Reports of our impending doom surfaced after a Twitter user posed a series of tweets claiming to have recalculated the date that the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar ended. The ancient Maya believed that at this point, a transformative event would take place. Some interpreted this to suggest the event meant the apocalypse, but most experts believe it represented a positive transformation and signaled a new era. The series of tweets posted by a user called Paolo Tagaloguin have now been deleted, as has their profile. According to the New York Post, Tagaloguin notes differences in the ways calendars are calculated. As a result, several media reports said the actual date the Maya calendar ends is June 21, 2020. Except their calendar didn’t end then. They had units of time they counted, just as we do. They didn’t use weeks and months and years, but it’s the same idea. It turns out that on 21 December 2012 one of their big units rolled over, similar to our date of 1999 turning into 2000. So it’s like a new decade or century, that’s all. There’s some interpretation that they celebrated such things (as we do at midnight 31 December every year), but nothing that indicates they thought the world would physically end. And what if they did? Lots of cultures have end-of-the-world stories, and in the history of humanity not a single one has ever been right. So why think this one will be?