Is the world going to end right in the middle of the upcoming holiday season? While that wouldn’t be good for retail sales, many people feel that Dec. 21, 2012 is a date that will linger in our minds forever — assuming we all survive the calamities that are supposedly headed our way.
The ancient Mayan civilization calendar is believed to end this year on Dec. 21. And somehow, through word-of-mouth, movies, books, the Internet, etc., a cult-like belief system has sprung up in our culture suggesting any number of awful things will take place on that date.
Some of these include:
- An unknown planet on a collision path with Earth.
- A close encounter between Earth and a black hole in deep space.
- More natural disasters around our planet.
- A shifting of Earth’s magnetic poles.
But where did all of these rumors actually start?
Many believe it goes back thousands of years to the ancient Sumerian culture who reportedly discovered a twelfth planet they called Nibiru — aka Planet X — which was predicted to have a close encounter with Earth in 2003.
When that didn’t happen, a new Doomsday was moved to December 2012.
On the other hand, there are some who believe the December date heralds not doom and gloom, but a more positive transformative experience for Earth and its inhabitants.
It all sounds rather sketchy, especially to a scientist.
“It’s all a hoax, and it’s based on absolutely no factual information. None of the things that are supposed to happen are real, and so it’s kind of hard to even have a scientific discussion about what they’re worried about because there’s no science there,” said David Morrison, a leading space scientist and director of the Carl Sagan Center for Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute in California.
Watch this Doomsday video with David Morrison
While SETI scientists are involved with the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence, they also want to quiet any fears the public has about the alleged Doomsday.
To that end, Morrison created a special Doomsday 2012 Fact Sheet in September that’s posted on both SETI and NASA websites.
According to this fact sheet, “opinion polls suggest that one in 10 Americans worry about whether they will survive past December 21 of this year.”
“Think about that. It means when you walk down the street and look around, there are 25 million people who presumably have no stake in anything because their world’s going to end in [December]. That is scary,” Morrison told The Huffington Post.
When Morrison was researching information for his Doomsday fact sheet, he didn’t find anything that confirmed that the Mayans left us any dire predictions.
Related articles
- Doomsday 2012: Do You Believe It? (jessicasimien.com)
- Rogue planet discovered: is the Mayan apocalypse coming? (theweek.co.uk)
- NASA refutes December 21, 2012 doomsday claims based on Mayan calendar (troyrecord.com)
- Two Months Until the Mayan Doomsday Nonevent (news.discovery.com)
- Mayans demand an end to 2012 doomsday myth (rawstory.com)
- Waiting for doomsday: Our apocalypse obsession likely to last long past 21/12/12 (news.nationalpost.com)
- World Ends in Only Five Weeks! (sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com)
- NASA: The world is not ending on Dec. 21 (whas11.com)
- NASA: The world is not ending on Dec. 21 (krem.com)
- NASA: The world is not ending on Dec. 21 (kgw.com)
