(NaturalNews) I don't claim to be able to see the future through any sort of powers of premonition, but when it comes to December 21, 2012, I'll offer an armchair prediction that deserves some discussion: The world will not end.

But this doesn't mean the Mayan prophecies about the end of time are wrong. I think they're actually right about the ending of one era and the birth of a new one, but it seems far more likely that this transition will take place over a period of time rather than occurring on a single calendar day. (And it may have more to do with an explosion in human consciousness than natural disasters, by the way...)

With the movie 2012 coming out soon (http://www.whowillsurvive2012.com), an increasing number of people are concerned about the world coming to an end on December 21 of that year. A popular website (http://www.december212012.com) even touts itself as the "official" site of 12/21/2012.

Sony Pictures is playing up concerns about the date in some edgy marketing for its 2012 film, hosting a website called the Institute for Human Continuity (www.InstituteForHumanContinuity.org...), which asks visitors to vote on who should lead the world after the 2012 apocalypse.

What's disturbing about this is that people think this fictional movie marketing website is real, and they're calling NASA to ask if the world will end. Somehow, they think that even though the world is about to end, Sony Pictures is still giving away PlayStations and Webbie cams on their website.

NASA has received so many phone calls at this point -- about 1,000 -- that they've issued a public statement proclaiming the world will not end in 2012 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...). According to the story, "Dr David Morrison, a senior scientist at NASA's Astrobiology Institute, said he had received more than 1,000 inquiries from worried members of the public." For real?

Of course, it's a can't-lose bet to proclaim the world won't end in 2012. If you're right, it's business as usual and you look brilliant. If you're wrong, everybody's dead and nobody's left to point fingers at you. But it begs the bigger question: Could the movie be right?

Our world can't continue on its current course

Clearly, our world is in trouble. Multiple disasters appear to be converging from every direction. I can think of fifteen critical problems facing sustainable life on Earth right now:

1) The death of food pollinators (colony collapse disorder)

2) Genetically modified crops

3) Loss of topsoils

4) Ocean acidification

5) End of the oil era

6) Climate change

7) Earth shifts

8) Deterioration of Earth's magnetic field

9) The end of fossil water supplies

10) Massive chemical contamination of everything downstream

11) Global financial collapse

12) Threat of nuclear war

13) Pandemic outbreak

14) Global crop failures due to ecological disaster

15) Global loss of plant and animal diversity from environmental destruction

... and there are no doubt other huge threats to the continuation of life on Earth. Many of these threats seem to be converging in the next few years, potentially activating tipping points right around the end of 2012.

And many of them are strongly interconnected. For example, an end to cheap oil would disrupt the routine shipment of honey bees that pollinate food crops across North America, resulting in a disastrous collapse of the food supply leading to mass starvation which, in turn, would likely lead to a pandemic outbreak of infectious disease. (Did you know that honey bees pollinate roughly one-third of all the food you eat? Did you know that most of them are shipped around the country by beekeepers, and there are almost no wild pollinators left near the monoculture food farms?)

What did the Mayans know that we don't?

Despite all this, I think it's risky to place bets of such events occurring on a single day, or even a single year. Sure, I make my own trends predictions from time to time, and although many of them end up being correct eventually, it is extremely difficult to accurately predict the exact timing of such events. The world is highly complex, and disasters can often be delayed through temporary intervention (which is exactly the case with the global banking fiasco and the derivatives systems right now...)

Then again, I'm no expert on ancient Mayan civilization, and perhaps they had access to a lot more information than I do. Maybe they had premonition talents, or visits from advanced alien races, or maybe they were spiritually connected to the cycles of the universe in a way that modern humans can't even begin to approach. Everything's possible, I suppose. Nothing surprises me in our world anymore. Everyday events are so bizarre (balloon boy, anyone?) that now even bizarre events seem routine.

Again, this isn't in any way meant to discount the very useful information being discussed by those people who are concerned about 2012. Clearly, the end of one age on our planet is upon us. Life simply cannot continue the way it has been pursued here for the last several hundred years.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that burning up all the oil, pumping away all the fresh water, poisoning the land, playing God with the genetic code of our crops and drastically altering our ecosystem is bound to have dire consequences... consequences that will almost certainly result in a huge correction in population sooner or later. Right now, human civilization is dangling on the edge of a temporary wave of cheap fuel, cheap food and cheap water, all under the innocence of delayed reactions to our collective causative actions. Payback sucks, they say, and nowhere is it going to be more painful than when Mother Nature catches up to the destruction we've caused across our planet. When coral reefs are dying off around the globe, frogs are born as mutants and pollinators start to vanish, you're in for some tough corrections ahead.

But don't place your bets on that one day of December 21, 2012. Stuff could hit the fan well before that... or after. Wise people are getting prepared now and finding ways to live sustainably by reducing their dependence on complex technologies and increasing their own locally-grown food supplies. Lots of people I know are transitioning to sustainable lifestyles in Hawaii, California, Oregon and even places like Florida. No matter where you live, there are things you can do to be more prepared for whatever's coming, regardless of whether it happens precisely on December 21, 2012.

Ancient Mayan technology

I've visited Mayan ruins in Mexico and pre-Inca ruins in Ecuador. I've been to Macchu Picchu in Peru and hiked through the Andes Mountains to check out ancient civilization sites. Clearly, the ancient people of Central and South America were extremely advanced in many ways that we are just barely beginning to understand today.

This is especially true when it comes to the topic of the movement of heavenly bodies. There is strong evidence, for example, to suggest that these ancient civilizations were able to measure the 26,000-year cyclical precession of our solar system against the backdrop of the Milky Way galaxy -- a feat of observation that took place thousands of years before Galileo invented the telescope. Technically, such a feat should have been impossible without modern-day advanced instruments.

And yet somehow they figured it out. They recorded it in myth and architectural symbolism, wrote it into songs and stories... and although they didn't have modern data storage techniques, they still managed to find ways to preserve their astute observations in other forms (read The Secret of the Incas by William Sullivan).

Did they know something about December 21, 2012 that we don't? Perhaps they did. But predicting some major catastrophic event with the accuracy of a single day -- from thousands of years ago -- seems extremely unlikely.

The biggest risk of things happening on December 21, 2012 probably comes from self-fulfilling prophecy. If people freak out on that day and start leaping off tall buildings or pressing all the wrong buttons in nuclear bunkers, we could very well end up with a disastrous day caused by human fear of what might happen on that day. It begs the question: Which came first, the fear of December 21, 2012, or the prediction of the results of that fear?

It's a classic chicken-and-egg conundrum, especially if you believe in psychic premonition (i.e. seeing the future, as in the quatrains of Nostradamus).

God particles, physicists and the Large Hadron Collider

Interestingly, some modern physicists believe in precisely this kind of reverse-time causative event. Last year's failure of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_...), for example, has been described by some physicists as the equivalent of "an act of God."

The LHC machine, as you may know, was engineered to search for the "God particle" (the so-called Higgs boson particle). As Wikipedia explains: "The Higgs boson is a massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model in particle physics. At present there are no known fundamental scalar particles in nature." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_...)

Of course, the Standard Model was totally wrong about the mass state of neutrinos, so it might be wrong about Higgs boson, too. But that's what physicists are trying to figure out. Watch the Large Hadron Rap song, if you dare, right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50Z... (it will teach you a bit about what the LHC is trying to accomplish. It will also teach you that physicists should be legally barred from dancing on camera...)

To hear some scientists explain why the LHC machine broke last year, this God particle causes such a disturbance in the fabric of the universe that the mere possibility of this particle being born into existence from the machine caused a ripple in space-time that sent a wave of probability back in time to wreck the machine and prevent it from ever creating the God particle in the first place. (I swear I'm not making this up...) (http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/arch...)

Or, maybe some lone LHC technician named Bob accidentally dropped a wrench into the cooling coils and made up this elaborate story to cover his tracks... "Uh yeah, a probability wave from the future made me do it!"

In other words, while NASA scientist are right now saying the world won't end in 2012, some other physicists seem to believe that all depends on whether the LHC machine cranks out some God particles or not.

Heck, maybe the Mayans who predicted the end of our world were actually seeing a successful run of the LHC where a God particle gets created, tears a hole in the fabric of reality, and brings our present era to a whimpering close only to be reborn in a subsequent Big Bang Episode 2.

Or, for all we know, this whole birth / rebirth cycle has been repeating itself for eternity. Each new universe moves forward until the day that some sufficiently-advanced civilization cranks up its own collider machine and blasts the Higgs-boson into existence, wiping out the whole universe as a result. Theoretically, we might all exist in universe iteration number 3,571 (and counting).

Not that it matters, of course. If the universe ends on December 21, 2012 for whatever reason, you probably won't be reading about it on some blog on December 22. Blogs don't work from inside an infinitely compressed mass of all-that-is.

My suggestion is that if you believe the Mayan predictions are right, then on December 20, 2012, you should just party like it's 1999 and hope for the best. And if some small guy named Higgs shows up at your party, you'd better pray he doesn't bring a buddy named "Boson."

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