2012: Six End-of-the-World Myths Debunked

But could humankind absolutely accommodated its end in 2012—drowned in apocalyptic floods, walloped by a abstruse planet, seared by an affronted sun, or befuddled abdicate by dispatch continents?

And did the age-old Maya—whose authority ailing amid A.D. 250 and 900 in what is now Mexico and Central America—really adumbrate the end of the apple in 2012?

At atomic one aspect of the 2012, end-of-the-world advertising is, for some people, all too real: the fear.

NASA's Ask an Astrobiologist Web site, for example, has accustomed bags of questions apropos the 2012 doomsday predictions—some of them disturbing, according to David Morrison, chief scientist with the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

"A lot of [the submitters] are humans who are absolutely frightened," Morrison said.

"I've had two teenagers who were because killing themselves, because they didn't wish to be about if the apple ends," he said. "Two women in the endure two weeks said they were advertent killing their accouchement and themselves so they wouldn't accept to ache through the end of the world."

(Related gallery: "Apocalypse Pictures—Ten Failed Doomsday Prophecies.")

Fortunately, with the advice of scientists like Morrison, a lot of of the predicted 2012 cataclysms are calmly explained away.

2012 MYTH 1

Maya Predicted End of the Apple in 2012

The Maya agenda doesn't end in 2012, as some accept said, and the ancients never beheld that year as the time of the end of the world, archaeologists say.

But December 21, 2012, (give or yield a day) was nonetheless momentous to the Maya.

"It's the time if the better admirable aeon in the Mayan calendar—1,872,000 canicule or 5,125.37 years—overturns and a new aeon begins," said Anthony Aveni, a Maya able and archaeoastronomer at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.

The Maya kept time on a calibration few added cultures accept considered.

During the empire's heyday, the Maya invented the Long Count—a diffuse annular agenda that "transplanted the roots of Maya ability all the way aback to conception itself," Aveni said.

During the 2012 winter solstice, time runs out on the accepted era of the Long Count calendar, which began at what the Maya saw as the aurora of the endure conception period: August 11, 3114 B.C. The Maya wrote that date, which preceded their acculturation by bags of years, as Day Zero, or 13.0.0.0.0.

In December 2012 the diffuse era ends and the complicated, alternate agenda will aeon over afresh to Day Zero, alpha addition astronomic cycle.

"The abstraction is that time gets renewed, that the apple gets renewed all over again—often afterwards a aeon of stress—the aforementioned way we renew time on New Year's Day or even on Monday morning," said Aveni, columnist of The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012.

I will be posting the other myths in the next few posts