I've been trying to bust back into journalism, and I'm piecing together a full feature article on the "End of the World" thing that I'm sure you know about. I'll possibly post the whole thing up here soon, but I want to, for the sake of it, give you the bare bones of the thing.

The World isn't going to end. The scary thing that's scheduled to happen is happening right now. You're doing it now! Basically the Mayan calendar ends on the 21st of December. Now, the Gregorian calendar (the one we generally use) is crap. It is. It's got leap seconds and leap years and odd-length months and nothing runs perfectly with anything, be it moon, Sun, stars, anything. But the Maya were bang on the money. Their calendar was pukka.

It was divided into thirteen stages, called baktun. These are roughly 394 years long. The end of the 13th baktun was prophecised as a period of great change. As an ending, not of the World, but of something. Some change of never-before-seen magnitude, almost beyond comprehension.

Skip forward a bit.

England. About 300 years ago. The invention of the Newcomen steam engine, later improved by Watt. This kicked off a chain reaction. Before these, mechanisation was done by mills and water wheels. But with the steam engine, mechanisation got big. Rail infrastructure grew. So did cities. Factories got big and the industrial revolution increased the pace of life hugely. But soon steam wasn't enough to power us around. So internal combustion engines came about. With internal combustion, we could fly, with viable aircraft. But soon our planes demanded more, and so the jet engine was invented. Another step up for the pace of life. While this was going on, radio had been invented, but soon there were too many people too far away for that, and so radio had given way to telephony. We had turned the Earth into a global village. But soon even the jet engine wasn't fast enough for our pace of life, and the internet came forth. Slowly at first, but now ever faster, and hasn't it changed the World? It's totally and completely transformed the way humanity works, from a single person level, all the way up through to multinational businesses and beyond.

300 years ago we were milling corn with a waterwheel. Now look at us.

Compared to the many thousands of years since the Mayan calendar was created, this has all happened in the blink of an eye. It's a period of great change. It's an ending, not of the World, but of a World. It's a change of never-before-seen magnitude, almost beyond comprehension. This is it.

Welcome to the end of the 13th baktun.