I thought his replies below were unnecessarily rude:
16. All my school friends are telling me that we are all going to die in the year 2012 due to a meteor hitting earth. Is this true?
Your friends are dumbasses. The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA NEO Program Office website (neo.jpl.nasa.gov), so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.
17. If Nibiru is a hoax, why doesn?t NASA issue a denial? How can you permit these stores to circulate and frighten people? Why doesn?t the U.S. government do something about it!
Another one of these boneheaded Nibiru questions? God you people are dumb. Listen, if you go to the NASA home page, nasa.gov, you will see many stories that expose the Nibiru-2012 hoax. Try searching nasa.com under ?Nibiru? or ?2012?. There is not much more that NASA can do. These hoaxes have nothing to do with NASA and are not based on NASA data, so we as an agency are not directly involved. But scientists, both within NASA and outside, recognize that this hoax with its effort to frighten people is a distraction from more important science concerns, such as global warming and loss of biological diversity. We live in a country where there is freedom of speech, and that includes freedom to lie. You should be glad there are no censors. But if you will just use common sense I am sure you can recognize the lies, Einstein. As we approach 2012, the lies will be come even more obvious.
18. Can you prove to me that Nibiru is a hoax? There are so many reports that something terrible will happen in 2012. I need proof because the government and NASA are keeping so much from us.
It is not logical to ask for proof that the 2012 doomsday is a hoax, dumbfuck. Your questions should be to the doomsday advocates to prove that what they are saying is true, not to NASA to prove it is false. Bother them-- I didn't go to work for NASA just to refute the ridiculous claims of a bunch of internet conspiracy theorists. If someone claimed on the Internet that there were 50-foot tall purple elephants walking through Cleveland, would anyone expect NASA to prove this wrong? The burden of proof falls on those who make wild claims. Remember the often-quoted comment from Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary levels of evidence if they are to be believed.
However, I think that astronomers have reached the point where we can offer extremely strong arguments that Nibiru does not exist. A large planet (or a brown dwarf) in our solar system would have been known to astronomers for many years, both indirectly from its gravitational perturbations on other objects and by direct detection in the infrared. The NASA Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) carried out the first all-sky survey in 1983, and several subsequent surveys would also have seen Nibiru if it were there. Further, if a large mass passed through the inner solar system every 3600 years, we would see its disruptive effects on the orbits of the inner planets, and we don?t.
You don?t need to take my word for it. Just use common sense. Have you seen Nibiru, genius? In 2008 many websites said it would be visible to the naked eye in spring 2009. If a large planet or brown dwarf were headed for the inner solar system in 2012, it would already be tracked by hundreds of thousands of astronomers, professional and amateur, all over the world. Do you know any amateur astronomers who are watching it? Have you seen any photos or discussion of it in the big popular astronomy magazines like Sky & Telescope? Just think about it, quiz kid. No one could hide Nibiru if it existed. You don't have to be a rocket scientist like me to figure this shit out.