2012 Will Not Be the End of the World

The world is not going to end in 2012, according to NASA. There will be no solar flares that set fire to Earth, and the planet Nibiru is not going to collide with the planet in 2012.

According to Discovery News, "it's all fiction," but the movie 2012 may cause people to think otherwise.

NASA scientist David Morrison said that he does not have anything against the movie 2012, but he does not like the way the movie is being marketed "and the way it exploits people's fears." The movie 2012 has a website and Facebook page for the faux book in the movie about murder and conspiracy on the space shuttle Atlantis. The movie marketers also set up a fake institute that "presumably dispenses "real" science supporting the movie's claims, as well as a fake news website that distributes fake press releases about a fake aerospace company winning government contracts."

This is nothing new, according to Warren Betts, owner of a California-based publicity firm. For example, in 1999, some people thought the fictional movie The Blair Witch Project was an actual documentary.

Morrison, however, thinks that "Sony has crossed a line" with the way they marketed the movie 2012, and he said that many people are upset and contemplating suicide. "People are very gullible," he said. "It a sad testimonial that you need NASA to tell you the world's not going to end."

Morrison has an online column, entitled "Ask An Astrobiologist," where he disputes the claim that the world will end in 2012. Although he has had more than 1,000 questions about the end of the world, there are more than 200 books and 1,000 web sites that claim the world will end in 2012.

One such website, surviving-nibiru.com, claims that a rogue planet known as Nibiru/Planet-X will, by 2010, "be the headline of every newspaper in the world and global pandemic would soon follow. It also claims Nibiru can currently be seen by the naked eye in Earth's southern hemisphere, and by next year, it will be seen by the naked eye in the northern hemisphere. The homepage of the site then goes on to say that Planet-X has been tracked by NASA since 1983, but "in the name of global security, official news of Nibiru has been suppressed. However, news and pictures of Nibiru are becoming more common."

However, a recent study, whose results came out July of 2009, says that "most mass extinctions on Earth were not caused" by impacts to the planet, and there is not much chance of seeing any impacts during our lifetime, according to Discovery News.

Although the study focused on comets and found that the "most powerful comet shower of the last 500 million years might have caused a minor extinction event about 40 million years ago" but could not possibly have caused any major extinctions, scientist Hal Levison said, "I'm not a big fan of worrying about impacts on the Earth now. Our society has more important things to worry about." Additionally, "the chance of comet impacts in our lifetime just went from none to even less."

For more information about comets, read Facts About Comets.

References:

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/10/22/nasa-debunks-2012.html

http://www.surviving-nibiru.com/

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/07/30/comet-earth-collision.html