Okay, I'm going out on a limb here, but I am going to state categorically that the world will not end this year.
The Earth's core will not explode, aliens will not invade, a magnitude 10+ earthquake will not send a monster tsunami around the globe, and I'll go out on another limb and say that nanobots will not turn us all into a gray ooze.
Over the weekend, there was a story about a Biblical scholar who called the prediction of the world ending in December 2012 based on the Mayan calendar a 'fairy tale' because he knows it will really end on May 11, 2011.
A quick online search shows at least 200 predictions of the end of the world being made during the last two millenia. But no one seems to be betting on 2010, so my prediction may be a safe bet.
Given that the hero of the disaster movie "2012" is also a geologist, I feel emboldened to make my dramatic non-prediction.
So, it looks like we are going to be stuck with another year of dragging ourselves into work, fighting traffic, paying bills, listening to pundits and blowhards get even more rabid (it is an election year remember), and trying to hold it all together for family and friends. Kind of makes the apocalypse sound like an easy way out, doesn't it?
But seriously, the year ahead offers not only challenges but opportunities. Let's see what we can do with them. Happy new year to us all!