The Mayan Calendar

I can’t help myself.  I have to stick my own two cents in on the whole Mayan calendar thing, as if there aren’t enough people already yakking about it.

To begin, there are all sorts of opinions about what’s supposed to happen and December 21, 2012.  Everything from the end of the world to the sudden enlightenment of the human species.  So, what can we derive from that?  Nothing, really, other than the idea that something will happen, which of course is what happens every day.

Still, those Mayans were pretty smart folks, so the fact that their calendar ends on that day has to mean something, doesn’t it?  Of course it does.  But, maybe it is only as significant as the end of our own calendar, and on January 1, we start a whole new one.  But, the Mayan calendar is over 5,000 years old, so it seems that the ending of this particular calendar should be way more significant than the ending of a calendar that has only lasted a year.

This kind of reasoning is what prompted me to do a little looking around on the internet to find out what I could about the Mayan calendar.  It turns out it really is significant, if you happen to believe, as the Mayans did, that this is actually the third world that the gods created.  The first two failed.  The significance, apparently, of December 21, 2012 is that if this world lasts until that day, we will have outlasted the last failed world.

So, nobody really knows whether December 21, 2012 will be the end of the world, or perhaps the beginning of human enlightenment.  I’m somewhat cynical, and so my own belief is that the human species will come to believe themselves enlightened, and thus precipitate the end of the world or at least the end of the world as we know it.