2012 End of World

End of the World 2011

The world didn’t end in 2011. As I recall, there were two prominent predictions by the same pundit. Doomsday was confidently predicted for March 21, 2011. The date came and went and our mundane lives continued. Heads were scratched and calculations remade and an equally confident revised date for humankind’s demise was pronounced for October 21. Few held their breath and even fewer were surprised when the next day dawned and the world remained unscathed. Everyone carried on with their lives confident that the world would continue to turn for a very long time. But the Maya were about to have their say. However, unlike the two 2011 predictions, the Maya prediction came from the grave.

The Maya and 2012

The Maya were a significant civilisation in Central America before the coming of the Europeans. Like most peoples, the Maya kept a close eye on the passage of time and had an accurate and far seeing calendar. Unfortunately their calendar ended sometime in 2012. You have to wonder why a people, at their peak a little over 1100 years ago, would need a calendar to reach out this far, long after their civilisation had perished. Perhaps they were simply mischievous and wanted future humans to ponder and wonder at their diligence. And ponder we did and so was born: 2012 end of world. Not content with failed predictions for 2011, the doomsayers set their sight on 2012, December 21, to be specific.

2012, the End?

No one knows why the Maya did not extend their calendar beyond 2012; perhaps they had become lazy. Or maybe they felt the enterprise not worth perusing post 2012; a distant ancestor could always take on the task. There are those who think the Maya had the power to see deep into the future and surmised that they foresaw the world’s end in 2012 and consequently did not see a need to extend their calendar beyond that date. It seems a pity that they didn’t harness this all seeing facility and focus their penetrating gaze on their own fate. The civilisation of the Maya petered out, according to expert opinion, in the seventeenth century, with a little help from the Spanish Conquistadors. A calendar stopping at around then would have suited their purpose much better and have saved them a lot of unnecessary calculation. It could be argued that maybe the Maya were altruistic and wanted to provide distant mankind with a warning of their impending doom. That being the case it wouldn’t have hurt them to have given us a clue of what fate had in store. In fact it wouldn’t have hurt them to be more specific. After all, they bothered to give us the date, why not the fate? Could it be that the Maya possessed a sense of humour?

2012, End of World

As I write, December 21 is some ways off and there is still plenty of time to place our affairs in order in preparation for the big event. Personally, I don’t think I’ll bother. I would like to make a prediction of my own. I am confident that I will still be around to summon in 2013, at midnight December 31. Probably I will be dead drunk, but still very much alive. The world will not have stopped spinning in fact it will be spinning much faster, at least to my eyes.