The world is not coming to an end on December 21, 2012, Nasa insisted on Monday in a rare campaign to dispel rumours fueled by the internet and a new Hollywood movie.
The latest big screen offering from Sony Pictures, “2012,” arrives in theatres on Friday , with a $200 million production about the end of the world supposedly based on theories backed by the Mayan calendar.
The doomsday scenario revolves around claims that the end of time will come as an obscure Planet X - or Nibiru - collides with Earth.
The mysterious planet was supposedly discovered by the Sumerians, according to claims by pseudo-scientists, paranormal activity enthusiasts and internet theorists.
Some websites have accused the US space agency of concealing the truth about the wayward planet’s existence, but Nasa has 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.
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,” it added. “Obviously, it does not exist.”
“Credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012,” it insisted.
After all, “our planet has been getting along just fine for more than four billion years,” added Nasa.
Initial theories set the disaster for May 2003, but when nothing happened the date was moved forward to the winter solstice in 2012, to coincide with the end of a cycle of the ancient Mayan calendar.
Nasa insisted the Mayan calendar does not in fact end on December 21, 2012, as another period begins immediately afterward. And it said there are no planetary alignments on the horizon for the next few decades.
And even if the planets were to line up as some have forecast, the effect on our planet would be “negligible,” Nasa said.
Modern Maya in Guatemala and Mexico have also rushed to debunk the “prophesy”.
they view the burgeoning end-of-the-world 2012 industry with a mixture of confusion, exasperation and anger at what is perceived as a Western distortion of their traditions and beliefs.
“There is no concept of apocalypse in the Mayan culture,” Jesus Gomez, head of the Guatemalan confederation of Mayan priests and spiritual guides, told The Sunday Telegraph.
Cirilo Perez, an adviser to Guatemala’s President Alvaro Colom is a prominent ajq’ij - literally a “day counter”, a wise man who makes predictions and advice on the most propitious dates to marry, plant or harvest. He decried the commercial exploitation of Mayan culture by outsiders.
“This has all become business but there is no desire to understand,” he said. “When foreigners, or even some Guatemalans, see us, they think ‘Look at the Maya, how nice, how pretty’, but they don’t understand us.”
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