Saurav Lamsal ☆☆☆

Will The World End on DEC 21,2012 ?

The Day is DEC21,2012!

This is the worst scenario of what the ancient Mayan people predicted would happen more than 2,000 years ago.

Now the prophecy has been turned into the movie 2012, which is due for release in July.

Worryingly, the prediction is backed up by scientists, respected scholars and modern technology.

The latest doomsday countdown starts with the Mayans, a highly intelligent race who lived around Mexico, Belize and Guatemala from about 1,800BC.

When they weren't sacrificing babies or tearing enemies' hearts out to offer to the sun gods, the Mayans were skilled at counting time.

Despite not having even invented the wheel, they created a complicated calendar system accurate to within 34 seconds of what we know a lunar month to be today.

But unlike our calendar, which counts dates up, theirs lasts 5,000 years and counts down to the winter solstice on December 21, 2012 - or 13.0.0.0.0 in what is called their "Long Count" system.

Adrian Gilbert, author of The End Of Time: Mayan Prophecies Revisited, said: "They based their calendar around this end date. They knew it was important.

"Each Mayan age ends with a cataclysmic event. The last ended with water, this one is supposed to end with earthquakes and Earth changes.

"What we do know is that the Earth's magnetic field is reversing. So north will become south and south will become north.

"No one is entirely sure what that is going to mean - but it could cause earthquakes."

The new movie, directed by Roland Emmerich of The Day After Tomorrow fame, shows awesome scenes of a huge tidal wave engulfing the world.

A trailer to the film, which stars Woody Harrelson, shows a Buddhist monk banging a gong in vain warning as a huge tidal wave approaches his Himalayan monastery.

Eerily, the date the Mayans picked as the day civilisation would change forever coincides with an event in space that only occurs every 25,800 years.

On December 21, 2012, for the first time in recorded history, the sun will block our view of the centre of the galaxy as we move exactly in line - disrupting any energy that flows to us from there, claims Gilbert.

Havoc

On its own, this event doesn't scare the experts. But separately, scientists from Nasa have also found a cycle of sun spots - magnetic blasts shot to us from the sun -and another is soon to begin.

These storms wreak havoc with satellites and electronic devices. In extreme cases they can even affect our magnetic field, which protects us from the sun's killer radiation.

This next cycle is feared to feature huge activity and is due to peak in . . . you guessed it, 2012.

Bizarrely, throughout history, tribes across the world that have never had any contact also predict a cataclysmic event to occur around 2012.

They range from the ancient Chinese, who prophesied it in their I Ching book more than 5,000 years ago, to the soothsayers of ancient Rome and Egypt.

An internet-searching programme called the WebBot Project also foresees disaster - nuclear attacks by the end of next year, building up to an apocalyptic event at the end of 2012.

The programme was originally designed to scan what people search for online to predict movements in finance.

But it predicted US anthrax attacks in 2001, earthquakes in August 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the September 11 attacks.

One theory about the end of the world is that the disruption caused to our magnetic field will make the Earth tilt on its side.

Adrian Gilbert adds: "Others think aliens will arrive, some think apocalypse. I think it will see humans waking up to our possibilities and becoming more in tune with the universe in the same way computers' possibilities became endless when they plugged into the internet."

Thousands of people in America, Asia and Europe - particularly Holland - have quit their jobs, joined survival groups and are stockpiling supplies.

But most in the scientific community are not worried.

Dr Sue Bowler, editor of Astronomy And Geophysics magazine, said: "I don't think we're all going to die. Nobody knows how a magnetic field reversal affects the Earth. But you can tell from fossil examples that mass extinctions don't happen.

"Birds won't be falling out of the sky and we won't be unprotected from blasts of killer radiation. Earthquakes aren't caused by it either. The last time it happened was around 780,000 years ago. Nobody ever died from this."