This is interesting. I was listening to a book on tape- well, on my computer- not too long ago that talked a little bit about the 2012 doomsday calendar. They said that if you look throughout history there have always been moments of time when things lined up(planets, stars etc.) that shifted things on the earth. It happens about every thousand years- more or less. It also talked about how the mayan's were very smart when it came to things like predicting future events based on the movement of the stars and planets and that's how they came up with the 2012 date- it is approximately 1000 yrs since the last big alignment/event.
I'll have to listen to it again- I was cleaning my house at the time and might have missed some stuff- but I thought it was interesting. That is was not really predicting the end of the world, but more of an "end of an era" and things will be shifting as different stars and planets are aliened differently affecting the gravity pull on the earth.
The book is from Kimball college, I'll see if I can find what it was called.
~Carrie