The first sign that humanity might just have got away with it came at 10am GMT. On the tiny island of Kiritimati, in the South Pacific, the clocks ticked round to midnight and, for this one land mass at least, December 21 officially came to an end. Crucially, it did so neither to the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth, nor the sonic boom of a catastrophic asteroid impact.
Over the next few hours, during which the Maya reputedly predicted the end of the world would arrive, the Earth continued to spin. In Beijing, where an entrepreneur had been