2^10 = 1024
2^11 = 2048
You missed the digital millennium by nearly 1,000 years. I wonder what kind of OS they were using back in 1024 A.D.? 
Probably a flavor of Unix.
ETA: in the West. Elsewhere they were using a flavor of Eunuchs.
There are going to be two lunar eclipses in 2012, on June 4 and November 28.
Lunar eclipses have nothing whatsoever to do with the Milky Way, other than the fact that the Sun, Earth, and Moon are all part of the Milky Way. Nor do eclipses have anything to do with the equinox.
Wasn’t this supposed to happen on May 5, 2000, due to the planetary alignment? That was supposed to start an ice age, too. As far as I can tell, it didn’t.
Show me some evidence that the Maya calendar was used to predict either the Classic Maya collapse or the collapse in population of the Americas due to disease after Spanish and other explorers arrived, and I’ll be a lot more impressed with its ability to predict apocalypses. Yes, the Maya calendar will go into another baktun in 2012, but why should that cause an apocalypse, when previous such turnovers didn’t? The last one before this happened about 394 years before 2012. Where was the kaboom in 1618 or so? Or at the one before that in approximately 1224?
I think part of the problem is that people are more socially isolated yet also have greater access to more information. You have these tracts of housing in the suburbs where both adults come home at night from work and probably never see their neighbors. They turn on the news or surf the internet and it’s nothing but stories about crime and war and molesters and whatnot. Their kids aren’t allowed outside to play because the parents are worried about kidnappings. I mean no one is worried about their kid becoming morbidly obese and developing diabetes or something.
And the 2012 thing is just idiotic. Anyone who predicts the “end of the world” without providing the specific mechanism as to how the world will end is full of shit.
We don’t even know what, if anything, the Maya thought would happen at the end of one baktun and the transition to another. Maybe it was just time to party, like New Year’s is for us.
The Aztecs did believe in a cycle of time with the world being in danger in the transition from one cycle to another, but the Aztecs and the Maya are not the same people, and the Aztec calendar cycle wasn’t the same thing as the Maya Long Count. The Aztec cycle had the world in danger every 52 years.
2038 is too far away. It seems that for an effective scaremongering end of the world date it needs to be 10-20 years away. (I’m assuming 2012 date came around after the world didn’t end in 2000 or in 1999…so 12-13 years)
In case anyone cares to waste their time watching the very same show that made me wonder why some people are so dead set on the worlds end.
It’s in segments, so…have fun.
http://www.history.com/video.do?name=armageddon&bcpid=3887230001&bctid=6072321001
Well, knowing me, I’ll be writing the old baktun on all my checks for months afterward.
They never stated that the Mayan calender was going to be the cause of any Armageddon, they used the Mayan calender as a supposed conformation that they too predicted the end of the world in 2012 as Nostradamus supposedly has.
I believe if you really thought about everything that has gone on, you’d conclude that the present age is one of the least chaotic in the past few centuries. I’m struggling to prove it, though.
That’s part of it, but it forms a feedback loop with the tendency of humans to be notoriously self-absorbed. We all believe, to some degree or another, that right now is really important. There’s no rational reason to believe that this particular moment is any more significant than any other moment; in the grand cosmological scheme, even (hypothetically speaking) a revolutionary cure for cancer on a backwater planet, while life-altering for its species, would be pretty small dust in the large sense. And yet, people persistently believe that the current generation is, or will be, witness to some grand sea change, some massive epiphany, even though an objective read of history shows (1) a very slow march of technological progress and (2) an even slower advance in human rights and collective conscience, overlaid on (3) more or less the same piles of stupid bullshit as have always plagued us. Combine our habitually egotistical navel-gazing with the modern firehose of data from which to cherry-pick the nuggets we desire, and the natural result is a cascade of entertainingly diverting paranoia.
But how does that work if you don’t have any evidence that the Maya thought that the end of this baktun would signal the end of the world? You have two statements here:
- Nostradamus predicted the end of the world in 2012.
- The Maya calendar goes into a new large unit of time in 2012.
2 doesn’t really support 1 unless you assume that the Maya had some belief that the world would end or was likely to end at the end of a baktun.
Probably because they weren’t there for the earlier periods, and they may have gotten an idealized view of them from others. The idea of some past “Golden Age” is very common in world mythology. You find it in Greek and Indian mythology, as well as an amusing story I read in Beyond the Blue Horizon (excellent book on sky myths, btw) attributed to Chinese mythology: supposedly, some ancient Chinese astronomers attributed solar and lunar eclipses to modern moral decay.
Well
Thats certainly better than our current every 4 or 8 years 
Quote:
Why do people believe the world to be worse off than anytime in human history? This is not from just the religious but from environmentalist to humanitarians.
They haven’t spent much time without indoor plumbing and toilet paper. I tell you, indoor plumbing is da bomb. Anyone who thinks the time before indoor plumbing and toilet paper was better just hasn’t thought things through.
Vaccines and antibiotics are cool, too. Those lead to family cemetary plots that don’t have more children than adults in them. I approve of that change.
I’m sure someone will come up with something. People have a really good track record of coming up with doomsday prophecies.
I suppose if we want a new “end of the world” date after 2012, we could go with the next end of the cycle in the Aztec calendar in 2027 (the last New Fire ceremony marking the beginning of a new cycle was in 1507).
I think this is an interesting development (at least in the burbs of America) that I have personally noticed since the early 1970’s. Being a military brat, I moved around to a lot of different places, and as time wore on, people DID in fact seem to become more and more isolated fron one another. We always used to know our neighbors when I was younger, would leave them a key to the house when we went on vacation, etc. That general “neighborly” feeling seemed to start drying up in the 1980’s and early 1990’s until now.
I recently lived in a more rural area and this phenomenon is not as pronounced (which may also be a function of people generally having less to do and being nosy!), and now I’ve moved back to the burbs as of last year, bought a house and I haven’t said two words to my neighbors other than the obligatory head nod or wave from the car.
I’m sure it’s not like this everywhere but there is certainly something to this, and the age of immediate mass information certainly must skew people’s perceptions about how dangerous their world really is (or isn’t).
Personally I would say that some things are getting better and other things are getting worse. It is delusional to believe that everything is getting worse, but equally so to believe that everything is getting better. Twenty years ago Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History in which he argued that it was going to be all peace, freedom, and democracy from here on out, more or less. Such beliefs are wrong nad moreover, they are inherently dangerous since they may lead us to turn a blind eye to the world’s problems.
In reality things are always in flux, with some aspects of life going up and others going down at any given moment. It is true that certain rights are much more common now than they were in earlier centuries. On the flip side, other rights are less common. For instance, 500 years ago each English serf had a plot of land that was guaranteed, which they could not possibly be removed from. No such right exists any more, as numerous foreclosure signs can attest to.
Ultimately the last 25-odd years have been a good time for humanity, with vast increases in prosperity, and numerous countries all over the world switching from dictatorship to democracy. However, modern times as a whole have not been marked by constant forward progress. I opine that the period from roughly 1914 to 1975 was the worst part of human history, what with two world wars, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, The Nazis, the Soviets, Red China, chemical warfare, nuclear warfare, the Vietnam war, and a great deal else. So what will the next few generations bring? Wait and see.
I’d say that we’re definitely at least in Hades right now, if not Tartarus, but not quite at the Abyss yet.
Whaddaya mean “become” ? It’s been that way from the get go.
I like to watch apocalyptic movies (particularly zombie movies). Some people wish they were living in one. Everyone has their hobbies.