There’s been more hype about December 21, 2012 than there was about the Y2K scare at the turn of the century. Remember all the dramas? Computers would blow up affecting everything from skyscraper elevators to microwaves. Well I can’t say we had too many problems up here in sunny Boomi. As a precaution I pulled the power on the main office computer on NYE and then powered up the next day with a mixture of curiosity and enthusiasm-all this with a ripping hangover courtesy of a local shin-dig on the river bank. Nothing. It was almost a let down. So here I am (a week ago) sitting on a plane enroute to Australia listening to four passengers discussing the ramifications of ‘The End of The World’. What is it about us earthlings that we manage endless conversational hours talking, thinking and writing about drama and destruction; until it actually happens of course.

 ‘Of course you can blame the Mayan’s’. One of the travellers announced.

‘They’re a highly intelligent bunch of people,’ her friend answered, ‘something probably will happen,’ the solemn voice announced. ‘Earthquakes, floods, total implosion!’

Where does that thought process stem from? Well I recently read an article in an old issue of USA Today (2007). The headline read; ‘Does Maya Calendar Predict 2012 Apocalypse?’ Out here we call that ‘stirring the possum’. In newspaper speak its the old newspaper adage, ‘if it bleeds it leads’. The confusionof course comes from the Mayan Calendar which tracks approximately 5000 years and then resets to zero. Western civilisation interprets that as end of the world stuff. The local Mayans on the other hand have no idea about our doomsday approach to their calendar.

The Mayan Calendar resets on December 21, 2012 which is also the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. It’s also the day that the sun will be aligned with the Milky Way Galaxy for the first time in nearly 26,000 years. The Mayans considered that 26,000 year period as a single galactic day and divided it into five cycles. It is the fifth cycle that ends this December hence the doomsday theories. In reality their calender simply resets and starts all over again.

The more interesting question of course is how did the Mayan’s actually discover that it would be roughly 26,000 years before the sun would be aligned with the Milky Way Galaxy, again.