![\"\"](\"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/2012-12-17-Will-the-World-End-on-December-21.jpg\" "\\"Will")
<\/a>Photo: Arnold B\u00f6cklin<\/p><\/div>\n
The prediction that the world will end on December 21st\u00a0<\/span>or 22nd<\/span>\u00a0is actually the 183rd<\/span>\u00a0one that we know of \u2013\u00a0since Nostradamus predicted the end of the world in 1555. In other words, over the last four and a half centuries, the world should have ended every two and a half years.<\/p>\n But supposedly <\/strong>this is the Big One. The proof? The Mayan calendar is coming to the end of a long 5000-year cycle.<\/p>\n However, there is a big problem with this reasoning. The way calendars work, when one cycle ends, another one starts. It\u2019s like a clock. When the hands have gone around once, they start again. Cars don\u2019t explode when they reach 100\u00a0000 kilometers on the meter: the meter rolls over to 100\u00a0001. No one thinks there\u2019s anything amazing about that, except maybe watching five digits roll over into six. So why would the end of a calendar cycle necessary spell doom?<\/p>\n There\u2019s another problem with this End of the World prophecy: we are not really in 2012.<\/p>\n Yes, you read right: our calendar (the Gregorian calendar) is loaded with errors in calculations accumulated over centuries.<\/p>\n The mistakes started in A.D. 532 \u2013 970 years before Columbus discovered the Americas \u2013 when a monk, Dennis the Short, took it upon himself to calculate the year of Christ\u2019s birth. It was the Middle Ages and people still didn\u2019t count that well \u2013 actually, they used a mix of Roman numerals and finger counting.<\/p>\n But according to Dennis\u2019 calculations, Jesus was actually born in 4 B.C. \u2013 or 4 years before Christ!<\/p>\n And there\u2019s more\u2026 Like everyone else in Europe at the time, Dennis didn\u2019t know about the zero yet. The Arabs would introduce the concept three centuries later. So Dennis actually made the calendar jump from 1. B.C. to A.D. 1 without stopping at zero.\u00a0 That\u2019s why Jesus is born on year 1.<\/p>\n Given the errors in Dennis\u2019 calculations, the year 2000 was in fact in 1996 or 1997, depending on your position on the year-zero issue.<\/p>\n In other words, dates have all been wrong for 15 centuries \u2013 or 60 generations.<\/p>\n There are other incongruities. If the birth of Jesus determined the beginning of the calendar, why is his date of birth December 25th and not January 1st<\/span>? And things get even more perplexing when you consider that in Dennis the Short\u2019s calculation, the beginning of the year was April 1st<\/span>.<\/p>\n Any way you look at it, 2012 is not today\u2019s actual year. So anyone who is making a prediction based on correlations between a faulty calendar like ours and that of the Mayans, is most certainly making a presumptuous leap of logic. We\u2019re most probably in 2016, not 2012.<\/p>\n The great mystery is why the people in Abrahamic religions \u2013 Christian, Jewish and Muslim \u2013 have such a strong apocalyptic impulse. Their religions have even developed their own branch of theology, called eschatology \u2013 which is the science of the study of the end of time.<\/p>\n No matter what faith Westerners adhere to, they always build in an \u201cend-is-nigh\u201d vision. Even if nature is their religion, they develop their own scientific fantasy of an environmental apocalypse. If they believe in money, socialism is the end; if they are communists, it\u2019s capitalism; if they believe in weapons, they become survivalists.<\/p>\n Even scientists can\u2019t resist drawing end-of-the-world scenarios. There was Carl Sagan and his nuclear apocalypse. And there were the computer scientists with their Y2K bug.<\/p>\n This fixation on apocalypses gets recycled through pop culture, where it takes the form of hundreds of end-of-the-world films, thousands of novels and novellas, all feeding on our morbid fascination for the definite end.<\/p>\n That fascination is one thing that really never really ends \u2013 along with the world.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Jean-Beno\u00eet Nadeau & Julie Barlow The prediction that the world will end on December 21st\u00a0or 22nd\u00a0is actually the 183rd\u00a0one that we know of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[32,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7457"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7457"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7469,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7457\/revisions\/7469"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}