Okay, there’s no real prize, but Jesse, if you’d like someone to provide some balance to the doomsday madness of Patrick Geryl or the supposedly scientific scariness of Larry Joseph, you know where to find us.

We’ve been told since childhood that an asteroid extinguished the mighty dinosaurs in a single day. When we look out at our pockmarked celestial neighbors, we know that something similar could happen here again. Recent discoveries at the bottom of the seas seem to bear this out and the “Planet X” rumors probably stem from these new scientific observations. “In 1980, only 86 Near Earth Asteroids and comets were known to exist…[today] NASA estimates that there are perhaps 20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets in the general vicinity of Earth.” So far, the technology to adequately view and track these potential threats simply didn’t exist. With the November 2009 launch of NASA’s “WISE”: Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, it is hoped that we’ll be able to see any hazards that we’ve missed.

NASA was a little late, but on December 14, 2009 at14:09 GMT today it was successfully launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The rocket deposited WISE into a polar orbit 326 miles above Earth.

In a cheap but cute video, NASA scientist Dr. Amy Mainzer describes how the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) will provide a map to the universe’s hidden treasures, not to mention warning us of impending impact with Near Earth Objects:

Check out these new interviews with 2012: Science or Superstition author Alexandra Bruce.  Back on Halloween night she appeared on the Barbara Simpson’s Hot Talk on KSFO in San Francisco.  Here’s the link.

Alexandra also appeared on The X-Zone podcast this past week.  Here’s the link.

So how did I become a prophet of doom? By agreeing to go on camera for syndicated “news” TV show Inside Edition. I just knew that they were going to take what I said out of context, and they did! I was explaining Larry Joseph’s ideas about massive coronal mass ejections delivering so much radiation to Earth that our satellites are knocked out, electricity grids, crippled, etc. Of course I went out of my way to say that I didn’t think there was much evidence to suggest that Larry’s theories were right, or that there was a good reason to think that December 21, 2012 would be the date on which it happens … but of course that part was edited out!

‘I always wanted to do a biblical flood movie, but I never felt I had the hook. I first read about the Earth’s Crust Displacement Theory in Graham Hancock’s “Fingerprints of the Gods”. When I discussed it with Harald [Kloser, his writing partner], I said we need a “plausible” reason, not a scientific one. Show this film to a scientist and they would probably laugh.’

NBC set its weekend nightly news anchor Lester Holt on the case, but his 2012 report won’t be on NBC; rather they’ve relegated it to cable network Syfy (formerly the SciFi Channel). It airs tonight at 9 PM Eastern and the main interviewees are John Major Jenkins (safe and sensible choice); geologist Robert Schoch (surprising choice as he’s not really a 2012 researcher, although his work on dating the Sphinx was a major breakthrough in legitimizing theories about a much older date for its creation); and Richard Hoagland (the wacky choice that might help ratings but probably kept the show off NBC proper). Syfy 2012 site here.

We’ll be looking at the major media for the most unusual takes on 2012 all week, so please check back here for more every day or two.

Oh, and there was one quite articulate article in British broadsheet (read ‘upmarket’) newspaper The Telegraph this weekend that focuses on the modern Maya and quotes me at the end:

With so many wild claims and theories running rife on the Internet, Gary Baddeley, a British writer and producer who runs the New York-based Disinformation Company, produced the documentary 2012: Science or Superstition.
“There can certainly be harm in scaring people that the world is going to end and we’re trying to allay some of those fears by explaining what the focus on 2012 is about,” he said. And for the Maya, he believes that perhaps the year can bring opportunity rather than curse.
“To the modern Maya in the Guatemala highlands, 2012 means very little and they have not used the Long Count calendar for a long time,” he said. “But perhaps they can turn this to their advantage by encouraging understanding of their culture and bringing in some much-needed tourist dollars. It could help put them back on the map.”

Meredith Woerner writes on io9.com:

Just seconds after telling us that he makes disaster movies because he hates sequels, director Roland Emmerich spilled all about his new ABC TV series 2013, that picks up after the waves part. It sounds epic. Spoiler warning.

At the end of 2012 the cast members who have survived the massive floods and volcanic destruction on Earth head over to Africa, the new center of the world. What happens next has just been picked up by ABC as a television series that Emmerich is helping out with. We got the chance to find out more about his post-post-apocalypse series at the 2012 press day. (More on io9.com)

Here’s the 2012 trailer, yeah, I’d want to be alive after this happens…