One month from today, the world will end as the terminal date is reached of the Mayan Long-Count Calendar.
Innumerable batty explanations have been forwarded as to why a cataclysm is supposed to occur on that date, but the main body of speculation seems to be that the sun is going to be “aligned with the galactic center”, which “only happens every 26,000 years”. The two parts of this claim are actually unrelated.
As Earth rotates annually around the sun, the sun always appears, from Earth, to be situated against a different part of the backdrop of the Milky Way. December 21 is when the sun will appear to line up with the black hole in the center of our galaxy, an arrangement with no astronomical or gravitational significance. In fact, the sun’s closest alignment with the galactic center actually falls a couple of days before 12/21 - though apparently that's still close enough for new-age metaphysicians to call it a match with the Mayan date.
Making things worse, the “26,000-year” reference is a little off in its dating as well. The Earth’s axis constantly precesses, or wobbles like a gyroscope, completing a circuit each 26,000 years. If you imagine a perpendicular line going outward from the center of the Earth’s axis, that line spends most of its time slowly tilting up or down, but sometime in 1998 it crossed through the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. New-age theoreticians seem to feel that this date too, 14 years ago, was recent enough to play into the significance of the 12/21/12 “alignment”. But however neatly or poorly these parameters line up, what has yet to be offered is any mechanism by which a cataclysm or “spiritual event” would be triggered by any of it.
NASA - 2012 - "Shadow of the Dark Rift"
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