December 21st 2012: Time Wave Zero

[Aerimae]

2012 will not happen because if it was supposed to happen it should have already. The Mayans didnt have leap years. It should be late 2013 right now because there have been around 500 leap days.

[Sayl]

Yepp. This puts the final bullet in the wriggling corpse of the 2012 Doomsday "prophecy".

Debunking the 2012 crap is rather simple.

But if you'll scroll back a couple of posts, I just linked to a write-up showing why that leap year issue is wrong.

[schwarzkopf]

2012 will not happen because if it was supposed to happen it should have already.

I'm currently watching 2012 happen

The Mayans didnt have leap years.

And again - what does the end of the world have to do with the Mayans anyway ?

[Synros]

I think something big will happen around that time. Weather it be disclosure, humanity stops being retarded and wakes the f**k up to whats really going on, we make a massive leap technologically wise or all-the-above. I'm hoping for all-the-above.

[Sayl]

To clarify for me... who predicted the world would end on 21/12/12 ?
I know it wasn't the Mayans, and it wasn't me.
Just curious.

Michael D. Coe, in 1966, was the first to glom onto a doomsday idea and correlate it to the Long Count rollover. Oddly enough, he's an otherwise well-respected, award-winning, Harvard-educated archaeologist and anthropologist, but he sure got this one wrong.

Coe's initial date was "24 December 2011." He revised it to "11 January AD 2013" in the 1980 2nd edition of his book, not settling on 23 December 2012 until the 1984 3rd edition. The correlation of b'ak'tun 13 as 21 December 2012 first appeared in Table B.2 of Robert J. Sharer's 1983 revision of the 4th edition of Sylvanus Morley's book The Ancient Maya.

Link (scroll down for the footnote)

In the Hoopes paper I provided earlier, he states:

The reference to Armageddon, written to stimulate his audience, undoubtedly reflected Cold War anxieties. Its repetition in subsequent editions of The Maya has fed the 2012 meme for four decades.

I wish there were a better answer for such a boneheaded error from someone with otherwise clean credentials, but the motivation appears to be less than honest given that he kept changing the date. He also wrote that stuff for a popular audience rather than an academic one, so it looks conspicuously like an attempt to milk a cash cow.

As noted in the Wiki article, Coe's claim has drawn lots of criticism over the last couple of decades and isn't accepted by other scholars; it's also flatly rejected by Maya descendants.

[AdriWar]

Noone but the "faithful" are concerned about 21st of december...

My bible doesn't mention anything about December 21st 2012 :P

[Sound911]

if the world ends it ends, you won't know that it does, you'll be dead.

if not, well continue life.

[iamdisappoint]

By the way, the Mayan Calender is a separate system from the Julian Calender and DOES account for leap years.

Also, can we close this post? This shit has been posted so many times and it's on the level of religion.

1st part, I agree with, though I don't buy into the end of world stuff. That argument is for the lazy man with no intellect to think past what someone else told them, and no courage to debate or take the time to learn the subject properly before a debate. Basically, people are lazy and they can't see past their own little closed off train of thought. Like people who say there can't be aliens because they haven't seen them ... but if there were aliens, and they haven't seen you, does that mean -you- don't exist? absence of evidence is not evidence of absence ... and repeating misinformed statements doesn't make it any less false


2nd part

let people talk about what they want, you can always choose NOT TO READ IT. Silencing people whom you don't agree with is the opposite of 1st amendment ... just like tv and radio (not including pure hate speech and directions to assault others) should be allowed to play whatever they want, know why? you have the choice to not listen/watch.



on a side note ... the people who believe in this ... what time is it supposed to happen? 12:00 am like the ball dropping on new year's? 11:59 pm so we get a full day minus 1 minute/second? What time zone? GMT? Pacific? Will the EU have a better shot at world firsts? or does the US have the advantage? Who gets to fight deathwing, i mean Quetzalcoatl first? just curious ...

[Gheld]

Le sigh. You can't just take a hypothesis like "The world is going to end in 2012." and then present other such hypothesis' as scientific evidence of your own hypothesis.

That's called pseudoscience.

You have to say "I hypothesize that the world is going to end in 2012 by means of X". You then have to make a mathematical prediction that can be proven in a lab setting based on X. Such as "If X is true, then if I do this, the result will be Y.". You then have to chronicle the entire process, and leave it to the scrutiny of your peers. If your mathematical prediction proves false you then have to reason as to why it proved false.

So to take the hypothesis "The world is going to end in 2012, read this book, this proves it." and the book is all hypothesis and no fact, scientifically that makes you an idiot.

There is no scientific basis for anything on that video. It's just some drug addled hippy randomly babbling and attempting to make it sound scientific.

I stopped listening when he suggested that doing yoga on psychotropic drugs is a scientific method.

EDIT: The beautiful thing about science is that it can't always explain absolutely everything in any given circumstance. It leaves much mystery in the universe to admire, but with that beauty and mystery people need to stop being fools and realize that where science doesn't see, the words "proof" and "evidence" are worthless.

[Maievshadow]

The beautiful thing about science is that it can't always explain absolutely everything in any given circumstance. It leaves much mystery in the universe to admire, but with that beauty and mystery people need to stop being fools and realize that where science doesn't see, the words "proof" and "evidence" are worthless.

To quote Dara O'brian: Science knows it doesnt know everything, otherwise it would stop. But that doesnt mean you can fill in the gaps with whichever fairy tale most appeals to you

This is what will happen on December 21st: i will wake up, brush my teeth, have dinner, play wow, watch some TV, eat tea, play wow abit more, go to bed, wake up to december 22nd. The world will not end is any way, shape or form.

[Linkedblade]

If the world were to end on that day, why does it matter? We won't be around to worry about it.

And if nothing happens life will go on. I don't quite understand why this matters.

[Sayl]

on a side note ... the people who believe in this ... what time is it supposed to happen? 12:00 am like the ball dropping on new year's? 11:59 pm so we get a full day minus 1 minute/second? What time zone? GMT? Pacific? Will the EU have a better shot at world firsts? or does the US have the advantage? Who gets to fight deathwing, i mean Quetzalcoatl first? just curious ...

I think the answer will vary between different factions of end-of-the-world nutters. The experienced varieties probably won't ever list a specific time, so they can try to drag it out as long as possible despite the painful obviousness of nothing happening. Since the mythologists tend to obsess over the coincidental timing of the "Mayan doomsday" falling on a solstice, my opinion is that they should be consistent and pick the corresponding start time, 11:12 UTC.

[Yoshimiko]

If it ends and there's no way to stop it - why care?
If it ends and there's no way we can intervene - why care?
If it doesn't end - why care?

This is something that's entirely irrelevant to everyone. If you can't effect the outcome - seriously, why care?

EDIT: The beautiful thing about science is that it can't always explain absolutely everything in any given circumstance. It leaves much mystery in the universe to admire, but with that beauty and mystery people need to stop being fools and realize that where science doesn't see, the words "proof" and "evidence" are worthless.

We know 4%. That's what scientist estimate. We fully understand 4% of all that is. Yeah, it's a guestimate, it's not really a meaningful number in any way, but we know we don't know much. We know there's so much more to learn. If we knew everything with 100% accuracy, we wouldn't have science.

Proof and Evidence are NEVER worthless. If you believe something, with no proof, nor evidence, you're delusional. That is, infact, the definition of the word. While I see it as erroneous, and it may be, religious people have some proof. They have their holy book, their personal feelings, etc. These are irrelevant in the fact that holy books are just a books written and edited by people over time, and personal feelings have no place in science - that doesn't change the fact they have a reason behind believing.

If you go off spouting "Proof" and "Evidence" are worthless, you've given up all hope to possibly expand your knowledge beyond what you, or humanity currently understands. And when I say understands - I mean can factually back up, without the shadow of a doubt. The things we understand may have errors, they might even be downright wrong(everything we know about atoms doesn't work, we know practically nothing about the quantum world, and Dark energy & dark matter make no sense in any way shape or form), but they are a starting place. They work for now, and for now that's what we go with. We'll know more as we explore deeper into these conundrums, but to cast off such important things as proofs, will lead to no scientific growth, will help no person, and will often times only lead to panic - regardless of scale - or worse, with no real gains in return.

[Keosen]

Only 7 months until the moment i'll start bashing the 2012 idiots, i'm gonna insult them so hard that i'll probably get banned on 90% of the forums i participate.

[Adam Jensen]

So as I'm sure you all know the ancient Mayan calendar ended on December 21, 2012 and everyone is concerned about that.

I think you over estimate the number of people who are concerned with that.

Hell, I'm more concerned about the heat death of the universe than I am of the "doomsday" of Dec 21, 2012.

[Cairhiin]

I know that's been making the rounds for a couple months, but it's incorrect. Here's a proper explanation with calculations.

Surely whoever came up with it meant well and hoped to debunk silly 2012 claims, but sadly, they're doing it wrong.

Wow that was an excellent read. Thanks for that link.

[Sayl]

If it ends and there's no way to stop it - why care?
If it ends and there's no way we can intervene - why care?
If it doesn't end - why care?

This is something that's entirely irrelevant to everyone. If you can't effect the outcome - seriously, why care?

I care for a number of reasons, primarily because I have empathy for other humans, despite all our flaws and shortcomings. I also care because it's important to foster critical thinking so we can get past all these nonsensical distractions as a species and tackle more pressing issues. Since these silly doomsday claims can easily be shown false, it doesn't take much effort to help alleviate the concerns of others, keep them from getting ripped off by con artists, or engaging in activities that can bring harm to themselves or others. Apathy is not nearly as productive.

---------- Post added 2012-05-07 at 02:15 AM ----------

Wow that was an excellent read. Thanks for that link.

My pleasure, glad you enjoyed.

[Yoshimiko]

I care for a number of reasons, primarily because I have empathy for other humans, despite all our flaws and shortcomings. I also care because it's important to foster critical thinking so we can get past all these nonsensical distractions as a species and tackle more pressing issues. Since these silly doomsday claims can easily be shown false, it doesn't take much effort to help alleviate the concerns of others, keep them from getting ripped off by con artists, or engaging in activities that can bring harm to themselves or others. Apathy is not nearly as productive.

---------- Post added 2012-05-07 at 02:15 AM ----------



My pleasure, glad you enjoyed.

I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. Why should ANYONE care when the earth is going to end, if we have no possible way of countering it nor escaping it? I'd think it better to live in ignorance, than live knowing the exact moment your days will end. Blissfully unaware, we can live full happy lives until the day we die. Knowledge, in this case, I feel would do nobody good.

[Deleted]

I don't believe in the doomsday or whatever, although weird enough I'm kinda hoping it will happen. Or atleast something strange at that day.

[Razorice]

The only thing will happen on Dec 21ist is some crazies killing themselves in belief that the world is ending.