Despite what the drunk hobo at the end of the block keeps shouting at passersby, the world is not going to end on December 21, 2012. I know about the Mayan calendar and the alignment of the planets, but I have some news: California is not "going down," the Himalayas are not going to split and the Statue of Liberty is going to be a-okay. However, now that Roland Emmerich has decided to make a movie about it, all of the conspiracy-theory nut jobs are coming out of the woodwork to warn us about the impending apocalypse. Fortunately, smart people like NASA scientists exist to put these rumors to rest.
In a question-and-answer style feature, the country's favorite space engineers have gone through the different theories about the end of the world and have explained them away so that you don't have to worry your collective pretty heads. Summing it up:
- The Mayan calendar did not end on December 21, 2012. Rather, it was simply the end of the long-count calendar (just as ours is December 31)- The planets are not going to align for at least another few decades. Even when they do align, nothing is going to happen.-There are no "loose" planets in the solar system. That is bull.- We haven't had a devastating asteroid hit the planet for 65 million years, and, whats more, NASA already has a system to warn against such incidents. You can read about it here.- Solar storms will not hurt you. They happen approximately every 11 years and, if you can remember that far back, the world did not end in 2001. A solar maximum (period of greatest solar activity) is expected in the next few years, but the solar cycle will be unchanged.
I'm so happy that we were able to work through that. If your hopes have been dashed and you need another conspiracy theory to cling to, I have read that Roland Emmerich is in fact the world's first supervillian and is, in fact, trying to destroy the world. All of his films up to this point have merely been experimental simulations to test which method would be best. He does all of this from a secret station located on the moon, from which he is able to track all of your movements. I expect a new website to launch in 30 minutes.
