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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."
The War of the Worlds (radio)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio)
Quote: "Some listeners heard only a portion of the broadcast, and in the atmosphere of tension and anxiety leading to World War II, took it to be a news broadcast. Newspapers reported that panic ensued, people fleeing the area, others thinking they could smell poison gas or could see flashes of lightning in the distance."
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
How many of those sending their questions to NASA are part of the 2012 movie marketing campaign?
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.
Or just do what Penn & Teller did. Offer "2012 Reverse Mortgages". To paraphrase, "We'll give you a bunch of money to spend on whatever hedonism you like for the next 2 years, and in 2013, in the infinitesimal chance that it's still standing and we're still alive to claim it, we take your house!"
This is the first film I've worked on that caused actual general panic. Grudge 2 scared people, but it's actually a little gratifying to think that work I did is scaring people even AFTER they walked out of the theater. At the time we were making it I knew the whole black president/conspiracy thing was definitely going to push a lot of buttons, just considering the way things are right now, 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?
ps. I was the lead sound effects editor on the show. Along with blowing up Yellowstone and other sundry destructions, I personally cut about 80% of the computer screen beeps. And I cut every one of them just for you guys, because I know you love them so much :D
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Yeah, so if you run into one of these idiots, and she happens to be cute, just tell her that you are a Mao Shan master and you know the perfect ceremony to stop Nibiru from hitting the Earth, if you could just get a little help from her...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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
A friend of mine is taking an Arky (Archaeology for those less hip) Class, as she is an ancient & medieval history major, and she is taking a class this semester SPECIFICALLY on the Mayans. Her Prof is one of the archaelogists who work on sites like Tucan. The prof held an open public lecture in the University of Calgary in the first week of November here. My friend and I both attended, and while I never did believe in the whole Mayan Myth it's interesting to see where its origins begin.
So this prof is basically a Mayan pro, she can translate most inscriptions just by looking at them (no reference needed) and she intimately understands their number and Calendar system. The first thing to know about Mayan numbers is that they don't use Base 10, they use base 20. The other thing to know is that there is not ONE Mayan Language. They were similar to all of Europe, where the europeans had french, English, spanish, german, etc, the Mayans had about 6 to 8 different Variants. And with that in mind, they were never a single nation, each city had it's own king/queen type leader, and they peacably would trade with the other cities of the area. No one city was truly the capital, but those major trade hubs and those with rarer goods tended to prosper more than the little towns.
Anyways, so the Mayans used 2 different Calendars, and I can't remember how big, but there was a sizable gap in between the usage of each (I think like 800 years?). But basically what it breaks down into is the Short count and the Long count.
The Short count is very much like our Calendar today, 18 months of 20 days each with 5 days at the end of the year for some religious purpose (Similar to the egyptians). They also had Names for days of their week, like Monday Tuesday Wednesday (Except Mayan Gods instead of Norse Gods). So if I were to say, Friday, December 25th, you'd know I mean this Christmas and not last Christmas or the next Christmas because they don't land on a Friday. This works well for 8 years until Christmas lands on a Friday again. You could be more precise about the date if you gave me the year, which is where the Long Count comes in.
We attribute a year to 365 days. So I would say that Dec 31 2009 would be day 733285. The Mayans didn't use years, they merely counted days. Which is neat in some ways because there were 20 days in a month (And they're number system is base 20, remember?) But also a bit of a hassle in others, because there are 18 months.
So the way Archaeologists expressed their long count is in a series of numbers seperated by decimals (It looks like a long IP Address to me). Day 1 would be like 0.0.0.0.0.1 and Day 23 would be like 0.0.0.2.3 - - Except here's the kicker - Mayans didn't set day 0 as anything in particular. In fact, their creation story takes place well after 0. This leads many people to believe that the Mayans set a date in the future as some signifigance and worked their way backwards. What day that could be or what they believed it would be has yet to be discovered. There are some speculations. No, its not 2012.
Essentially the numbers further to the left represent longer periods of time, so each 1.0.0.0.0 in the long count is really like 8767 years give or take, which is a really long friggen time, right? We celebrate every year pretty much, but every odd once in a while we hold huge celebrations, like when we ushered in the new millenia in the year 2000. That sort of thing was also important to the Mayans. If I recall correctly, we're roughly around the 13.0.19.0.0 era on the Mayan Calendar. So when it rolls around to be 13.1.0.0.0 - wouldn't that be a rollover worth celebrating? To the Mayans it would be. Guess what day that happens to fall on? You're right, December 21 2012.
So now that you've got a crash course on the Calendar and how it works, where exactly does the Prophecy come in? I'll tell you. Amongst the ruins of cities, Mayans had what we call Stelas. They are basically big stones which have stories and such carved into them, very much like a monu