The Internet has ushered in a whole new environment for marketers to ply their trade, and some manage to do it in such a way that the lines between reality and fiction become very blurry indeed. So it is with 2012, the new movie from director Roland Emmerich, which portrays the end of the world as we know it, with Planet Earth going through a cataclysmic episode. The campaign has been so effective as to entice NASA to debunk it.

You’ll no doubt have seen the trailer for 2012 by now. It’s one of those movies that grabs you by the short and curlies and doesn’t let go, mainly thanks to the promise of seeing cities and important landmarks around the world destroyed before your very eyes. But the fact that it’s a fictional movie seems to have bypassed some people, who seem to believe it’s some kind of premonition of what is to come.

2012 has been a year foreseen as potentially disastrous for a long time. The Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012, leading many to suspect that that is when the world will cease to be. In reality, this date merely marks the end of a 394-year cycle of time the ancient civilization of Maya called Baktun 13. Its link to the end of our planet are dubious at best.

There is also the author Zecharia Sitchin, whose books suggest a planet called Nibiru which enters our solar system every 3,600 years thanks to a highly elliptical orbit. A collision between Nibiru and Earth could be disastrous, if it were indeed possible. But as the planet doesn’t actually exist, it isn’t.

According to The Washington Post, the makers of the new film, titled simply 2012, have taken full advantage of the suspicion that has arisen around the year and its link to the future of mankind. They have created a fictional Web site called Institute For Human Continuity that looks and feels very real but is, of course, merely a marketing tool for the movie which is released on Nov. 12.

Enough people have been taken in by it that NASA scientist David Morrison, who works in the Astrobiology Institute, has come out to debunk the whole thing. He claims 1,000 people have contacted NASA about 2012 and Nibiru, with some even contemplating suicide so as to avoid witnessing the end of the world.

Morrison assures us that the books, movies, Web sites, and theories that have grown up around the year 2012 are pure fiction. And rather than having three years left to enjoy the planet, we actually have around 4-5 billion years left. At which time the sun will peter out and leave us all feeling the cold. So much for global warming.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 2:14 am under Amusing, Internet, Opinion, Science and technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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