I'm still not sure what your thinking is on this.  We are IN the Milky Way.  What we see in the sky at night is not a part of the Milky Way, but the Milky Way itself.  We are in it, looking through the disk of the Milky Way.  We are no farther away from the Milky Way, than any other part of the Milky Way is.

@Gamerace

I completely agree with you. It's just someone that's bored, looking for reasons of a cataclysm. If you look at all the events that happen in nature, you can easily find plenty of times that many of them happen at once. And it'd be easy to find something that an ancient prophecy says or what an ancient civilization did, that coincides with it. Like when an ancient civilization's calander ended.

::sigh::

Absolutely, and it's been done over and over again, just like this.

 I even remember back in the day (showing my age here) there was a group claiming Michael Jackson was Jesus Christ reborn and had found all sorts of circumstancial evidence to prove it.   ....  I wonder where those people are now.

Let me apologize in advance:  Sorry.  This is a pet peeve of mine.

Y2K was, software-wise, a disaster that was averted.  And it was averted because of all the media attention, which got software (and hardware) companies working on the problems before they became serious.  I mean, maybe you don't consider the bank transaction systems shutting down a crisis...but then have you ever lived through a time when the bank denied you access to your money?  Imagine it on a larger scale.

What kind of impact would it have been to wall street to find out that thousands of companies couldn't do their financial reports because their accounting software had a Y2K glitch in it and they had to delay it?  How about the number of unionized payroll workers who didn't get a paycheck on time because the programs failed to function for the first payroll of the year?

No, the earth wasn't going to be torn asunder by earthquakes and heaters that didn't shut off because of a Y2K glitch.  But financially, I think the software industry averted some significant financial disasters waiting to happen.  Not to mention the huge army of blood thirsty lawyers who were just waiting with class action lawsuit papers bursting out of their briefcases. 

I don't look at Y2K nonevent as a media failure.  I look at it as a software development success.

Being in the trenches, I saw what was going to happen had we not made the changes we did, and that's just in my company.  I'm sure there were similar things in other companies.

@Jman - My brother got a years work and travel all over the province doing Y2K fixes, so I know exactly where you're coming from.  I'm not implying Y2K wasn't a real problem, it was.  But the media and people over-reacted.  People were stocking up on food and rations and crap because of Y2K.  Famously the media harped on 'it'll cost XX billions!!' - true, but, that's XX billions divided by XXX hundreds of thousands of businesses and government offices so for each it was an inconvienent but affordable fix and not sort of 'OMG where is that money going to come from??' thing the media played it to be.

It was kinda like saying, OMG if XXX millions of people don't adjust there clocks back an hour they'll be mass confusion and choas!!  Well, yes, but once we all know to do it, it's not that hard really.

A) Well this is in the off-topic board so why respond to it if you have no interest. Off topic sections make forums a bit more interesting for people who want to change topics.

B) Yes I suppose an event that happens 1 in 26,000 years is fairlly common. I think it's pretty special even if it has no impact on us. Tell you kids you live through a time when you were at the equator of the Galaxy. A topic like this brings interesting reactions from people to say the least. I never made any claims in my original post, only listed what I understood.

 On a side note, did you guys know they are making a movie about Dec 21st 2012. I think it's called 2012 The War of Souls and is directed by Michael Bay. Should be interesting to see Hollywoods take on all this.

Actually I didn't really take a side on this subject at all. I left it open to interpretation. Sometimes I think that "cherry picking" has become the new cool thing to say to sound smart or something. Even if it doesn't apply to the situation. Sadly people have become drones, regurgitating what other people have said, appying it needlessly.

I think living through the change of a millennium will be the most exciting thing to happen in our lives, cosmically...unless of course a meteor strikes the Earth or something along those lines.

So for the most part, none of this crap matters...it won't affect your daily lives.

Too bad that a "millenium" is only special because we have ten fingers. It's not really a very cosmical event ;)

What did the Mayans predict that were right? I'm totally clueless. We didn't learn those stuff at school.