>>>The google translation sucked so I fixed it here and there:

www.natutech.nl/00/nt/nl/4...eeuwen.html

"...In the 2012 film that will premiere this month, cities and continents are destroyed in droves, as the world decays. What a pity that research has shown that the "end times" of December 21, 2012 is probably more than two centuries later ..."

The dozens of books, websites, yes, even the Flemish gentleman who is planning to flee to a mountain in South Africa. You couldn't have missed it: the doom preachers have discovered yet another deadline. This time the world perishes on Friday, December 21, 2012. Our planet will be torn to pieces by a passing stray planet, burned by solar flares, lifted by the gods or even spiritual cleansing by cosmic primal forces - it all depends on which book or website you read.

On two things the stories agree. First, on 21/12/2012 the sun climbs to a very special place in the sky. And second, on 21/12/2012 the calendar of the ancient Maya ends. For enterprising prophets of doom, the sum is quickly made: say goodbye to the world. "I think the idea of the year 2012 as a special year began in 1985 with the encounter between esoteric Terence McKenna and Jose Arguelles, Sacha Defesche suspects, whom graduated in Philosophy and Religion studies on the subject of 2012 at the University of Amsterdam. "Together they are responsible for giving a religious, apocalyptic meaning to a date that would otherwise probably have remained unnoticed."

Astronomer Louis Strous comforts us, and says it's not all that bad. "It is the beginning of astronomical winter. But there are no special forces connected," said Strous, who set up a public page for the Utrecht University in which he drew up the astronomical side of the 2012 discussion. This 'special' position of the stars is a bit of a stretch, says Strous. During lectures, he sometimes shows a series of pictures to of the celestial sky at different dates. Whereupon he asks his audience: point to any image here where you think something special is to be seen. Nobody picks December 21, 2012, of course. "The random population will have nothing special to see."

Yet something happens on the day of the disaster. The sun climbs over to where you, at night, would see the Milky Way - the bright band of stars that runs diagonally through the sky. Right in the middle of the band, also called the "galactic equator ', the sun will reach its highest point on 21/12/2012. It is only once in the roughly 25,800 years that the Sun performs this feat exactly while the winter solstice occurs. A true 2012-believer sees it certainly evident: a cosmic portal to the Galaxy will open, through which spiritual forces will flow.

Too bad that this state isn't quite that unusual. "This happens every few thousand years", stresses Strous. Moreover, there is no such thing as an exact 'equator' of the galaxy. "These are not things you just can see. The galactic equator is not a line in the sky or something. In previous years, the Sun was also even with the galactic equator on December 21st, and the coming years this will also be the case. "Apart from the fact that the sun passes the galactic equator twice a year anyway when there isn't a winter solstice. But hey, why would you really worry, says Strous. "I think it is questionable whether the Maya did have such knowledge to begin with."

Mishmash...

No cosmic sky suddenly swinging gates open, so what about that other disaster story: Mayan Calendar?

Also here lies the truth quite differently. When the Spaniards in the 16th century conquered the realm of Maya, the Maya did not have merely one calendar. The people kept time with no less than four calendars at once. The oldest was a calendar count of 260 days called the "Tzolkin", consisting of 20 days with all one's own name, that each passed 13 times. The Maya also knew the "Haab", a calendar of 365 days, spread over 18 months of 20 days each, with a sort of bonus at the end of 5 'accident days. Calendar number three was the "short count", a sort of counter of days, months, years and "Katun", periods of almost twenty years. And finally dozing in the background is called a "long count". They counted the Katun: 20 Katun formed a "baktun", and those of those baktuns there were again 13. This long count was however abandoned when the Spaniards arrived, probably not least because the baktun count is so extremely slow running.

Therefore, it was a creepily complex system, that was expressed in date terms as '10 .4.0.0.0 - 12 Ahau - 3 Uo ', or' the tenth baktun plus the fourth katun after the creation by the long count, the next-to - Ahau last-days according to the Tzolkin calendar and the 3rd day of the month according to the Uo Haab calendar. "

Well, but what is really the western translation of such a date? What Christian calendar date corresponds to what Maya Year? This is a practical problem that scientists already are in discussion about for a century. The Spaniards were so unwise to burn most of the written texts of the Maya that could have been used as a guide. Researchers who want to know how the Maya Time fits the regular calendar, must therefore rely on carved inscriptions, a couple written documents from the Spanish settlers and modern tables with which you can determine the positions of planets and the moon. The "correlation problem" is the name of this complex scientific dating puzzle trying to tie down the Mayan calendar to that of the West.

And here comes the infamous end date 21/12/2012 into play. A small one hundred years ago scientists thought that they had figured it out. By looking at references in Spanish writings, the archaeologists Goodman, Martinez and Thompson presented their "GMT-correlation": a calculation that the creation date of the Mayan mythology (and thus the start of the long count) pointed to August 11 of the year 3114 BC. After some mathematics, the GMT-correlation means that the long count completes a full round in December 2012. The counter then jumps on 13.0.0.0.0 and the time, literally, runs out, the archaeologists thought.

However, for what little 2012-prophets know is that the GMT-correlation has come under heavy fire over the past ten years by modern astronomers, archaeologists and a few hobbying mathematicians. The final blow was arguably the thesis that nature scientist Andreas Fuls presented three years ago at the Technical University Berlin. Fuls pointed out that the GMT-correlation is not consistent with a preserved Mayan table on which the positions of Venus are listed. And there is more, such as inscriptions and objects that at the time of Goodman, Martinez and Thompson were not yet detected or outdated. By adding this all up, Fuls ends up with a very different dating: one that is shifted 208 years ahead. The end of the long count by his correlation is about two centuries from now, at 21, 22 or December 23, 2220. "It is the only option," says Fuls if you ask him about it...

This is btw not to say that the world in the year 2220 will still perish. "Can you even speak of an 'end' in a cyclical calendar, such as the Maya", notes Defesche. You can expect that after 13.0.0.0.0 the time of the Maya goes straight back to 1.0.0.0.1.

Apart from the question of whether the "long count" even actually expires at that point. Four years ago, archaeologist David Kelley and astrophysicist Eugene Milone proposed that the Maya probably had an even longer count, one in 'pictuns': "baktuns periods of 20 (or 20 x 144,000 days = 7890 years). It seems that he prophets of doom - and the film industry - can keep going for many thousands of years.