It appears to be astronomy related.
They ran out of ink.
Grammar police! Please come quick!
or maybe we need the time-machine folks?
The calendar ended on that date. The world di
If the username for this post was Siam Sam I would be more concerned… You know, International Date Line and all.
It is only a misdemeanor.
(1) The Mayans ran out of room on the rock where the carving is located.
(2) The stone carvers got tired.
(3) The Mayans were sacrificing people right and left to end the drought, and finally ran out of folks and only the carvers were left.
(4) They added the biggest number they knew to their present date, and figured nothing went any higher than that number.
(5) It was a government contract, and the lowest bidder had to cut corners to make the calendar with the amount of money he got.
~VOW
Isn’t it just a matter of running out of cycles? Their calendar was cyclic, and after a while, there simply weren’t any more years, rounds, great rounds, or whatever. It’s like someone using a Jewish, Islamic, or Chinese calendar asking why the west paid such attention to “A.D. 2000.” It’s just a number, right?
Wikipedia’s got your answer right here.
Nothing’s ending. It’s just rolling over to the next digit. It’s basically the Y2K of ancient Mayan civilization (minus the fact that there were actual systems that broke on Y2K, and probably more that would have if we hadn’t made a big effort to fix them). At some point in any numbering system you run out of numbers that are n digits long, and you have to go up to n+1 digit numbers. That’s all that’s happening here.
Exactly; the Wikipedia link even says that they have units of time as long as 63 million years - so it won’t completely roll over for at least that length of time, and if you assume that there are 20 Alautun like most of the other units, then that becomes 1.26 billion years, which incidentally, is about how long we have until the Earth gets cooked by the Sun over its stellar evolution:
So in a way, the end of the Mayan calendar really is the end of the world (ignoring the time until the Sun swallows the Earth)!
Ulysses, Ithaca
Leopold Bloom, Everyman, is in mid-air, having hopped over the railing to the front door of his house, because he forgot his key. As his universal and holy day comes to an end, the questions are catechistic. And he has a scientific, as opposed to artistic temperament (although he has a touch of the latter):
Did he fall?
By his body’s known weight of eleven stone and four pounds in avoirdupois measure, as certified by the graduated machine for periodical selfweighing in the premises of Francis Froedman, pharmaceutical chemist of 19 Frederick street, north, on the last feast of the Ascension, to wit, the twelfth day of May of the bissextile year one thousand nine hundred and four of the christian era (jewish era five thousand six hundred and sixtyfour, mohammadan era one thousand three hundred and twentytwo), golden number 5, epact 13, solar cycle 9, dominical letters C B, Roman indication 2, Julian period 6617, MXMIV.
In addition to the archeologist wrongly assuming that the end of a calendar equals the end of the world (“OMG! There are no days after December 31st on this calendar… it must be an accurate prediction of the end of the world on that day!!!”), he thought that their description of the spectacular events surrounding that day is of an apocalyptic nature, when it was just references to one hell of a New Year’s (New Baktun’s) party!
No. It’s even less astronomy related than the Gregorian calendar ending every December 31st, which is at least an annual occurrence.
I just want it be on record that at least one person got your joke.
Fuck 'em, my life stinks, I hope they were right 
The Long Count calendar (which is the one people are talking about) isn’t astronomy related at all, actually. It’s simply a count of days from a particular epoch, believed to be August 11, 3114 BCE according to the Gregorian calendar. It’s conceptually similar to the Julian Day Count used by astronomers.
The Mayans had a different calendar to keep track of year-ish events they called the Haab’, which has exactly 365 days a year. (The Mayans were well-aware that this calendar “slipped”, BTW.) It’s also not astronomy-related.
They do have the Tun, equivalent to 360 days or about a year, so that can be considered to be their equivalent of a year (ETA - see Blakeyrat’s post, but that is a different calendar). What’s ending tomorrow is the B’ak’tun, equivalent to about 394 years, but that in turn is only 1/20th of a Piktun (7,885 years, and we are only near the middle of one), and so on to the Alautun (63 million years, which as previously stated, 20 of these, as with most of the other units, would be enough for the entire future of life on Earth).
What was amazing to me is how they kept track three entirely separate and independent calendar systems, none of which on its own could accurately measure a year.
But by correlating dates between all three systems, they could pinpoint when years began more accurately than the Gregorian calendar (as it was defined, not the current refined version). Plus it has a 5-day vacation built-in, which is awesome!
When recording dates for posterity, they usually recorded at least two of the three (always including the Long Count), and sometimes all three, which is how archaeologists have been able to work-out the system.
EDIT: also prominent Mayans were often named based on their date of birth in the ceremonial calendar. Which is why one of their most famous leaders is named “18-rabbit”.
The sun’s December solstice position in Sagittarius is crossing through the galactic equator in the sun’s 230 million year orbit around the galactic center? That’s something I’d like to know more about. I don’t know how many thousands of years it takes for the sun to cross the galactic plane. But currently it seems to be aligned with the December solstice. The connection to the Mayan calendar is supposedly that the Mayan astronomers set this date because of the solstice passing through the Xibalba Be, the dark streak of dust down the middle of the galactic arm—but that seems quite farfetched to me. One problem is that the galactic plane cannot be precisely drawn because the dimensions of the galaxy are not known exactly. Also, what estimates there are of the galactic plane’s position, the solstice would have precessed there in 1998 instead of 2012. The whole idea sounds awfully sketchy.