NASA: Ruining the End of the World As We Know It

NASA is ruining the end of the world for Dino Londis, and here’s what doomsday December 21, 2012 means to the Mayans, mobile tech users and his mother. It’s the end of the world as the Doomsdayers know it, and Dino feels fine.

In a statement on its site, NASA is emphatic that the world in fact will not end on December 21, 2012, as predicted by the Mayans, the Doomsdayers and my mother, among others. The agency is unequivocal about it: There will still be an Earth with folks living on it on December 22, 2012, its scientists insist. Killjoys.

Notice NASA did not deny that December 21 does mark the end of fall and the beginning of the gadget shopping season.

Doomsdayers claim the Mayan calendar ends on 12/21/12 and there is a hidden planet called Nibiru which is on a direct collision course with earth. NASA responded on its site with a Q and A — it’s excerpted at the end of this piece — but given we might not have that much time for idle reading, I’ll sum it up for you:

  • Yes, the Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012. But that only means the Mayans need to man up and order new ones.
  • Nibiru is an Internet myth and no such planet is speeding toward Earth or we’d know it by now. Sumerians be damned.
  • Relax, says NASA, the real collision to fear is Astroid 2004 MN4 — it has a 1 on 60 chance of hitting earth on a Friday the 13th in the year 2029.
  • There is a fake NASA release affirming the coming end, says NASA senior research scientist Don Yeomans. “There apparently is a great deal of interest in celestial bodies and their locations and trajectories at the end of the calendar year 2012,” he says. “Now I, for one, love a good book or movie as much as the next guy. But the stuff flying around (on the Internet), TV and movies is not based on science.”

    Really? But Yeomans hasn’t met my mother. She has an amazing track record for predicting the future. She always said she would hate any woman I married. And she does absolutely hate my wife.  She also said that her world would come to an end when I left home. 

    I should call her.

    Granted, NASA gained a certain amount of cred after it predicted that the world would not end when CERN in 2008 starting colliding particles. Then again, it started tracking Santa only two days after the press release.

    So I’m certain the world won’t end on December 21, 2012 because NASA has all the facts and the Doomsdayers’ only have a web page. And if the Mayans were so smart, why didn’t they leave stone blogs about it?  One calendar isn’t that impressive.

    On the off chance that the world will end, let’s humor my mother and the rest for a moment, how would it play out?  My predictions:

  • RIM will issue a press release claiming it survived to the end of time.  Though December is pretty far off …
  • GroovyPost.com would run a great series of How To galleries on every aspect of preparing for it.
  • Apple would release the Apple iPad 3, 4, and 5 in quick succession, and designate 2012 as 2011S.
  • The astronauts on NASA’s space station will return to earth only to discover that Earth is ruled by smart, yet oddly angry apes.
  • It’s easy for NASA to debunk any end of the world scenario. If it’s wrong, there’s no one to answer to. 

    Here’s an excerpt from NASA’s denial of the forthcoming end of the world, which it likens to the Y2K nuttiness of yore.

    Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?
    A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012. Then these two fables were linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 — hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.
    Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?
    A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then — just as your calendar begins again on January 1 — another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.Q: Could phenomena occur where planets align in a way that impacts Earth?
    A: There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence.
    > More about alignment 

    Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?

    A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.

    Q: What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours?
    A: A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-shift to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly, with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. A magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia, anyway. 

    Q: Is the Earth in danger of being hit by a meteor in 2012?
    A: The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA NEO Program Office website, so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.

    Q: How do NASA scientists feel about claims of pending doomsday?
    A: For any claims of disaster or dramatic changes in 2012, where is the science? Where is the evidence? There is none, and for all the fictional assertions, whether they are made in books, movies, documentaries or over the Internet, we cannot change that simple fact. There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012.

    Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?
    A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history.

    Photo courtesy: Gina Smith

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