Mayan Apocalypse Panic: Is It Really the End of the World?

 

It’s The End(s) of The World As We Know It: Did Pop Culture Cause Mayan Apocalypse Panic?

By Graeme McMillanDec. 19, 2012

The ancient Mayan calendar runs out tomorrow morning (By the time I Publish this it will be Friday, December 21, 2012), and some true believers are anticipating the end of time at 8AM. ‘If it ends, it ends,’ tryp guru Terence McKenna — whose fractal time-wave graph also predicts the apocalypse — told TNN. It’s the sort of thing we thought went out of fashion years ago. But for some people, it seems, the apocalypse just never knows when to stop.

It was from those words, written 15 years ago, that I discovered that the end of the world had been forecast for this Friday, December 21, 2012. It’s likely that I wasn’t alone; the dialogue, spoken by some heard-but-unseen news anchor from the then-futuristic year 2012 in the sixth issue of the second volume of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, was one of the first instances of the conspiracy theories that declare December 21, 2012, as the official date of the apocalypse breaking out of the paranoid fringe and into popular culture. Published in May 1997, it may, in fact, have been the very first to reference the Mayans and self-styled psychedelic shaman Terence McKenna agreeing on the date, as if the mix of ancient prophecy and modern science was enough to lend the idea some credibility amongst the skeptical. As everyone is, by now, well aware, it was far from the last.

Not that that one reference made the 2012 apocalypse common knowledge to the world singlehandedly. After all, The Invisibles — which ran from 1994 through 2000 and served as one of the main inspirations behind The Matrix —  was a comic book in an age when that medium remained somewhat fringe itself. (Morrison’s mention may have inspired rock band Incubus to add a 2012 reference to “A Certain Shade of Green” on its 1997 album S.C.I.E.N.C.E., reportedly recorded just after the issue had been released, however). It would take another five years for the idea of a 2012 end of days to truly hit the mainstream consciousness—and it would do so, fittingly enough, through what may be the most paranoid and conspiracy-laden TV show ever to grace the cover of TV Guide: Fox’s The X-Files.

In “The Truth,” the two-part story that closed out the nine-year run of the series, paranoid FBI agents Mulder and Scully are told very plainly by the Cigarette Smoking Man (Remember him? Such memories!) that December 21, 2012, was exactly when the series’ long-running alien threat would arrive on Earth, heralding an end to life as we know it. The prospect of an alien invasion may not have been exactly the shift in consciousness that the Mayans promised or McKenna’s mathematically proven apocalypse (although, as Sacha Dedesche points out in “The 2012 Phenomenon,”the X-Files‘ promised invasion does bring “a number of essential ingredients of the 2012 phenomenon [together] at once: conspiracy theory, extraterrestrial intelligence, ancient calendars and prophecies related to the year 2012″) but, like the truth, the date was now out there—an estimated 7.5 percent of America’s households watched “The Truth,” and now they knew just when the world was going to end.

(MORE: Mayan Apocalypse Film Festival – 21 Films for Our Final 21 Days)

From that point on, the 2012 date became fodder for the sort of faux-”reality” reporting that periodically wonders about the existence of Bigfoot or whether the Illuminati are actually manipulating the world. The History Channel produced multiple shows that “investigated” the possibility of the world ending in 2012, including 2006′s End of Days and Last Days on Earth, 2007′s Seven Signs of the Apocalypse and Nostradamus 2012 in 2008. The Discovery Channel also decided to get in on the act in 2009 with the soberly titled 2012 Apocalypse, a one-hour special that looked into the possibility of solar storms, earthquakes, volcano eruptions and the reversal of the magnetic poles of the planet all happening during a one-year span—just in case you were concerned.

To be fair, by that time, you really might have been concerned. In 2009, the notion that the world would end — by natural disaster, a cosmic awakening, the Rapture, or any combination of the three — was everywhere thanks to Roland Emmerich. Not content with bringing a breathless panic and action movie sensibility to the dangers of climate change in 2004′s The Day After Tomorrow, Emmerich turned his attentions to bigger issues with his follow-up, which went by the simple name of 2012. In Emmerich’s film, the Earth’s core starts to overheat, and the viewer discovers that the rich and powerful of the world have not only known about this for some time, but also prepared an escape plan that would leave them alive as untold millions perished. Classic disaster movie stuff, perhaps, but with one new twist: The movie’s promotion accidentally convinced people that it was based on fact.

The first trailer for 2012, you see, was a cascade of images of natural disasters intercut with text that asked — in upper case type, for emphasis — “HOW WOULD THE GOVERNMENTS OF OUR PLANET PREPARE SIX BILLION PEOPLE FOR THE END OF THE WORLD?” before answering its own question: “THEY WOULDN’T. FIND OUT THE TRUTH: GOOGLE SEARCH: 2012.” The problem with that type of tease, of course, is that you couldn’t predict what such a Google search would turn up, as The Guardian‘s film critic Anna Pickard pointed out at the time: “The first few hits are links to anxious tin-hat conspiracy sites where people earnestly discuss the impending end of the world and what possible connection that might have to giant lizards. Then there are a couple of links pointing to this very same teaser. Then there was finally something about the film itself,” she wrote. “Hoping that your film will always be top of the pile when anyone types in four digits — an upcoming year in which, let’s face it, quite a lot of things could be happening — is trust indeed.”

Perhaps hoping to learn from its mistakes, the next round of promotion for the movie centered around a fictional scientific research think tank, the Institute for Human Continuity, which encouraged visitors to enter a lottery that could allow them to escape the world’s destruction via a specially constructed Ark, while simultaneously offering faux “science” to explain why the world was, indeed, careering towards imminent destruction. Unfortunately for the movie’s producers, not everyone realized it was a joke, leading to NASA receiving more than a thousand requests for more information about the planet’s upcoming destruction. “I’ve even had cases of teenagers writing to me saying they are contemplating suicide because they don’t want to see the world end,” NASA scientist Dr. David Morrison said in response.

(MORE: Cinematic Visions of the Apocalypse)

Faced with an increasing number of requests for more information about our apparently impending doom, Morrison — who hosts the interactive “Ask an Astrophysicist” feature on NASA’s website — went on to create a special webpage debunking 2012 apocalypse mythology. NASA currently even has a “Beyond 2012: Why The World Won’t End” FAQ page on its site in which multiple scientists patiently explain why we really, really aren’t speeding towards extinction.

Fittingly, perhaps, 2012 the movie turned out to be the peak of popular culture’s obsession with 2012 as apocalyptic scenario. Although the idea still appeared from time to time — Luis G. Abbadie’s 2010 novel 2012: El Código Secreto del Necronomicón, for example, sees the author mixing Lovecraftian mythos with the familiar end of the world scenarios, while Jay Sean and Nicki Minaj tried to reassure us with their 2010 song “2012 (It Ain’t The End)” — apocalyptic themes slowly grew less and less popular until fading away almost entirely by the time the real 2012 rolled around, with the exception of reruns of rabble-rousing History Channel documentaries (even there, the date of the apocalypse has entirely been pushed back by a century or so {http://www.history.com/schedule/12/15/2012}). Chalk it up, perhaps, to others trying to avoid the mild panic (and scientific backlash) the movie had accidentally incited, or perhaps the realization that the actual 2012 was just a little too close for comfort.

I suspect that the slow end of 2012 hysteria in storytelling comes down to something far simpler: Maybe familiarity with the idea had finally bred contempt—or, worse yet, boredom. After all, how many times can you really show the same end of the world scenario before your audience yawns and asks what else you have? When it comes to popular culture’s take on what happens on December 21, 2012, things have somewhat unexpectedly turned out just as Morrison’s fake news anchor predicted 15 years ago: it went out of fashion years ago. Here’s hoping that the rest of Morrison’s prophesized events for December 21 turn out to be as off-base as that off-handed comment was on the nose.

End of the GRAIL’s Quest: NASA’s Lunar Probes to Crash into the Moon

By Michael Lemonick 

 NASA / JPL-CALTECH / MIT

An artist's depiction of Ebb and Flow, the twin spacecraft that comprise NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission

Read more: http://science.time.com/2012/12/17/end-of-grails-quest-nasas-lunar-probes-to-crash-into-the-moon/#ixzz2FfEeMDeI

If the twin spacecraft known as Ebb and Flow had any glimmer of awareness, they would have realized on Friday that something ominous was going on. For nearly a year, the two probes have been orbiting the moon in tandem, one behind the other, working tirelessly to map the gravity field of that cratered orb. It was always something of a thrill ride: the pair, known collectively as the GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) mission has been screaming along at thousands of kilometers per hour, dipping to as low as 10 km above the surface.

But on Friday, NASA controllers ordered Ebb’s rockets to life, and then, 16 seconds later, sent Flow an identical command, and both spacecraft began to descend. The glide path was far gentler than that of a passenger jet, but the end would be a lot more abrupt: between 5:28 p.m. and 5:29 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, an unnamed mountain will suddenly loom dead ahead, and first Ebb, then Flow, will smash headlong into its flank at a blistering 6,051 km/h, almost literally vaporizing themselves. Last week, the GRAIL probes made history. This week, they are history.

(MORE: Top 10 Space Moments of 2012)

The reason for the controlled crashes near the moon’s north pole is that the probes, having completed their mission, are nearly out of fuel. They’d be going down anyway, but NASA wanted to avoid even the small chance that they might damage the sites of the Apollo landings, where footprints, flags and other artifacts remain, perfectly preserved in the lunar vacuum.

It isn’t the first time interplanetary spacecraft have been crashed deliberately either. Back in the early 1960s, a series of Ranger probes took nosedives into the moon, furiously snapping photos as they went and giving scientists the very first closeups of the lunar surface. During the Apollo program, discarded rocket boosters were crashed so that seismometers on the surface could record the impacts. In 2009, the LCROSS probe smashed into a permanently shadowed crater floor to see if traces of water vapor would emerge from the fireball, proving there was ice on the moon’s surface (there was). And further from home, the Galileo probe was sent plunging into Jupiter in 2009 rather than take the chance that it might crash into Jupiter’s satellite Europa instead, contaminating a place where life could plausibly exist with Earthly bacteria.

Fortunately for scientists, Ebb and Flow have completed their mission with impressive success, mapping the subtle differences in gravity from one part of the lunar surface to another with extraordinary precision. When the pair approached a place with extra material — say, a mountain range — the extra gravity would tug on Ebb, lengthening the distance between the two craft. When they approached a place with less material than average, such as a crater or a crevice, Ebb would slow down, letting Flow catch up just a bit.

(PHOTOS: Eagle Eye: The Best Satellite Views of the Earth)

Those gravity differences let the GRAIL mission create the most detailed topographic map ever of the moon’s surface. But Ebb and Flow also responded to areas of high or low density below the surface — and those revealed something nobody had imagined: the moon is crisscrossed with underground cracks, up to 483 km long and up to 40 km wide, filled with solidified magma. The cracks were created billions of years ago, as the moon’s hot interior expanded against its cool, solid surface; the fact that they’re now buried shows that the surface was later pulverized by a bombardment of asteroids.

There’s plenty more as well: the enormous volume of data sent back by Ebb and Flow (they were named by elementary-school kids in Bozeman, Mo., who won a contest) led to three separate papers published on Dec. 5 in Science — but they’re just the beginning of what could be a revolution in our understanding of the moon.

Once they’re gone, space lovers will remember that Ebb and Flow lived fast, died young — and while they didn’t leave a pair of good-looking corpses, they certainly left a gorgeous scientific legacy.

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Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2012/12/19/its-the-ends-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-did-pop-culture-cause-mayan-apocalypse-panic/#ixzz2Ff6r6Vwy

Terence McKenna's Time Wave Zero

There is another odd pointer to the 2012 date, American psychedelic shaman Terrance McKenna's Time Wave theory. In that theory, the year 2012 is called "Time Wave Zero." McKenna took the I Ching, did some kind of mathematical fractal operation with it, and produced a computer program which supposedly produces a "time wave" which maps out something called "novelty" across the scale of time, from the Big Bang to the Eschaton, the ending of time. And guess what? The mapping of time mysteriously ends at 2012. The Omega point.

I found out about the time wave zero because I had been interested in McKenna's work for quite some time. He was primarily an expert on psychedelic substances, especially as religious sacraments and as used by shamans throughout history. He recounts, like Ginsberg and Burroughs before him, memorable journeys to the Amazon region in search of the mystic brew called "Yage" used by shamans there as an entrance to the "other world" beyond our ordinary consciousness. He was also a heroic taker of, and expert on, that explosive beyond-LSD drug called DMT or dimethyltryptamine. His accounts of his trips using that are really amazing to read, and he seriously believed that this particular drug enabled telepathic contact to occur with extraterrestrial intelligences, or what he called "the self-transforming elves." He felt that DMT opened up direct perception of hyperspace.

I will confess straightaway I don't understand his time wave scheme or its mathematics at all. It seems very complicated. But I thought I would check out some links today and present them for anyone who is interested in investigaing this strange linking of the very ancient (I Ching) and the very modern (computers & fractals). I am not very good at mathematics so it is a bit beyond me, but the whole thing is intriguing, especially in that he arrives at the same date pointed to by the Maya calendar.

Here is a time wave graph showing the fluctuations in "novelty" over a vastest scale, starting with the Big Bang and ending on Dec. 21, 2012. Apparently the fractal function can be graphed for any time period at all, but this one is the overall widest period, 25 billion years:

Exactly what this shows, I am still not sure. I am trying to figure it out. To show how the fractal graph, somehow derived from the 64 I Ching hexagrams (King Wen Sequence), here is another graph of a much smaller chunk of time:

Apparently the fractal function depends especially on the sequence (order) in which the hexagrams are taken. You may have seen fractal pictures before. One of their features is that you can zoom in on them forever and each emerging tiny detail reveals the same structure of the overall whole. The two diagrams above represent this kind of "zooming in."

McKenna explains how he derived the Timewave from the I Ching in an article called "Derivation of the Timewave from the King Wen Sequence of Hexagrams," which you can look at here. If anyone can understand this article, please write to me and explain it! It contains the key to McKenna's whole system, but for the life of me I cannot figure it out. As I said, my mind gets kind of fuzzy when I try to dive into mathematics. Anyway, he arrives somehow at the following graph of the 64 hexagrams, of which he says "Here is the complete graph of the King Wen first order of differnce with its mirror image fitted against it to achieve closure:"

"Using techniques that I developed for the problem I was able to mathematically collapse the hexagram construct into a self-similar fractal curve that can be used to map the unfolding of temporal variables and their resonances on all levels of duration."

I will leave it to the more mathematically gifted to try to understand this derivation of the Time Wave, but I find it fascinating that anyone would even think of trying this in the first place. If anything is modern computerized esotericism, this is it! Has any reader figured out what all this means?

McKenna sums it up this way:

"Such quantized transitions from one modality to another are called "changes of epoches" By Whitehead. The appearance of life in an inorganic world, of consciousness in an unconscious world, or of language in a world without language are all examples of such epochal transitions. Our lives are filled with such transitions, but they are terminations of relatively short cycles in the quantified hierarchy. Terminations of cycles or epoches of really long duration cause extreme accelerations toward the zero state. This idea is similar to Whitehead's conception of concrescence and the Vedic conception of world ages which grow shorter as they tighten around an axis point. The spiral image of the Christian apocalypse is another example of this intuition that time is a series of tightening gyres around the quantized emergence of transformation."

Using his computer program based on the structure of the I Ching McKenna could generate what he called "Novelty Reports." On another page called Novelty & Concrescence he explains what he means by "novelty" by quoting Alfred North Whitehead:

"Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The creative advance is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the 'many' which it finds and also it is one among the disjunctive ' many' which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesises. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively 'many' in process of passage into conjunctive unity... Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of 'production of novelty' and 'concrete togetherness' are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition." (Process and Reality, p. 26)

I'm not sure that helps much. Western philosophers! They drive me crazy. I can read that paragraph forever and have no idea what it says! Let's forget about it for now and go on. On another page McKenna describes what the "Omega Point" is, or Time Wave Zero, 2012:

"Novelty Theory suggests that on December 21 of 2012 AD, at the coincidence of the moment of the solstice and the heliacal rising of the galactic center, levels of planetary novelty will exponentially increase. Theory does not make clear the nature of the ultranovel event, however. Speculation as to the nature of the encounter with the trans-dimensional object at the end of time includes the following:"

Hyperspatial Breakthrough
Planetesimal Impact
Alien Contact
Historical Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis of Natural Law
Solar Explosion
Quasar Ignition at the Galactic Core

Eschatology is defined as "a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of mankind," and McKenna calls this "trans-dimensional object at the end of time" the "Eschaton." Applying his time wave formula to various periods of history he produces more of those time graphs like those at the top of this page. You can see more of them, with explanations, on the page The Time Wave and History. Just exactly WHY the grand time wave ends in 2012 is something I have still not figured out. Probably one needs to grasp the mathematical formula to understand that.

On another page called From Here to the Eschaton he gives the following image which shows the novelty graph from now upto 2012.

As far as I can figure out so far I think the points where the graph changes greatly, going up or down, are the points of great novelty or change, in other words, big events. And notice at the point of 2012 the graph no longer fluctuates, it goes to zero. That is Time Wave Zero, the Omega point, the Eschaton.

Remembering that this fractal time wave can be magnified to show increasing detail, you can look at some more sample "Novelty Reports" generated by McKenna's I Ching/Novelty program to get more of an idea of how it works.

If this all seems fairly whacky, another page describes how a couple of noted mathematicians went over McKenna's work. One of them, John Sheliak, found an error in basic formula I guess, AND CORRECTED IT, putting the whole thing on firmer mathematical ground. McKenna was very excited about this.

"I owe a real debt of gratitude to both Watkins and John Sheliak, but especially John. His work now makes explicit every stage in the construction of the timewave, any interested mathematician can now satisfy him or herself as to the precise details of the construction of the timewave. What is exciting to me and what makes me very confident of the new formulation is the fact that we are now getting a better fit of the Novelty graphs to historical data in a number of key areas where before, with the old version, we had some problems. Just to mention two examples. The new wave, which we are calling Timewave 1, to distinguish it from Timewave 0, the new wave gives a much better picture of the ebb and flow of Novelty during the Second World War and during the century of the birth of Islam, than did the old wave. These are exciting times for Novelty Theory. I am happy to admit my error in the construction of the wave. Novelty Theory can now mature into a genuine intellectual discipline in which we can hope to see the contributions made by many people exploring the field. Many exciting discoveries now lie ahead."

Sheliak's work on the time wave theory can be found here:
http://www.levity.com/eschaton/sheliak/

Sheliak states in the forward to his consideration of the Time Wave:

"Does the mathematical or philosophical structure of the I-Ching, reveal anything of an underlying connection with nature or the cosmos, that could explain how it (the I-Ching) might work? When it is viewed as a system that reflects or represents a process of flow, motion, or change in nature and the human experience, it is one that finds considerable correspondence elsewhere in philosophy and science, including elements of quantum theory. The flow of yin to yang, yang to yin, finds correspondence in the flow of matter to energy, and energy to matter - revealing a dynamic and ever changing universe. The First Order of Difference (FOD) number set, described by McKenna and others, is derived from the King Wen sequence of the I-Ching and is assumed to contain meaningful information about the nature of the physical universe, that is intelligible to us and consistent with our experience. If correct, Novelty Theory is then a description of the form in which this information expresses itself - i.e. the TimeWave."

McKenna has written a number of books and they are all fascinating. One book is called "The Archaic Revival," which he describes in an essay.

"What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace."

I have no idea what it is that the Mayan calendar points to and the Time Wave formula points to, in the year 2012. McKenna doesn't pretend he knows either. He just calls it "the eschaton," a "something" that has been pulling mankind toward itself since the beginning, like a great attractor. Is it mankind's graduation at last into hyperspace? One can't help but be reminded of that great science fiction book by Arthur C. Clark called "Childhood's End," where the "last generation" of children comes of age and transforms into something completely beyond mankind as we know it. Clark has often been called a prophet in realm of science, but I think "Childhood's End" may have been his most prophetic book of all. Looking toward that end, the eschaton, McKenna writes:

"We are flesh which has been caught in the grip of some kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time, and that is sculpting us to its ends; speaking to us through psychedelics, through visions, through culture, and technology, consciousness. The language forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward as though it were going to shed the monkey body and leap into some extra-surreal space that surrounds us, but that we can not currently see. Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF, you name it, they know that history is ending. They know by the reports which cross their desks: the disappearance of the ozone hole [?], the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rain forests. What this means is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits, and that the human species has now, without choice, begun the decent down the birth canal of collective transformation toward something right around the corner and nearly completely unimaginable. And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes is because I believe that what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace. And from that hyperspace we look down on..., we look down on both the past and the future, and we anticipate the end. And a shaman is someone who has seen the end, and therefore is a trickster, because you don't worry if you've seen the end. If you know how it comes out you go back and you take your place in the play, and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This is what boundary dissolution means. It means nothing less than the anticipation of the end state of human history."

[snip]

"This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a pseudo-millenium. This is the real thing folks. This is not a test. This is the last chance before things become so dissipated that there is no chance for cohesiveness. We can use the calender as a club. We can make the millenium an occasion for establishing an authentic human civilization, overcoming the dominator paradigm, dissolving boundaries through psychedelics, recreating a sexuality not based on monotheism, monogamy and monotony. We.. All these things are possible if we can understand the overarching metaphor which holds it together which is the celebration of mind as play, the celebration of love as a genuine social value in the community. This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news. And if we are able to make this point then we can pull back, we can pull back and we can transcend. Nine times in the last million years the ice has ground south from the poles pushing human populations ahead of it and those people didn't f*ck up. Why should we then? We are all survivors. We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable. And now with the engines of technology in our hands we ought to be able to reach out and actually exteriorize the human soul at the end of time, invoke it into existence like a UFO and open the violet doorway into hyperspace and walk through it, out of profane history and into the world beyond the grave, beyond shamanism, beyond the end of history, into the galactic millenium that has beckoned to us for millions of years across space and time. THIS IS THE MOMENT. A planet brings forth an opportunity like this only once in its lifetime, and we are ready, and we are poised. And as a community we are ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it our own.

It's there. Go for it, and thank you."

Space

NASA vs. the Maya Madness

By Michael D. Lemonick

Read more: http://science.time.com/2012/12/12/nasa-versus-the-mayan-madness/#ixzz2FfDnij9O

If you want to see a roomful of people roll their eyes, just walk into a gathering of astronomers — or experts on ancient Mesoamerican civilizations, for that matter — 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. It’s been the inspiration for get-rich-quick schemes. It’s like Y2K all over again, but at least that episode of end-of-world hysteria was reality-based.

(MORE:  Cinematic Visions of the Apocalypse)

The 2012 apocalypse, by contrast, is just plain nutty. 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. The earth won’t be plunged into a three-day blackout. And contrary to what you’ve been hearing, Maya astrologers never said any of that stuff would actually happen. The idea is so preposterous that a Web search for “Mayan apocalypse” turns up as many spoofs as it does serious discussions.

The truth is a lot more prosaic than what the tinfoil-hat crowd would have you believe. Yes, the Maya had what’s known as a Long Count calendar, and yes, that calendar ends on Dec. 21, 2012. But the delightful thing about calendars — including the one the Maya used — is that they always start over again from zero. Just because we have a record of the Long Count equivalent of last year doesn’t mean the Maya weren’t busy working on next year’s. As for Nibiru, well, never mind. That one was borrowed from the ancient Sumerians, and the original prediction was that we’d get clobbered by the free-range planet in 2003. You might have noticed that that didn’t happen, so the date of arrival was moved up to 2012 to coincide with the Maya silliness. An apocalyptic twofer!

(MORE: Safe Haven from the Maya Apocalypse? Sorry, We’re Closed)

All the same, some folks at NASA are seriously worried — not about the end of the world but about the real harm the loose talk may be doing to some people’s mental health. “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, who hosts the agency’s Ask an Astrobiologist website. “A large fraction are from people asking if the world will end, saying they’re scared and don’t know what to do. A few even talk about suicide.”

It might seem implausible that people would kill themselves over an imaginary cosmic event, but it happened back in 1997, when 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in Southern California committed mass suicide under the delusion that the approach of Comet Hale-Bopp meant it was time to leave their physical bodies. Fearing that people were taking the 2012 scaremongering too seriously, NASA convened a Google+ hangout on Nov. 28 during which people could interact with six astronomers who were prepared to debunk any myth the public could throw at them. For nearly an hour, they did just that, patiently explaining, for example, that any asteroid en route to obliterating earth in just a few short weeks would have been spotted by telescopes long ago and that Nibiru, one of whose leading proponents is a woman who insists she’s in touch with aliens from the Zeta Reticuli star system, would be the brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon.

(MORE: Want to Tweet in Mayan? This Group Can Help)

But NASA has been debunking the apocalypse for years now, in the same patient and rational manner, and it hasn’t helped a whole lot. “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., who wasn’t part of the online hangout. “That’s about the same percentage that believes in Santa Claus and thinks we never went to the moon.”

Trying to reduce that percentage by providing facts isn’t necessarily going to work, since proponents of the nonsense provide plenty of their own “facts.” “I have to admit,” says Morrison, “that there’s something of an inherent contradiction when we scientists tell people not to trust things they read on the Internet, and then put information on the Internet.”

The real problem, said Andrew Fraknoi, an astronomer at Foothill College in Los Altos, Calif., during the NASA webcast, “is that our schools have not taught skeptical thinking, have not taught children to distinguish between fantasy and reality. The real threat in 2012 is the public’s low level of science understanding.”

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Whether that could lead to panic or suicides this time around is unclear. Only a tiny handful of the thousands of worried e-mails Morrison has gotten raise the disturbing possibility of people taking their own lives, and those have all been from adults.

But even if kids are not suicidal, plenty of them are frightened, and have been for a long time. “Two years ago, I met with a group of middle-school science teachers,” Morrison says, “and I asked them how many of them were seeing kids who were worried about 2012. Nearly every hand shot up.” When Dec. 21 comes and goes without incident, those fears should finally evaporate — that is, until the next doomsday pronouncement comes along.

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