History has a long and rich tradition of apocalyptic predictions, all of which were wrong,

yet some people still think that this time round in 2012 is the real deal. Why 2012? Because of ancient Mayan calendars, obviously.

Mayan calendars not only recorded the days and years, but also longer cycles of about five millennia,

so they could easily make calendars that went thousands of years into the future. But of course, thousands of years in the future from thousands of years ago, brings us to current times when the Mayan calendars stop in 2012. Modern New Agee people decided that the wise Mayans stopped making calendars because they knew when the world would end. And because New Ages are happy, though scientifically illiterate people, their vision of 2012 was a great spiritual awakening or world reboot or other hippie consciousness expanding nonsense that the Mayans, who spent time pulling strings of thorns through people's tongues, probably didn't have in mind. To a normal person, the thought that, calendar finished, therefore end of the world is an odd conclusion to draw.

After all, the amount of time in the universe is infinite and the amount of stone is limited,

so at some point the Mayans had to stop carving calendars.

But never mind.

What should have stayed a fringe belief turned into mass hysteria with the 2012 disaster

movie that swept the Academy Awards and the numerous Emmy-nominated Apocalypse documentaries

on the History Channel. What happened to you guys? swept the Academy Awards, and the numerous Emmy-nominated Apocalypse documentaries on

the History Channel. What happened to you guys? Anyway, after this, NASA became so inundated

with questions that they had to take time away from their busy robot building, frontier

pushing, knowledge expanding, civilization-inspiring schedule, to write a web page explaining that

no, a human-sacrificing Stone Age society with neither wheels to pull carts nor glass to make no, a human sacrificing Stone Age society with

neither wheels to pull carts nor glass to make telescopes, didn't know more about science

at the dawn of history than real scientists do today. But the parade of crazy marched on

anyway, making wilder and wilder predictions for Earth, including geomagnetic reversal, a process

that unfolds on a geologic timescale not a single day, a collision with mysterious planet X that no astronomers have found, a local star going supernova, despite there being no such candidates, an alien invasion, which is ludicrous on the face of it, or is it? And a galactic synchronization beam. Whatever the hell that is. A sane person at this point would wonder how the Mayans were able to predict astrophysical anomalies

thousands of years in advance and millions of miles away, yet didn't foresee the Spanish coming across the Atlantic.

And that's because the Mayans never predicted apocalypse.

The only people to claim that Mayans knew about the end of the world were distinctly not Mayans.