Doomsday: The Mayan Code

Earth is humanity’s cradle, but by no means can it completely harbour us from harm. Many risks threaten individual lives, but there are some catastrophic enough to wipe out entire species. Is it possible for the prolific human species to face extinction?

The Maya empire fell centuries ago, yet their work continues to intrigue to this day. Among many opinions of that work is the conclusion that the world will end on 21 December 2012. How well does that theory stand up to modern scrutiny?

There’s a calendar for that
The Maya were a mathematically advanced civilisation. Their astronomers would gaze at the heavens, tracking celestial bodies with modern precision. As they find patterns in these apparently tangled pathways, they would formulate cyclical calendars which would guide their agriculture and celebrations, among other activities.

Among these many calendars is a linear Long Count system of 144 000-day cyclical Long Count periods, which binds the beforementioned cycles into one great passage of time. We are currently in the 13th Long Count, before which the gods created and disposed of progressively more advanced iterations of humans four times. The disposals coincided with catastrophic events.

Currently (at 2011), we, of the fifth iteration, are in the 13th Long Count and fifth Creation cycle, both of which will end the day before the summer (in the southern hemisphere) solstice of 21 December 2012. The Maya had calculated that, on the next day, the Sun would line up between Earth and the Milky Way’s galactic core in a Galactic Alignment. The Sun would block the nourishing energy emanating from the black hole in the galactic core (which may or may not be Hawking radiation).

Not all Maya descendants share that same apocalyptic belief. The mythology is silent on whether the gods would perform yet another iteration of humans. As the Maya believed time to be cyclical, and the start of a new Long Count is traditionally well celebrated (much like how the modern world celebrates the New Year), many believe that life will continue beyond 20 December 2012, even if in a new environment.

Scientific insight
As accurate as Maya predictions were, the date of the Galactic Alignment was still off by a few years. The perfect transit was on 1998, on which nothing significant happened.

An abrupt cooling of Earth happened 5100 years ago, with which the start of the Long Count system coincides. It is likely that the event influenced the work of the Mayans; indeed, several other civilisations around the world have accounts of this event. The Mayans may have expected a similar abrupt climate change for 2012. This would be interesting considering that they could not have imagined humans' having an effect on the world’s climate, a conclusion with which the majority of scientific opinion agrees. However, it has been observed that the global warming phenomenon is gradual, and there does not seem to be a reason why a tipping point would be passed exactly on 21 December 2012.

The Mayans seem to prescribe a single date on which any number of disastrous events occur. As would go for any random event, they would happen with equal chance on any point in time. There is no scientific evidence of anything that would make bad things happen more likely on 21 December 2012.

Bibliography

• 2012 Apocalypse 2009, television program, Discovery Channel.
• 2012: The Final Prophecy 2009, National Geographic Channel.
• Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, wiki article, viewed 24 March 2011, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar>.
• Stephen Hawking and the Theory of Everything 2008, Discovery Channel.

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