Salon.com > end of the world

A brief history of the end of the world

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:22:00 +0000

The world did not end! That is great news! Besides meaning that we will all live to see the next season of "Girls," today's notable absence of earthquakes, floods and other apocalyptic ephemera connects us to a long, happy tradition of losing our minds about the end of the world. From 2800 B.C. to 2012, a look back at the apocalypses that got away.

[slide_show id=13152092]

Parenting through the apocalypse

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When my daughter was 4, she was afraid of the Humble Bumble from the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer movie. She didn't like his sharp teeth. It was a cute fear. To this day, we joke about things having sharp teeth, like sharks. She body-boards 3-footers in shorties breaking over a sandbar off the southern Massachusetts coast. She's not afraid of sharks. But now that she is 11, she is afraid of the end of the world. My healthy child is afraid of dying.

"Andrew Kirby said that he doesn't have to do homework tonight," she tells me on Dec. 11.

"Why?" I ask. Kirby's a middle-school classmate, a chunky wild man.

"Because he said to the teacher: 'Why bother? The world is going to end on 12-12-12 at midnight.'" She rifles through a Samsung Galaxy tab before she even gets her little ballerina arms through her NorthFace sleeves.

"The world doesn't end on December 12, 2012," I tell her, opening the front door to let her sister out into the cold. “The world ends on December 21, 2012. We have approximately 10 days left."

She lets out an exacerbated argh and climbs into the backseat of her mother's Prius with her younger sister in dance leotards. Ah, yes, the world may be coming to an end soon, but we are still trying to save her while sticking it to Exxon one mile at a time.

The Maya apocalypse is not nigh

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:50:00 +0000

Earlier this year Reuters reported that 10 percent of people believe the Maya 2012 phenomenon could signal the end of the world. Speculation surrounding the advent of the apocalypse has gained enough currency that a cranky NASA astrobiologist taped a video explaining that tomorrow will not be doomsday. What’s going on?

Tomorrow is the date 13.0.0.0.0 in the Maya’s (the generally accepted anthropological term) “long count” calendar. Remember the hoopla attending Y2K? This milestone is “almost exactly analogous to the end of the millennium for us,” according to Todd Little-Siebold, a professor of history and Latin American studies at the College of the Atlantic. But tomorrow is when the Maya’s cyclical calendar resets after a period of more than 5,125 years, or 13 Baktuns (a Baktun lasts approximately 394 years). While it's clearly not something that happens every day, it doesn't quite explain why a calendar that had disappeared before the Spanish invasion continues to captivate, especially since, as Little-Siebold put it, “There’s not a lot of evidence that the Maya believed [the world] would come to an end” in 2012.