The Future's Hard To Predict (Usually, Anyway)

Susan Milbrath, curator of Latin American art and archeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, calls all the doomsday predictions "utter nonsense." She says the Mayan calendar doesn't simply end, it rolls over like a car's odometer.

"We don't have any evidence that the Mayans thought the rollover of a new calendar was associated with the creation of a new world," she says.

Milbrath says scholars have also found inscriptions on monuments in Palenque, Mexico, that allude to dates well beyond 2012. Why would they go to the trouble of marking dates if every human would be turned to ash by then?

She attributes the Armageddon hysteria simply to the fact that the long count is rolling over in our lifetimes. The Apocalypse is probably a lot more interesting if you're around to see it. Plus, this would hardly be the first time for end-of-the-world panic. Astronomers, soothsayers and religious figures have been predicting doomsday for thousands of years. Many in the Christian world thought Christ would return around 1000. In London in 1524, thousands abandoned their home, fearing a coming flood predicted by astrologers. In 1999 in America - well, you were probably there, so you know what happened. Or didn't.

The bottom line is, the world isn't going to end because the Mayan said it will. It's going to end because Al Gore said it will.

-- Reed Tucker, with a little bit of that rarest of things these days: common sense, in The New York Post.