World ending in 2012? Fear not, say Mayas, who should know

Or is it? Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."

It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood's "2012" opens, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the "Curious? Ask an Astronomer" Web site, says people are scared.

"It's too bad that we're getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they're too young to die," Martin said.

Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan, ideas.

A significant time period for the Mayas does end on the date, and enthusiasts have found a series of astronomical alignments they say coincide in 2012, including one that happens roughly every 25,800 years.

But most archaeologists, astronomers and Mayas say the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, Internet doomsday rumors and TV specials such as one on the History Channel. That show mixes "predictions" from Nostradamus and the Mayas and asks, "Is 2012 the year the cosmic clock finally winds down to zero days, zero hope?"

It may sound all too much like other doomsday scenarios of recent decades — the 1987 harmonic convergence, the Jupiter effect or "Planet X." But this one has some grains of archaeological basis. One of them is Monument Six.

The stone tablet, found at an obscure ruin in southern Mexico in the 1960s, almost didn't survive. the site was largely paved over and parts of the tablet were looted.

It's unique in that the remaining parts contain the equivalent of the date 2012. The inscription describes something that is supposed to occur in 2012 involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with war and creation.

However — shades of Indiana Jones — erosion and a crack in the stone make the end of the passage almost illegible.

Archaeologist Guillermo Bernal of Mexico's National Autonomous University interprets the last eroded glyphs as maybe saying, "He will descend from the sky."

Spooky, perhaps, but Bernal notes there are other inscriptions at Mayan sites for dates far beyond 2012 — including one that roughly translates into the year 4772.

And anyway, Mayas in the drought-stricken Yucatan peninsula have bigger worries.

"If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn't have any idea," said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. "We have real concerns these days, like rain."

The Mayan civilization, at its height from A.D. 300 to 900, had a talent for astronomy.

Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 B.C., marking time in roughly 394-year periods called baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and the 13th baktun ends around Dec. 21, 2012.

"It's a special anniversary of creation," said David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas-Austin. "The Maya never said the world is going to end; they never said anything bad would happen necessarily. They're just recording this future anniversary on Monument Six."

Bernal suggests that apocalypse is "a very Western, Christian" concept projected onto the Mayas.

But some say the Mayas knew another secret: The Earth's axis wobbles, slightly changing the stars' alignment every year. Once every 25,800 years, the sun lines up with the center of our Milky Way galaxy on a winter solstice, the sun's lowest point on the horizon.

That will happen on Dec. 21, 2012, when the sun appears to rise in the same spot where the center of the galaxy sets. Another spooky coincidence?

"The question I would ask these guys is, so what?" says Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs the "Bad Astronomy" blog. He says the alignment doesn't fall precisely in 2012, and distant stars exert no force that could harm Earth.