大震频繁.docVIP

大震频繁，难道世界末日2012成真？ NASA said last week that the world was not ending--at least anytime soon. Last year, CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, said the same thing, which I guess is good news for those of us who are habitually jittery. How often do you have a pair of such blue-ribbon scientific establishments assuring us that everything is fine? On the other hand, it is kind of depressing if you were looking forward to taking a vacation from mortgage payments to finance one last blowout.CERNs pronouncements were intended to allay concerns that a black hole would be spit out of its new Large Hadron Collider and eat the Earth.The announcements by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in the form of several Web site postings and a video posted on YouTube, were in response to worries that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012, when a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count in the Mayan calendar supposedly comes to a close.But this is only one version of apocalypse out there. In other variations, a planet named Nibiru crashes into us or the Earths magnetic field flips.There are hundreds of books devoted to 2012, and millions of Web sites, depending on what combination of 2012 and doomsday you type into Google.All of it, astronomers say, is bunk.Most of whats claimed for 2012 relies on wishful thinking, wild pseudoscientific folly, ignorance of astronomy and a level of paranoia worthy of Night of the Living Dead, Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory, in Los Angeles, and an expert on ancient astronomy, wrote in an article in the November issue of Sky Telescope. But the trend has gone too far, suggested David Morrison, an astronomer at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., who made the YouTube video and is one of the agencys point people on the issue of Mayan prophecies of doom.I get angry at the way people are being manipulated and frightened to make money, Dr. Morrison said. There is no ethical right to fri