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Celebrating the vision of 2012

I admire the visionary thinking behind 2012. It's easy to dismiss it as typical Hollywood production-line stuff but I think the movie has a message if only people are willing to ponder.

Of course, the movie could have done without all the razzmatazz: the special effects and the biblical allusions. But that's perhaps necessary to engage an audience with very short attention spans.

I would perhaps have preferred a movie that debated not only this particular possibility that might put a spanner in all our corporate-ladder-climbing careers but other possibilities as well. But may be that's up to Seth Sostak and Discvoery Channel.

The world may not quite turn turtle come 2012 and the Mayans may not quite have gotten it right — I certainly hope so — but there are dangers on the horizon for humanity. This permanent fiesta can't last. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, as Newton's Third Law says.

What we are doing to the planet will have an equal and opposite reaction. Then there are the imponderables. It's churlish of humanity to imagine that we have a 'spcial' place in the universe. The reality is that planet Earth is a speck of dust and an oasis in an universe that is essentially a place of endless darkness.

As we go about our daily routines, it's worth remembering that our planet continues to rotate ... endlessly, unceasingly, relentlessly ... suspended in space, in nothingness.

And it continues to revolve around its star, the Sun ... some unseen force binding it to its parent. Imagine that ... imagine the blackness of space and imagine this fragile, blue marble in the vastness of space.

No religious philosophy can exceed the beauty of this reality of the universe we inhabit.

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