2012

I love end-of-the-world theories. I never believe them, but I love them, in the same way that I loved the SF novel Rendezvous With Rama or the movie The Road Warrior. A story doesn't have to be plausible, or even possible in the strict sense of the world, to be enjoyable.

The short version of the 2012 End Of The World Theory is this: that on some day in the year 2012, the Mayan "Long Count" calendar will "max out" (or "overflow", as computer scientists would put it). When the Long Count overflows, time will end, the world will be destroyed, and pigs will fly (among other things).

The Mayans had three calendars. There was a 260-day sacred calendar, based perhaps on observations of the planet Venus. Then there was a 365-day secular calender. These were "geared together" in such a way that a single named day wouldn't recur in that system for 52 years - but the difficulty was that the two geared calendars couldn't distinguish one 52-year cycle from any other. You could specify a single day within the 52-year cycle, but you couldn't specify which 52-year cycle you were talking about (52 years is a long time, but it was possible and I'm sure it happened that an individual's lifespan exceeded a single 52-year cycle, so it wasn't a strictly academic problem).

To address this problem, the Maya developed the "Long Count", a sequential count of days starting somewhere in the year 3114 BC. The count was recorded in a number that looks a lot like a modern IP address, in the form of century.decade.year.month.day, such as 32.9.11.2.12. Supposedly this way of recording dates will overflow in 2012, signaling the end of days and the Phoenix Suns winning an NBA championship.

But according to what I've read, the Mayan priests who developed and maintained the calenders knew that the system would eventually overflow, and went ahead and calculated up another nineteen named periods of time beyond the century, culminating in the alautan, a period of time lasting about 63 million years. In other words, recognizing that eventually the "five-digit" Long Count would overflow, they cheerfully permitted it to simply add more digits as required. So 2012 does not signal the end of days and the Phoenix Suns winning anything; it merely represents the year that the sixth digit of the notation rolls over from zero to one. Consult Appendix D of the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann for a concise example.

My high school math thus suggests that the system, with its nineteen named time periods, should be able to enumerate 126 million years minus one day, give or take - that is, it'll remain functional until the year 125,997,000 AD, give or take a little. In other words, the problem of the Long Count overflowing is one we can comfortably put off for a few million years...

But you can't tell the nuts anything. 2012 has become a key feature in the nutcase view of the world, a view that now seems to include crystal skulls, UFOs, crop circles, Sedona-style vortices and other pseudo-spiritual gewgawry. In same way that "Y2K" became the mating call of survivalists in the late 1990s, "2012" has become the mating call of that fringe element in society that seems to have a particular taste for end-of-the-world theories.

While I'm at it, let me say that I think we as a society should be able to levy a Stupidity Tax on people who misuse the word apocalypse. Apocalypse is a Greek word meaning "revelation"; it doesn't refer to the end of the world at all. Nor does "Armageddon" for that matter either; Armageddon was the name of an ancient city-state and hill in modern-day Israel. I think any time some maroon refers to the end of the world as an apocalypse or an armageddon, he (or she) should have to pay the nearest sane person a five-dollar Stupidity Tax. These should even be additive - someone who refers to the "2012 Apocalypse" should have to pay a ten dollar Stupidity Tax, five dollars for misusing the word apocalypse and five dollars for not taking the time to understand what the Long Count is and how it really works.