Mon 15 June 2020:
The year 2020 has been pretty horrible so far due to coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and a conspiracy theorist is now claiming the world will end ‘next week’ on June 21.
The Mayan calendar is an alternative system of counting time to the Gregorian calendar, which is used by most people in the world, and other systems such as the Islamic or Julian calendars.
The calendar was devised by the Maya civilization, a term which refers to the peoples who inhabited the Central American area of modern-day Guatemala and Belize, southeast Mexico, and western Honduras and El Savador before the arrival of European colonialists.
While Europeans conquered the Maya and destroyed most evidence of their history, in the 1990s archaeologists began to piece together more knowledge about the civilization’s calendar system.
Unlike the Gregorian or Islamic calendars, the Maya calendar was not based on cycles of the moon or the sun directly. Instead, they had three calendars for different purposes.
The theory, which sounds completely bizarre, is based on an ancient calendar and a Mayan end of the world prediction. It is to be noted that Gregorian calendar is now use by majority of people across the world but this calendar came into existence in 1582 and before this people used different calendars to keep a track of dates. Two of the most popular calendars were the Mayan and Julian calendars.
In a since deleted tweet, scientist Paolo Tagaloguin reportedly said: “Following the Julian Calendar, we are technically in 2012. The number of days lost in a year due to the shift into Gregorian Calendar is 11 days. For 268 years using the Gregorian Calendar (1752-2020) times 11 days = 2,948 days. 2,948 days / 365 days (per year) = 8 years”.
The Maya long-count calendar is the one that has attracted attention from Doomsday theorists – people who believe in a catastrophic end to all life on Earth. According to their reading of the calendar and interpretation of the Maya belief in “world ages,” the calendar said that the world was set to end on December, 2012, the date which marked the end of a 5,126-year-long cycle.
Following this theory, June 21, 2020 would actually be December 21, 2012.
While their prediction was evidently wrong, last week a scientist accused of being a conspiracy theorist reexamined the calendar – and suggested that the correct date for the end of the world was in fact this week.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
