Keeping the present data about recent geological activity in view and predicting accordingly, the Earth may just withstand human battering for at least another century. That is, if humans are not silly enough to bring on more disaster with the latest weapons of mass destruction. Experts believe that the Mayan calendar might be pushed off by 50, or maybe even 100 years.

These results became apparent after calculations on the Mayan calendar were converted into today's Gregorian calendar using the GMT constant. Gerardo Aldana of the University of California, US, writes in the book, Calendars and years 11: astronomy and time in the ancient and medieval world, that the previous conversion made of the Mayan calendar were incorrect. But still, the human race's desire for self-preservation will always be threatened by such predictions.

This is similar to the 1833 Leonid meteor shower in which thousands of shooting stars scattered across the sky in just a few hours made people think that the world was coming to an end.

On a realistic note, there’s another interesting happening surfacing on Earth: the magnetic north pole is shifting from the North Sea towards Siberia. So much so, that even airports are renumbering their runways; the reason being the most important tool of navigation—the compass. The Earth's iron core sustains its outer magnetic field. This is how surface measurements are made according to the two magnetic poles, the North and the South. This means that our Earth is a giant magnet. Now, when the magnetic field shifts even a bit, navigational points shift, resulting in an aircraft landing in a completely wrong direction.

Interestingly, the magnetic poles are not the same as the geographic poles. To make matters more confusing, the magnetic field shifts and causes the angle of declination, (the difference between the North and South Poles) to also change. The strange phenomenon takes place one-fifth of a degree every year at lower latitudes, meaning that after every five years, the compass will be off its mark by one degree. Even though this does not sound much, there is a likely chance that one could find oneself in a completely different destination when travelling, especially by air.

Airport runways are designed according to the points of a compass and a difference of a couple of degrees could mean renumbering runways. These slight shifts in Earths magnetism do not exactly spell a doomsday scenario, but a catastrophe would be in offing if the poles actually reverse. That is, if the North became South and vice versa. It last happened around 780,000 years ago and according to scientists, we have another 10,000 years before it happens again.

What exactly will take place and how bad the effects of such a reversal will be for life on Earth is not exactly known as experts believe that they really cannot estimate such a disaster. But even after what might have happened thousands of years ago when the magnetic poles reversed, life did not become extinct. As Seti astronomer Dr Seth Shostak writes in his article, Apocalypse 2012:the truth about the end of the world, "There's been life on this planet for nearly four billion years, and nothing, not asteroids, gamma ray bursts, shifting magnetic poles, or the occasional supernova has managed to snuff it out. Life's tougher than a leather sandwich."

But Shostak also agrees that humans will have their time under the sun and then fade out for a better species, basing his assumption on the fact that 99.9 per cent of all living creatures that crawled or wiggled on the planet long ago no longer exist.

Still, keeping present natural disasters in mind, global warming due to human folly may be the destruction of many species including human population in most areas. As the seas get warmer and coastlines get shorter, hurricanes will get stronger resulting in more devastation.

However, an extremely weakened magnetic field might make life a little difficult as it does on Mars. Without this protective field around us, harmful radiation may hit us directly. But until any such extremely unlikely event in the near future does take place, we can sit back and enjoy the beautiful planet we live on.