Dan Duray profiles Dr. David Morrison, the senior scientist at NASA's Astrobiology Institute and NASA's unofficial expert in the apocalypse:
For the past eight years Morrison has run the Ask an Astrobiologist feature on the institute's website. Started by a civic-minded intern, the column has become the go-to place for concerned citizens to write to NASA and ask if, as they'd heard on the internet, the world will truly end on December 21, 2012. Before he took the helm on Ask an Astrobiologist, Dr. Morrison hadn't heard anything about such theories. Now he can't escape them. "I don't know why they write to NASA at all," he told me over the phone recently. "Probably because there's nowhere else to write."
The emails started filtering in at a trickle, but after a few years of what he called "relative peace," it’s become a deluge. He estimated that over the past four years, he's gotten over 5,000 emails related to doomsday. Lately, the column has been receiving about 50 emails a week, most of them about the apocalypse.
Morrison's explanation for the increase in crazy theories:
Dr. Morrison believes that their faith might come from an increasingly virulent "conspiracy meme" he's seen come into play since President Obama's election. His evidence, he noted, is strictly anecdotal, but over the the past four years he's noticed an uptick in the number of people eager to believe that 1) bad things are going to happen and 2) that the current government will do anything it can to facilitate them. What's inexplicable to him is the ferocity of their conviction.
The Dish 