NASA flooded with calls about the world ending Friday

NASA has been busy lately debunking the Mayan calendar that some interpret as claiming that the end of the world will happen on Dec. 21, 2012.

About 200 to 300 people are contacting NASA daily. NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown has sent the callers to the NASA website and YouTube video. Brown told the Los Angeles Times that the space agency typically receives about 90 calls or emails per week. NASA’s website has hit 4.6 million reads – mostly those consumed or obsessed with the Mayan doomsday prediction.

Even Russia is telling citizens that the world won’t end in 2012 while China started arresting  people spreading doomsday scenarios.

NASA’s  four-minute YouTube video called, “Why the World Didn’t End Yesterday’ has so far  attracted more than two million viewers. Mayan dedicated websites  scattered across the web suggest the world won’t end but some type of spiritual change will take place. They call it a rebirth.

For example,  Mayan elder Carlos Barrios, claims to have studied different Mayan calendars. Barrios  said he and  his brother Gerardo along with several teachers  interviewed nearly 600 traditional Mayan elders about the end of the world prophecy and found conflicting interpretations.

“Anthropologists visit the temple sites and read the inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. It’s just their imagination,” Barrios said. “Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.”

He says  “material structures will change and “we will have the opportunity to be more human.”

What is comes down to is this – bad communication. The Mayans never said the world will end in 2012. Hollywood did.

In fact, archaeologists recently found a cache of Mayan calendars proclaiming the world will survive thousands of years past 2012.

And here’s a sampling of what NASA is saying so people don’t panic, especially readers of the Weekly World News or quit their day job and yes you still will be able to stop at your favorite coffee shop before heading to work.

And now the condensed version of NASA’s responses to a series of questions:

Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.

The world will not end in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.

What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?

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 and 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.

Is NASA predicting a “total blackout” of Earth on Dec. 23 to Dec. 25?

Absolutely not. Neither NASA nor any other scientific organization is predicting such a blackout. The false reports on this issue claim that some sort of “alignment of the Universe” will cause a blackout. There is no such alignment (see next question). Some versions of this rumor cite an emergency preparedness message from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. This is simply a message encouraging people to be prepared for emergencies, recorded as part of a wider government preparedness campaign. It never mentions a blackout.

Could planets align in a way that impacts Earth?

There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. One major alignment occurred in 1962, for example, and two others happened during 1982 and 2000. 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. There apparently is a great deal of interest in celestial bodies, and their locations and trajectories at the end of the calendar year 2012. Now, I for one love a good book or movie as much as the next guy. But the stuff flying around through cyberspace, TV and the movies is not based on science. There is even a fake NASA news release out there…”- Don Yeomans, NASA senior research scientist.

endofworldxIs there a planet threatening  our planet with widespread destruction?

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.

Is it true that the Earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days?

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-switch 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. Scientists believe a magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia.

Is the Earth in danger of being hit by a meteor in 2012?

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 Near-Earth Object Program Office website, so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.

How do NASA scientists feel about claims of the world ending in 2012?

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.