Considering Leap Year didn't exist when the Mayan calendar was created, It's safe to assume that the actual "end of days" as the Mayans predicted has already passed. That being said, I'm never going to turn down an excuse to get wasted on a school night.
Not cool dude, not cool at all trying to ruin my plans. And with lies! Lies! The world ends tomorrow, accept our assured demise. You scared me for a moment, but Google brought an end to your villainy.
The Mayan calendar is very inaccurate when calculating years. Not only did they not account for leap years, they were completely wrong about how many days were in a year. The Mayan “tun” is 360 days long, equivalent of 0.986 years.
However, the date of December 21, 2012, is not based on Mayan tuns. It is based on the total accumulation of days since the beginning of the Mayan calendar. It is commonly accepted that the first date on the Mayan calendar is August 11, 3113 BCE on the Gregorian calendar. Therefore, we must start on that date and count forward in time.
The Mayan baktun is the equivalent of 400 Mayan tuns (years). But remember, their years are only 360 days long. 400 x 360 = 144,000. Therefore, each Mayan baktun is a total of 144,000 days long.
As of the time of posting, the Mayan date is 12.19.19.3.11. The first number represents the baktun, the second number katuns (20 Mayan years), the third number is tuns (Mayan years), the fourth is uinals (20 day “weeks”), and the final number is the day. I know that I’m making some history nut cringe at my over simplification of the Mayan calendar; I’m using “years” and “weeks” to make things easy to understand.
On December 21, 2012, the first number in the Mayan calendar will change from 12 to 13, making it 13.0.0.0.0. The last time this happened was on September 18, 1618, when the current baktun started. As you have already imagined, the Mayan date on that day was 12.0.0.0.0. Obviously, the world didn’t end.
But how do we know that 13.0.0.0.0 will happen on December 21, 2012? First, we need to calculate the total amount of days required to reach the 13th baktun: 144,000 x 13 = 1,872,000 days.
If we start counting from August 11, 3113 BCE, we probably won’t get very far. I don’t know about you, but counting to almost 2 million isn’t something that I have time to do. Instead, use any date calculator to do the math. Sure enough, you’ll always arrive at the same date: December 21, 201
