The ancient Mayan or Aztec prophesy suggests that they are sudden or major changes in any form in 2012. Great idea about the cycle will end soon. Maya inscription that predicts the future has consistently shown that they are expected to continue to live almost as good. In Palenque, for example, they predicted that the people in the year AD 4772 will celebrate the anniversary of the coronation of their king the Great.
Of course, astronomers hope the sun will eventually explode into a red giant and then collapsed, and finally burned, but not for a few billion years. While Maya was thrown a few predictions to the distant future, we have not found anything that reaches that far. As if our world will end in 2012, the answer is, well, yes and no. Americans' sense of immunity ends on 9-11-2001. Everything is getting darker and more desperate. Wall Street is crashing. Prospects for peace in the Middle East dimmed from year to year. Several Russian nuclear weapons unaccounted for. Oil consumption has exceeded our oil production capacity. It does not even start with global warming or overpopulation. By any measure, the world after the year 2012 would have looked much different from that done today. Some significant changes are much worse will happen in the year 2012, or in 2011, or 2013, or 2020, or whatever year you choose.
Even if we find evidence of actual Mayan prophecies about 2012, it does not make them right. Apparently all Christians expected Jesus to return in the year 1000, for example. And perhaps the most important question to ask presented to me by Bill Saturno, the discoverer of San Bartolo murals. If Maya is skilled as a prophet, how they could lose Conquest?