It's the End of the World, Again

According to the press, the world will end in less than 24 hours.

This prediction is based on the way the Mayan calendar cycles. The Mayan equivalent of throwing out the yearly calendar to replace it with one filled with 12-months of kittens.

It’s hard not to find humor in such a prediction. People have been predicting the end of the world since the beginning of time. As the smartest creature on the planet, we love placing value in outlandish statements. This apocalyptic prophecy seems to carry more sway than previous predictions.

Nasa has received three-times the amount of call volume they normally do. Rather than received a whopping 90 phone calls a day on random subjects, they are having to answer 300 questions regarding the Mayan predictions. Of course, NASA could hire another person to field the calls, but they just don’t have the funding.

Due to high call volume, NASA released there own video along with a frequently asked questions page containing the following tongue-in-cheek sentence:

Dec. 21, 2012, won’t be the end of the world as we know, however, it will be another winter solstice.

Even NASA finds humor in the prediction.

Although some people will be throwing end-of-the-world parties and selling software at discount prices, the mayan’s themselves didn’t even think the world would end on December 21, 2012.

Dr. Mark Van Stone, a Maya hieroglyph expert, states:

“There is proof that the Maya calendar continues after the 13th baktun to the 14th, and the 15th, and on to the 1st piktun or 20th baktun,” he says.

A baktun is a cycle in the Mayan calendar containing more than 5,000 years.

“It is in the third panel of the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque (a pyramid structure in Mexico built by the Mayans). This inscription tells us that the Maya priests at Palenque expected the calendar to go on.”

This is reinforced by Erik Velasquez, an etchings specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico:

We have to be clear about this. There is no prophecy for 2012. It’s a marketing fallacy.

The whole doomsday prediction seems to be a media campaign filled with link-bait to generate clicks. It has worked.