The other fact that is going on is Pole Shift, doomsdayers ou to believe that the poles will shift sudenly. If that happened then yes we got a serous problem, but the fact is that the pole shift takes a loooooooooooong time. The pole shift is currently happening along with plate tectonics, but we don't feel it. Granted we do feel earthquakes, but for the most part the plates move slowly over time and we never feel a thing.
Actually the doomsday scenarists are confusing two separate phenomena, either out of ignorance or dishonesty. The shift that takes place is in the orientation of the Earth's
magnetic poles, as the magnetic field gradually weakens, reverses, and strengthens again over thousands of years. But the doomsayers confuse this with a shift in the Earth's
geographic poles, claiming that it means the whole planet will physically flip over, which is just nonsense.
Plate tectonics has no connection to magnetic field shifts. Nor does it cause the Earth's rotational poles to move, except very, very fractionally as the Earth's mass shifts over millions of years. What it does do is change the orientation of the Earth's land masses
relative to its rotational poles -- for instance, Antarctica was once near the equator rather than overlapping the South Pole as it does in the modern era. The continents are essentially big slabs of rock floating on top of an ocean of magma and slowly drifting across its surface. Movement of the continents is not the same thing as movement of the entire Earth. They're just the surface layer.
The galactic center is a super massive black hole and some think that once the sun aligns with it, then the solar system will be sucked into it. If that were to happen we would be dead before we know it, so it dosen't matter. The fact of the matter is that our solar system is a long way out from the center and even though super massive black holes are huge, we will not fall into it's gravity.
The black hole thing is complete nonsense. Regardless of any arbitrary "alignment," as long as the Sun is the same distance from the galactic center, it's going to feel the same pull from the central black hole. People have this ludicrous cartoon image of black holes as something that can reach out aggressively and suck you in like a tractor beam or something, but that's crap. From a distance, a black hole of a given mass exerts no more pull than a star of the same mass. It's only when you get close that their gravity becomes significant.
As far as the Myan calander goes, the truth is that even the experts don't have a clue what it all means and interpet it several ways. The Myan language is basically lost along with the civilization.
Now, that's not true. The Mayan people still exist, and to quote
Wikipedia, "The Mayan language family is one of the best documented and most studied in the Americas." As for their
writing system, far from being "lost," it's the most fully deciphered indigenous script in the Americas. And the calendar is quite well understood today.
I think it is odd or weird that the calander does point to a specific date that happens to align with certian celestial events, but the truth of that is the Myans spent centuries recording daobserving the stars.
No, the truth is that there is no such alignment; the 2012 alarmists
made that up by distorting the facts. As I said, the alleged alignment with the galactic equator
already happened in 1998. The only alignment the Mayan calendar actually points to on the date we call 12/21/2012 is the winter solstice, which happens every year. Yes, the Mayans were very good at astronomy, and it enabled them to create a marvelously accurate and powerful calendar which they used as any agrarian society would, to tell them when to sow and harvest their crops and manage the other annual cycles of their lives. Any more melodramatic interpretations of what the calendar predicted are modern myths.
Now all that bieng said, I would worry about solar flares or solar storms. If a big one hits, it will disrupt our electronics and such. One person sugested it would set us back to the stone age, I disagree and it would probably set us back to the 19th century.
Both are huge exaggerations. The Earth's atmosphere shields us from the worst effects of a solar flare. The electronics that would be threatened would be those in satellites orbiting the Earth.
To quote
the Q&A page I linked to earlier in the thread:
Flares and mass ejections are no danger for humans or other life on Earth. They could endanger astronauts in deep space or on the Moon, and this is something that NASA must learn to deal with, but it is not a problem for you or me. Large outbursts can interrupt radio transmission, cause bright displays of the aurora (Northern and Southern Lights), and damage the electronics of some satellites in space. Today many satellites are designed to deal with this possibility, for example by switching off some of their more delicate circuits and going into a “safe” mode for a few hours. In extreme cases solar activity can also disrupt electrical transmissions on the ground, possibly leading to electrical blackouts, but this is rare.
So we're talking a few days of inconvenience here, not the collapse of civilization.
