According to the Discovery channel, the world will end next Friday. Apparently that's when the 5000 year Mayan calendar runs out, so those rumours of the Apocalypse must be right, right? Wrong. We don't even know they meant that they believed the world was going to end then. I've got a calendar which predicts (accurately this time) solar eclipses up until the year 3000. Will future seers look at that and infer the world is going to end in the year 3001? Only if they're idiots.
As the redoubtable Mitch Benn said on "The Now Show" last night, if the Mayans were so good at predicting the future, how come there are no Mayans around now? Clearly they didn't see all those droughts, pestilences and Conquistadors coming. And neither can we. We don't know what's coming next, and indeed, that's half the fun of living: we just have to wait and see what happens. We can anticipate to some extent, which is why we're advised to get a pension sorted while we're young, just in case we live long enough to need one. Otherwise it's all a bit of a lottery.
The Mayans may have chosen this years winter solstice to finish their calendar for a less apocalyptic, but nonetheless important reason. It marks a very special astronomical event, and one that the Mayans must have had extraordinary skill to be aware of: the day marks the alignment of the galactic core with the sunrise on the winter solstice. This only occurs once every 26,000 years, and to predict it the Mayans must have been aware of the phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes, that is to say the wobble in the Earth's axis. The fact that they worked this out is a huge tribute to their amazing mathematical and astronomical abilities.
As for Xmas, we've got our Christmas dinner planned already, and because a) my mum will be in London and b) my father-in-law is having his dinner at his OPH, we shall be having what we always said we would when we were free to do so: beans on toast, with grated cheese on top. That's if we're not all dead, of course.
Good luck with your festive plans.
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