NASA.GOV: 2012: Beginning of the End or Why the World Won't End?

[Stadium-Armory]

I don't buy it. Our dear 6,000 year old planet will be coming to an end soon.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012.html

Remember the Y2K scare? It came and went without much of a whimper because of adequate planning and analysis of the situation. Impressive movie special effects aside, Dec. 21, 2012, won't be the end of the world as we know. It will, however, be another winter solstice.

Much like Y2K, 2012 has been analyzed and the science of the end of the Earth thoroughly studied. Contrary to some of the common beliefs out there, the science behind the end of the world quickly unravels when pinned down to the 2012 timeline. Below, NASA Scientists answer several questions that we're frequently asked regarding 2012.

Question (Q): Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.

Answer (A): Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.

Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?

A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012. Then these two fables were linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 -- hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.

Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?

A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then -- just as your calendar begins again on January 1 -- another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.

Q: Could a phenomena occur where planets align in a way that impacts Earth?

A: There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence.

"There apparently is a great deal of interest in celestial bodies, and their locations and trajectories at the end of the calendar year 2012. Now, I for one love a good book or movie as much as the next guy. But the stuff flying around through cyberspace, TV and the movies is not based on science. There is even a fake NASA news release out there..."

- Don Yeomans, NASA senior research scientistQ: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?

A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.

Q: What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours?

A: A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-shift to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly, with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. A magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia, anyway.

Earth, as seen in the Blue Marble: Next Generation collection of images, showing the color of the planet's surface in high resolution. This image shows South America from September 2004.Q: Is the Earth in danger of being hit by a meteor in 2012?

A: The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA NEO Program Office website, so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.

Q: How do NASA scientists feel about claims of pending doomsday?

A: For any claims of disaster or dramatic changes in 2012, where is the science? Where is the evidence? There is none, and for all the fictional assertions, whether they are made in books, movies, documentaries or over the Internet, we cannot change that simple fact. There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012.

Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?

A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history.

[Big Weirdo]

I'm not going to say anything because I'd jinx it and we'd probably die. I don't want to be that douche.

[AsburySkinsFan]

6,000 year old planet. :doh:

[Stadium-Armory]

6,000 year old planet. :doh:

Sarcasm. No tin foil hat here.

[China]

Well, the Rapture is scheduled for May 21, 2011.

And, if that doesn't happen, 3 Giant Spaceships Are Coming to Attack the Earth and Will Arrive December 21, 2012

[Mufumonk]

Well, the Rapture is scheduled for May 21, 2011.

And, if that doesn't happen, 3 Giant Spaceships Are Coming to Attack the Earth and Will Arrive December 21, 2012

It must be the Ramans. They do everything in threes.

[Bang]

Sorry, I lost it when the first paragraph said we overcame the Y2K bug thru planning and analysis.

Y2K was a hoax, huge hoax. Created a whole cottage industry.

And according to this article, miraculously worked.

So I'm expected to believe that EVERYONE on earth finally got together on something ,and absolutely NONE of the horror scenarios happened?

Not one plane without instrumentation, not one ship without guidance, not one microwave even losing time.

Somehow the world solved this problem COMPLETELY without a hitch.

:rotflmao::rotflmao:

sorry,, but no ****ing way.

The notion that the mayans were righti s also ludicrous.

It's 2011 people. enough with the ****ing idiotic superstition.

~Bang

[HRNY4ZRNY]

It must be the Ramans. They do everything in threes.

I love Raman Noodles.

[Predicto]

Sorry, I lost it when the first paragraph said we overcame the Y2K bug thru planning and analysis.

Y2K was a hoax, huge hoax. Created a whole cottage industry.

No it wasn't a hoax. It may have been overblown by the media, but no one really knew what was going to happen, and yes... some real potential problems were identified and fixed before the turnover date.

[AsburySkinsFan]

Sarcasm. No tin foil hat here.

Ahh ok, we seriously need a sarcasm smiley thing.

[GibbsFactor]

He's been instructed to say that to reduce panic.

ETA: Y2K was fabricated in order to put a "crying wolf" aspect to 2012. We are DOOMED!!!!

[AsburySkinsFan]

He's been instructed to say that to reduce panic.

No joke, imagine the panic that would happen if the gov't didn't say things like this regularly?! I mean how would we get to the arks in the Himalayan mountains if there was wide spread panic....errr.....umm....forget I said that. :paranoid:

[Bang]

No it wasn't a hoax. It may have been overblown by the media, but no one really knew what was going to happen, and yes... some real potential problems were identified and fixed before the turnover date.

Come on man.

Against all odds, nothing happened.

I respect your voice in here a LOT, I hold your posts in the highest esteem, even if I don't necessarily agree... but that's too much of a stretch for me to believe.

There may have been a glitch or two, but the cataclysm that not only the media perped, but spawned a whole cottage industry of people fixing a problem that didn't exist...

and somehow they fixed it ALL before the deadline and it worked?

That's too much for me to swallow.

~Bang

[Mr. Sinister]

It's just my personal opinion, but I don't the 2012 hysteria will be anything close to what Y2K was like. People were going absolutely ape**** here.

[Corcaigh]

Come on man.

Against all odds, nothing happened.

The Y2K issue was a widely known problem and actively addressed starting in the 80s and throughout the 90s.

Many, many systems were fixed.

As usual once the media got wind of a possible threat they didn't have the first understanding of, it became an immediate crisis on th 6 o'clock news with the potential to slaughter your family as they lay in their beds.

[mjah]

My understanding of Y2K is that many mission-critical systems (nuclear weapons facilities, power plants, etc.) were already using 4-digit dates with well-tested date functions, or were otherwise programmed to handle the 2-digit transition from 1999 to 2000, so the disaster-scenario hype was wildly overblown.

But plenty of far less civilization-critical legacy systems needed to be fixed, and they largely were. There still were some glitches on 1/1/2000, but nothing major.

The first step of a Y2K fix consisted of poring through code or documentation to determine whether a given system would even cause problems in the first place, and where those problems would occur. Often the answer was "no/nothing." I can see how folks might have abused this step to "diagnose" systems they already knew would be perfectly fine. But there also were very well documented problems.

C had a standard library problem; Javascript had problems; other systems had fundamental problems that caused basic date arithmetic to fail very badly. If such standard tools used by millions of people had issues, I have no trouble believing that countless more custom systems had their troubles too.

[Stadium-Armory]

Further evidence that the world is coming to an end:

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/04/study-us-bumblebee-population-in-sharp-decline/

Study: US Bumblebee Population in Sharp Decline

The population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed.

Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, possibly because of increased fungal infections and inbreeding. Researchers called the findings of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "disturbing" and said they were in line with findings in Europe.

"Disturbing reports of bumblebee population declines in Europe have recently spilled over into North America, fueling environmental and economic concerns of global decline," the authors wrote.

The bumblebee is wild, but it pollinates commercial crops from tomatoes to coffee, and its disappearance could have a dire effect on food sources. "People need to know that wild bees are an enormously important ecosystem service, just like honeybees," Sydney Cameron, the head author of the study and a professor at the University of Illinois, told AOL News by phone today.

To find and count the bees, teams of researchers across the United States visited fields of flowers where hives had historically been found and gently scooped up the insects in butterfly nets.

The disappearing bees have scientists somewhat perplexed. They think a disease-causing pathogen, Nosema bombi, as well as a "lack of genetic diversity" could be plaguing the insects, but they haven't been able to prove it yet. Cameron said the Nosema bombi pathogen seems to make it difficult for queen bees to survive the winter so they can reproduce.

Honeybees in the United States are also in trouble. They are suffering from a phenomenon called "colony collapse," a disorder that seems to kill massive numbers of a hive's worker bees. Scientists aren't entirely sure what's causing the disorder, but they suspect a virus may be to blame.

Keith Delaplane, the director of the University of Georgia's Honey Bee program, said that like honeybees, bumblebees seem to be having trouble generating new hives. He said pathogens can sometimes lower the sperm counts of both bumblebees and honeybees, making it difficult to reproduce.

"A bumblebee colony would be doing pretty good if it could simply replace itself," Delaplane told AOL News by phone today. "The study is telling us that fewer hives are able to do this, however. Colonies are becoming less and less successful at replacing themselves."

Cameron said the next step is to find out whether there's a direct link between the Nosema bombi pathogen and the decline of bees in the United States. She said scientists suspect that the disease may not be native to bees in North America and may have become a problem in the early 1990s when European beekeepers brought bees to the United States to help expand the honeybee industry.

[KingGibbs]

I'm not going to say anything because I'd jinx it and we'd probably die. I don't want to be that douche.

Sorry Who del, but Eagles fans already own the title of douche. So don't worry about that jinx.

[thehogs]

Come on man.

Against all odds, nothing happened.

I respect your voice in here a LOT, I hold your posts in the highest esteem, even if I don't necessarily agree... but that's too much of a stretch for me to believe.

There may have been a glitch or two, but the cataclysm that not only the media perped, but spawned a whole cottage industry of people fixing a problem that didn't exist...

and somehow they fixed it ALL before the deadline and it worked?

That's too much for me to swallow.

~Bang

as an anecdote I recall around 3rd or 4th of January 2000 I recieved a call from a loan Company asking if I could go in to a local branch to pay that months premium. Couldnt understand why as it was paid direct from my bank account. Ah well, you see, the call centre person said, our systems crashed on New Years day. As a programmer myself that had to go through acres of tedious checking of date code I couldnt help thinking 'oh really?!' But yes, when you consider that some individual Companies and countries would have had attrocious system operations, the idea that everything was covered just isnt feasible.

The sad thing is that my Y2K fixing was for the Company I worked for, so it made me nothing! There were free lancer consultants out there earning a fortune through the fear it manufactured.