How many times have you heard people say in all seriousness that the world will end in 2012 and point to the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in that year as proof?
Soon a Hollywood film is coming - 2012 - about the end of the world that has all sorts of earthquakes, buildings toppling down, meteors and tsuanamis. The trailer for the movie is so over the top, I laughed out loud.
But too many are really terrified
At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the "Curious? Ask an Astronomer" Web site, says people are scared.
"It's too bad that we're getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they're too young to die," Martin said. "We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn't live to see them grow up."
The Mayans have had enough. 2012 isn't the end of the world, Mayans insist.
I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."
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"If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn't have any idea," said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. "That the world is going to end? They wouldn't believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain."
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Doomsday theories come from Westerners not from the Mayans. Gifted Mayan astronomers mapped out out a "Long Count" calendar from 3114 B.C. to roughly 4772
marking time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and the 13th Baktun ends around Dec. 21, 2012.
"It's a special anniversary of creation," said David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin. "The Maya never said the world is going to end, they never said anything bad would happen necessarily, they're just recording this future anniversary on Monument Six.
Now Scientists try to calm '2012' hysteria. They are so concerned about the level of fear, they are speaking out.
"Two years ago, I got a question a week about it," said NASA scientist David Morrison, who hosts a website called Ask an Astrobiologist. "Now I'm getting a dozen a day. Two teenagers said they didn't want to see the end of the world so they were thinking of ending their lives."
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According to Rosemary Joyce, a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley, the Maya never predicted anything. The 2012 date is approximately when the ancient calendar would roll over, like the odometer on a car; it did not mean the end -- merely the start of a new cycle.