End of Days

November 07, 2009

Are you ready for the End of the World? Master of the Apocalyptic Blockbuster Roland Emmerich unveils his latest doomsday disaster on Friday November 13: 2012, starring John Cusack as sci-fi writer Jackson Curtis, a divorced father who occasionally moonlights as a limousine driver. First come the mass suicides in Guatemala in anticipation of the end of the world. Then vast cracks are found in California fault lines; Curtis saves his ex-wife, child and her new boyfriend in the nick of time as Los Angeles crumbles into the sea. Rio, Washington DC, and the Vatican in Rome are all destroyed in short order. Oh, did I mention the sooper sekrit society that is constructing giant arks in the Himalayas to save a small fraction of humanity from impending doom? It's all delivered in Emmerich's trademark cataclysmic style (what io9 has dubbed "disaster porn"). Check it out:

The film's premise derives from a popular doomsday prediction centered on the Mayan calendar. It lasts 5126, at which point the calendar abruptly stops at December 21, 2012. For whatever reason, the Mayans didn't bother to count any further, leading certain highly imaginative, rather hysterical types to conclude this denotes the End of the World.

2012 conspiracy theorists have also bundled in the notion that this global destruction will occur when the legendary Planet X crashes into Earth. Astronomers were intrigued by the possibility in the mid-19th century, shortly after the discovery of Neptune -- they thought it might explain perceived discrepancies in the orbits of the great gas giants. Pluto, discovered in 1930, was initially heralded as Planet X, but it turned out to be too small to effect the orbits of the gas giants. Heck, it's not even technically a planet any more. (There is a dwarf planet called Eris just beyond Pluto, but it's in a stable orbit and isn't going to crash into Earth.)

And because you can never cram too many crazy ideas into a single Disaster Hoax, there are some people who believe Planet X is actually the mythical Nibiru, supposedly known to ancient Sumerians, which has a highly elliptical orbit and passes into our solar system every 3600 years. Earth itself, according to this crackpot theory, was created from a collision between Nibiru and some other object in the asteroid belt. Oh, Nibiru also doubles as a "spaceship" of sorts, in that an alien race supposedly traveled to Earth during one of its passes and founded the human race.

There isn't a shred of evidence for any of this, of course, and any number of articles and blog posts have been written debunking the nonsense -- along with Neil de Grasse Tyson, who does so with typical good humor in the clip below. That doesn't mean we won't thrill to the sight of a cinematic end of the world, because who doesn't love a good disaster flick now and then? But we should really focus our doomsday anxieties to more realistic scenarios.

Comments

[Mike]

I love this Mayan calendar business.

Theory A: the Mayans predict the end of the world.

Theory B: the Mayans figure 600 years worth of calendar ought to be good enough for awhile.

The truth has got to be A.

[Al]

What part of the word 'fiction' is unclear to those people? Some of them must think John Wayne settled the West, won the Civil War and WW 2 with only minor help from a supporting cast.

[JupiterIsBig]

Didn't John Travolta make a movie about that ? Oh no that was that other hoax religion.

Just some pedantry
"Planet X, but it turned out to be too small to effect the orbits of the gas giants." The interaction of gravity and mass effects the orbits and planet X is too small to affect these orbit. ne c'est pas ?