New Delhi: Yet another predicted doomsday, that didn’t happen. Nothing earth shattering happened on December 21, 2012. That December 21 marked the end of an age in a 5,125 year-old Maya calendar, the event was variously interpreted. Some believed the date to be the end of days, so other it marked the start of a new era and for many just a good excuse for a party.
As the dawn breaks on Friday, according to the Maya Long Count calendar, it marks the end of the 13th bak’tun – an epoch lasting some 400 years – and the beginning of the 14th. This fact would probably have languished in academic obscurity had not a young Maya expert named Michael Coe written in the 1960s that to the ancient Mesoamerican culture the date could herald an ‘Armageddon’ to cleanse humanity. Since then, the cult of 2012 has snowballed. The mix of religion, ancient inscriptions and media-driven speculation about the doom triggered worldwide interest.
As the appointed time came and went in several parts of the world, there was no sign of the apocalypse. Indeed, the social network Imgur posted photos of clocks turning midnight in the Asia-Pacific region with messages such as: “The world has not ended. Sincerely, New Zealand."
There have been hundreds of thousands of doomsday predictions since the beginning of recorded time and we are still here, reading this post that the world didn’t end again. This in itself says a lot about how much we should believe in these apocalypse prophesies.
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