Madison news - Happy New Year! (it may be your last)

In show business, it’s known as a “triple threat” – the signifier of a rare force who can sing, dance and act. Think Beyoncé. Or Hugh Jackman. Or (most of the time) Liza Minnelli. For those susceptible to doomsday theories and end-of-world conspiracies, the year ahead is a temporal equivalent. And not in the entertaining way, but rather the “you may want to hug nanna a few more times because time is running out” kind of way. The year 2012 has been earmarked as the great global renovation by cultures ancient and science contemporary.

Pay heed to historical myth-makers, astrophysics buffs, astrologists and even the Bible (specifically Revelation, uh, 20:12), and this will be the type of year for which the word “cataclysm” was invented. And that’s a pretty impressive feat when you consider how dicey things looked at the start of last year, when floods, fires and a tsunami packed a devastating one-two-three punch.

Doomsday predictions have been around for time immemorial – more on that in a moment – but something about 2012 has always held the popular imagination in thrall, its status as the year that changes everything locked into place for so long that you have to wonder: will it really mark, as REM once sang, “the end of the world as we know it?” (Those guys, by the way, recently broke up after more than three decades together, a split nobody really saw coming. Do they know something we don’t?)

The most notable soothsayer was Nostradamus, who wrote of a comet – actually, he said that “in the sky will be seen a great fire dragging a trail of sparks” – that would doom us all by, oh, the Christmas holidays. Another foretelling involves a planet called Nibiru. The ancient Sumerian culture calculated that it visits our part of the galaxy every 3600 years and could alter the Earth’s distance from the sun. This could result in either some fabulous tans (for the first few days, at least) or a new ice age.

But the most talked-about vision of decimation stems from the Mayan calendar, which is set to end its final cycle on December 21, 2012. Despite the fact this ancient civilisation failed to anticipate its own demise, that date lies at the heart of much of this hysteria. Plenty of nervous theorists have circled it in fire-engine red in their diaries, though University of Sydney religious studies professor Christopher Hartney says it’s for no good reason. He points out the Mayans ended their calendar on this date because they simply didn’t see a need to calculate beyond this cycle. For a culture that emerged around 1800BC, it’s understandable they would have adopted a “let’s cross the 2012 bridge sometime later” kind of attitude.

Belgian author Patrick Geryl is so certain it’s curtains that he’s written no less than nine books on the subject. So it’s no surprise that he says we ignore his warnings at our own peril: “Upheavals in the sun’s magnetic fields will generate gigantic solar flares that will affect the polarity of the entire Earth. Massive earthquakes will demolish all buildings on the planet and instigate colossal tsunamis and intense volcanic activity. In fact, the Earth’s crust will shift, sweeping continents thousands of miles away from their present positions.”