Tourists get their picture taken Saturday next to a slab of stone counting down the days until Dec. 21, 2012 at the Xcaret theme park in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.Have you said your prayers and kissed your family good-bye?
Are your closets stocked with bottled water, flashlights, Twinkies, Spam and enough guns and ammo to fight off zombies and survive for months in a lifeless, dystopian landscape?
If not, you’d better hurry! Today is Dec. 20, 2012. That means the apocalypse is less than 24 hours away according to the doomsday theorists who claim that Mayans predicted the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012.
Thankfully, reports of the Earth’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. No reputable archeologist, geologist, Mayan scholar, astronomer or proctologist, for that matter, actually believes doomsday is tomorrow.
The notion that the world will end tomorrow came about when it was calculated that the Mayan “long count” calendar comes to an end on Dec. 21, 2012. The long count calendar calculates a huge cycle of time, which comes out to be about 5,125 years. When scholars converted the long count calendar into our modern Gregorian calendar, they discovered that the last cycle began Aug. 13, 3114 B.C., and ends on Dec. 21st, 2012.