Doom or Age of Aquarius predicted for 2012

Today we have great news for people who are worried about growing old: The world’s going to end in 2012, so don’t worry about it.

According to people who keep up with ancient prophecies and the latest doomsday science news, all heck could break loose that year: hurricanes, volcanoes, solar storms, whatever.

You may find this hard to believe, but I just heard it last week on National Public Radio, and now it’s in the paper, so it must be true.

Some say this crisis was predicted long ago by ancient Mayan astronomers whose “long count” calendar of 5,126 years will by our measure run out on Dec. 21, 2012. So don’t go overboard on the holiday shopping that year.

In December 2012, we will have held another presidential election, so you know who’ll be blamed for ending the world: Barack Obama. Folks who said electing him would be a disaster will be vindicated.

But not everyone thinks the news is bad. Some folks who are into astrology think 2012 will mark the dawning of the age of Aquarius. If so, then you know what we’re in for, according to that song by the Fifth Dimension: harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding, golden living dreams of visions, mystic crystal revelations and the mind’s true liberation.

So it’s either that, or massive upheaval: earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, war, etc. According to Lawrence Joseph, author of “Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization’s End,” some of the threats are:

• Solar activity will peak in 2012 “at record-setting levels.”

•  The Earth’s magnetic field, which protects people from solar radiation, is weakening. This could signal a shift in the magnetic poles.

• Physicists believe the Earth is “overdue” for a meteor strike similar to the one blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

• The super-volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park is about to blow.

•  Some geophysicists believe our solar system has entered an “energy cloud” that is affecting the sun and the atmospheres of planets.

• Some interpretations of Chinese and Hindu theology, and of Armageddon in the Bible, also support the 2012 disaster date.

Those threats are listed at www.apocalypse2012.com, which touts Joseph’s book as “an authoritative, unsettling and at times scathingly funny appraisal of just how close the Earth, or at least our species, might be to extinction.”

That does sound funny, like a joke: A doomsday prophet walks into a bar and says, “The world’s ending and I want to live it up. Pour me a glass of your best single-malt Scotch.”

The bartender laughs and says, “We quit ordering 12-year-old whisky when you said the world was going to end in 1999.”

Remember Y2K, when people geeked out thinking the zero-digit computer switch from ’99 to ’00 would cripple the country?

Yet all that happened after 1999 was the 2000 election debacle, 9/11, the Enron and Worldcom scandals, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the world economic collapse.

If those who prepared for Y2K have been unable to sell their remote compounds, in this real estate climate, then this whole 2012 thing could be good news for them: They should be all set for the catastrophe to come.

And hardened by experience.