The end of the world is due on 21.12.2012 - apparently

Cometh the hour, cometh the scare. The new one predicts that, on 2012's shortest day - 21 December - the world as we know it will end. Why? Because the Mayan 'Long Calendar' stops then. And why should that matter? Because the Mayans were fantastically sophisticated and inventive astronomers, and 21/12/12 is the last day in a 5,000-year countdown from their 'creation'.

If further proof were needed, Nostradamus forecast that a comet would hit Earth in 2012; Saint Malachy predicted that the last Pope would be installed then; and it's the year of the alien invasion in The X Files.

Cue every shaman, spirit guide and Ufologist on America's west coast to prophecy famine, floods, second comings - you name it. While some foretell a spiritual awakening, the majority seems to think that, in Private Fraser's words, we're all doomed - their favourite theory being that we're 30,000 years overdue for a 'polar shift', a genuine scientific phenomenon that may have done for the dinosaurs.

Mayan hieroglyphs aren’t crystal clear about what the calendar even means

You can get a taste of the pros from survive2012.com, and the cons from skepdic.com/maya. The former has handy hints on building bunkers, digging fire pits and how to make steel, along with pages on the shelf lives of seeds and which gun to use in a catastrophe. On the other hand, the latter points out that "Mayan glyphs and hieroglyphs aren't crystal clear about what the calendar even means". Either way, you'll see it's a topic that's generating heat - and money.

In San Francisco, for example, a company called Sacred Mysteries is running one convention a month. Meanwhile in Hollywood, a recent seminar drew a thousand people and the director Michael (Transformers) Bay is developing 2012: the Movie. Based on a novel by the self-proclaimed alien abductee Whitley Strieber, the film should tell the story of an academic who discovers that multiple versions of Earth co-exist in different dimensions, and all are threatened by the Mayan apocalypse. By opening a portal into a parallel universe, he makes contact with his double to stop the prophecy from being fulfilled.

"The idea of a man teaming up with himself to solve a cosmic mystery was way too good for us to pass up," says producer Alex Kurtzman. But Roberto Orci, who wrote the script for Transformers and is now working on the 2012 screenplay, is making no promises about fidelity. "We always try to be extremely free with what the dictates of the live action story need to be," he says. "If it ends up being similar to the book, great. But we don't stick to anything just because it's there."

Away from Tinseltown, forests are being felled for 2012 literature. But from the scores of titles on offer, which should one trust? Nephilim Stargates: The Year 2012 and the Return of the Watchers tells us among other things that beings will descend from heaven and use human and animal DNA to create giant offspring. But Earth Changes and 2012: Messages From the Founders - which was "received telepathically from a vast collective intelligence" - claims the planet will tune to a "higher frequency".

Consideration must go to Conversations With the Children of Now: Crystal, Indigo, and Star Kids Speak About the World, Life, and the Coming 2012 Shift. (They recommend "changing our world with grace".)  But what about The Christian Survival Guide to 2012 and Beyond - which deals with the rather un-Christian dawning of the astrological Age of Aquarius - not to mention the pithy if rather defeatist Pandemonium in 2012, which promises a second American civil war? There are so many of these works, they have already been parodied in a Complete Idiot's Guide.

Perhaps this millenarianism is just the Y2K scam all over again - but through a glass, darkly. Nine years ago, technicians and consultants were 'needed' to save the world from sloppy computer programmers. This time round, the profits are in pseudo-cosmology and survivalism.

As Sacred Mysteries' founder Jay Weidner recently told the LA Times: "People should want to know how to pound a nail, milk a cow and grow their own food". Which, actually, isn't such a loopy idea; because even if 2012 doesn't bring the end of the world, those skills could still be handy for the coming Depression. ·