NASA confirms world will not end Dec. 21

NASA confirms world will not end Dec. 21


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SALT LAKE CITY — With the approach of the winter solstice Dec. 21, NASA would like to remind everyone the world will not be ending that day.

In a post on the NASA website, the organization addressed concerns about what will happen Dec. 21, and said no apocalyptic claims have any scientific footing.

"The claims behind the end of the world quickly unravel when pinned down to the 2012 timeline," NASA wrote.

The organization is working to dispel a variety of myths, perhaps the most well known of which is the thought that the end of the world will come on Dec. 21, when the Mayan calendar "ends." But the only way the Mayan calendar "ends" is the same way ours do every year — we hit the end of the year and buy a new calendar.

"(Dec. 21) is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then ... another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar," the post said.

Of course, there are myriad theories about how the world will end, and NASA only addressed the most common, one of which is the thought that a planet called Nibiru, Planet X or Eris is approaching the Earth and threatening the planet with widespread destruction.

Neither Nibiru nor Planet X exist, according to NASA. Eris is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto, but the closest it could get to Earth is 4 billion miles.

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"If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye," according to NASA.

Another theory is that a shift of the Earth's poles will lead to widespread destruction, but NASA said isn't supposed to happen anytime soon. And even if it did, it wouldn't cause any harm to human life. Similarly, there are no large meteors — of dinosaur extinction fame — on track to collide with the Earth in the near future.

"For any claims of disaster or dramatic changes in 2012, where is the science? Where is the evidence? There is none, and for all the fictional assertions, whether they are made in books, movies, documentaries or over the Internet, we cannot change that simple fact," the post said. "There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012."

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Stephanie Grimes

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