Question: Why did people think the world was going to end on the 21st of decmber

Simon Holyoake answered on 21 Jun 2013:

There was a culture of people who lived thousands of years ago in south america called the Mayans, the Mayan people developed a large stone calendar which was later discovered by archaeologists, they were able to translate it and deciphered that the calendar suddenly ended on December 21st, 2012

Many people thought that this meant the Mayans knew some crazy secret that we don’t know today, and believed that they knew when the world was going to end

There are a few problems with their idea, as the mayan calendar does not account for leap years (the extra day added to the year every 4 years) then december 21st on the mayan calendar was actually approximately 250 days earlier than on our calendar!

Some people believe in various things, whether it’s aliens, magic or conspiracy theories….it’s those kinds of beliefs in things that have no real basis in the world we observe, combined with our ability to spot patterns almost everywhere that leads people to come up with these ideas!