End 2012

NASA says not to worry: the world is not coming to an end on December 21, 2012. The National Aeronautical and Space Agency has embarked in an unusual, to say the least, campaign to dispel widespread rumors fueled by the Internet and a new Hollywood movie.

Contrary to what you may read elsewhere on the Internet, a rogue planet named Nibiru and discovered by the Sumerians is not on a collision course with Earth, they say. And a solar flare won’t toast the planet.

“I don’t have anything against the movie. It’s the way it’s been marketed and the way it exploits people’s fears,” NASA scientist David Morrison at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

A few websites have even accused NASA of concealing the truth on the wayward planet’s existence, but the US space agency denounced such stories as an Internet hoax.

“There is no factual basis for these claims,” NASA said in a question-and-answer posting on its website.

They point out that if such a collision were real “astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye.”

Not only that, Nibiriu is actually behind schedule. The first stories about the planet actually set the date of catastrophe for May 2003, but when the world didn’t end, the paranoid starting looking ahead to the winter solstice in 2012, coinciding with the end of a cycle of the ancient Mayan calendar.

Contrary to popular myth, the Mayan calendar does not predict disaster in 2012 or come to its final end. Rather, it is the end of a very long time period and the beginning of a new one. They Mayans knew this, just like we know that time doesn’t cease existing if we run out of pages on our annual wall calendar.

Furthermore, it doesn’t seem that the Mayans are particularly good prognosticators, since they failed to predict the demise of their own civilization at the end of the 14^th century.

Scores of Internet postings and books delve into the supposed disaster, including “Apocalypse 2012″ and “How to Survive 2012,” reminiscent of the Y2K scare that came and went without much of a whimper. Impressive movie special effects aside, Dec. 21, 2012, won’t be the end of the world as we know. However, it will, NASA points out, be another winter solstice.