We are less than one month away from the winter solstice when the days get shortest and the sun is slowest in the sky. Doom, I say. DOOM. Well, not from the solstice; civilization has had thousands of those, yet no catastrophes connected to them.

But we are lead to think there is one this time because of beliefs about the Maya calendar. This is the whole 2012 apocalypse belief, and it’s one that isn’t well-founded in either archaeology or science. To show the problems with the latter, let’s look at all the proposals I can find about how the world will be destroyed on December 21, 2012.