21 December 2012: time for another doomsday

The end of the world is predicted to coincide exactly with the time of the Winter Solstice. If we write out the time and date, it looks elegant and slightly mysterious:

12:12 21.12.2012.

Do you remember the other doomsday dates? They were 5.5.2000, 1.1.2000, 31.12.1999, 10.03.1982, the first second of Christmas morning in 1967 – along with innumerable other dates.

The day after one of these days, one usually wakes up with a slight degree of disappointment. So I really do need to get out of my warm bed. Oh damn!

So what’s going to happen this time around?

The doomsday prophesies are rooted in a combination of many coincidences that occur on 21 December 2012:

• The planets in our solar system will align
• The Maya calendar expires
• The Sun and the Moon will be aligned with the huge black hole in the centre of the Milky Way
• Nostradamus predicted it
• There is a sunspot maximum
• The Sun’s magnetic poles swap places
• The doomsday planet Nibiru – also known as Planet X – will collide with the Earth
• The north and south poles will shift, and those who survive it will be enslaved by a special breed of people with lizard-DNA, who are governed by the British monarchy and Barack Obama himself.

If we gather all the catastrophes together, for instance from various websites, we see more than 100 different causes and effects, with each one being weirder than the other. One of my personal favourites is the one that says the Sun will be rising in the West on this date!

The truth is that not a single one of these claims should be taken seriously.

The Maya calendar will go on

One of the most frequently mentioned occurrences in the predictions is the expiration of the calendar used by the Maya Indians. It expires on the date which they called the 13th baktun.

The Maya calendar (probably) started on 11 August 3114 BC. A baktun is equivalent to 144,000 days or just over 394 years, so it coincides neatly with 21 December 2012.

On some of the many Mayan stone pillars with date inscriptions, the 13th baktun certainly is the highest value, but other inscriptions look much further into the future.