The Mayan Calendar ends on 12/21/2012. Why do you think that is?

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someone watched the history channel last night...i fell asleep..

Not everyone conceives of time as an arrow, moving ever and always in one direction. Among most ancient pagan peoples it was, on the contrary, assumed that time repeated itself in longer or shorter cycles; the Mayans have one of the shorter ones, for mind-boggling time scales one should look at Jainism and Hinduism.

It was Zarathustra who seems to have first concieved of time as a line with a beginning, middle and end, and the Abrahamic religions borrowed it from that source. It has passed into common usage, stripped of its original, eschatological rationale.

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Grassaf, Eolas

They thought they had plenty of time to add to the calendar???

Really it is a mystery, and probably most like the reason that EP already stated. Most indigenous peoples see time as a wheel, not a line.

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"Philosophy is a walk on a slippery rock
Religion is a smile on a dog."

I'll just add to what EP was saying earlier. The calendar doesn't really "run out", its more like an odometer that when it hits a particular number (oh let me pull one out, say, 25,800 ) it resets to zero. The calendar isn't predicting the "end of time", its just "cycling through".

-TC

The cycle ending in 2012 is the long night cycle. Its ending is the beginning of another cycle.
Coincidentally we are at this point in time as a solar system crossing the galactic plane. If you look at the galaxy from the side it is saucer shaped with a point of high gravitation emanating out from the centre like a thin disc of paper. It is theorized that the source of that gravitational field is a black hole at the centre of the galaxy, or some type of similar phenomena.
Our solar system oscillates across this plane on a regular basis which it has been speculated is the cause of past cataclysms, pole shifts and global warming (not the industrial causes Al Gore and crew would have you believe).
We are due to cross the mid-point on 2012.
What will happen is not exactly know and there are a lot of really wild speculations floating around.