Sorry if I'm banging on, but of a hobby horse of mine this. I have an extreme distaste for this kind of woolly-headed nonsense. We actually do know, through science, an enormous amount about how the universe works, and have a pretty good picture of what's going on in our local bit of it. "local" in this case meaning an area far, far larger than the solar system. There are no surprises coming in the next two days.

Sorry, one more point. I think it's worth clearing up, as someone mentioned it a few posts back. There are ZERO Mayan "prophecies". There are barely any Mayan writings in existence, and none of them are prophetic, and none of them talk about golden ages or any of the rest of it. This has all been made up by hucksters long after the fact. Mayan civilisation is very interesting, and the Wikipedia page on it is an excellent primer. None of this stuff is remotely hard to find out. Just stop reading the crank sites, and it all starts to become a lot clearer.

John, i enjoyed reading all of those posts. I for one am TOTALLY AMAZED that it has created so much worldwide debate. I am tending to side with whoever mentioned that its the media creating something out of nothing for ratings.
I certainly believe i will be eating my cornflakes on saturday morning.

Bibs

Aye. If I was a producer for a low end TV production company, I'd have made shedloads of 2012 apocalypse documentaries this year.

A good explanation of the reality:
http://www.planetpapp.com/br21december2012/

The Mayans noticed the relative slippage of the positions of stars in the night sky over long periods of observation, indicative of precession, and foretold this great coming attraction. By using an invention called the Long Count, the Mayans fast-forwarded to anchor December 21, 2012 as the end of their Great Cycle and then counted backwards to decide where the calendar would begin. Thus the Great Cycle we are currently in began on August 11, 3114 B.C.

This is all a big scam by people trying to avoid my birthday...

Agreed. How many times was the world going to end before now anyway? If it's not one thing it's another and always, it seems to employ some religious nonsense.

Your wrong about the allignment though. These things will happen. What effect will have for us? That's anyones guess. I'm guessing we'll still have to pay taxes.

Here's the reality for many doomsayers after Dec 21;  

Had already long since left their jobs over a year ago; 

Had already long since moved to highly-remote areas with absolutely no prospects of employment; 

Their worthless little underground bunkers will start to rust and cave-in; 

Their massive supply of so-called food (that nobody will want to eat) will perish within 1 year; 

Default on mortgages and personal loans; 

Bank foreclosure on their homes; 

All their guns, ammo and household items be reprocessed; 

Have their unemployment benefits garnished; 

For everyone else; their lives will prosper. Oh and; Happy New Year 

I feel like I'm boring everyone now, but JM24, honestly, if you look into this, you'll find that the Mayans had no concept of precession, and no interest in the things you describe above.

Re: galactic alignment. That's an old astrological observation that the constellations likely have a rough 26,000 year cycle in terms of how they line up in the sky. It's not actually completely wrong, but it's not entirely accurate either, and it really doesn't add up to anything that could have an actual physical effect. You have to remember that the stars are vastly different distances away, and there is a huge temporal distortion effect that robs the appearance in the sky of any real meaning. To put it another way, the constellations are all different amounts of light years away, and apparent repeated configurations as observed from earth are not in fact repeated configurations, and can have no gravitational or otherwise physically meaningful effects.