In the movie "2012," released in theaters last November, an alignment of five planets in our solar system — supposedly foretold by the Mayans thousands of years ago — causes horrors that span nearly every earth science disaster movie cliché: solar flares, neutrinos, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, poles shifting, oceans washing over the tallest mountains in the world, cities falling into the sea, mass hysteria and, basically, total destruction of life as we know it.