(note not sure when that was originally posted so do not get too hung up on the July 28, 2013 date)
I presume most here are aware of the apocalypse that some say is predicted by the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar which ends in December of this year.
I will also assume we do not need to debunk the apocalypse stuff here. Just curious if any whacko spouts end of world stuff based on this I can rightfully tell them the date actually already came and went and they missed it.
I do not know about the Mayans’ calendar so I will not talk about that but the reason we have leap years as we do in the Gregorian calendar is that the time it takes he earth to orbit around the sun is slightly more than 365 days. You could just as well say that if we did insert leap days periodically the “actual” date would be before the calendar date.
I thought I read that the date given in the Mayan calander corresponds to sometime in December of this year. Not that it means anything- everyone knows the world will end in 2030.
First, as has been stated, the Mayans didn’t say “Dec, 2012”. They said “this many days from now.” People then counted that many days out and arrived at our current doomsday date.
Second, I really hate it when people act like leap days are illegitimate. They’re an error-correcting measure, not an error-inducing one.
As a general rule, take any bit of “common knowledge” that the “ancients” knew some field of science “better than we do today” with a huge grain of salt.
Aside from stuff like day-to-day knowlege of their own, now-extinct cultures, I can’t think of a single case where that’s actually true, even though it’s a common trope.
What the ancient Mayans knew was sales and marketing technique.
That graven stone calendar was designed to end after a limited period of time as a deliberate act of planned obsolescence, so that everybody (well, all the priests anyway) would have to run out and buy new ones every so often.
At least their calendars lasted many many earth-years at a time, as opposed to the ones that we supposedly “advanced” civilisations use, which usually only last a year at a time. This was due to the relatively higher production cost of hand-carving each calendar on a slab of stone, in contrast to our “advanced” sales and marketing technique of making things more and more obsolescent after shorter and shorter periods of time.
I remember poor Harold Camping, in his end-of-the-world calculations. He (properly) took leap days into account…and any number of people calling in to his radio talk show chastised him for it. They also thought he blundered by accepting the missing days involved in the conversion from Julian to Gregorian calendars.
There is a guy on the History Channel on a show called Ancient Aliens (not sure of what his name is, but he’s the guy with wild hair and crazy, googly eyes :p) that says something like (to paraphrase): The Mayan calendar was nearly as accurate as a modern day atomic clock! (it’s hilarious if you haven’t seen the show).
It’s total bullshit. Neither their calendar nor their astronomy is within light years of modern standards (not even ‘modern’ as in the last few centuries). Their calendar was superior to some other, earlier civilizations (IIRC, the Arabic calendar was as accurate, however, as was their astronomy), but it’s a ridiculous claim if you really think about it.
Makes a great saying though, and a really hilarious sound bite on a show like Ancient Aliens.
According to this Cracked.com article the whole ‘end-of-the-world’ thing was never even believed by the Mayans. It was just the end of a long cycle with a new one starting after it.
As far as the accuracy of any predictions of ‘the wise ole timey peoples’ remember that they also held down innocents and hacked out their beating hearts because, ah, um, er, ya know, they had to! Kinda makes you understand why the Catholic Spaniards forceably ended such practices and destroyed all their texts…
The mayan calender is still one of the most accurate calendars EVER. right up there with the atomic clock. on december 21st there will be a once in 26,000 year alignment with the earth, sun, and the center of the milky way( a starless, empty, one light year across space) The mayan calendar says a year = 365.2422 days and the atomic calendar says it = 365.2420 days.But the atomic clock keepers admit that in the fourth decimal it is plus or minus 4… So yes, they accounted for leap year!
The mayan calender is still one of the most accurate calendars EVER. right up there with the atomic clock. on december 21st there will be a once in 26,000 year alignment with the earth, sun, and the center of the milky way( a starless, empty, one light year across space) The mayan calendar says a year = 365.2422 days and the atomic calendar says it = 365.2420 days.But the atomic clock keepers admit that in the fourth decimal it is plus or minus 4… So yes, they accounted for leap year!
You guys should watch Ancient Aliens (Season 4 Episode 2 specifically)!
This is so wrong it’s punching holes in my brain to try and make me dumb enough to accept it.
A calendar is a notation system. It’s ultimately just marks on stone or paper or a screen. It cannot possibly be compared to an atomic clock, which is an actual mechanism, in any way that makes any sense. You might as well say “Banana banana banana coconut bream on my thighs fig newton.”
Yes, that was my mental response too. Although, on reflection, there is a sense in which a calendar system can run slow or fast, and thus be judged for accuracy: presumably, the months within it are supposed to correspond to seasons in a way that doesn’t drift all around the place (and, depending on the design, there may also be claims implicit in the calendar system about lunar periods, etc.). But it’s not really a matter of accurate metronoming, like an atomic clock; more a matter of accurate astronomy (and translating the inconvenient bits of that astronomy [e.g., the non-integer year/day duration ratio] into a convenient enough notation system).
There is a “new” Mayan calendar that goes out to 3500 so forget 2012. Of course, that’s beyond when the intergalactic highway comes through making the whole issue moot.
