For all the people who are reading this while holed up in their apocalypse shelters, I bring you good news. And some bad news.

The good news: The Mayans were wrong. I’m not saying that in a glib, “your era of human existence was so stupid” way. After all, we couldn’t really expect them to be horribly accurate about stuff like that. They didn’t have computers. They didn’t have satellites measuring the stars and interpolating real time data for them. Hell, they had to put their calendar on a giant round stone. I’m amazed they made it cover as many years as they did. We do ours in paper and it still doesn’t go out more than a year or two, never mind thousands of years. My guess is that they just didn’t want to make it any bigger or have to make another one. It was probably their version of our Y2K problem, where the consultants who made the calendar probably just made it long enough so that it would be somebody else’s problem by the time the end of it rolled around. So rest assured that they haven’t lost any of my respect for getting the end of the world wrong.

Now the bad news: The world will actually end December 21, 2037. And unfortunately, this wasn’t predicted by a dead civilization who we can thumb our noses at while laughing at their backward ways. No. This comes from the tippy top of our own present day empire – Apple.

Special thanks to Howie Begosa (howster.com)

That’s right. It’s the Macopalypse.

It’s one thing to mock and second guess a long dead empire, making fun of their giant calendars. But this is Apple. They’re not wrong about anything. Which makes sense, because they’re the exact opposite of the Mayans. They not only do have computers that can figure all this stuff out, they invented the computers they used to figure all this stuff out. And they don’t have the limitations that come with doing your calendars on giant blocks of stone. They could easily have made their calendar go out to the year 12037 if they wanted to, but they didn’t. They stopped it cold a mere 25 years from now. Because they knew that there wouldn’t be a January 1st, 2038. They knew that overtly announcing it would throw the entire planet into chaos (not to mention kill their stock prices), so they simply just made their calendar say it for them. We got a pass on this apocalypse, live it up. Take the opportunity to go out and do all those things you’ve been putting off and thought you wouldn’t have a chance to do after 12/21/2012. Write that book. Call that girl. Think of this as a dry run for the real end of the world:

12/31/2037