No Virginia, the Mayans weren’t saying the world will end on Dec 21, 2012.

According to the Mayan Calendar, my birthday is 12.17.6.9.15, and today is 12.19.18.26.15, which makes me just 2.65 K’tuns old.

Quick Mayan Calendar Overview:

It’s set up on a modified base 20 system, and my guess is that the modification is to keep the Tun as close to a physical year as possible.

The Mayan word for a day	K’in
20 K’in	Uinal
18 Uinal (not 20, the modification)	Tun (20*18=360, making this close to the 365 days in a year)
20 Tun	K’tun
20 K’tun	B’ak’tun
20 B’ak’tun	Piktun
20 Piktun	Kalabtun
20 Kalabtun	K’inchiltun
20 K’inchiltun	Alautun

If you’re thinking “WTF"?”, consider our system, which is a modified decimal (base 10) system.  Day, week = 7 days, month = about 5 weeks, year = 12 months, decade = 10 years, century = 10 decades (100 years), millennium = 10 centuries (1000 years) and so on.

So, what does this have to do with the end of the world, or lack thereof? 

In the Mayan calendar, December 21, 2012 is their date 13.0.0.0.0.  They didn’t stop their calendar on December 20, 2012 because they believed that there wasn’t going to be a Dec 21, but because it was the end of a B’ak’tun.

Kind of like saying there isn’t going to be a 2020 because the calendar I made only goes up to December 31, 2019.

If you want to look up your birthday on the Ours to the Mayan calendar, open up this pdf file of the spreadsheet I made.

 

 

Sources:

• Exploring Life’s Mysteries
• Wikipedia
• NASA