It’s only a very recent, very wrong and arguably very wilful misinterpretation of the ancient Mayan calendar to conclude it ends on 21 December 2012. And that even if their “long count” does stop then, there’s no more reason to think it will immediately lead to a planet-wide liquidation sale than if your desk calendar reaches the end of the year before you’ve bought a new one.
Even Nasa – who ought to have plenty on their hands looking for traces of life on Mars – have weighed in to apply logical to the eschatological bypublishing Beyond 2012: Why the World Won’t End. There’s no need to recap here on the details of their argument – suffice to say that after reading it only the most hardcore conspiracy nut would still have worries about an upcoming end of everything. The more interesting question – at least for me – is why so many, so often, are drawn to these tales of impending destruction? Why do we seem to want it to be the end of days, and to have the apocalypse, now?
The doom-mongers are only around to – probably – be wrong about the world ending on 21 December this year, because they’d already been wrong about it ending in 2003, when the entirely fictional planet Nibiru was first supposed to collide with us. And wrong about it ending on 31 December 1999 simply because of an arbitrary change of date that wasn’t even the end of the millennium. And wrong about it ending on at least six other dates in the 1990s. And also wrong about it ending at least two or three times every single decade until at least the 1840s, with evidence of scores of other more sporadic global false alarms stretching right back to ancient Rome.
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