what'll happen at the end of December, 2012. He said they'd turn over their calendars and start 2013. But I'm not sure I really believe him. He also said the Mayans probably didn't sacrifice hundreds of people simultaneously in an orgy of blood, but instead preferred to sacrifice squashes and bananas. Sounds like he's just trying to play it all down.

So here's a question:
Did anyone who believes in this "EOD on 2012" ever think that the reason the Mayan Calendar ends is because they decided that they didn't really need to know whether January 1st 2013 starts on a tuesday or a friday? Maybe they just didn't care about what was going on 5000 years down the line...hmmm? Just something to think about...because personally, I think that anything that happens in 2012 will simply be part of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As in, we think civilization is going to end so we Nuke each other...well..civilization sure ended, but it was our fault...

Personally, I'm just hoping that no good games come out in November of that year.

i suspect its basically that they found some astrological elements that would return to the same location as when they started observing it, and based everything on that...

If it is indeed the Awakening I hope I get my horns and tusks....

... and fireballs!!


I do like how CGI has got to the point where you can have so much death and destruction on screen at the same time. Would not have happened with the 70's version: 2012- It's a Disaster!

Well...you'll have to wait for that I think...it took what, 20 years or something for goblinization to start? We'll just have a few Elf and Dwarf babies running around for awhile...

Magic on the other hand, is something we could all look forward to

And Dragons... And HMHVV... And Dragons... And Hellhounds... And MORE Dragons.
Also, I would probably be deported from my homeland when Hualpa took over...
Sounds like FUN

Apocalypse isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just means a change in the world as we know it. As much as disaster movies sell, it could just mark the beginning of the era of hugs and talking rabbits.



Actually, that'd be fucked up enough to end my world.

Did you remember to mention Dragons?



Let's just hope that this is also the era of shotguns and pepper spray then...

That made me laugh loudly! Brilliant. I saw the trailer for this at the cinema the other week and I thought it was a Michael Bay film until I saw the Black president. This film looks awful but if it resulted in the clip you just posted, then at least some good came of it.

K.

I like how the trailer goes from "Oh no! Floods and Eathquakes" to "We're going into Space!!!!"
One of the trailers had big spaceships that they were loading people into like Noah's Ark...kind of...out there if I do say so myself...

At least, I'm assuming they were Space ships...that or REALLY FRIKIN BIG submarines...yeesh...

I'm gonna try and find a picture of them, but I'm pretty sure that's what they were in the trailer...

The Mesoamerican Loung Count, as the Mayan Calendar is formally known, might also be one of the most poorly designed calendar ever in use.

Dates within the Long Count are 5 digits long using base 20 numerals.
20 days or K'in = 1 Winal
18 Winal = 1 Tun
20 Tun = 1 K'atun
20 K'atun = 1 B'ak'tun
Seemingly, some text says the previous world lasted 13 B'ak'tun.

The occurrence of 20, along with the fact that the Mesoamerican writings use a base 20 to write down number, should ring a bell, and draw attention on why a 1 Tun is 18 Winal long, and why is a world 13 B'ak'tun long.

Hypothesis A, answering why a world is 13 B'ak'tun long : Someone noticed some astrological event with a period of exactly 1,872,000 days.
Hypothesis A' : They were a brilliant civilization with advanced astronomical knowledge, maintening a calendar designed by people who could predict the exact time of doomsday, millenias before.

Hypothesis B, answering why a Tun is 18 Winal long : Someone noticed some astrological event with a period of roughly 360 days .
Hypothesis B' : They did not give a shit about astronomy and kept, for administrative convenience, a calendar designed by people who couldn't even find the exact length of a solar year (or a lunar year, for that matter).

As a side note, the Mayan also used a 365-day solar calendar and a 260-day ceremonial calendar. The later was divided into 20 periods of 13 days. There might be a connection, one way or another, with the alledged number of B'ak'tun of the last world.

The Ancient Mayan world view puts us currently in the 4th world. The Aztec world view puts us in the 5th world. The Shadowrun timeline and fluff appears to be a conflation of the two world views.

I'm not sure what you see as "poorly designed". Their calendrics are one of the most complex and internally consistent schemas from anywhere around the world. Their astronomy is one of the few anywhere that allowed the prediction of both solar and (much more difficult) lunar eclipses.

They maintained various ritual and practical cyclical calendars (365, 260, ?185?- Venusian cycle, and others), some of which they inherited from earlier peoples, as well as the Long Count which was used both for prosaic functions such as recording historical events and royal occasions, and for placing mythical events in temporal context, ranging back millions of years. Their powers of observation in astronomical matters and their complex mathematics leads me to believe that the fact we don't know for sure that they understood the approx. 1/4 day extra length of the solar year is more an artifact of our ignorance than theirs.

And by the way, the Maya are not gone. They, along with the Inuit, are the only native peoples of the Americas to have regained the population they had before the Europeans arrived with their diseases and genocidal tendencies.

There was an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit that covered this a few weeks ago.

It's episode 4 of season 7 if anybody is curious.

That is correct. It has to do with some constellation shifting so it's in some astrological quadrant or something (you can look up the details if you want). Their calendar was based heavily off astrological changes beyond those of the sun or the moon, which is why some of the counts seem, to us, to be useless, made up or just wrong. Their results were some of the most advanced produced prior to the 19th century, and well in advance of those in Europe (note that European astrology is falling to pieces because people didn't properly predict the shifts in constellations and such).

A book I read a while back gave as one of many interpretations that the current world will end (OMG! Doomsday!!)and the next one will begin.

Perhaps we are nearing the Technological Singularity. A brave new world of technological wonders! The end of the Information Age and the beginnning of the SuperInformation Age...
Of course, now we have to worry about SkyNet going live.... If you don't get this...think of the Governator of "Cah-lee-fon-ya" (<< Shameful impersonation of Arnold, I know...)

Who cares about he Mayan calendar? The calendar on my wall ends on Dec. 31st, 2009, and it is way more advanced than the Mayan calendar, just one look at the full color glossy photos embedded throughout will tell you that. The Mayans had it wrong, we have less than 6 months before doomsday, oh the humanity!

Then again, maybe the Mayans just ran out of room, and figured they had a few centuries before they needed to replace it with the updated version, complete with Lolcats.

Yea... that was what I was saying earlier (kinda)...glad to see I'm not the only one thinking that...hehe...
Mayan Lolcats would be...interesting....though I feel thay'd probably be closer to Lol-jaguars...

Why did I just put fangs on Ceiling Cat?

Twice as deadly...

Somehow I was going to work in a masturbation joke (because that's what ceiling cat watches you do) but I failed to concoct a good one.