Sigma Van Lockheart said:
There have been about 514 Leap Years since Caesar created it in 45BC. Without the extra day every 4 years, today would be July 28, 2013.
Also, the Mayan calendar did not account for leap years.... so technically, the world should have ended 7 months ago.
The date was calculated using star charts as a universal reference point between our calendar and the Mayan calendar. The motions of the stars and planets are like gears in a giant clock, and the positions of the stars are like the hands on the clock. We know the hands are going to point a certain way at the end of the Mayan calendar because they tracked time in terms of the positions of the stars and celestial bodies. The stars will take those positions on a date WE call "December 21st, 2012". If we did not have leap year in our calendar and we called today "July 18th, 2013" instead of "March 6th, 2012" then we would be calling the date that the Mayan calendar ends "May 5th, 2014". The stars and celestial bodies ("hands of the clock") have not moved into the position that marks the end of the Mayan long count calendar. It makes NO difference that the Mayan calender does not "account for leap year" because accounting for leap year was our responsibility when calculating the modern equivalent of the end of the Mayan calendar... the Mayans never gave us the date "December 21st, 2012", they gave us a set of star positions, and scholars calculated the date into our terminology. So this insinuates that we did not account for our leap year when using our own calendar system, or that we calculated the date prior to 45BC using the old calendar system and no one ever corrected it all this time. Regardless of the fact that we calculated our date (December 21st, 2012) using our own calender and we were well aware of our own practice of leap-day, there is still the universal clock independent of either calendar system- the positions of the stars and planets. And those "hands of the clock" have not yet moved into the position that marks the end of the Mayan calendar.
That having been said, even though the Mayan "calendar" accounts just fine for leap years; I don't think the world is ending in December. Or anytime soon.
