Here's an idea, we want the Mayans
to be right about the end of the world.
So for anyone who's worried, I want to be super clear.
The world is not going to end on December 21.
I'm looking at you, Rainn.
Oh, and the entire run of "Cheers,"
cranberry sauce in a can, and moxie soda, by the way.
So for the last while there's been this idea
that an ancient Mayan calendar predicts an apocalyptic event
that happens this week-- a black hole opening near earth,
a collision with the planet Nibiru,
the sun baking the Earth to a crisp, and so on and so forth.
Well, guess what?
You're safe.
And you don't have to take my word for it.
Mesoamerican scholar and Penn State anthropology professor
David Webster wrote that 2012 will
come and go without the world falling apart,
at least any faster than it is at present,
and people will soon forget about this intrusion
of the ancient Maya into our lives.
Now this might make you wonder, if the experts are all, uh,
nu-uh, and say that there isn't anything that actually supports
these doomsday theories, then how
did they even become a thing?
Because they're part of the zeitgeist.
Zombies, canceling great television, doomsday movies,
mobile devices, they're all part of the spirit of our age.
Which, incidentally, is also what zeitgeist means.
2011 had four doomsday predictions,
and 2012 has already had at least two.
The Mayans are also in the zeitgeist.
In 2006, Daniel Pinchbeck's "2012,
The Return of Quetzalcoatl" was released
and a slew of books about Mayan culture followed it.
Mel Gibson's conveniently titled "Apocalypto," a Mayan themed
adventure film, was also released.
Not to mention John Cusack in the limo,
and I'm sure the History Channel is implicated
in all of this some how.
Ideas about the mystical, magical Mayan calendar reached
a kind of terminal, cultural velocity and some of us
got worried.
So worried, in fact, it was asked over 5,000 times
of NASA's Ask an Astrobiologist is if the world would
end this year.
They said no, by the way.
No!
Link in the doobly doo.
Now, I know what you're going to ask.
How did 2012 even reach the zeitgeist
if it's a load of malarkey?
To answer that, let's take a look
at where this "prediction" actually comes from.
So if you've read any of these predictions,
you know that they're like, the Mayans
said at the end of the long count calendar
there would be a rebirth of the human race
after a cataclysmic blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
OK, so that's not really true.
Wrong!
The Maya, viewing time as cyclical,
actually had a complex system of calendars, only one of which
was this long count calendar.
They actually had a 365 day calendar.
Yep, they roughly nailed the solar year
because they were wicked smart.
Nailed it.
But they also had calendars which measured 20 days,
260 days, about 20 years, and about 400 years.
When certain combinations of calendars were used,
their periodicity allowed the Maya
to keep track of huge amounts of time.
The end of the 400 year calendar,
the b'ak'tun, was a celebrated event,
because it was the loop point of their longest single metric
of time.
And in Mayan mythology, the world began anew,
like a completely clean slate, at the end of the 13th
b'ak'tun, a date which will occur again on December 21,
2012.
So where the Maya thought, yay, a new era, party time; we see,
oh my god, it's the end of times,
call Will Smith, Sigourney Weaver, Bruce Willis,
and the Dalai Lama.
We see the end of the world in the Mayan calendar
because we're looking for it.
We're sort of--
Game over!
Game over.
---always looking for it.
I know it sounds fatalistic, but a lot of the Western World
is built on a fundamentally teleological understanding
of history.
That's a fancy way of saying we think
we are headed towards something, the Rapture, the Second
Coming, the restaurant at the end of the universe,
or at the very least, some unclear concept of the future.
The Mayans didn't think of time this way.
We crammed their ideas into our belief box,
because as evidenced by pop culture alone,
we pay ominous ideas tons of attention.
So maybe, because in some weird way we want them to be true,
we go out looking for clues trying
to prove these apocalyptic insights, and we find them.
The alignment of the planets on December 21
is of astrological importance.
The I Ching mentions 2012, the sun's December solstice
is on 12 21, many other soothsayers
have mentioned this exact date.
Olmec said that thing that one time about the destruction
of the human race on the "Legend of the Hidden Temple,"
the list goes on.
But consider this, in our vast knowledge of both the modern
and ancient, terrestrial and extra,
aren't we always going to find some correlation?
With all of the stuff we know about all of history
within the hugeness--
Huge!
---of the universe that we are only venturing further
into, isn't there are always going to be some alignment
or coincidence or serendipity or synchronicity,
imagined or real?
In reality, the end is probably really far away,
and if anyone's going to cause it's going to be us.
You blew it up!
We should stop looking for clues in ancient Mesoamerican
cultures and just ask Nate Silver when the polar ice
caps are going to melt.
But until then, if we keep looking
for the end of the world we're just going to keep finding it.
What do you guys think?
Why are we so focused on the end of the world?
Let us know in the comments.
And if you're looking for a way to celebrate the end of this
b'ak'tun, you could subscribe.
So I thought a lot this week about what Santa's special move
would be if he were wrestler.
I don't really know, but dollars to dimes it
would be called the "Sleigh Ride."
Let's see what you guys had to say about Santa and wrestling.
To David Welch, I know exactly how you feel.
And to anyone who doesn't know what a snipe is,
it's this small black bird with a white stripe and red beak
that you can usually find like amongst the reeds.
TastyBarrel talks about deciding whether or not
to tell his kids about Santa and Tbonegirl28 I think
responds in a way that I agree with.
That's how I feel.
I think Santa is an important part of magic.
ThatGentleman says that Christmas actually
improved when he learned the Santa wasn't real,
because it gave him more agency in Christmas,
that he could now be in charge of getting presents
and you know, making sure that everybody had a good time,
I guess.
Which is-- I never thought about it that way,
but that is-- I can see that possibility. vodun writes
a really amazing comment about the ironic enjoyment
of experience and Santa as a commercial entity,
so we'll just pause here so that you can read it.
To J Durksen, this is definitely a new one.
Heinrich Hertz had a very large forehead though,
I don't know if-- is it that bad?
Is it that bad?
To Drukoshinimari, this comment I um, wha?
We'll put links to a couple eyebrow gifs in the description
so you can see those if you want.
RulingTommy points out that Sinterklaas is also
celebrated in Belgium.
So thank you for the correction.
To SoulNoodlesCrew, the Globetrotters are real,
they're very good at basketball, it's
just that the games that they play against the Generals
are a show, like an act.
Wait, wait, wait, wait Elexhad, the plural of LEGO is LEGO?
I- why didn't anybody tell me?
I have been making a fool of myself for years.
And finally, ferbfan12 tells a story
about how when she was a kid she thought
she was saving her parents money by asking for expensive things
from Santa, which is some perfect kid logic, adorable.
So we're going to take next week off uh,
and then we'll have a short episode for the New Year's
and then a full episode the week after that.
So until then, a pan-galactic holiday greeting to everybody,
and I will see you after the apocalypse.