Mayan Calendar 2012: Apocalypse Date Approaching, NASA, Scientists, Scholars Champion Reason

As the supposed Mayan apocalypse date of Dec. 21 quickly approaches, everyone from NASA, scientists, and cultural scholars are speaking out to debunk doomsday prophecies.

Many scholars contend that much of the frenzy surrounding the date stems from a misinterpretation of the Mayan calendar.

"On the 21st, the date of the winter solstice, a calendar cycle called the 13th b'ak'tun comes to an end. Although Maya scholars agree that the ancient Maya would not have seen this day as apocalyptic," NASA explained in an FAQ note.

"It's not the end of the calendar," professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley Rosemary Joyce said. "It's the end of a cycle. It rolls over, like an odometer."

"December 21st will be just another Friday morning," said Andrew Wilson, Assistant Head of Social Studies at the University of Derby. "A hippy guru called Jose Arguelles associated the date with the Mayan calendar in a book called 'The Mayan Factor' in 1987. But it's an obsolete form of the calendar, which had not been used since the year 1100AD."

An expert on the Maya, William Saturno, also believes the people wouldn't have thought Dec. 21 marked the end of the world. Saturno conducted a study earlier this year in Guatemala and discovered new notes about the Mayan calendar written on the walls of an ancient structure explaining how the calendars operated. The evidence suggested the Mayans foresaw a hug, otherworldly progression of time.

"They were looking at the way these cycles were turning. The Maya calendar is going to keep going and keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future, a huge number that we can't even wrap our heads around," Saturno said.

"The ancient Maya predicted the world would continue, that 7,000 years from now, things would be exactly like this. We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It's an entirely different mindset," he concluded.

NASA and its team of scientists likewise strongly agree rumors of the Mayan apocalypse are just that - rumors.

"Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than four billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012," NASA researchers wrote.

David Morrison, a Harvard-trained astrophysicist who studied under Carl Sagan, and the senior scientist at the Astrobiology Institute at NASA Ames Research Center, answers question about the purported Dec. 21 Armageddon date daily now. Lately, he's emerged as the chief debunker of doomsday theories.

"I got my first doomsday question four years ago and wondered what the heck it was," he said. "Perhaps I made the mistake of answering them, but since then I've gotten a little over 2,000 emails. I got 200 last weekend."

Morrison has taken on the cumbersome task of calmly, and logically explaining why these theories don't predict the end of the world through his "Ask an Astrobiologist" website.

One of the most prevalent rumors is that a rogue planet named Nibiru, which is hiding behind the sun, will collide with Earth.

"Impossible," Morrison said. "Earth goes around the sun. We see all sides of the sun. We'd see it."

And he adds, if a planet were scheduled to smash into Earth in just a few days, it would be impossible to miss. "It would look like the moon in the sky," he said. "You'd see it in the daytime. You wouldn't have to ask the government."

In recent months, things have gotten especially hectic for the scientist. As the supposed Mayan end of times approaches on Dec. 21, anxiety and fear are running high, inspiring some wild predictions and behavior. People are frantically preparing for Armageddon the world over, flocking to such far off spiritual destinations as Bugarach, France and Mount Rtanj, Serbia to await alien saviors, a new dawn that will "upgrade" human consciousness, a door opening up another dimension and other surreal phenomena to occur.

"I get questions from people saying, 'I'm 11 years old, and I can't sleep, I can't eat.' I have had kids saying they are considering suicide, mothers emailing me saying they are considering killing their children before the end of times."

Andrew Fraknoi, chairman of the astronomy department at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, said Morrison's work is heroic.

"He has taken on a thankless task," said Fraknoi. "He feels that we as scientists have an obligation to respond, to reassure the public and to give the public the fact-based view of the universe. That is so absent from so many realms of our social discourse today."