How NASA Used Social Media to Tell America the World is Not Ending in 2012 Asawin Suebsaeng - Mother Jones
go to original December 12, 2012

Stories about the fictional planet Nibiru and predictions of the end of the world in December 2012 have blossomed on the Internet. Contrary to some of the common beliefs out there, Dec. 21, 2012 won't be the end of the world as we know, however, it will be another winter solstice. (NASAtelevision)

"WHEN THEY TELL YOU NOT TO PANIC, THAT'S WHEN YOU RUN!" John Cusack screams at his ex-wife over the phone in Roland Emmerich's 2009 disaster movie 2012. Cusack races through a Los Angeles suburb in a black limousine, trying to warn his family of the coming End Of The World. Next thing they know (at the exact moment Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is telling everybody to remain calm), all of California spontaneously falls into the sea and LA is thrown into a seething apocalyptic firestorm - just as the ancient Mayans foretold!

Meanwhile, in the real world, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a.k.a. NASA, is on the multimedia warpath to reassure American citizens that Roland Emmerich is wrong, and Planet Earth will mostly likely not experience a cataclysmic death this December.

There's plenty of confusion for NASA to address: There are several distinct theories out there predicting the world as we know it will cease to exist on December 21, 2012. Some of these theories are based on questionable readings of the I-Ching, or misguided analysis of the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar (a flawed interpretation that tends to piss off real-life living Mayans and the researchers who are most familiar with the calendar). Some say the world will end when we all get sucked into a black hole. Others claim that in a couple weeks Earth will collide with the nonexistent rogue planet "Nibiru," thus ruining everything forever. Pseudo-scientific doomsday speculation has gained so much attention over the years it's ingrained itself into our pop-culture: The theories have provided the basis for the aforementioned big-budget John Cusack movie, inspired college courses, and earned a special on Fox News this past November.

Though this all might seem like little more than a collection of laughable fringe superstition, promulgation of these beliefs do have troubling real-world consequences. "I get 1-2 [questions] a month from a person who self-identifies as 11-12 years old, who is contemplating suicide," David Morrison, a senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute, told ABC News. (Speaking to a USA.gov blogger, Morrison later said that he gets a message at least "once a week" from "a young person...who says they are ill and/or contemplating suicide because of the coming doomsday.") Morrison also highlighted a letter he received from someone claiming to be a middle school teacher in California, who wrote that parents of a student said they were going to kill their kids and themselves before the 2012 apocalypse.

On top of that, there's polling data to suggest that 12 percent of Americans believe the world is coming to an end this year (and that 14 percent worldwide think they will live to see the planet go poof).

NASA, for its part, has blanketed its social-media operation with anti-doomsday content, in an attempt to chip away at public misconceptions over what will or will not end this December.

Read more at Mother Jones

Asawin Suebsaeng is an interactive writing fellow at the Washington, DC, bureau of Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. You can also follow him on Twitter: @swin24

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