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NASA Attempts To Assuage 2012 Fears
eldavojohn writes "The apocalyptic film 2012 has dominated the box office, taking in $65 million on opening weekend. But with all those uninformed eyeballs watching the film, NASA has found itself answering so many common questions that their Ask an Astrobiologist blog offers calming, professional reassurance that there is no planet Nibiru, nor will it collide with Earth (although I do recall a massive solar storm forecast). NASA's main site even offers a FAQ answering similar questions. NPR has more on NASA scientist David Morrison and his efforts to calm the ensuing public hysteria, but survivalists are already planning for the big one. Pretty funny, right? Not according to Morrison: 'I've had three from young people saying they were contemplating committing suicide. I've had two from women contemplating killing their children and themselves. I had one last week from a person who said, "I'm so scared, my only friend is my little dog. When should I put it to sleep so it won't suffer?" And I don't know how to answer those questions.'"
Just, wow.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You respond with, "It's only a movie. The world isn't ending. Don't kill your children, your pets, or yourself."
2. Create a hysteria and panic about the world ending due to Y2K or Planet Nibiru or Mayan Calender cycle ending or Banks collapsing or Obama winning the elections.
3. ...
4. Stock of survivalgears_are_us.com zooms up and ..... profit!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Why is the taxpayer's money being spent on this nonsense?
It's one way of doing science PR these days, I guess.
I've had two from women contemplating killing their children and themselves
You tell them to come in, explaining that you have a secret rocket that will take some of us off of this planet. When they arrive, you have social services take the kids away and the police can take her to the nearest asylum for the criminally insane.
Offing themselves is one thing, offing their children is quite another.
Because taxpayers are contemplating suicide over this 2012 nonsense?
Before you breed...
Taxpayers' money is spent on religion all the time. I don't see why this is any different. It's all fiction.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Why is the taxpayer's money being spent on this nonsense? What's next? Scientific evidence, that there is no Santa Claus? That black cats crossing your path do not cause "bad luck" (whatever that is)?
It's a blog post and a FAQ. That's it. No probe to prove there is no planet Nibiru, no expensive mission. Are you really worried that one man probably spent a few days writing this up?
Frankly, I thought it was nice to hear that a NASA scientist is working to take the time to respond to a worried public and trying to minimize that time by having an informative page. When I was a kid, I wrote to NASA from Minnesota all the time. Every single time they responded. I still have fact sheets on all of their shuttle craft in my parent's closet. I read those things over and over trying to imagine how someone could come up with such amazing machines. Go ahead, spend a few minutes to hand write them a letter, you might be surprised with the response:
And if you came here to complain that NASA wastes tax payer money, you're in the wrong place. NASA's budget is about half of one percent of the Federal budget--don't even get me started on what our defense budget comes out to be. That's a ridiculously low amount of money for an agency that's charged with a major component of our future and probably the whole future of the Earth and its inhabitants.
... what exactly are you implying these questions and blog are strawmen for?
Your subject confuses me further
My work here is dung.
Ignorance is not stupidity. NASA has addressed the ignorance. Good for them.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Thats because this movie isn't terrifying anybody, its a marketing campaign. If 20 people are genuinely frightened out of the millions who may see it, big friggin deal. On that scale, 20 people will also be frightened to eat the popcorn, or that they caught pig flu from the guy next to them, or that aliens abducted them the night before. Its noise.
Its no more earth shattering or scary than Independence Day.
Some people like to believe movies and books, hence the whole Dan Brown thing. Does it matter? No, lots of stupid people out there. Its a non issue.
Why is the taxpayer's money being spent on this nonsense?
It's a blog post and a FAQ. That's it. No probe to prove there is no planet Nibiru, no expensive mission. Are you really worried that one man probably spent a few days writing this up?
They probably saved taxpayer money by writing a FAQ instead of getting repetitive calls from all the loonys.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
The real crime is that you think it is okay for people to assume movies have any relation to reality to begin with. ALL movies would have your disclaimer, making it worthless.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
but to be honest, the whole scientific backstory of the film is so thin I never actually considered that people would genuinely fear a cataclysm as depicted in the movie. "Mutating neutrinos"... really?
Yeah, I can't even hate you for working on it, nor the producers et al for creating it. It's just a movie, after all, so you don't fall into anything like the same class as the people who are promoting the 2012 thing as fact for their own benefit.
If anyone ends up killing themselves or ruining their lives, it'll be at the feet of those bastards, not artists and businesspeople who are honestly trying to make a buck piggy-backing on the phenomenon. You lot have pursued the only honourable way of profiting from this kind of idiocy, and more power to you.
That given, my question is: if we have people who want to ban cell phones because of zero evidence that they emit any harmful radiation, when will see a movement to ban panic-mongers? Panic-mongers do cause demonstrable harm and in the case of the LHC black-hole lies are known to have precipiated at least one death (a teenage girl who committed suicide.) So while artists making clearly absurd fiction ("mutating neutrinos"?) are in the clear, I think we should be looking very carefully at how to come down hard on panic-mongers. They are far more dangerous than any of the ridiculous threats they promote.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Wow, this unoriginal post was modded insightful? I hate having to waste my mod points modding stuff down that shouldn't even be modded up in the first place.
Mi is a hard core anti-government libertarian. For him, there is no excuse to thin to turn into an opportunity to bash the government. He's one of those people who think government can never, ever do anything good. If it looks good, you aren't looking hard enough. To people like Mi, NASA is just socialism for scientists and engineers who should be working in private industry.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And remove themselves from the gene pool.
Almost no stupidity or suicidal tendancies are hereditary. Most mental disabilities are caused by accident or disease. A very large number of children are born every day with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome to (other then being alcoholics) perfectly sane, normal, intelligent people. The "Darwin Award" is pure bullshit; evolution doesn't work like that.
If a stupid woman has fifteen kids and ten die, and you have never had sex, she won the Darwin game and you are its loser.
Free Martian Whores!
Lots of people have commented on how incredibly stupid these people are. I don't think it's quite that simple.
I think that they're just scared. There's so much fear in our culture, people are scared of health care, scared of a black president, scared of terrorists, scared of oil prices, scared of cell phone companies, scared of pirates (the Somalian kind), scared of pirates (the MPAA kind), scared of the RIAA and MPAA, scared of swine flu, scared of unemployment, scared of having a job that doesn't pay a living wage, scared of peanuts, scared of global warming, scared of pollution, scared of home invasions, scared of floods, earthquakes and fires, scared of nuts with guns, scared of the government taking away everyone's guns.
Fear makes you irrational. It suppresses the "carefully think about the situation" part of your brain, and supercharges the "fight or flight" part. If people stopped to think rationally about it, they would realize it is fiction. But the fear prevents them from thinking rationally.
We live in a constant state of fear, and our culture (or our media, depending on how you look at it) keeps giving us more reasons to be afraid.
What we need is more reason to be hopeful, not fearful. If we remove the irrational fears about health care, presidents, terrorists, MPAA, pirates, global warming, etc., then we would also have fewer irrational fears about the planet Nimbus crashing into Earth on December 21st, 2012.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
Cute but stupid women only remain cute as long as they don't say anything. When I was 19, I took a subway and there were 2 cute chicks that I ogled. After listening to them for 5 minutes, the length of my ride, they were really ugly just based on what I had heard them say. So...
I've been noticing a lot of these "NASA Calms 2012 Fears" articles in the last few days, enough that it makes it sound like there's more of a story here than I think there really is. The real question is, how many people are actually worried about this? I'm guessing that it's a tiny number, and probably what happened is, a statistical blip caused a few of the crazier ones to contact NASA. So then he posts on the blog about it, and for some reason a lot of places pick up the story.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
That show has some REALLY bad science in it at times. For instance, one episode discussed the "myth" (rather old wives saying) that with breakfast cereal (the american kind) the cardboard box it comes in contains more NUTRITION then the cereal itself.
The amazing mythbusters then went on to determine the CALORIE/ENERGY and FAT contents of both products. Do Americans REALLY need more CALORIES or FAT in their diets? Not once did they test EITHER of the products for NUTRITIONAL values, as in minerals/vitamins etc. They proved that sugar coated grain gives you energy. No shit sherlock. Your MOTHER is talking about nutrition as you find it in fresh vegetables, and fruit. Not a sugar cube or lump of butter.
And yet many here at slashdot consider mythbusters as valid science and often quote their results to prove how silly a myth is.
I seen another show where helicopters were discussed and the claim was made that helicopters do not have ejection seats. Correct. US helicopters do not, SOVIET helicopters did. How many believe a lie because they thought a documentary was a documentary?
The truth, the real absolute, total and complete truth is not good entertainment and does not fit in a soundbite or between commercial blocks.
And the truth is hard to understand because you need to understand an lot of complex subjects that you actually need to spend some time thinking about.
What IS the mayan calendar and why is 2012 significant and as mentioned in the article is that different then 31st december 2009? If you don't understand WHAT a date really is, how time is tracked, then you COULD think 31st december 9999 would be an ending (which is rougly what 2012 is to the mayans). Silly if you TRULY understand calendars, numbers and such but many don't.
For many people, magical thinking fills in the gaps between their understanding of the world and a LOT of us do it. Come one, be honest how much of your understanding of gravity is a rubber sheet with a weight on it? There is no rubber sheet, that is magical thinking to help your limited intelligence deal with the concepts thought up by truly brilliant people.
So, don't be to condescending, you are no Einstein.
Our world is filled with half lies to explain things away because explaining everything to everyone would explode the education system and not help getting the bloody toilets cleaned and garbage collected and even peoples wounds dressed.
A simple story: In africa there used to be a believe that if you used a cooking stick twice, evil demons would posses it. White missionaries said this was silly superstition and forbid this practice. people soon dropped dead. Why? The evil spirit called food poisoning. This is LESS of an issue in colder climates like europe, but in the hot african sun food spoils far more rapidly.Oh, the story might not be true, but the gist of it is that sometimes "magical thinking" fills a gap between knowing that something is true and knowing the reason behind it.
But we humans ain't perfect and we all can't spent all our time reading books. These people heard something, didn't understand it and nobody is willing to clearly explain it and then there are stations like Fox that even add to the fear mongering for their own gains. Hell even Discovery and National Geographic are happy to host a "lets scare people" show to get ratings. How are people to know the full truth when the lies are sold so much better?
I think what NASA is doing is the right thing, but they should do it more clearly and get someone like Carl Sagan, someone who can talk plain english to explain it on tv on popular chat shows. SHOW people. Don't hide in the ivory tower sneering down, come out with the science. People LOVE science, but you need to open up to them, not by talking down to them, but by starting easy and then pulling them up. Why do you Einstein is such a celebrity? Because HE could do that. Few can. Certainly not most people here.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You know plenty of people laugh at the superstitions of people in the Dark Ages, but science as we know it, didn't exist then. I mean Aristotle had some great ideas, but there was little or nothing to take the place of raw superstition until about the 13th or 14th century (at least in the West).
But what is peoples' excuse today? How is it that people who presumably graduated from the American educational system are no better off than some dirt-farming peasant from barbarian times? Things weren't always this bad. If I had the choice of hiring someone with a high school education from 1909 or someone with a high school education from 2009, I'd choose the 1909 person, and 90% of the time I'd be better off.
But of course or education system is fine, it just needs more money thrown at it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.