I saw the movie. It’s a bit of fun fiction made sufficiently plausible to allow the moviegoer a willing suspension of disbelief.
It’s decent entertainment. It’s Armageddon meets Independence Day meet Poseidon Adventure. See the movie. Enjoy the moment.
It is *NOT* presented as ‘fact’ a la “An Inconvenient Truth” or any Michael Moore movie.
I vision some Mayan kid with a hammer a chisel scribing out the Mayan calendar getting a few thousand years out saying to himself "heck with this I'm done, none of us will be here in 2012, let someone else finish this"
A little old man working on the calendar and dropping dead at 2012. Thus ending the calendar scribing.
Granted, I haven't seen the film, but my understanding (as per wikipedia) is that the Earth's core is melted by neutrinos generated by a massive solar flare.
Neutrinos. Really.
A neutrino has a 50/50 chance of penetrating a light-year of lead. It's practically a ghost particle. Of all the things in the universe, there isn't anything more harmless.
This as bad as the time someone on a Star Trek episode announced that the ship had been cleansed of baryonic matter. 10 brownie points to the first person to point out why that would be bad.