There are those who would have us believe that in December of 2012, at or near the winter solstice, the world will come to an end. This ominous prediction is based in part on the conclusion that the Mayan 'Long Count' calendar comes to an end of its days at that time. That some of us subscribe to this is a result of how we tend to think about really big numbers.
In my last blog,"Want to Make a Million?", I danced with the decimal point in order to illustrate a human tendency to believe in "magic" numbers like the fish and loaf that fed the multitudes, or "lucky" numbers that defeat all odds, or simply a dogmatic faith that playing a number often enough must mean that 'my time' will come regardless of the odds stacked against me.
A side-effect of my research for that piece was the growing realization that in this day and age we are called upon to deal with very many very large numbers. Not so long ago numbers on such a scale were quite rare but today they are almost routine, numbers of a size beyond normal comprehension, a size for which I (for one) was never adequately prepared. I am unable to visualize these numbers and so they tend to pass right through me like a bullet through jello.
I read recently about the discovery of a new planet and learned that it is 330 times farther from the star it orbits than the earth is from our own sun. I was not overwhelmed by this. I know that the earth is very far from our sun, farther than I can possibly comprehend. If you tell me that this new planet is 330 times farther than that from its star, or if you tell me that the actual distance is about 454 million kilometers, it makes no difference. The moment I know that it was farther away than, say, Chicago, I lose interest. Such a distance has no meaning for me.
Which may be why we find it so difficult to become alarmed about very large numbers that probably should alarm us, such as our national debt. Our national debt is 15.1 trillion dollars. My first tendency is to kiss off the point one trillion. I mean, who cares, really? It just gets in the way of the math. But how much is point one trillion dollars? Well, it's one hundred billion dollars. Oops. Maybe we need to hang on to that, after all. That might be what we owe Jamaica.
Another incomprehensibly huge number is what we are paying toward that debt. How does $454 billion sound? That's the amount the Treasury Department paid from our 2011 tax money toward the interest on that debt alone. Again, I feel I should be alarmed. It's my patriotic duty to feel alarmed. But I don't. The number is just too large to grasp. It does seem like a waste, though.
Members of congress, financial experts, candidates for office all rattle off stunningly huge numbers constantly. We hear about fraud on a scale of millions, of corporate bailouts in the billions, of deficits in the trillions. Shouldn't we be more shocked? Or has that become impossible as the number grows beyond our comprehension?
In an effort to better grasp very, very large numbers experts in fields that commonly use them began creating new names for them. Take computer speeds, for instance. By now we've all had to become familiar with terms like megahertz or even gigahertz. But some computers go really, really fast. The fasted computer in the world today, I've read, is the Tianhe-1A supercomputer in China. It hums along at 2.5 petaflops. Petaflops? That is one thousand trillion floating point operations per second, apparently too fast for previous nomenclature. Hence the need for petaflops. Am I astonished? Of course not. I was left behind at megahertz.
Any time I flip on PBS I may be called upon to discuss the distance of a planet from earth in Astronomical Units (An AU is equal to ~149,600,000 km.) or to define time in SI seconds (a second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom), or learn the width of the Milky Way (between 90,000 and 160,000 light years)(one light year = 9.4605284 × 1015 meters). But the fact remains that my brain refuses to conceptualize such vast numbers and instead relegates them to an obscure portion of my understanding in which there is no relationship to my real world.
So what does all of this mean in terms of the world coming to an end? I believe that the average Mayan dealt with numbers in the same way as me.
Does the Mayan calendar predict the end of the world this December? Let's look at the numbers.
The Mayan's had more than one calendar - they had three. One, the Divine calendar, with a 260 day year, another, the Civil Calendar, with a 365 day year and the Long Count calendar for historical and future events. The Mayan calendar was an amazing tool, more accurate than the Gregorian Calendar in measuring the fluctuation of days and hours from year to year, with 365.242129 days to the year as opposed to the Gregorian 365.2425 days. All of the Aztec calendars cycled but it was the full cycle of the Calendar Round, a mathematical combination of the two short term calendars which resulted in a 52 year cycle that drew panic from the Mayan people concerning the end of the world. As each 52 year cycle came to an end they would hold their collective breath until Pleaides successfully crossed the horizon. But much like our world as we came the end of the Millennium, their world always continued and began another cycle - at least until it didn't.
The Long Count calendar measured time from the inception of the Mayan era in cycles of 13 baktuns, each 144,000 days (kins), or roughly 394 years (tuns). Thus each full Baktun cycle of 13 is 5125.40 years. There is disagreement as to the exact date the Long Count calendar began, but two of three proposed dates are scheduled to bring us full cycle on either December 21 or 23, AD 2012. The third suggested date would put the full cycle two plus centuries later. In that case, the end-of-world posters would have to be stored for a while.
Just as I must rely upon the experts, the every-day Mayan relied upon his priest to count the days and years, to do the math, and to deal with the really large numbers. From all accounts they dutifully celebrated the harvest or planted the corn or sacrificed the odd virgin in accordance with the pronouncements of the "Keepers of the Numbers" without questioning the results too closely, much as I do today. While 52 years, the span of a lifetime, is not so difficult to conceptualize and consequently might be anticipated fearfully, 5125.4 years is a whole different matter, the end of which I contend was far from the conscious minds of the Mayans, as the end of the world or anything else. Quite the opposite. To the Mayans the conclusion of 13 Baktuns would have been seen simply as the start of a new 13 Baktun cycle, a time to begin the count over again. In fact, a renewal. And although just five positions in the Long Count calendar have been found scribed, the Mayans had calculated it all the way to 19 positions, culminating in what we now call the Alautun, a period of 23,040,000,000 days or about 63 million years. Now there's a big number! Happy New Year!
References: Marq deVilliers The end, www.webexhibits.org/calendars, K. Garcia Atlantis Rising magazine issue 9.
