 |
| Image |
Depending upon who you talk to, the world may or may not
meet its apocalyptic doom on Friday. If
you’re talking to someone with critical thinking skills, their plans for Friday
may include going to class or work, finishing up holiday shopping, seeing
friends and loved ones, and drinking
heavily. If you’re talking with someone
without critical thinking skills, their Friday agenda may substitute the “going
to class or work” for “sharpening knifes or loading guns” and “holiday shopping”
might involve less Xbox games and more dehydrated meats. Also, “seeing friends and loved ones” will
occur in a bunker. Drinking heavily will
likely happen regardless.
The reason for the impending apocalyptic hullabaloo,
which has grown steadily in recent years, has mainly to do with a severe lack
of fact-checking and a gross misunderstanding about how calendars work. Seeing as I once wrote a term paper on Mayan
cosmology in college and also have access to Google, I feel that it is my duty
to give a little background on the impending Mayan doomsday and set the record
straight. I did concerningly little
fact-checking of my own while writing this piece, but since I’m sure that I’ve
still done more of it than the people who expect the world to end on Friday, I
really don’t feel bad about that.
The Maya (This section is informative, feel
free to skip it)
The Pre-Columbian Maya were, as a whole, both deeply
interested and extremely talented in astronomy and arithmetic. They were more or less the Asian students in
our high school math classes, except instead of considering their lives to be
over when their teachers gave them an A-, they considered their lives to be
over when Spanish conquistadors gave them smallpox.
The Maya based their architecture, their time keeping,
and other parts of their lives around the movements of the planets and the
stars. They were also spiritual beings,
placing large significance on the number 20 (due to the amount of fingers and
toes on the fully-formed human body that has not placed its hand too close to a
table saw) and the number 13 (due to the number of major joints in the fully-formed
human body that has not passed out drunk on a table saw). The Maya used several different calendars in
their overall system of time-keeping, and held the belief that time was
cyclical, like a clock, as opposed to linear, like a ______.
The Calendar (This section is also
informative, but does contain a poop joke…your call)
The Mayan Long Count, the calendar that everyone is
losing their shit about, is a 5,125 year cycle that is written like a car
odometer. Each placeholder counts to 20
before the one to the left of it tallies a digit. Therefore, after 20 days have passed of the
new long count calendar, the date will read 0.0.0.1.0. Once the farthest digit to the left reaches
13, the calendar rolls over and begins again.
Or, as many crazy people on the internet read that sentence: “Once the
farthest digit to the left reaches 13, the calendar springs to life, eats your
grandma, shits on your face, throws asteroids at Earth, and rides a dazzling
rainbow unicorn into the sunset, which of course will be brighter than normal
because the sun is exploding, all while Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a
Thing” plays in the background. The
current 5,125 year cycle, also referred to by the Maya as a “Sun,” marks the fourth
completion of the Mayan Long Count, and is set to end on December 21st,
2012.
What Crazy People Say
Depending on which crazy people you talk to, any number
of doomsday shenanigans could take place on December 21st. The Yellowstone supervolcano could erupt
turning us all into that guy who looks like lava from the Fantastic Four, which
would be awesome; previously unknown Planet X could pop out of fucking nowhere
and blindside us in a collision so powerful that even Flo from Progressive won’t
be able to help you because, let’s be honest, she’ll be vaporized; the Earth,
the Sun, and the black hole in the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A, might
align causing some mathematically impossible gravitational effect that involves
us being swallowed whole in an act that sounds downright cosmologically kinky;
Earth will be hit by an asteroid, which is pretty much the same thing as the
planet one, except slightly less creative; or the magnetic poles of the Earth
may shift, causing…I don’t know…people’s compasses to be less accurate?
Still more crazy people think that Bugarach, a small 178-person
village in the French Alps, will be saved from the apocalypse by aliens living
inside the mountain upon which the town is situated because, let’s be honest,
if all human life on Earth is about to be extinguished, somebody’s going to
save the fucking French. Non.
My personal favorite prediction, however, comes from a
Christian cult in northwestern China who fear that starting on December 21st,
the sun will not shine and electricity will not work for three days.
Or as people in Boston call it, a Nor’easter.
What Not Crazy People Say
As mentioned before, the Pre-Columbian Maya viewed time
as cyclical. This means that, at the end
of their 5,125 year long calendar, it does exactly what the Gregorian calendar
does: it starts again. This idea is
further supported by the fact that the last time the third Mayan Long Count
ended in 3114 B.C., the Earth did not explode.
A few thousand or so years before that, the Maya undoubtedly stared at
each other in confusion as God created the universe. And if we’re really feeling rambunctious, we
can dig into things like science and facts to refute the other doomsday
theories:
·
Ok, the Yellowstone Supervolcano could
technically erupt, but we wouldn’t turn into the guy from Fantastic Four. We’d probably die, the quickness of said death
depending on our proximity to Wyoming. Honestly,
that one’s kind of a bummer.
·
The previously unknown Planet X will not come
crashing into Earth; because if it were going to, or if it were real, it would already
have been visible to the naked eye for quite some time.
·
The alignment of the Earth, the Sun, and the
Sagittarius A black hole won’t eat us.
Sagittarius A is over 30,000 light years from Earth and that isn’t how
physics work. Plus, this alignment
already happened in 1998, and the worst thing that happened that year was Limp
Bizkit hitting #22 on the Billboard 200 chart.
·
The asteroid one is pretty much like the planet
one too. But fuck it, if one does come
towards Earth we’ll just throw Bruce Willis at it. Jesus, don’t any of you crazy people have TV’s
in your bunkers?
·
The magnetic poles of the Earth do shift periodically;
however, scientists have calculated that this can take up to fully 10,000 years
to occur. Plus, raise your hand if you actually
use a compass. Put your hand down,
Hippie. No one cares.
Conclusion
The moral of the story is that on December 21st
the world will continue. You’ll still
have to finish your Christmas shopping.
You’ll still have to go back to work after the holidays. All those who started having promiscuous sex
recently and expected absolutely no repercussions will still have to deal with
that persistent crotchal itch. Bashar
al-Assad will still be a monumental dickbag and a third of registered voters in
Mississippi will think interracial marriage should be illegal. Large amounts of the developed world will
remain in financial recession and large amounts of the undeveloped world will
still be drinking out of the same river they shit and bathe in. And worst of all, there will still be people
in this world who think that if any of the 7 billion people on Earth are going to
be saved in an apocalypse, it will be citizens of a small village in France.
Sorry, France. No
disrespect. Assholes.
So happy Mayan New Year’s Eve, everyone. See you in 7137.
I use a compass.
ReplyDelete