The End is Nigh!

Every era of mankind has had its doomsday prophecies.  The early Christians, for instance, believed that Jesus Christ would return to Earth in their lifetimes.  Two thousand years on, they're still patiently waiting, and even the Jehovah's Witness Watchtower movement has stopped making prophecies about His return after a couple of highly embarrassing "miscalculations".

Doomsday prophecies are usually perpetuated by fringe groups shunned by the mainstream, but increasingly in these times they are creeping their way into the accepted mainstream culture.  The date 2012 appears frequently in modern-day prophecies, especially since the turn of the century when modern society didn't melt down or grind to a halt due to the Y2K millenium bug, as some individuals who ran to their nuclear bunkers in the hills to live off tins of beans predicted.

So what is the relevance of this mysterious date of 2012, and how does it correspond to the mysterious phenomenon of galactic alignment?

New Agers will tell you that 2012 is significant because it is when the Mayan Calendar "ends" - or more precisely, its current cycle will finish.  Proponents of the 2012 Doomsday Theory believe that on December 21 2012 the world will end due to some terrible event.

So who were the Mayans anyway? Well, the Mayan civilisation existed in Mesoamerica from around 2000 BC up until the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors, at which point their civilisations crumbled as the Spanish dominated their lands. Old Mayan beliefs gave way to Roman Catholicism and their native tongues waned in favour of using Spanish.

Mayan scholars - you know, the chaps that know things and stuff - maintain that the talk of the world ending on 21 December 2012 is a misrepresentation of the Mayan Calendar, but New Agers are having none of it. They firmly believe our chips are numbered, to mix metaphors.

The question to ask, of course, is why could the Mayans have known our civilisation was due to end in 2012 yet they couldn't even predict the end of their own culture?

The theory of Galactic Alignment was first proposed by John Major Jenkins in the eighties. You can read up on it in detail at his website Alignment2012 - give him all the traffic he can now, because he won't be getting any in 2013! - but in a nutshell, it is the theory that on the Winter Solstice in 2012 - that is, on December 21st 2012 - the point at which the plane in which the planets orbit meets a special area of black dust clouds in our Milky Way galaxy that the Mayans termed the "Black Road" will be in perfect alignment with our Sun.

Cosmologists, astronomers and other bespectacled sciency-types often take a long time to respond to queries about Galactic Alignment, because it takes them an awful long time to stop laughing.  There is simply no evidence to suggest that December 21 2012 is any different to any number of past dates that have seen this exact same galactical alignment occur in the past.  It's pseudoscience, pure and simple; fun to read, but with not a shred of proof.

Not exactly.  On December 21 2012, accidents will occur.  Cars will crash.  People will die.  Businesses will go bankrupt.  People will lose their jobs.

Just like any day in the past or the future, all these things will happen.  But good things will happen too.

It's just another day, and it will be what you make it to be.