Adam Wilcox; tea drinking Brit with fondness for the media and tech.
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2012 14 November 2009

2012 is a ridiculous and silly film which hits (almost) every cliché ever, it was also exactly what I needed and thus amazing
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Yesterday, disaster film 2012 was released in the UK. The film is loosely based on the 2012 phenomenon, the umbrella term for the frankly barking mad beliefs that suggest that cataclysmic events will take place in 2012. No doubt London hosting the Olympics will be one of these terrible events.

This particular brand of paranoid apocalyptic belief has its basis in the Maya Calendar. The Mayans had some fairly complex ideas regarding mathematics and time, and had several calendars that ran simultaneously. Some calendars tracked short periods of time; 13 days, 20 days, 260 days and a 365 days. They also had much longer calendars, one of which is known as the ‘Long Count’. The Long Count started from ‘Zero Date’, (when the Maya Creation Gods first created man out of Maize), due to end on the 21st or 23rd of December 2012. Amazingly some people have taken this to mean that the world will end on the 23rd of December 2012.

As it happens Mayans believed in a cyclical nature of time, and come the end of the Long Count, the Universe resets itself back to the beginning. That said they also believed in human sacrifice, that you could reach the underworld by poking around in caves, and that the creation gods first made people out of mud, then wood, and finally maize- due to maize people being more accomplished at worshiping them. Why this suggests the Mayans were an authority on anything much is somewhat confusing.

Still, the marketing of the 2012 film has done little to allay the fears of the stupid, going so far as to suggest the public should “Google 2012” to “find out the truth”. If you Google 2012, you’ll be bombarded with wing nut conspiracy theories.

NASA has received thousands of inquiries from concerned individuals, and have released several question and answer debunks regarding the 2012 phenomenon. The always brilliant professor Brian Cox very succinctly manages to drive a car, and debunk the paranoid apocalyptic beliefs in this video. He is clearly the rock star of physics.