Get ready for the apocalypse - yeah, no

So apparently the whole world as we know it is coming to an end. That's right, the countdown has begun.

In some way, shape or form the end of human civilisation is growing closer and closer as I am writing this.

We have all heard the rumours, seen the movies and some of us might have even liked the Facebook page "Don't worry; if we all die in 2012, Justin Bieber goes with us". Some of us might even be cheeky enough to be "attending" 2013 on our social networking events list.

I have never been to pay much attention to the whole Apocalypse Now doomsday theories.

My view has always been that people like Nostradamus have been predicting the end of the world since the first people were on Earth and people are still here today, thousands of years later.

The first time I heard about people predicting the world is coming to an end on December 21, 2012 I thought to myself, "Seriously? Again?"

So far in my measly 17 years I have survived the new millennium, the dreaded Biblical triple-sixes - 06/06/06, bird flu, 09/09/09 and swine flu. Bring it on, 2012!

My idea of the Earth being an indestructible source of life that will never ever be destroyed has, however, begun to change with the increase in natural disasters over the past few years.

Over the past two years alone there have been the Pakistan and Queensland floods, the Victoria bush fires and the Haiti, Chile and Yushu earthquakes. These all seemed rather insignificant and far-removed from me as a New Zealand resident until the Christchurch earthquake in February devastated the nation.

That was the event that really hit home for me. The Christchurch earthquakes made me realise what would happen if kindly, nourishing Mother Earth turned on us.

I understood the true damage the Earth's unpredictable forces are capable of causing. Mother Earth really hammered the message home a couple of weeks later when the Japanese earthquake and tsunami took the lives of over 12,000 people.

In the days following these natural disasters my Facebook news feed was overflowing with statuses about how the world is coming to an end.

Pages such as "If the world really does end in 2012 I have spent my whole life in school, lovely!" began to appear and a significant number of my friends became a fan of or liked these pages.

All the commotion caused by these natural disasters and the reaction of my friends and the media made me realise that the idea of the world coming to an end is not as unrealistic and far-fetched as I had always believed.

So there I was thinking to myself if the world really does end on December 21, 2012, would I be happy with the life I had lived? Will I regret leaving so many things unsaid and so many chances untaken?

After seriously contemplating leaving school and travelling around the world, stopping off at all the places I had dreamed about but never seriously considered visiting, ticking off activities on the bucket list inside my head, living life with no regrets, spending every moment like it was my last, living like I was dying ... I took a moment.

I snapped back to reality and thought to myself even with billion-dollar weather satellites and all the modern technology available to mankind, scientists can still not accurately predict something as mundane as the weather forecast for tomorrow. Aren't we being a bit naive in thinking that members of an ancient Incan civilisation could predict the exact date of the apocalypse 2000 years ago?

Ruan Simenson, Year 13, Trident High School