2012, Hollywood's latest blockbuster, will be screened worldwide this month.

I watched the online trailer: The iceberg melting at unprecedented rates, floods ravaging dry lands, the Earth's crust tumbling and falling apart, cities reduced to a rubble, tsunamis lashing wildly on the land and the entire planet submerged in water.

This is a foretaste of Doomsday. The year is 2012.

Wow! the world will see its doom in three years' time! Isn't it a little too early?

Some people are planning to get married three years later, some preparing to make a fortune, some conceiving to take over the government by then, while some gearing up to host the Olympics that year...

If the world is to be reduced to ashes in three years' time, then no one should come out with any more ideas or plan to do anything.

But why is it in 2012?

The movie has an explanation.

According to the Mayan predictions, the Earth has a lifespan of five solar eras, and we are now in the fifth solar era!

The fifth solar era began in Year 3113 in the Mayan calendar, and will end after the 5125-year Mayan cycle.

The sun will then vanish, and our planet will experience earth-moving changes that will see it through its demise.

This terminal date is equivalent to the 22nd of December 2012 in our calendar.

Coincidentally, the Tang Dynasty prediction in ancient China also foretold that the Earth would undergo a complete makeover, which could be interpreted as the end of the existing world, in the Year of Dragon (2012).

Call that coincidence or sheer superstition, but NASA satellite data have shown that the oceanic ice in the Arctic Circle this summer is only half its coverage four years back.

A NASA scientist has said, "At this speed, the Arctic Ocean will be totally depleted of ice at the end of 2012 summer."

As a matter of fact, we have a good deal of books and movies plotting around the 2012 Doomsday prediction; but in the past, we didn't see so many natural disasters as we do now, and such predictions and stories therefore hardly raised a brow in this world back then.

However, we have a fair share of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, sand storms and droughts in recent months, and this has triggered widespread alarm among people who are not typically bothered about environment preservation.

Be it three years, 30 years, or 300 years. If we keep consuming our Earth this way, we will send our planet to its end sooner or later.

I don't care whether you believe in 2012, but my personal prediction is that: 2012 is going to sell like nobody's business. (By TAY TIAN YAN/Translated by DOMINIC LOH/Sin Chew Daily)