Reuters, By Chris Michaud, May 1
New York – Nearly 15 percent of people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime and 10 percent think the Mayan calendar could signify it will happen in 2012, according to a new poll.
The end of the Mayan calendar, which spans about 5,125 years, on December 21, 2012 has sparked interpretations and suggestions that it marks the end of the world.
“Whether they think it will come to an end through the hands of God, or a natural disaster or a political event, whatever the reason, one in seven thinks the end of the world is coming,” said Keren Gottfried, research manager at Ipsos Global Public Affairs which conducted the poll for Reuters.
“Perhaps it is because of the media attention coming from one interpretation of the Mayan prophecy that states the world ‘ends’ in our calendar year 2012,” Gottfried said, adding that some Mayan scholars have disputed the interpretation.
Responses to the international poll of 16,262 people in more than 20 countries varied widely with only six percent of French residents believing in an impending Armageddon in their lifetime, compared to 22 percent in Turkey and the United States and slightly less in South Africa and Argentina.
Mayan Prophecy: The End of the World?
he should have.
It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were all traitors.
5% think, 5% think they think and the other 90% would rather die than think.
It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were all traitors.
if the EOW is actually going to happen on Dec 21 because, if true, it would be a very great shame for everybody to be wasting time Xmas shopping all for nothing.
I would bet that roughly the same percentage has thought the world would end soon for the full history of humanity. the number creeps higher at certain times, like a nice round number in any one of the calendars devised by our kind or for specific reasons, but i’d be shocked if it ever dipped very low.
It may be the innate response of some to the inescapable, natural knowledge that the world is always ending because it must to continually be being reborn in the manner that only death begets life.
And then there’s the large matter of our small minds. We have a hard time seeing the world beyond ourselves. For example, global warming may kill off people but it will not “end the world”. Even God has no track record of ending the world as an all inclusive event.
there is no shortage of folks predicting the End of the World. John Michael Greer over at The Archdruid Report has been chronicling some of the more widespread and popular scenarios that made headlines down through the ages in the “end notes” to his recent posts. He is up to number 20 of his End of the World of the Week. Always entertaining and insightful.
The Quillayute Cowboy
MSNBC Cosmic Blog, By Alan Boyle, May 10
Archaeologists have found a stunning array of 1,200-year-old Maya paintings in a room that appears to have been a workshop for calendar scribes and priests, with numerical markings on the wall that denote intervals of time well beyond the controversial cycle that runs out this December.
For years, prophets of doom have been saying that we’re in for an apocalypse on Dec. 21, 2012, because that marks the end of the Maya “Long Count” calendar, which was based on a cycle of 13 intervals known as “baktuns,” each lasting 144,000 days. But the researchers behind the latest find, detailed in the journal Science and an upcoming issue of National Geographic, say the writing on the wall runs counter to that bogus belief.
“It’s very clear that the 2012 date, while important as Baktun 13, was turning the page,” David Stuart, an expert on Maya hieroglyphs at the University of Texas at Austin, told reporters today. “Baktun 14 was going to be coming, and Baktun 15 and Baktun 16. … The Maya calendar is going to keep going, and keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future.”
The current focus of the research project, led by Boston University’s William Saturno, is a 6-by-6-foot room situated beneath a mound at the Xultun archaeological site in Guatemala’s Peten region. Maxwell Chamberlain, a BU student participating in the excavations there, happened to notice a poorly preserved wall protruding from a trench that was previously dug by looters, with the hints of a painting on the plaster.
Saturno said he didn’t think there’d be much to the wall, but “I felt we had a responsibility to find out at the very least how large this room was.”
When archaeologists worked their way into the mound, they were amazed to find that it was a richly decorated room from the Classic Maya period, dating back to roughly the year 800. One niche was adorned with the faded picture of a Maya king, wearing a blue-feathered headdress and holding a white scepter. The picture of a scribe holding a stylus, perhaps the son or brother of the king, was painted nearby with the label “Younger Brother Obsidian.” Another wall showed a row of three stylized black figures, with one bearing the hieroglyphic name “Older Brother Obsidian.”