A NASA scientist has condemned the doomsday film “2012″ and launched a web site, “Ask an Astrobiologist,” to quell the fears it is raising.

The film, now showing in the U.S., is the latest and most high-profile public airing of an ancient Mayan prediction that a world cataclysm will occur on the winter solstice in 2012. There have been many books and TV shows on the theory but “2012″ has had a much greater impact, creating widespread public fear that the prediction may be correct.
Dr. David Morrison, a senior scientist at NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, has become so concerned that he decided not to remain silent.

“Two years ago, I got a question a week about it,” said Morrison. “Now I’m getting a dozen a day. Two teenagers said they didn’t want to see the end of the world, so they were thinking of ending their lives,” he added.

Morrison attributed the general fear to the fact that several items have become conflated into one mega-myth. One is the persistent Internet rumor that a planet called Nibiru, or Planet X, is going to crash into the Earth.

Then there is the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, suggesting that the Mayans knew something we don’t. Finally, end-of-the-worlders have seized upon the publicity about the 2012 date to push their claims the end of the world is near.

Morrison said Nibiru was a name in Babylonian astrology sometimes associated with the god Marduk. The claims that Nibiru was a planet and was known to the Sumerians were just imagination.

He said IRAS, the NASA Infrared Astronomy Satellite, which carried out a sky survey for 10 months in 1983, discovered many infrared sources, but none of them was Nibiru or Planet X or any other object in the outer solar system.

He said if signs of a new object in space turned out to be not real, or not a planet, then it was not heard about again. If it was real, it would not be called Planet X. Therefore, the so-called Planet X did not exist.

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Source : Xinhuanet News