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Remember the end of the world excitement when we reached the year 2000 or on May 5 2005, when the planets were supposedly in the right position to trigger the chain reaction of doom? Well nothing happened we are still here browsing Dreevoo.com. The famously progressive and much talked about, yet relatively short-lived Mayan civilization, located between the north and south America was present between the year 250 and 900.
At their peak, then Mayan's were the first civilization in America having their own written language, densely populated cities and were extraordinary mathematicians, astronomers and had their own perception of how the calendars should look like. Their astronomic calculations and estimations were far superior to those known from the antic Greece. And knowing this interesting facts we can now move on to the ever so famous Mayan calender which supposedly predicts the end of the world as we know for at the lest days of 2012.
Mayans had a number of calenders, their perception of time was based on spiritual cycles. The Georgian, western calender was created and intended for social, administrative and business purpose, the Mayans on the other hand added the spiritual elements. To put this more into perspective - a certain day was excellent for traveling but bad for doing business.
One of such Mayan calenders was a so called Long Count calendar. It was created in the year 355 and the base was a scheme that consisted of 5 places for numbers. Its starting date looked like this: 0.0.0.0.0, which is equal to August 11, 3114 b.c. The December 21, 2012 (alleged end of the world date) would be 13.0.0.0.0. Pretty interesting right?
Our counting system is a so called base-10 scheme, meaning we count in 10s (0,1,2,3,...,10, 11,12,...,20,...) the Mayans on the other hand chose the base-20 counting scheme (0 to 19). Their calendar was read as a mileage counter in a car, 0 to 9 in our and 0 to 19 in Mayan's case. The right most digit was used to count days and at the end of the 19th day, the counter was set back to 0. Meaning the 0.0.0.0.19 would the next day turning into 0.0.0.1.0.
To explain a bit further, 0.0.0.0.1 represented 1 day, 0.0.0.1.0 twenty days, 0.0.1.0.0 about a year, 0.1.0.0.0 twenty years and 1.0.0.0.0 about 400 years. Like said before, the December 21 2012 according to Mayan Long Count calendar would be 13.0.0.0.0, which is approximately 5126 year long period since when the Mayans started counting using their calendar. Some archeologists mean that the Mayan calendar should be reset to back to 0 but the rest don't find this to be a good idea at all and share the same thoughts of continue with the count until it reaches its end number 19.19.19.19.19 and the reset it to zero.
Unfortunately we don't posses enough information to prove indisputably who's in right and who's not, but in the case of the Mayan base-20 scheme the end of the world theory face plants, at least regarding the year 2012. But let's take theory that's defending the base-13 scheme (the calendar resets with the number 13). On December 21 2012, all sorts of events, like atomic holocaust, cosmic forces destroying two thirds of whole humankind, the earth flipping and changing the positions of north and south pole... All this predictions are without a doubt a great cue for another spectacular apocalyptic motion picture but when face wit the real world all sorts of issues and questions arise.
The first issue is the end of the calendar year. When we look at our western version, the December 31 is the end of a year and the next day is the beginning of another. The same goes for the Mayan calender, when the number 12.12.12.12.12 (base-13 theory) is reached, it won't then go into 13.0.0.0.0 but it will start with the 0.0.0.0.0 all over again or in our case to December 22, so you will still have time for your Christmas shopping. The second thing, the more so obvious one, is the idea of telling the future which is still considered to be impossible or at least very difficult to predict the events which didn't happen yet. What can we pull out of all this at the end? End of the world will come someday, if not this month then maybe in 1000 or million years from now, regardless the fact, try and enjoy the single day like it's your last, I know it sounds corny and old, but it's sounds like a mighty good idea to me.
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