Doomsday debunked, but lessons learned?
By PAT BRENNAN / ORANGE COUNTY REGISTERPublished: Dec. 18, 2012 Updated: Dec. 19, 2012 11:48 a.m.
The woman was so despondent about the end of the world, she told a NASA scientist via email, that she was contemplating suicide.
"I don't know whether she was exaggerating, but I took her at her word," said Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's near-Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena."I tried to persuade her there was really nothing to be worried about," he said. "She thanked me, and said she felt better."
It was one of many calls and emails Yeomans has fielded about a variety of imaginary predictions of doomsday that seem to have converged on Dec. 21, 2012.
NASA as a whole has fielded even more – at its peak some 200 to 300 calls or emails per day, said spokesman Dwayne Brown.
Many are concerned about a misinterpretation of an ancient Mayan calendar, wrongly believed to forecast the end of time. Others focus their fears on an immense planet, dubbed Nibiru, that is supposed to be heading for collision with Earth – but has somehow remained invisible, or at least well concealed.
Asteroids, mysterious cosmic blackouts, fictional planetary alignments with equally fictional destructive effects, polar shifts and solar storms – all have figured into various predictions of the end, rocketing around the Internet and scaring the daylights out of a good many people.
And NASA has fired back, posting videos and online Q&As debunking a variety of myths.
The debunking itself is not difficult. Many of the assertions circulating in cyberspace are, in essence, physically impossible.
Take Nibiru, for instance – sometimes called Planet X.
The Mars-sized body is sometimes said to be hiding behind the sun, or approaching from the south, keeping it out of sight for many astronomers.
In reality, NASA says, anything that huge moving into the solar system would cause serious gravitational disruption to other planets, and would have been tracked by scientists for at least the past decade.
It would also be quite easily visible in the night sky – in fact, if it were large enough, you could see it during the day, according to a debunking video by NASA scientist David Morrison.
The ancient Mayan calendar, meanwhile, neither ends on Dec. 21 nor predicts a global cataclysm.
"Just as the calendar on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012," a NASA Q&A reads. "This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then – just as your calendar begins again on Jan. 1 – another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar."
No planetary alignments are coming for the next few decades, and when they occur, they do not have any world-shattering effects.
Polar shifts happen too, when the Earth's magnetic poles flip, but none are expected for thousands of years – and there is no indication they cause any harm to life when they do happen.
Some doomsday scenarios link polar shifts with a reversal in Earth's rotation, another physical impossibility.
Solar flares can sometimes interfere with satellites, but again, show no tendency to turn the planet into toast. A part of the sun's cycle of activity called the solar maximum is happening in the 2012 to 2014 range, but is likely to be average as such maximums go, NASA says.
There are no cosmic blackouts foretold by scientists, whatever the Internet imagines those to be.
The idea of a world-shaking comet or asteroid striking the Earth is not quite so far-fetched. Just such a space body is believed to have smacked into the planet 65 million years ago, leading to extinction of the dinosaurs.
But work by Yeomans and other scientists has resulted in identification of some 94 percent of space bodies large enough to be a global threat.
"None of them present a credible threat in the next 100 years," he said. "We're starting to look for smaller ones now."
NASA's debunking effort even took the form of a video, already posted, that assumes an intact Earth on Dec. 22.
"December 22nd, 2012," the video, made by Science@NASA, begins. "If you're watching this video, it means one thing: The world didn't end yesterday."
The idea is not to mock those who fear such claims, but to offer solid scientific reasons for their dismissal.
"There was so much misinformation out there, and the public was coming to us," Brown said. "We felt it was our duty to respond."
But the fears themselves ought not to be so easily dismissed, says Lilith Mahmud, a cultural anthropologist at UC Irvine who studies political conspiracy theories.
Doomsday prophecies have much in common with political conspiracy notions, she says.
"They follow a very standard pattern," she said.
While political conspiracy theories usually lack the apocalyptic dimension of doomsday forecasts, "more often than not, political conspiracies hint at an imminent threat to a way of being."
Examples include Cold War conspiracy theories and, more recently, fear of a millennial technological meltdown known as Y2K.
And while the doomsday pronouncements are easily debunked, the fear behind them might be telling us something important.
"It is easy to laugh it off, because the world is not going to end on Dec. 21," Mahmud said. "However, that conspiracy also is an actual expression of very real anxieties about the state of the environment, and about the future of our species – the future of human beings."
She advocates deeper analysis of both conspiracy theories and doomsday prophecies to reveal subtle currents beneath the surface of society.
"There is a connection between different genres," Mahmud said. "It's not as if anxieties about the environment had nothing to do with anxieties about international politics and whatnot. Anxiety can make us all more prone to fear, and to looking for answers, and looking for a sense of control."Source: http://www.ocregister.com/news/nasa-381019-doomsday-earth.html
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