Scientists doubtful the end is near

VANCOUVER - If you're banking on the world to end on December 21 with the conclusion of the Mayan calendar, you're in a minority, mainstream scientists and researchers said.

With more than 8,000 scientists, media and the public wrapping up the Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting Monday in Vancouver, questions about the alleged doomsday, just 10 months away, largely drew skepticism.

"If the Mayans knew so much, why are they extinct?" anthropologist Thomas McGovern of City University of New York asked in an interview with Xinhua.

The end of the Mayan calendar is "merely the end of another calendric cycle," said Eric Dunn of the Canadian Institute For Advanced Bogosity Research, a Vancouver-based research body.

"There has been a ridiculous amount of misinformation. Many ignorant people piling one non-fact atop another until this ridiculous myth has come out. It is about as reasonable as expecting your car to cease to exist when more than three zeros in a row come up on the odometer," Dunn told Xinhua.

The Maya civilization, which thrived in what is now southern Mexico and Central America from 2000 B.C. to 900 A.D. and was versed in art, architecture, astronomy and mathematics, had once created a 5,125-year-long calendar that unexplainably comes to end December 21 this year, leading some to interpret it as "the end."

In actuality, the Mayans never predicted the end of the world, researchers said. The end of their calendar comes close to the winter solstice, a natural phenomenon when the path of the sun and the Milky Way equator meet. The ancient Maya recognized this as the "Sacred Tree" that holds up the sky.

"Cool, but I think I'm going to still pay my mortgage payment that month," McGovern said.

It's good people are interested in broadening their outlook for future development, McGovern said, but there's a bunch of pop culture focusing too much on fiction rather than reality, that's why Indiana Jones becomes part of the public's view of archeology. "So what we're left with is people imagining all kinds of cool things from the past and actually this (Mayan doomsday) is one of them."

"In my experience, the actual past that you get backed by doing the work, by doing the archeology, turns out to be a whole lot weirder and neater than the sorts of things that people make up."

As inveterate followers of the stars, the Mayans were known for their expertise in tracking the winter solstice and over time created several calendars they used, most notably the Long Count Calendar. While some people have interpreted its December 21 finish as the beginning of the end, others believe it is just the start of another "Great Cycle."

"The fact that the calendar ends is no more evidence that the world will end, than the fact that the year ends in December is evidence that there won't be a following year. I'm unaware that there was any evidence that they had that would yield that kind of conclusion," Professor Richard Creath of the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences said.

"Doom has been predicted quite regularly and it's not clear such evidence is worth taking too seriously," he told Xinhua.

For those still nervous about the alleged end, Dr. Roger Christianson, a professor of biology at Southern Oregon University, suggests checking out a calendar. Like every year, it ends on December 31.

"I'm not sure that science can predict the end. We can talk about what's going on today. We can extrapolate back to what might have gone on in the past. You can look forward into the future and make predictions but nobody knows when the end might actually happen," he said.

Most people, in general, are shortsighted about the world around them but like conspiracies and good storylines. That's why the Maya prophecy prevailed, Christianson explained.

"The Mayans are extinct anyways, so why did they even run their calendar out that far? What were they thinking?"