From: Mitchell Porter (mitchtemporarily@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Feb 13 2006 - 04:10:31 MST
For those who are wondering where this obsession with the year 2012 comes
from... The Mayan calendar appears to be based in part on the precession of
the
equinoxes, caused by a 26000-year cyclic wobble in the orientation of
Earth's
rotational axis. In the present era, the northern summer solstice places the
sun
roughly in line with the Great Rift of the Milky Way, a string of dark
molecular
clouds which lie between us and the galactic central bulge, and which Mayan
cosmologists may have interpreted as a cosmic birth canal (I derive this
explanation
from John Major Jenkins). I say "in the present era" because it will take
several
years for the solstice sun to cross the Rift - I'm not sure how many, but it
may
be decades. As for why they picked 2012, it could be because that year will
see the second in a pair of solar transits of Venus, a once-in-a-century
phenomenon,
and Venus also played a role in the Mayan calendar. That's just my guess,
however.
ObSingularity (as they might say on Usenet): The character Juan Chanson in
Vernor Vinge's "Marooned in Real Time" is surely based on another neo-Mayan
2012er, Jose Arguelles.
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