From the History Channel:
"Debunking the 2012 Myth
In recent years, popular culture has latched on to theories that the Maya predicted an apocalypse on December 21, 2012. That date corresponds to the end of the Mayan calendar’s current cycle, which lasts for 13 of the 144,000-day intervals known as baktuns. But scholars have long argued that, while Mayan astronomers saw each cycle’s conclusion as significant, they never foresaw an apocalypse. According to the researchers who studied the Xultún house, the calculations on the walls confirm once again that the Mayan calendar stretches far beyond this December. One notation in particular records an interval of 17 baktuns, a period of time that extends past the alleged doomsday.
“This sort of popular culture conception of the Maya calendar having an expiration date on it is in and of itself a fallacy,” Saturno said. He compared the system to odometers that reset to zero after 99,000 miles because they can’t display more than five digits. “If we’re driving a car, we don’t anticipate that at 100,000 miles the car will vanish from beneath us,” he said. Stuart said that, rather than covering a finite period of time, “the Maya calendar is going to keep going and keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future.”
GuzziJohn
