6500 people visited and cast their vote in TV2’s online poll. According to the results, 3 out of 4 Norwegians think Mayan’s Doomsday is not true, while 16 per cent think this date is the beginning of “a new era”. Also more than 8 percent of the participants think there will be doomsday on that day.
Films, documentaries and websites have promoted the idea that the ancient Mayan calendar, which is made up of 394-year periods called baktuns, predicts that doomsday is on December 21.
Experts estimate the system starts counting at 3114 B.C., and will have run through 13 baktuns, or 5,125 years, around December 21.
They say 13 was a significant number for the Maya, and the end of that cycle would be a milestone — but they have been keen to stress that it does not mark an end.
Conspiracy theorists nonetheless believe the Maya may have been privy to impending astronomical disasters that would coincide with 2012, ranging from explosive storms on the surface of the sun that could knock out power grids to a galactic alignment that could trigger a reversal in Earth’s magnetic field.