Hello everyone!!! Well I just wanted to share with you some news about the end of the world
Well as you may know, Im from Guatemala (where the thing is going to happen) and I just want to be a good ambassador of my country and share with you,
its not the end of world.
I found some articles at BBC News I consider interesting and true. I hope you can read them before the day ends.
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The 2012 phenomenon is essentially an accounting problem; a misinterpretation of some very ancient book keeping.
It is based on the Maya calendar, which counts the days since a date in the mythical past. This count reset after the last creation (on or about 11 August, 3114BC). On 21 December, we will reach that same number of days once again, and many now are concerned that a calendrical reset the following day will mean the end of the world.
But it is not even clear that the Maya themselves agreed on this book-keeping issue. Two ancient inscriptions emphasise the importance of the date. But a third focuses on 13 October 4772, the end of an even bigger cycle that cannot happen if a reset occurs in 2012.
This more detailed text predicts that, at an even later date, the great king K'inich Janaab' Pakal will return to Palenque to rule. If this Maya prophesy is true, then the world will not end in 2012 or even 4772, no matter how the ancient calendar functioned.
Mayan apocalypse: End of the world, or a new beginning?
The "Long Count" cycle of the Mayan calendar began in 3114 BCE and is widely accepted to end on 21/12/12 CE.
Except that in Simon Martin's view, everyone has got it wrong.Martin is curator of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia's "Maya 2012" exhibition. He says the calendar is complex, and best thought of as a series of gear wheels.
He points out that there is an inscription describing an event that takes place in 4,722 of our era, "and that is the turning of an even bigger cycle".
In 3114 BCE the calendar reset to zero with the turning of the 13th bak'tun (which is a smaller, 400 year cycle). This time, however, it does not reset to zero but merely goes on to the 14th bak'tun.
The Mayan Calendar is a weird and wonderful thing.
Mayan ruins
The Mayan ruins of Tikal are hidden deep in the rainforests of Guatemala. From the air only a handful of temples and palaces peek through the canopy. The stone carvings are weather-beaten. Huge plazas are covered in moss and giant reservoirs are engulfed by jungle. The only inhabitants are wild animals and birds.
But 1,200 years ago, Tikal was one of the major cities of the vast and magnificent Maya civilisation that stretched across much of what is now southern Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. Tikal was home to perhaps 100,000 people. Thatched farmsteads and fields would have stretched as far as the eye could see.
The Maya thrived for nearly 2,000 years. Without the use of the cartwheel or metal tools, they built massive stone structures. They were accomplished scientists. They tracked a solar year of 365 days and one of the few surviving ancient Maya books contains tables of eclipses. From observatories, like the one at Chichen Itza, they tracked the progress of the war star, Venus.
They developed their own mathematics, using a base number of 20, and had a concept of zero. They also had their own system of writing. Their civilisation was so stable and established, they even had a word for a 400-year time period.
Mayan society was vibrant, but it could also be brutal. It was strictly hierarchical and deeply spiritual. Humans were sacrificed to appease the gods. The elite also tortured themselves - male Maya rulers perforated the foreskins of their penises and the women their tongues, apparently in the hope of providing nourishment for the gods who required human blood.
In the ninth century, the Maya world was turned upside down. Many of the great centres like Tikal were deserted. The sacred temples and palaces briefly became home to a few squatters, who left household rubbish in the once pristine buildings. When they too left, Tikal was abandoned forever, and the Mayan civilisation never recovered. Only a fraction of the Maya people survived to face the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century.
For decades, archaeologists have been searching for an explanation of the Maya collapse. Many theories have been put forward, ranging from warfare and invasion to migration, disease and over-farming. Many think the truth may lie with a combination of these and other factors.
But none of the conventional theories were good enough for Dick Gill. He believed that what had devastated the Maya was drought. However, drought as the only explanation of the Maya collapse was highly controversial.
Pictures of Tikal
source: BBC News
But yeah, some of the people who wrote 2012 doomsday books have been lying low for awhile now, ever since it was perfectly clear that none of their predictions leading up to 'the end' were coming true ...
