Will the end of the world be on December 12, 2012?

I don't think so though I've heard some people say that if Sarah Palin wins the presidential election that year, it will.

The Mayan calendar was only calculated until December 21, 2012. Conspiracy theorists are delighted about it. The same people who stored bottles of water and bought generators in anticipation of Y2K, the millennium are just as excited about the idea of the world ending in 2012 as they were about a world wide blackout and chaos in 2000.

The Mayans developed a 5,126 year calendar cycle. The Mayans were rather clever but not clever enough to predict the end of their own civilization which disappeared sometime around the year 900. But the Mayans weren't predicting the end of their own civilization, much less the end of the universe. They were ingenious when it came to astronomy and they were proficient in preparing their calendar to account for centuries to come. If the Mayans had accurately predicted the end of the world, it is much more likely they would have predicted what to them would have been the end of the world, their world, the Mayans, which disappeared around 1100 years ago.

If Microsoft had been as far thinking as the Mayan scholars, it would have prepared its computers for a calendar year beginning with a 2. It wouldn't have been that hard. They were still building computers in 1995 that weren't programmed in anticipation of the year 2000. That they weren't thinking five years ahead doesn't mean they weren't capable of doing so, it simply illustrates that in our consumer driven society, it was expected that computers would be obsolete in three years.

According to some Doomsday theorists, there will be solar storms that will trigger volcanoes. Since there are solar storms in almost any given year, it's likely that there will be solar storms in 2012. Solar storms occur in 11 year cycles. Sometimes they cause brief power outages. Since there are 50-60 volcano eruptions every year, it is likely that there will indeed by volcano eruptions in 2012. If there were no volcano eruptions in a year, that would indeed be remarkable.

Some doomsayers predict that there will be a reversal of poles that will make the Earth spin in the opposite direction. There is geological evidence that shows that polar reversals have occurred in the Earth's history. But polar reversals don't happen in a year or even ten years. Polar reversals occur over a span of about a thousand years or more. The reigning theory on polar reversals is that the inner molten core of the earth's chaotic motion changes through time which causes the poles to reverse.

Scholars who have made the Mayan civilization their life's work dispute the claims that the world will end in 2012. Scientists dismiss the 2012 doomsday conspiracy theories with facts. But seemingly ordinary people completely dismiss scientific evidence and cultural knowledge of the Mayans in favor of a doomsday scenario.

So the question then becomes, what is it about disaster, catastrophe and doom that so fascinate people who are otherwise rational people? I suspect that it is derived from the apparent human desire for drama and excitement. Humans love a mystery. The Mayans are mysterious because their civilization was so advanced. It's often hard for people to put people from ancient civilizations into any real context. The people who lived 2000 years ago had the same brain capacity that we have and they did remarkable things. They built pyramids. Even 200 years ago people built magnificent bridges and dams while today it is easy to think of the crumbling infrastructure of our country and be unable to conceive of how such engineering can be replaced. We built canals and railroads without the aid of computers and those remarkable feats seem long ago in a dim and mysterious past already. In a thousand years, our descendants will deem it remarkable that we built skyscrapers and roads with the limited technology we have.

Yes, the Mayan civilization was remarkable. They were clever enough to create a 5000 year calendar. Our own civilization has been remarkable too. The ancient Egyptians were remarkable too. They built pyramids. Ancient people in Britain created Stonehenge, managing to move tons of rocks and manipulate them into a circle without the aid of cranes and trucks. The Roman empire was remarkable too. To date, none of the great civilizations have been able to predict the end of our own civilizations, much less the end of the world. The Mayans had to stop somewhere in their calendar calculation. That it happens to be in 2012 means they felt comfortable enough about their own civilization to predict that their descendants, 5000 years later, would be able to continue their calculations. They had to stop somewhere. Even if one brilliant Mayan mathematician and astronomer spent his or her whole life calculating a calendar, it would have ended sometime.