[ARCHIVED THREAD] - December 21st, 2012 (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 12/26/2007 9:47:28 AM EDT
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Long ago, the ancient Mayan civilization created a calendar system which was, considering the age in which is was developed, remarkably accurate with respect to the actual orbit and rotation of the Earth. For an unknown reason, this calendar stopped after 13 "cycles", which when compared to the Gregorian calendar, indicates a final date of December 21st, 2012. And nobody has any idea why, if they created their calendar for thousands of years into the future, they decided to stop tracking the passage at this point. The Mayans are also known for amazing advances and development (compared to the age in which they lived) in writing, mathematics and astronomy. This leads some to speculate that the Mayans were aware of something happening at that point in time which would make further tracking of time meaningless. This has lead many to speculate December 21st, 2012 as being the date of the apocalypse or, as ARFCOM would call it, TEOTWAWKI. Given the state of the world today, what do you think is going to happen on December 21st, 2012? Poll inbound... _MaH |
Haven't you seen the X-Files?
The did track dates past 2012. |
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Nothing is going to happen--but wouldn't it be wild if one of these EOTW predictions actually came to fruition? Personally, I think it's going to be an asteroid that does in the human population. No whether or not one may blow us to bit in 2012 is open for discussion. |
+1. That reminds me of some people here in Utah who spent $30,000 on fully-stocked underground bunkers in the mountains to survive Y2K, then couldn't unload them for half the price on January 1, 2000. |
<Mayan Wife>"Jaguar Snot, you're always working on that damn calendar! My mom is expecting us to come over to her house this year for the solstice celebration, and you'd better be done with it by then! I don't care what the village Elders say, you're going this year!"</Mayan Wife> |
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Haven't any of you played Shadowrun? First we'll have megacorporations acting as their own governments. WalMart, I'm looking at you. Then the Indians will start some shit. Last week, didn't that actor guy from Last of the Mohicans decide the Lakota are now soverign? Less than five years from now magic will come back, dragons will awaken, and I'll be able to start getting cybernetic implants and become a street samurai. It'll be the best day ever. |
I'm saving up for a smartlink. 
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 I don't need to wait for 12/21/2012 for that to happen, it happened last week and has been happening since long before then! _MaH |
HA! Y2K. I remember it. I was playing counterstrike and didn't realize it had changed until Y2K + 10 minutes! 
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Haha I was playing Team Fortress Classic and didn't notice it was 2000 either. |
and ill be hooked into simsense :D |
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Am I going to have to explain this all over again? I think I’m going to have to sit down and write a well worded version of this so I can copy and paste whenever this comes up. But for now here’s a quickly written and poorly worded version. (All this was worked out assuming a geocentric universe, so I’m going to use their frame of reference to make things simple.) Calendars are based on the cycles of objects in the heavens. The sun moves across the sky every day. But, where does the “day” start and end? Our culture says it ends/begins when the sun is at its lowest point (midnight) but others have chosen either sunset or sunrise as the start and end of the day. It’s a cycle based on circular motions, and circles don’t have beginnings or ends. So you’ve got to pick one arbitrary point and call it the beginning/end of the cycle if you’re going to measure time by them. Months were originally based on the motion/phases of the moon. Years are based on the path the sun takes through the sky, lower in winter and higher in summer. This is what gives us our seasons. Like with a day, you can pick any part of the cycle and call it the beginning/end of the cycle. What you should have gotten from this so far is that calendars are based on the apparent motion of objects in the sky and that the start/end point of a cycle doesn’t have any cosmic significance, it’s just what we arbitrarily pick. There are smart people in every culture, even Neolithic ones. In many cultures, these smart people got bored with digging in thee dirt all day and came up with a plan to get out of work. They claimed that the motion of the stars could predict the future or were otherwise somehow significant. So, they got government funding to sit up all night charting the stars. And many of these scammers did some very good scientific work and made very accurate measurements. They worked out the motion of the stars in amazing detail. Our modern scammers/scientists have more accurate instruments and fun tools like calculus and the theory of gravity, so they understand things far better than the Mayans, Greeks, Babylonians, Ancient Chinese, Egyptians, etc. did. But considering the tools they had to work with the Mayans did a great job. The Mayans even detected another cycle called “the precession of the equinoxes.” This cycle is no mystery to us and hasn’t really been a mystery to the West since the ancient Greeks, but it still takes some careful observation to detect. It’s a 25,000 (or so) year long cycle of the constellations as they travel around the Earth (geocentric). The Mayans even built a calendar based on this cycle. They picked an arbitrary point in the cycle to be their beginning/end point based on their religion. By chance we start a new “year/age” on this calendar in 2012. But other than the significance in the Mayan religion, absolutely nothing happens because the date is completely insignificant. Someone here even claimed that the early Mayans worked this calendar out, then their culture started to decay. The early Mayans supposedly knew it was just another “new year.” As their civilization began to decay they started to attach end of the world myths to the date. That makes sense to me. |
Sounds like you know Bert Gummer: "Food for five years, a thousand gallons of gas, air filtration, water filtration, Geiger counter. Bomb shelter! Underground... God damn monsters." 
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