@...ColombianMonkey: Hey, don’t make me break out the trout…

@...nyokki: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhJQp-q1Y1s 😀

@...TrikYodz:
Well, the Mayans were a very smart people. They were a people steeped in mysticism, yet they somehow managed to learn things that would have been extremely difficult to understand by observation alone, even by todays technological standards. So it is hard to separate the fairy tale from the facts with them.

But I don’t think they really believed the world would actually end, but rather that some globally life changing event would occur. At least one thing is clear. They believed some celestial event would occur on Dec 22, 2012 that would change everything.

The rest is, imho, all idle speculation. There simply not enough hard data to form any valid hypotheses regarding what might actually happen, whether it is preventable/survivable, etc. so it does little to change my views on life.

I think we may have more to fear from the select few extreme psycho nutcases who do actually believe the world will end in 2012, than from any possible event itself…

@...dieAntagonista:

Let’s assume the Mayans were able to foretell the future.

Nooooo… I can assume no such thing. Imho, the Mayans were at best, unusually good mathematicians, astrologers and statisticians. They were good at predicting the *likelihood* of specific things happening, based on past events. To an ancient Mayan, this might have seemed like the same thing, (witchcraft) but there is a very big difference between this and actually predicting any random event in the future.

That is why I made the comparison between the Mayans ability to tell the future, and how a doctor might tell a cancer patient they have 6 months to live. They aren’t right all the time, and it still won’t save them if they are ever diagnosed with cancer themselves…

@...sylvanish: I tend to agree on that interpretation of the date. In fact if memory serves, the Mayans had a date of similar significance in one of their shorter calendars, for which it is said the world was supposed to end, unless the Gods intervened. Needless to say, the Gods kept granting the universe a new lease on life… Given that past experience, If I were a mayan, I’d say it’s a fair bet that the Gods will spare us in 2012 as well 😀

P.S. RE Zombies vs Giants, I think the Giants may be a just a little bit harder to fight… I’m just sayin’…

@...SumoSnipe: LOL Fezzik FTW! It depends on the actual size of the giant in question, but I think you may need an oar instead of the spoon…

@...nyokki: LOL O I C… In other words Dick Devine killed his own game… I stand corrected. My apologies. 🙂

@...dieAntagonista:
Here’s my perspective. Modern knowledge does not always provide good answers to old questions.

If you study the construction of the pyramids of egypt, you will notice some interesting things about their construction. Their orientation is very specific. Magnetic Pole aligned, which if memory serves, results in some rather interesting properties. And the blocks used to make the pyramids were cut to such a high degree of accuracy that you would have been unable to fit a razor blade between any two blocks.

There is no evidence of any of the traditional tooling marks that would have to have been used to shape those blocks. To this day we aren’t exactly sure what tools they used and how they got so precise in their engineering, nor why they chose that specific alignment.

The Mayans exhibited a similar, highly advanced, level of astrological and meteorological expertise as well, with the same apparent lack of the technologies they should have needed to come to the same observations that we have.

I’m not saying the world is gonna end (far from it), but there were many ancient cultures who knew things they really shouldn’t have, including things we still do not fully understand today, so I’ve learned not to be so quick to dismiss them just because it’s “old magic”… 😀

@...nyokki: Your question about the sanding out imperfections in the rocks used is one of the more interesting ones. They absolutely could have sanded out the tool marks, the problem is that it’s hard to see how it could have been done with the traditional tools they had.

The only metals we know that the ancient Egyptian pyramid builders had access to at the time was copper. Copper would have been fine for hewing/cutting soft stone, like sandstone, but would have not been adequate, by itself, for cutting the harder rocks, like granite.

To get roughly square granite blocks, they would have needed to use a copper saw with an embedded abrasive to literally cut the rock into a block. There is evidence of this on some of the unpolished rocks. But the confounding part of it is that the tooling marks on the unpolished surfaces indicate much straighter lines, and a cutting speed much faster than one could achieve with a quartz impregnated copper hand saw or similar.

The second point of uncertainty is that in order to have the “straight as a razor” flat mating surfaces, you are right, the granite blocks would have to be “block sanded”. Every surface of each block would have to remain true, at 90deg to each other, and flat along the entire surface.

They could certainly have used quartz powder and copper tools again, but to maintain a perfectly flat surface along the entire block, sanding by hand, without cutting dips or rises into the surfaces, all while avoiding over sanding any given side so that the overall dimensions of the block do not change enough to render it a poor fit…? Not easy to do unless you have massive machining equipment at your disposal.

Just one of the many intriguing feats they pulled off with ridiculously primitive tools over eons of construction. We really put too much faith in the “science” we think we know…

@...nyokki: 22 seconds? HA! BEAT YA BY 1 SECOND… YES!! Aktualy, I had 2 get mah intertubes unclogged… Hairball… 😀

But yeah, it does make sense that the technical knowledge to build a pyramid would have been religious in nature. The entire purpose of the pyramids was based on religious beliefs. And I agree they would have thought about things a lot differently. The point you were making about progress not being what we think it is is true on so many levels.

I was just thinking about how Nikola Tesla’s theory on using the earth as an energy storage/transmission medium could have changed the way the world operates drastically, how we think about technology, how we carry energy, our dependence on wires, etc. Technological progress is not a linear process. There are so many branches, so many different ways of thinking, and we often forget that the way we think about things is not the only way.

@...sylvanish:
I’ll post some links that may help, but the problem is that, just like anything else, even the interpretation is subject to interpretation.

But the main reason why I don’t believe that this 2012 thing will be on any real significance, is that, in one of thier shorter calendars, there is a similar 52 year (if memory serves, I’ll see if i can find a link describing it) cycle, which was supposed to also mark the end of times.

However an important point to note was that it appeared that the Mayans believed that the world was not automatically going to end at the end of that cycle, but rather it was a time for the gods to decide whether or not to grant the world another 52 years. Since we are still here, (and they existed for a heckuvalot longer than 52 years), it’s a fair bet they were always granted those next 52 years, and the simply started the cycle again. 🙂

But I believe the long count calendar should have been interpreted the same way, but because the cycle of long count calendar would have been considered of greater importance than that of the short count, they would have used more globally terminal metaphors to describe it.

But anyone can do the research and judge for themselves.
www.lost-civilizations.net/mayan-calendar-prophecies.html
www.geocities.com/ericjwin/mayan.html
www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-mayan.html
www.survive2012.com/
www.maya12-21-2012.com/
members.shaw.ca/mjfinley/calnote.htm
www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/maya/cont.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar

@...ColombianMonkey: 7 seconds?!? You’re using portals aren’t you… ? I’m tellin’ ya, that’s not safe man… Those things you are seeing? It ain’t the bacon…