Have you heard of the Mayan calendar and their predictions?

Question

They say that 2012 is the end of one galactic year and there will be great catastrophe and supposedly this is when the earth reaches the top of its axis and begins to go back down, it goes so far up while rotating and then it goes so far down and when it changes some say cataclismic earth events happen. What do you think?

My question was based on a program I saw on the science channel and I found it interesting that the Mayans knew more about outer space than we knew until a few years ago, also the Mayans are not extinct, they are still there as a people they just don't operate as they once did. I didn't figure to find so many intellectuals who wanted to sparr with one another.

Answer 1

Wow...tough crowd...tough crowd.

When you ask a question, there's this little thing that pops up below it to let you know if any similar questions have been asked. So far, there are about 2400 questions about the year 2012AD so if you are inquisitive, check those out!

To captain debunker, let us not use someone's misguided question as an opportunity to criticize another culture or people in direct proportion to our ignorance. I know of no civilization that has constructed a calander to predict it's own demise. I don't see a date on the Gregorian calander predicting the collapse of America. The intention of the Mayan calanders was to keep track of cycles.

To eri, the civilization that "barely invented the wheel" (give me a break) also held some of the worlds greatest mathematicians and astronomers.

To nrao, I agree with many of your points. The word is sheathing. The current magnetism is not normal but, in fact, reversed. Earth's magnetic South is currently in the northern hemisphere.

To freent, be careful when you use the words "they say". The 2012 subject has unfortunately attracted more than it's share of doomsayers, end-of-the-world catastrophists, occultists, and just plain kooks. Always keep in mind that 90% of what you hear and read about 2012 is not true.

The Mayan priests were astronomers. They developed calanders based on the movements of the planet Venus, and a longer calander based on what is now called Precession. Precession is a wobble in the planet Earth's rotation. It takes about 26,000 years to complete one wobble. They divided that into 5 and called them ages. Each age lasting about 5,125 years. One age ended around 3114BC so they used that as the start of their calander even though the current year was around 300AD. This is the age ending 2012AD.

At the end of each age we are to expect an element. This time we may expect an increase in earthquake and possible volcanic activity. However, the mayans never said the world would end. That is stuff being made up by some people living today.

All the Mayans did was mark an astronomical point in time when the Earth's axis will be at 60 degrees relative to the Milky Way galaxy. Such a rare astronomical event should cause you to celebrate, not live in fear.

That's all. If we do get more earthquakes, we will not get them all in one day or one year. Remember, 26,000 years is a long time.

Finally, the last time Earth's magnetic field flipped was the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal 780,000 years ago so it is not connected to Precession at all.

Seperate truth from fiction.

Answer 2

Planetary alignments of some form or another occur every 200 years or so. If this caused the magnetic field to reverse or the earth to flip upside down or worldwide catastrophe (with accompanying weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth), I think we'd have been aware of it by now.

Per these websites, recent planetary alignment 'the world will end' predictions have been made for 1982, 2000 (all nine planets aligned!), 2002 and 2010.

The Mayans have to get in line! Besides, maybe this is just the ancient Mayan equivalent of Y2K...remember all the stuff that didn't go wrong then?

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planets.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/planets_align_020402-1.html
http://www.etsu.edu/physics/etsuobs/starprty/22099dgl/planalign.htm

Answer 3

You are gullible for believing this tripe.Every bit of this is nothing but Mayan superstition, and they have taken their primitive pagan superstition and now control your weak mind with their religious fear-mongering.

You don't even repeat very well what bullspit HAS been regurgitated, so you've filled in blanks with horsecrap you made up.

The Mayans stopped predicting because their society disintegrated 500 years ago. There was nobody around to cast fear into and control their mind until you came along, patsy.

If all the compasses in the world started pointing south rather than north, many people might think something very strange, very unusual, and possibly very dangerous was going on. Doomsayers would have a field day proclaiming the end is nigh, and simple-minded clods would believe it. More rational persons might head straight to scientists for an explanation.

Fortunately, those scientists in the know—paleomagnetists, to be exact—would have a ready answer. Such reversals in the Earth's magnetic field, they'd tell you, are, roughly speaking, as common as ice ages. That is, they're terrifically infrequent by human standards, but in geologic terms they happen all the time. As the time lines show, hundreds of times in our planet's history the polarity of the magnetic shield ensheathing the globe has gone from "normal," our current orientation to the north, to "reversed," and back again.

The Earth is not alone in this fickleness: The sun's magnetic shield appears to reverse its polarity approximately every 11 years. Even our Milky Way galaxy is magnetized, and experts say it probably reverses its polarity as well. Moreover, while a severe weakening or disappearance of the magnetic field would lay us open to harmful radiation from the sun, there's little evidence to date that "flips" per se inflict any lasting damage .

It might sound as if scientists have all the answers regarding magnetic reversals. But actually they know very little about them. Basic questions haunt researchers: What physical processes within the Earth trigger reversals? Why do the durations and frequencies of both normal and reversed states seem random? Why is there such a disproportionately long normal period between about 121 and 83 million years ago? Why does the reversal rate, at least during the past 160 million years, appear to peak around 12 million years ago?

All these questions remain unanswered, though experts are hard at work trying to answer them. In the meantime, not to worry. Reversals happen on average only about once every 250,000 years, and they take hundreds if not thousands of years to complete.

Even the weakening currently under way may be a false alarm. The field often gets very weak, then bounces back, never having flipped. So hang on to your compass, Chicken Little. For the foreseeable future, it should work as advertised.

Answer 4

I have heard of their predictions and their calendar does end in the year 2012. Their suggestion of a reverse magnetism is plausible, their is evidence that it has occurred in the past and will occur in the future. However, I don't see this reverse magnetism as an overnight calamity. I see this as a very slow process, as with any other process that effects our world today. It would take longer than 4 or 5 years for this event to subside, so I do not believe the Earth will perish in 2012 do to this event.

Answer 5

The Mayan calendar makes no predictions about 2012 or any other year. Even on the science channel they still have to sell soap.

Answer 6

The Earth is not moving on an axis. It has an axis, but it is part of the Earth. That doesn't make any sense. And why do you think a 1000 year old civilization that barely invented the wheel and couldn't even predict their own demise knew anything about the future of the universe?

Answer 7

'Something' will happen as a result of the heavy magnetic pull on the earth, due to a lineup of solar sytem forces, but no one is certain exactly what. Anything from asteroids to a realignment of the magnetic fields of the north and south poles has been discussed, but I personally see this as speculatory, and subsequently no cause for alarm. This occurs roughly every 28,000 years and comes to a focal point Dec.21,2012. Time will tell.

Answer 8

Yes, I have heard of the Myan Calendar, and looked into the projections. I find this very interesting, but not worthy of further
concern or fretting on our part. Far more important is the next meal - where is it coming from, and will we be able to eat it in peace, or will some nut walk in with a bomb on his back.

Answer 9

Synchronicity, telepathy, Harmonic Convergence, Cosmic Consciousness, Dreamspell, love based artist hero paradigm, solar seed, collapse of time, prophecy, codes of time, 28-day male biorhythm codes, 4th dimensional time, inharmonic numbering of days and months, "natural time" coded to female biological rhythms, and on, and on, and on, goes the nonsense.

When you read anything written by astrologers and others who wish to sound authoritative and intellectually vast, you always get tone of meaningless garbage like that. If you are creative and have a good vocabulary, you could make up stuff just as cosmic and etherial sounding and equally stupid and useless.

But most comical of the huge post from ritukiran16, is the bizarre disclaimer that the end of the world is not really the end of the world but a warm fuzzy new age of love and harmony, and, well, you see how utterly bogus all that hype is. But there is never a shortage of people eager to believe in any nonsense as long as they get that woo-woo feeling out of it.

Help me out, folks, I lost that web site that had hundreds of predictions of doom throughout history, including a couple dozen around the year 2000. It's all nonsense. Dumb superstition by smart primitive people, uncritically accepted, embellished, and perpetuated by dopey modern people.

Answer 10

The apocalypse has been arriving
Since as far back as we can learn
I don't know who's doing the driving
But it seems he took a wrong turn

It appears that in each generation
The folks think the world's going to end
"There will be a great conflagration!
You'd better get ready, my friend!"

John Donne said "I am a little world,"
And we accept that it's true
There's an end to each little world
When the end comes for me and for you.

It's knowing we're going to die
Thus ending the world that we are
I reckon that leads us to cry
"The end of the world can't be far!"

And even if earth should expire
Why should we panic or simper
We'll be dead if it all ends in fire
Or as Eliot says, with a whimper.