Is Doomsday Really Upon Us?

It is hard to avoid the warnings that the Mayans, a Meso-American civilization that collapsed around 930 AD, predicted the end of the world for this December. But is this real?

Since the year 1000 there have been 422 documented predictions for the end of the world. 419 of these, through the end of 2011, seem to have failed, since the world is still here. Last year actually had three different dates that we were assured each was definitely, no question about it, kiss the ones you love goodbye, the end. This year also has had three such dates announced by various sources, May 27, December 12, and December 21. Of these, December 21 has gotten the most publicity because it allegedly was predicted by the Mayans. Given that they were not perceptive enough to avoid the collapse of their own civilization, it is hard to see why anyone would trust their predictions on such issues.

However, what the people spreading such predictions seem not to be aware of is that the Mayans made no such forecast. The Mayans, like their neighbors in Meso-America, had a unique calendar. It has long been recognized that hunting and gathering cultures tend to have calendars based on the Moon's phases. Agricultural peoples switch to a calendar based on the Sun, since seasons are important for raising crops. But the Mayans and their neighbors lived in a region where seasons ranged from hot and wet to very hot and rainy. They wound up basing their calendar on the motions of the third brightest object in the sky, Venus. To the Maya the name was Kukulcan. Instead of a year of 365 or so days, they had a 584 day period based on what astronomers call the synodic period of Venus, that is, the time Venus takes to return to the same position in our sky. A twenty day period was a uinal, and a 260 day period was a tzolkin. A baktun was 144,000 days.

Archaeologists working to translate Mayan dates into our calendar have had to create an algebraic formula to convert the various Mayan terms and periods. But... none of these are intended to indicate the end of the world. All the various cycles (including several not mentioned in order to preserve readers' sanity) come to a simultaneous end point every 5125 years (they started the current set of cycles back in the third millennium BC). Some, not all, archaeologists believe that the current cycles may end this year. But what happens then is not, according to Mayan belief, the end of the world. Instead a new set of gods take over as all the cycles continue rolling along. So the most that might happen is that we say farewell to Kukulcan, Chac, and the rest of the crowd, and welcome new gods that demand human sacrifices.

Despite this, we hear of threats of a new planet, Nibiru, rushing in from the depths of space to collide with Earth and end it all. Jupiter is 318 times the mass of the Earth, and so its gravity is far more likely to attract loose space junk (as seen a few years ago when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter). Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all make better targets than Earth, while our Moon, Venus, Mars, Mercury, and several moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are all nearly as good targets as Earth. Of course, if some cult leader were to predict a collision taking out Jupiter's moon Callisto, or a violent collision with Neptune, few outside the space program would care. But threaten Earth, and you suddenly have people lining up to buy your books and mystical objects of protection.

There is no Nibiru. That was the name in the Akkadian language, spoken around Babylon a few thousand years ago, for the planet we call Jupiter. Nor is there a rogue star or brown dwarf invading the Solar System. The closest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 26,000,000,000,000 miles from us (which should go a long way towards explaining why astronomers use lightyears for distances rather than miles). The closest brown dwarf is catalogued as WISE 1541-2250, and it is just under ten lightyears away in the constellation of Lyra.

But so long as the public's scientific education is lacking, scam artists can invent fake celestial events and objects, and make money selling their nonsense.