Monday, 15 June 2020

Will the World End on Sunday?

A strange new story has emerged saying that the world is about to end. The report is based on a Tweet by somebody called Paolo Tagaloguin in which he claims that the date on Sunday will not be the 21st of June 2020, but it is really the 21st of December 2012. This date will sound familiar because it was the day the Mayan Long Count calendar changed over. I covered this is detail at the time because there were so many theories about what that meant and what would happen on that day; see background links below. The idea that the date will really be the 21st of December 2012 is because of the difference between the calendar we use, the Gregorian calendar, and the Julian calendar, an older count that was replaced in 1582. If the world had continued to use the Julian calendar then it would indeed be 2012, although how December ended up in the middle of the summer I'm not sure. We're supposed to have leap-years to prevent that happening. According to some people, that means that we got the date wrong for Armageddon and it's actually this coming Sunday. If you thought this troubled year couldn't get any worse then it might be the last one ever; beat that! Source: https://twitter.com/PaoloTagaloguin/status/1272542022142836736 and: https://www.the-sun.com/lifestyle/tech/973452/end-of-the-world-2020-conspiracy-theory-calendar/. However, I wouldn't worry. The date the Mayan calendar changed over was worked out through analysis of the Long Count itself, not a mention of a date in another calendar. The Mayans used their own dating system long before the Gregorian or Julian calendars ever appeared. So it doesn't matter what the date is in other calendars. The year I am writing this is, as I said, 2020; but in the Jewish calendar it is 5780 and in the Muslim calendar it is just 1411. So the world probably will not end on Sunday and in the unlikely event that it does then it will be for a different reason.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Load of bollocks

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

Correct.