SCIENTIFIC EXPERTS from around the world are predicting that five years from now, all life on Earth could well come to an end. Some are saying it’ll be humans that would set it off. Others believe that a natural phenomenon will be the cause. And the religious folks are saying it’ll be God himself who would press the stop button. The following are some likely arguments as to why the world would end by the year 2012.

Reason one: Mayan calendar

The first to predict 2012 as the end

of the world were the Mayans, a bloodthirsty race that were good at two things -- building highly accurate astrological equipment out of stone and sacrificing virgins.

Most people around the globelook at some form of a calendar every single day.For the people of ancient Maya, calendars were just as important to daily life as they are to people today.The Mayans originated in a region called Mesoamerica. Mesoamericans began writing during the mid-Pre-classic period. The Mayans were the first to keep any sort of historical record, and the beginnings of the calendar were born. The Mayans used stelae, or stone monuments, to carve their civil events, calendars and astronomy knowledge. They also inscribed their religious beliefs and mythology on pottery.

The Mayans placed great value in recording their people's history. While they weren't the first civilization to ever use a calendar, they did devise four separate calendars that lasted for discrete time periods. Depending on their needs, the Mayans used different calendars or some combination of two calendars to record each event. Their Long Count calendar, which we'll learn about i

n more detail later, expires in 2012, leading some to believe that it coincides with an apocalyptic event.

The Long Count Calendar

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A Mayan calendar column was found in Quirigua, Yucatan peninsula, Mexico, on August 13, 1929.

The Mayans designed the Long Count calendar to last approximately 5,125.36 years, a time period they referred to as theGreat Cycle [source: Jenkins]. The Long Count calendar is divided into five distinct units:

one day - kin
20 days - uinal
360 days - tun
7,200 days - katun
144,000 days - baktun

To find the Long Count date that corresponds with any Gregorian date, you'll need to count the days from the beginning of the last Great Cycle. But determining when the last cycle began and matching that up to a Gregorian date is quite a feat.

English anthropologist Sir Eric Thompson

looked to the Spanish Inquisition to calculate the Mayan-to-Gregorian date conversion, known as the Thompson Correlation. Events that occurred during the Inquisition were recorded on both the Mayan Long Count calendar and the Gregorian calendar. Scholars then gathered dates that matched on both calendars and compared them to the Dresden Codex, one of four Mayan documents that survived the Inquisition. This codex confirmed the date long thought by Thompson to be the beginning of the current Great Cycle -- Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. [source: Mayan Long Count].

Now that we have the beginning date of the Great Cycle, let's put the Long Count into practice. We'll take a date that's familiar to many Americans: July 20, 1969, the day Apollo 11 landed on the moon. In the Long Count calendar, this date is written as 12.17.15.17.0. You'll notice there are five number places in the date. Reading from left to right, the first place signifies the number of baktuns since the beginning of the Great Cycle. In this case, there have been 12 baktuns, or 1,728,000 days (144,000 x 12) since Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. The second place relates to the number of katuns that have taken place. Then, it continues on to the right with the number of tuns, uinals and kins.

In recent years, as the conclusion of the Long Count calendar approaches on Dec. 12, 2012, doomsday theorists have predicted the worst. That Gregorian date is denoted as 13.0.0.0.0 on the Long Count, signaling the end of the current Great Cycle.

However, Mayan scholars and natives dismiss the apocalyptic theories, noting that end of the calendar would be regarded as a time of celebration, much like modern-day New Year festivities [source: Stevenson]. There are also no Mayan inscriptions or writings that predict the end of the world when the Great Cycle concludes [source:MacDonald].

The most notable event slated for that 2012 winter solstice will happen in the sky. For the first time in around 25,800 years,

the sun will align with the center of the

Milky Way galaxy [source: Stevenson]. Although the event sounds impressive, astronomers claim that it won't have any effect on the Earth. And with that, the next Great Cycle will quietly begin anew.Thousands of years ago they managed to calculate the length of the lunar moon as 329.53020 days, only 34 seconds out. The Mayan calendar predicts that the earth will end on December 21,2012. Given that they were pretty close to the mark with the lunar cycle, it’s likely they’ve got the end of the world right as well.

Reason two: Sun storms

Solar experts from around the world monitoring the sun have made a startling discovery. Our sun is in a bit of strife. The energy output of the sun is, like most things in nature, cyclic and it’s supposed to be in the middle of a period of relative stability. However, recent solar storms have been bombarding the earth with lot of radiation energy. It’s been knocking out power grids and destroying satellites. This activity is predicted to get worse and calculations suggest it’ll reach its deadly peak sometime in 2012.

Asteroid Impact

If a giant asteroid wiped out the Dinosaurs, it can destroy us too.Scientists predict that the chances of a class 10

impact (zero indicating no impact an 8 indicating a certain Earth impact with severe global damage and 10 indicating a doomsday impact) are one in 1,000.

Yet did they predict a date ? Some say that the Mayans picked 2012 for a reason.

Reason four: The Bible says it

If having scientists warning us about the end of the world isn’t bad enough, religious folks are getting in on the act

as well. Interpretations of the Christian Bible reveal that the date for Armageddon, the final battle between good an evil, has been set for 2012. The I Ching, also known as the Chinese Book of Changes, says the same thing, as do various sections of the Hindu teachings.

Reason six: The physicists

This one’s case of bog -- simple maths mathematics. Physicists at Berkely University have been crunching the numbers. They’ve determined that the earth is well overdue for a major catastrophic event. Even worse, they’re claiming that their calculations prove that we’re all going to die, very soon. They are also saying that their prediction comes with a certainty of 99 per cent; and 2012just happens to be the best guess as to when it occurs.

Reason seven: Earth’s magnetic field

We all know the Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that shields us from most of the sun’s radiation. What you might not know is that the magnetic poles we call North and South have a nasty habit of swapping places every 750,000 years or so -- and right now we’re about 30,000 years overdue. Scientists have noted that the poles are drifting apart roughly 20-30 kms each year, much faster than ever before, which points to a pole-shift being right around the corner

. While the pole shift is under way, the magnetic field is disrupted and will eventually disappear, sometimes for up to 100 years. The result is enough UV outdoors to crisp your skin in seconds, killing everything it touches.