Hold the phone. NASA says the world is not ending.
The agency is swamped with phone calls and emails from concerned citizens wondering about the possibility the world will end on Dec. 21, spokesman Dwayne Brown told the Los Angeles Times.
Between 200 and 300 people have been contacting NASA each day for weeks with queries about the alleged apocalypse that some believe was forecasted by the ancient Mayans, Brown said. Normally, the space agency only gets about 90 emails and phone calls a day, according to the Independent.
NASA is confident that there will be a day after tomorrow. The agency has already issued a press release titled, "Why the World Didn't End Yesterday' and dated it Dec. 22, in advance.
They're doing "everything in their power" to make the truth be known, Brown told the Times, Employees are busy fielding questions like "Is the sun going to explode?" and "Will a rogue planet crash into Earth?" The spokesman also voiced some concern for those who have "embraced [the idea of the world ending] so much" that they want to harm themselves.
"It's all a hoax," NASA scientist David Morrison told The Huffington Post in November, "and it's based on absolutely no factual information. None of the things that are supposed to happen are real, and so it's kind of hard to even have a scientific discussion about what they're worried about because there's no science there."
Morrison also pointed out that there's no real evidence that the end of the "long-count" Mayan calendar was meant to indicate the end of the world. "The Maya scholars I've talked to say flat out they did not make any such predictions...there are written references to dates that are hundreds of years in the future, which indicates the calendar must keep going," he told HuffPost.
Even if the Mayans had prophesized the end times, Morrison said their forecast would only be "meaningful if you believe the Maya could predict the future."