Apocalypse Nope*

In which our Hero has a few words for our new Mayan Overlords

With increasing urgency over much of my life, I have been hearing about the end of the mayan calendar, and the subsequent theory that this possibly alien-influenced, possibly space-faring civilization had by implication forecast the end of the world. And now, it’s the day before their calendar runs out and I have a few words to say in case it turns out that despite the rule of common sense, science, statistics, history and possibly philately, the world somehow manages to end tomorrow.

But I’ll get to that.

The Mayan calendar was, to the credit of that people, well designed and accurate to a degree of sophistication that remains startling for that time. But every calendar in my house, every year, ends. And rather than having a meltdown about a forthcoming apolcalypse, we mostly manage to steel ourselves, step out into the radioactive wastelands, dodge the zombies and the mutants, and pick up a new calendar at the mall. One with cats. Or, ironically enough, with pictures of Mayan Pyramids.

So let’s say that the Mayans were able to predict what was coming to the point that they could see the end of the world more than three hundred years in their future, precisely to the day. It must have tired them out pretty bad, because they didn’t bother predicting the conquistadors. I can see the high priest now, watching the eventual destruction of his entire civilization from the top of the pyramid as he looked over his fresh human sacrifice, holding the freshly extracted heart. And he’s saying, “Boy is my face red!”

The biggest reason I don’t put much stock in the world ending tomorrow, though, is very, very simple. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.

I expect to exist on Saturday. But just in case, I have a few words that I’d like to have on the record, if the Mayans were right:

Fuck you, Mayans

That is all.

*EDIT*

I didn’t think my smartassedness needed clarification here, but after a few of the notes, let me make it clear that:

a) I am aware that Mayan peoples still exist in contemporary times, though not in the form that made the civilization famous or the fodder for decades of crappy sci-fi and apocalypse fiction.

2) I am aware that western civilization snuffed out the Mayan empire before they had need to layout the next cycle of years. My watch contains state of the art materials and atomic level manufacturing precision, but I have to fix the date at least every leap year. The Mayan calendar stayed on track for three centuries after the culture “stopped winding the watch” so to speak.

iii) Even if the end of the cycle included an world apocalypse, it’s not like the ancient Mayans built a death ray with a timer. They’d be as much victims as anybody else.

-) I’m fairly sure the ancient and modern Mayans would be smacking their foreheads at the collective idiocy.

I’m not retracting the entry because my more regular readers seem to understand the joke or forgive it with equal sufficiency. But I offer my apologies for any offense to people whose sense of humour does not align with my own.