Mix one part science fiction, one part misunderstood Mayan history, one
part Hollywood movie hype, and quite a bit of public credulity, and what
do you get? A new wave of doomsday hysteria that is causing scientists
to step forward to reassure the public that the world is not, actually,
going to end on December 21, 2012.
The rumors flying around the Internet offer a number of ways in which
the world may end, including a planetary collision and changes to the
Earth’s rotation or magnetic field, but they all agree on that date of
doom. You can bet that the viral marketing campaign promoting the
upcoming planetary disaster movie 2012 has a little something to do with the recent uptick in paranoia.
“Two years ago, I got a question a week about it,” said NASA scientist David Morrison, who hosts a website called Ask an Astrobiologist.
“Now I’m getting a dozen a day. Two teenagers said they didn’t want to
see the end of the world so they were thinking of ending their lives". In response, Morrison put together a list of 10 frequently asked questions about the potential for
apocalypse, and refuted them one by one. The clamor has grown so loud
that Morrison coined a new word to describe the phenomenon:
“cosmophobia,” a fear of the cosmos.
Still from a movie "2012"
The frenzy has its origins in a handful
of fictional, mythological, and downright confused ideas. To take the
fiction first: a writer named Zecharia Sitchin has spent his career
promoting the idea that a rogue planet named Nibiru is on an extremely
elliptical orbit around the sun, and in 2012 it will return to crash
into the Earth - or maybe just to tragically disrupt its rotation or
orbit. Devotees of the Nibiru notion suggest that NASA and the world’s
governments probably know about this, they just aren’t telling us. But
scientists wearily note that if there was a
Nibiru heading our way, one of the 100,000 amateur astronomers on Earth
would have spotted it long ago. “You have to be pretty dumb not to
realize that Nibiru is a no-show,” Morrison says.
The mythological component comes from a misunderstanding of the Mayan
culture, a pre-Columbian civilization that had a number of
sophisticated calendars. One calendar, which is referred to as the “long
count,” measures out a cycle of 394 years; the current cycle comes to
an end on December 21, 2012, and some books and Web sites have suggested
that the Mayans foresaw the end of the world on that day.
Anthropologist Rosemary Joyce explains that the
Maya never predicted anything. The 2012 date is approximately when the
ancient calendar would roll over, like the odometer on a car; it did not
mean the end - merely the start of a new cycle. As
Morrison writes in his list: “I note that my desk calendar ends much
sooner, on December 31 2009, but I do not interpret this as a prediction
of Armageddon. It is just the beginning of a new year.”
The movie 2012 builds on all these ideas to create what looks like
an excellent bit of disaster entertainment. But some scientists are
worried that the movie’s viral marketing campaign will mislead the
gullible. Sony has set up a fake Web site for something called the Institute for Human Continuity
which uses scientific-sounding language to detail the upcoming
shredding, torching and obliterating of the world from so many
directions it makes your head spin (“large amounts of solar radiation
will bombard the Earth and heat up the molten, semi-liquid layers
beneath the lithosphere, thus allowing the crust to shift more easily”). The
site lets people vote for the leader of the post-2012 world, and
suggests that they sign up for a lottery that will determine who is
saved when the crisis comes.
Among the other ideas being circulated for what will happen that
fateful day: the direction of the Earth’s rotation will suddenly
reverse, the planet’s magnetic field will fall away, or maybe the Earth
will align with the sun or some other planets in such a way as to, um,
destroy us all. As astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, “It’s just Hollywood.”
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