End of the Earth Postponed
By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writerposted: 18 October 2010 06:06 pm ET
It's a good news/bad news situation for believers in the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. The good news is that the Mayan "Long Count" calendar may not end on Dec. 21, 2012 (and, by extension, the world may not end along with it). The bad news for prophecy believers? If the calendar doesn't end in December 2012, no one knows when it actually will — or if it has already. A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events. (The doomsday worries are based on the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, much as our year ends on Dec. 31.)
del.icio.us
Digg It!
Newsvine
redditThe Mayan calendar was converted to today's Gregorian calendar using a calculation called the GMT constant, named for the last initials of three early Mayanist researchers. Much of the work emphasized dates recovered from colonial documents that were written in the Mayan language in the Latin alphabet, according to the chapter's author, Gerardo Aldana, University of California, Santa Barbara professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies.
Later, the GMT constant was bolstered by American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, who used data in the Dresden Codex Venus Table, a Mayan calendar and almanac that charts dates relative to the movements of Venus. "He took the position that his work removed the last obstacle to fully accepting the GMT constant," Aldana said in a statement. "Others took his work even further, suggesting that he had proven the GMT constant to be correct."
But according to Aldana, Lounsbury's evidence is far from irrefutable. "If the Venus Table cannot be used to prove the GMT as Lounsbury suggests, its acceptance depends on the reliability of the corroborating data," he said. That historical data, he said, is less reliable than the Table itself, causing the argument for the GMT constant to fall "like a stack of cards." Aldana doesn't have any answers as to what the correct calendar conversion might be, preferring to focus on why the current interpretation may be wrong. Looks like end-of-the-world theorists may need to find another ancient calendar on which to pin their apocalyptic hopes.
1 comment:
derekspeed wrote:
Man will destroy this planet long before any "deathstar" will. Pay attention Jaylion, firstly it has been proven in a Supreme Court in the United States that there is no such thing as inteligent design "god" Secondly, it will be the philosophies of religion that destroy the earth. Two thousand years ago, someone named Moses wrote what's called the Ten Commandments, one of those Commandments was "Thou Shalt not Kill" that philosophy makes human life, more valuable than the planet that sustains it. According to experts, there was 1 billion people on this planet two thousand years ago. If no humans killed any humans for the last two thousand years like the bible suggest, what would the current human population of this planet be right now? Keep in mind, the human population has doubled in the last forty years from 3 billion to 6 billion. Take out a pencil and peice of paper, now draw a circle, with another circle around the outside of the circle you just drew. Make it look like a cell and a nucleus. Now think of how a virus works, a virus or parasite like the Ebola Virus. If one of this parasites invade one of our cells, it will do nothing but consume and reproduce, just like the human animal in the "thou shalt not kill" world. Think of planet earth as a cell in our bodies, the earth is the atom and the ozone is the nucleus that protects it. The human animal does nothing but consume and reproduce, because we are not permitted to kill or conflict with each other, it's against "gods" law. What happens to a cell when its totaly consumed by a virus or a parasite, well, it dies. We the human race in the "thou shalt not kill" world will kill our cell or planet. I want you to think of those four words uttered 2 thousand years ago, and then go pick up a dictionary and look up the word Ironic. Why is everything round, bubbles, the earth, the atom, our cells, even our orbit, well it's simple realy, the circle is the most efficient shape, the circle of life doesn't start at ocean plankton and end at the lion. We, the human race walk this planet with infinite complacancy, convinced of our superiority over it, that way of thinking is going to get us all killed.
Reply | Recommend (499) | Report Abuse
Post a Comment