hm.. i totally forgot about the LHC @ CERN - there's people who really believe it'll open up some kind of black hole or whatever..
Guess they been watching too many episodes of "Sliders" -- they're not going to create an Einstein-Rosen bridge, just slamming some particles into each other.. Who knows, maybe they'll discover Lazar's magic element 115 (so far they haven't), but that's another topic to be discussed... come to think of it- i'll start it myself
There's one more thing to consider:
since the maya's had such extreme understanding of the galaxy and our solar system, it stands to believe they may have calculated an exact date many centuries into their future. But that would mean they "predicted" a galactic incident, one that they could calculate.
One of the bigger asteroids or comets slamming into earth, i doubt it very much they could've even seen those objects without any proof they had lenses or some other means to magnify parts of the sky.
So then the question remains: what else could be predicted almost 2 millenia into the future? or are we just interpreting it wrong and will there just be another era after 13 baktun?