By now, you've probably seen the trailer for the end of the world.

All sorts of nasty stuff happens. A giant tsunami inundates the Himalayas to the point that you can get beachfront property at the summit of Everest. The dome of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican topples over, perhaps providing Catholic conspiracy theorist and hack novelist Dan Brown the plot of his next best-selling word salad. An aircraft carrier crashes into the White House.

There's all variety of fire and lots of huge explosions and volcanic eruptions and glaciers, and birds become very frightened and fly around in a vaguely menacing way and John Cusack's Winnebago gets hit by a meteor and Woody Harrelson makes a brief appearance as a zombie killer.

In short, the end of the world, the wiping out of humankind, the complete destruction of this fragile planet looks totally awesome.

Of course, that's just a movie -- "2012" -- coming soon to a theater near you.

The film, though, is based on something that, apparently, a lot of people believe -- that the world will come to an end on Dec. 21, 2012.

That's awfully handy to know. It will save you the trouble of shopping for Christmas presents that year.

It has to do with the Mayans and the Sumerians and some other ancient cultures that no longer exist.

In case you haven't heard about this, a lot of prophets are claiming that the world will end on that date because, apparently, the Mayan calendar ends on that date. Of course, it's a lot more

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complicated than that. Let's just say there are people who have looked at some scratches in rocks made by the Mayans and determined that they mean time will end on Dec. 21, 2012.

But that's just one theory. Another comes from crank author Zecharia Sitchin, who has written about civilization as we know it being wiped out when a planet called Nibiru will crash into the Earth. This has something to do with the ancient Sumerians, but it's not really clear exactly what they have to do with it. The Sumerians either predicted it or would have predicted it or maybe took a wild guess or something about this celestial train wreck.

Nibiru wasn't all bad. According to Sitchin, a previous collision between Nibiru and another planet created Earth and the asteroid belt -- like some kind of galactic game of bocce -- and astronauts from Nibiru are responsible for creating humans.

There are some other theories about Dec. 21, 2012, that involve biblical prophecy, galactic alignments, alien abductions, crop circles, Bosnian pyramids, the reversal of the geomagnetic field, black holes, the Cubs winning the World Series -- stuff like that.

The Web site December212012.com -- the official Web site of the end of the world -- is chock full of stuff like this. One of the articles is an interview with a guy who says he is a former engineer with a U.S. defense contractor. He spouts a lot of sciency sounding things and then says that the Earth can be saved by something called "heart-based living."

Here is how he describes it:

"In the past few years, our own science has made a radical, revolutionary discovery that changes everything about the way we think of ourselves and the world. What they found is that when we create heart-based feelings of gratitude, appreciation, care -- literally, using the muscle of the heart to create these feelings-- what we're actually doing is generating a magnetic field inside our bodies that is part of the magnetic field of the Earth that undergoes the change.

"The Earth's magnetic field rises, falls, and regulates everything from climate to ice caps and sea levels. This magnetic field joins all life on Earth from a blade of grass, to an ant, to a goldfish, to a hamster, to us. When many of us come together and create a common feeling, that experience is called 'coherence.' 'Coherence' can actually be measured. It is 0.10 Hertz. That is the measurement of the coherence created between the heart and the brain."

I'm not sure he knows what coherence means. Perhaps it has something to do with hamsters.

Anyway, the whole 2012/end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it cannot be complete cattle excrement. It has a whole flock of celebrity believers including former Philadelphia Phillie Darren Daulton, comedian/political gadfly Janeane Garofalo, talk-show host Montel Williams and noted actor/director/anti-Semite Mel Gibson.

Also among the celebrity believers in 2012 is a rapper named Canibus. Cannabis, I'm guessing, explains a lot.

And, thankfully, the end of the world has a theme song, and it's not REM's "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)."

It's called "Time for Miracles," and it's performed by American Idol's Adam Lambert. The song is described on the official Web site of the end of the world as "reminiscent of Aerosmith's 'I Don't Want to Miss a Thing'" and "a swelling power ballad full of soaring guitars, orchestral flourishes, and a super-climactic performance by Lambert."

Now, if that's not a sign of the Apocalypse, I don't know what is.


Mike Argento's column appears Mondays and Fridays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints. Reach him at mike@ydr.com or 771-2046. Read more Argento columns at www.inyork.com/ydr -- click on the opinion section -- or visit his blog at www.mikeargento.com.