There's a lot of misdirection involved in this meme. The Mayan calendar doesn't actually end, anymore than the Gregorian one does.
By its linear nature, the Long Count was capable of being extended to refer to any date far into the future (or past).
Maya calendar - Wikipedia
So it really is a lot like the turn of the century, only without even the excuse of a computer bug to rile people up with.
Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is the basis for a New Age belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012. December 20, 2012 is simply the last day of the 13th b'ak'tun, which began September 18, 1618 (1,728,000 days from the beginning of the calendar).
Maya calendar - Wikipedia
When you look at what the actual Mayas would predict or expect for such a period end, it isn't meteors and space brothers, either
The completion of significant calendar cycles ("period endings"), such as a k'atun-cycle, were often marked by the erection and dedication of specific monuments (mostly stela inscriptions, but sometimes twin-pyramid complexes such as those in Tikal and Yaxha), commemorating the completion, accompanied by dedicatory ceremonies.
Maya calendar - Wikipedia
There is indeed a Maya concept of cyclical creation and destruction of worlds, but it's on a much larger scale. The concept of 20 b'ak'tuns, for example, is just another marker on the calendar of the existing world.
I'm not going to yammer on about what's really going on here; but I will point out that the person who has stepped up to promulgate the idea is Terrence McKenna, and he didn't start off by talking about the Mayans at all, he just co-opted them at the last minute.
"Timewave zero" is a numerological formula that purports to calculate the ebb and flow of "novelty", defined as increase in the universe's interconnectedness, or organised complexity,[58] over time. According to Terence McKenna, who conceived the idea over several years in the early-mid 1970s while using psilocybin mushrooms and DMT, the universe has a teleological attractor at the end of time that increases interconnectedness, eventually reaching a singularity of infinite complexity in 2012, at which point anything and everything imaginable will occur instantaneously.[58]
McKenna expressed "novelty" in a computer program, which purportedly produces a waveform known as timewave zero or the timewave. Based on McKenna's interpretation of the King Wen sequence of the I Ching,[59] the graph appears to show great periods of novelty corresponding with major shifts in humanity's biological and cultural evolution. He believed the events of any given time are recursively related to the events of other times, and chose the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as the basis for calculating his end date in November 2012. When he later discovered this date's proximity to the end of the 13th baktun on the Maya calendar, he revised his hypothesis so that the two dates matched.[60]
The first edition of The Invisible Landscape refers to 2012 (as the year, not a specific day) only twice. McKenna originally considered it an incidental observation that his and Jos Argelles dates matched, a sign of the end date "being programmed into our unconscious". It was only in 1983, with the publication of Sharer's revised table of date correlations in the 4th edition of Morley's The Ancient Maya, that each became convinced that December 21, 2012 had significant meaning. McKenna subsequently peppered this specific date throughout the second, 1993 edition of The Invisible Landscape.[32]
2012 phenomenon - Wikipedia
Edited by Iblis, : softened language