Although I saw the movie 2012 and found it to be reasonably entertaining, albeit not entirely believable, I never gave much credence to the predictions apparently made by the Mayans regarding the end of the Earth prophecy, or at least human life, on December 21, 2012. Nostradamus predicted the world would end in 3786 or 3797, depending on whom you believe, if you believe any of this which certainly gives mankind more time to avert catastrophe.
Thankfully NASA looks to have relied on real world data acquisition products to debunk these prophetic visions. Actually, in full disclosure, I am operating on the assumption that NASA leveraged data acquisition solutions (i.e. data loggers, paperless recorders, PXI plug-in data acquisition analog I/O boards, etc.) in order to prove that the Earth faces no life ending asteroid collisions, no rogue planet Nibiru (talk about strange), no signs of catastrophic solar storms or anything else that may end life on Earth as we know it.
In order for man to understand the world around us we need to acquire data on things such as temperature, speed, light, pressure, force and other phenomena in order for NASA to give most of mankind, at least the reasonable people among us, some measure of comfort and confidence that the Mayans were not visited by aliens way back when and given a crystal ball into the window of our own destruction.
I am not ruling out the fact that other intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in an almost infinitely large universe(s), as I believe Drake's equation will mathematically and definitively answer that question some day, but rather I am not privy to enough evidence to believe the Mayans (or the Egyptians or any other earlier civilization for that matter) were visited by intelligent beings and told that mankind only had 2012 years to make a go of it before we went the way of the dinosaurs.
Shipments of data acquisition solutions to research related organizations such as NASA are very real, likely generating millions of dollars per annum worldwide. Mayan predictions of a pending Doomsday scenario or visitations by Extraterrestrial Biological Entities (EBE's) are discussions I will leave for a different day and a different venue.
Hope you had a Happy New Year and best wishes for a prosperous 2012
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