Its only an arguably very willful misinterpretation of the ancient Mayan calendar to conclude the world ends on 21 December 2012. The question is why so many people are drawn by these tales 【M1】______ of impending destruction? Theres more reason to think it will 【M2】______ immediately lead to a planet-wide liquidation sale than if your desk calendar reaches the end of the year before youve bought a new one. Why are we so determined to think our days are numbered, and so willing to bend the facts to fit our delusions? My whole 【M3】______ unscientific theory is what stems from our understandable difficulty 【M4】______ grasping the walk-on part we all hold amid the sprawling enormity 【M5】______ of deep time. It is not easy to get our head round the Earth having 【M6】______ existed for billions of years, and with our own life in comparison 【M7】______ being an almost insignificant instant in the middle of it all. Thus 【M8】______ fleeting and so far from either end of the story that many of us behave like individual black holes, mentally warping time to write ourselves into the grand finale. Sooner or later, those who are convinced of our imminent doom will inevitably be proved right. The planet cant last forever — astronomers predict the planet only has around another 7.5 billion years when it is engulfed by the Sun and humans will likely have 【M9】______ disappeared much earlier. If we do have only the briefest lines in a seemingly interminable epic, shouldnt we make most of it while we 【M10】______ are on stage? 【M1】