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2012: A Money-Making Odyssey?

“People are very gullible… It a sad testimonial that you need NASA to tell you the world’s not going to end.”

-David Morrison, NASA scientist, talking to Discovery News last week

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to clue me in to our gullibility.

Although Morrison does have a front row seat to the unfolding spectacle brought about by a number of apocalypse-themed movies starting to hit theaters near you. From the NPR website yesterday:

According to numerous sources on the Internet, in 2012 a planet called Nibiru will collide with Earth, resulting in the extinction of the human race. Or the Earth’s magnetic poles will flip, causing the rotation of the planet to reverse, resulting in the extinction of the human race. Or the Earth will fall into something called a “dark rift” in the Milky Way — resulting in the extinction of the human race.

So, what’s NASA doing about it?

“NASA has nothing to do with the Planet Nibiru, because it doesn’t exist,” NASA astrobiologist David Morrison tells NPR’s Guy Raz. “What I am doing is trying to answer all these people who are really scared, and see if we can’t get some facts out to counteract the mythology on the Internet.”

Morrison writes a column called “Ask an Astrobiologist” on NASA’s Web site. Some years ago, he started receiving questions from people genuinely worried about what may happen in 2012.

The questions aren’t as funny as you might think. “I’ve had three from young people saying they were contemplating committing suicide,” says Morrison. “I’ve had two from women contemplating killing their children and themselves. I had one last week from a person who said, ‘I’m so scared, my only friend is my little dog. When should I put it to sleep so it won’t suffer?’ And I don’t know how to answer those questions.”

Morrison now maintains a 2012 FAQ, where he debunks the doomsday scenarios.

Magnetic poles flipping? “The Earth reverses its magnetic polarity once every 400,000 to 500,000 years. There’s no reason to think it will happen now, [and] no reason to think it will cause a problem if it did,” he says.

Dark rift? “The dark rift is just a place where there are dust clouds in the Milky Way. I can’t imagine where someone decided to be afraid of that.”

The only real proof for many 2012 believers will come on Jan. 1, 2013 — but Morrison says that won’t be the end of doomsday hoaxes.

“The Planet Nibiru was predicted to hit the Earth in May of 2003,” he says. “As far as I know, it didn’t. And someone just pushed reset, and now it’s coming in 2012. So I don’t think we’ll ever be rid of apocalyptic stories about Planet X and the end of the world.”

But there’s still that problem with the Mayan calendar supposedly ending on December 21, 2012?

Maybe not— according to the Mayans.

From the Telegraph (UK) on October 11:

[Guatemalan Mayan Indian elder] Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the end of the world. “I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff,” he said.

A significant time period for the Mayans does end on the date, and enthusiasts have found a series of astronomical alignments they say coincide in 2012, including one that happens roughly only once every 25,800 years.

But most archaeologists, astronomers and Mayans say the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, internet doomsday rumours and TV specials such as one on the History Channel which mixes “predictions” from Nostradamus and the Mayans and asks: “Is 2012 the year the cosmic clock finally winds down to zero days, zero hope?”

Still, things are only likely to get worse for Mr Pixtun. Next month Hollywood’s “2012″ opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the “Curious? Ask an Astronomer” website, says people are scared.

“It’s too bad that we’re getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they’re too young to die,” Ms Martin said. “We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn’t live to see them grow up.”

Mr Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas.

But hysteria surrounding 2012 does have some grains of archaeological basis. One of them is Monument Six.

Found at an obscure ruin in southern Mexico during highway construction in the 1960s, the stone tablet almost did not survive; the site was largely paved over and parts of the tablet were looted.

The inscription describes something that is supposed to occur in 2012 involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation.

However, erosion and a crack in the stone make the end of the passage almost illegible.

Guillermo Bernal, an archaeologist at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, believes the eroded message is:

“He will descend from the sky”.

But Mr Bernal also notes there are other inscriptions at Mayan sites for dates far beyond 2012 – including one that roughly translates into the year 4772.

The piece continued to talk about the history of the Mayans, and added:

Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 BC, marking time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns.

Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and the 13th Baktun ends around Dec 21, 2012. “It’s a special anniversary of creation,” said David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin. “The Maya never said the world is going to end, they never said anything bad would happen necessarily, they’re just recording this future anniversary on Monument Six.”

Will the end of the world happen in 2012? I don’t know. I’m Christian, so I tend to believe the “day of the Lord” will come “like a thief in the night.”

But if there’s any lesson to be taken away from this whole 2012 thing, perhaps it should be this:

All-hazards preparedness is the way to go.

‘Cause you never know when a planet might hit you.

Oh, and be prepared to do some bargain shopping in the days leading up to December 21, 2012, when some of the “real” gloom-and-doom crowd decide they don’t need their earthly belongings anymore.

Sources:

“Scared Of Planet Nibiru? NASA Would Like To Help”
NPR.org, November 15, 2009

“2012 is not the end of the world, Mayan elder insists”
Telegraph (UK), October 11, 2009