If you want to see a roomful of people roll their eyes, just walk into a gathering of astronomers and shout, "Mayan apocalypse!" For years now, the idea that the earth will be destroyed in a terrible cataclysm on Dec. 21, 2012, has been bouncing around the Internet and showing up in articles, books and even movies. But despite what the tinfoil-hat crowd insists, an asteroid is not about to hit the earth. Neither is an imaginary planet called Nibiru. Our world isn't going to be abruptly flipped upside down like a burger on a griddle. What's more, Maya astrologers never said any of that stuff would actually happen.
Yes, the Maya had what's known as a Long Count calendar, and yes, that calendar ends on Dec. 21, 2012. But the nice thing about calendars, including the one the Maya used, is that they always start over again from zero. All the same, some folks at NASA are worried--not about the end of the world but about the harm all the loose talk may be doing. "I get a tremendous number of e-mails about it," says David Morrison, a space scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California. "A large fraction are from people asking if the world will end. A few even talk about suicide."
In an attempt to stop the hysteria, NASA convened a Google+ hangout on Nov. 28 during which people could ask astronomers anything they wanted to about the rumors. For nearly an hour, the scientists soothed nerves, patiently explaining, for example, that an asteroid en route to earth would have been spotted by telescopes long ago and that Nibiru, if it existed, would now be the brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon.
"I'm told that about 10% of the public believes this stuff," says Seth Shostak, a scientist with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "That's about the same percentage that believes in Santa Claus."
One problem, said astronomer Andrew Fraknoi of Foothill College in Los Altos, Calif., during the NASA webcast, "is that our schools have not taught skeptical thinking." Indeed, in 2010, Morrison met with a group of science teachers, and nearly every one of them said they knew kids who were worried about the Maya nonsense. When Dec. 21 comes and goes without incident, those fears should finally evaporate--that is, until the next doomsday pronouncement comes along.