Quote Originally Posted by Draigess View Post
Or worse yet... If the world or life as we know it happens to end in 3 years.. You just never know..
So eat, drink, breed, and be MERRY!!!
Mesoamerican Long Count calendar

December 2012 marks the ending of the current baktun cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. The Long Count set its "time zero" at a point in the past marking the end of the previous world and the beginning of the current one, which corresponds to either 11 or 13 August 3114 BC in the Gregorian calendar, depending on the formula used.[4]

The Long Count kept time roughly in units of 20, so 20 days made a uinal, 18 uinals, or 360 days, made a tun, 20 tuns made a katun, and 20 katuns, or 144,000 days, made up a baktun. After 13 baktuns, according to various inscriptions,[5] the baktun place resets and the count moves to a higher order.[6] So, for example, the Mayan date of 8.3.2.10.15 represents 8 baktuns, 3 katuns, 2 tuns, 10 uinals and 15 days since creation. Today, the most widely accepted correlations of the end of the thirteenth baktun, or Mayan date 13.0.0.0.0, with the Western calendar are either December 21 or December 23, 2012.[7] Even before the dating issue was settled, the early Mayanist and astronomer Maud Worcester Makemson had written in 1957 that "[t]he completion of a Great Period of 13 baktuns would have been of the utmost significance to the Maya".[8] After the correct date was determined, the anthropologist Munro S. Edmonson added that "there appears to be a strong likelihood that the eral calendar, like the year calendar, was motivated by a long-range astronomical prediction, one that made a correct solsticial forecast 2,367 years into the future in 355 B.C. [sic]".[9]

In 1966, Michael D. Coe more ambitiously claimed in The Maya that "[t]here is a suggestion . . . that Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final day of the thirteenth [baktun]. Thus ... our present universe ... [would] be annihilated on December 23, 2012, when the Great Cycle of the Long Count reaches completion."[10] These apocalyptic connotations were accepted by other scholars through the early 1990s.[11] But more recent academic scholars have specifically disputed the apocalyptic interpretation of the Long Count calendar end-date, saying instead that it would be a cause for celebration but that the cycle would continue uninterrupted by any cataclysmic event.[2]

These scholars argue that the Long Count does not end on 13.0.0.0.0.[12] In their seminal work of 1990, the Maya scholars Linda Schele and David Freidel, who reference Edmonson, argue that the Maya "did not conceive this to be the end of creation, as many have suggested."[13] They cite Mayan predictions of events to occur after the end of the 13th baktun, and note that creation date was inscribed at Coba as 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.0.0.0.0, with twenty units above the katun. According to Schele and Friedel, these 13s should be treated as 0s, so the Coba number would be read as if it were 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0, with the units of each column beyond the second (counting from right to left) equal to 20 times those of the previous one. This number represented "the starting point of a huge odometer of time". Schele and Freidel calculate that the date at which this odometer would run out lies some 4.134105 × 1028 years in the future, or 3 quintillion times the scientifically accepted age of the universe.
Don't be scared. just go outside and try and figure out if you can see the planets.