Will world end on December 21, 2012?

David Leafe, DailyMail.co.uk; Wisdom Quarterly

...One idea with at least some credibility is that the Earth will one day be hit by a large extra-terrestrial object.

But David Morrison dismisses the idea put forward in the [2012 doomsday] film that this will be a mysterious planet known as Nibiru -- long the subject of speculation among the gloom-mongers of cyberspace.

Niburu was supposedly first identified by the Sumerian people, who lived 5,000 years ago in what is now southern Iraq. And it is said to be heading towards Earth at an alarming rate. Astronomers insist that there is no such planet but, much to Morrison’s frustration, this only increases suspicion that governments worldwide are concealing its existence to avoid global panic.

Mountain tribe, Thailand (maxdrukpa.com)

"The simple laws of planetary motion tell you that if this thing really was only three years away from hitting Earth, it would be the brightest thing in the sky apart from the sun and the moon," he says.

"It would have been tracked by thousands of amateur and professional astronomers all over the world. You just can’t hide a planet."

Fictitious though planet Nibiru is, the Earth has always been subject to strikes by comets and asteroids. But to do any real damage, an object would have to be more than a mile wide. Such big hits are rare and the last was 65 million years ago, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs. 

Searches of the cosmos for potential collisions up to 100 years into the future by NASA’s Near Earth Object Program led to them reporting that there are no serious threats in the offing and, even if a sizeable projectile did hit us, it might not wipe us out altogether. More