There are many people out there convinced that something very, very big is going to take place on December 12, 2012. Related to several mythologies and seeming commonalities, the 12 / 21 / 12 date is looking pretty ominous to plenty, but the folks at NASA recently set out to debunk this date of doom.
One of the biggest stories related to 12 / 21 / 12 is that there is a small planet--a dwarf planet as it's called--on a collision course with Earth. The planet's name is Nibiru, sometimes called Planet X for extra drama, and it's looking to smash right into us with little warning from government figures. Some have switched out Nibiru / Planet X for another dwarf planet named Eris, but in this case, it's all about the giant rock slamming into Earth.
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There are several other stories, of course, from the re-emergence of giant winged serpent gods like Kukulcan and Quetzalcoatl, to tales of a much vaguer sort involving unspecified "changes" and the "end of an age". But when it comes to big rocks in space, it's hard to turn away from a source like NASA, who makes it abundantly clear that Nibiru / Eris / Planet X is not going to happen, and NASA has an excellent explanation of why.
Essentially, NASA--operating on a platform called Beyond 2012 devoted to the debunking of such celestial calamities--said that, if there were an enormous space rock the size of a tiny planet screaming toward our planet with the intent of slamming into it, there's one critical point that many conspiracy theorists are missing. While indeed, a government agency like NASA might well be tasked to keep such an event quiet so as to prevent widespread panic, there's one thing that even the government couldn't keep quiet, according to NASA: a human being's own eyes.
According to NASA, the dwarf planet would be plainly, naked-eye, visible to anyone who cared to look, and not even the government can hide the entire sky. Eris, meanwhile, was similarly debunked, saying that it can never get closer than four billion miles to Earth, as though under a cosmic restraining order.
While Nibiru in three weeks can be reasonably debunked, NASA also wanted to take on other conspiracy-theorist fun like magnetic pole shifts, giant solar storms, and several other potential disasters caused by planetary alignment. To that end, NASA launched a Google (News - Alert)+ hangout devoted to the debunking of various 12 / 21 / 12 affairs.
So what's actually going to happen on 12 / 21 / 12? There's no way to know, of course, until 12 / 22 / 12, but it's a fair bet that the answer is going to be "not much". Of course, the recent surge of disaster movies and accompanying literature from Hollywood really hasn't helped matters, and the overall global condition probably isn't making people sleep better at night, but still, it's looking pretty good that we will all in fact see Christmas, whether or not we all celebrate it, and much as NASA's organization implies, be able to look beyond 2012 to the future of mankind.