2012

[Reinhardt]

Y2K... scary shit, man!

[Templar_Ratigan]

Indeed.

Just because some civilization stopped writing a stupid calendar.. people are like it's the end of the world.

What if they had economic/cultural problems, thought that writing calendars forward is bullshit, or got bored of it and tried to enjoy life instead?

I mean, come on..

That's what I was getting at, the Mayan's technically still exist in South America, but that version of their culture is long since extinct, beyond a few odd fringe traditions.

[bagge]

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Slightly delayed. He'll return one day!

[zagibu]

So many good things to choose from.

Anyway, the central question involving the Mayan calendar is why did they even build a calendar that has such a long period? For some people, the answer is because they knew something would happen at this point in time. That this assumption doesn't make a lot of sense is obviously no problem for some.

I still like this whole thing, though, because it made some people learn about the Mayan culture in the first place, which is a very interesting piece of history/myth. E.g. they invented the wheel, but strangely enough, there is no single evidence of it ever being used in wagons. Historians think this is because they didn't have any fitting hauling animals.

[Malaclypse]

We break the novelty barrier and start over.

[Patoson]

The alien Maya are going to whipe us Spanish people from Earth for all the colonization during history sooner or later.

[Ginosaji]

The calendar doesn't end, lol, it is just the end of one cycle, like a year in our calendar.

This

[zagibu]

The calendar doesn't end, lol, it is just the end of one cycle, like a year in our calendar.

No, it's not like a year. A year tracks the earth's movement around the sun. What does the Mayan cycle track (probably nothing)? This is exactly the origin of the speculation, and you have completely missed it.

Actually, their end of the long cycle is more like a number overflow, like if we only used 4 digits to count years, so that the year after 9999 would turn back to 0000. Oh wait, we ARE actually doing this (at least on some devices). Maybe future cultures will also deduct doomsday prophecies concerning year 9999 because of some alarm clocks from the 20th century they found.

[[ptx]]

"Year" was a crappy comparison, i agree, whoever said "millenium" got it better.

[zagibu]

Still not good enough. Our calendar does not start at zero, when a millenium has passed.