The end might not be quite so nigh, after all.
Earlier this month, UC Santa Barbara scholar Gerardo Aldana published research that calls into question the formula that’s long been used to establish 2012 as the last date of the current 5,125-year cycle (there are five total) on the Mayan calendar.
Aldana says Dec. 21, 2012 — what’s become known in popular culture as “the Mayan end date” — may be as many as 100 years off from the date the Mayans suggested when they etched their remarkably accurate astronomical calculations and predictions into rock more than 1,000 years ago.
That’s good news for those of us planning to enjoy President Barack Obama‘s second term (Mitt Romney‘s first?), the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and Jaden Smith‘s ascension to Hollywood sex symbol.
The research might come as a disappointment to the many doomsayers who stocked up on survival items and piled them into fallout shelters backhoed into backyard rose beds.
For years, real scientists have discounted rampant 2012 pseudoscience, such as speculation that the Earth will undergo a polar reversal (throwing nature out of whack) or get sucked into the black hole at the center of our galaxy. As 2012 hit theaters last November, NASA released a much emailed FAQ about the supposed end date, reassuring the Earth’s citizens that life will go on after 2012:
“Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after Dec. 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on Dec. 21, 2012.”
The FAQ goes on to confirm that an increase in solar activity is scheduled to occur around the Mayan end date, as some apocalypse predictors cite, but it won’t be anything like the end of days portrayed in another apocalypse movie released in 2009. Nothing like in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or Monsters Vs. Aliens, either.
Paul Blart: Mall Cop?
Yeah, 2013 will probably look something like that.
Photo via NASA.