By now, the holiday detritus has mostly been put or tossed away, the menorah placed on the shelf, the dying Christmas tree out on the curb or the aluminum Festivus pole back in the garage. The champagne corks have popped, the resolutions have been made (and, for some, already broken), and so begins a lazy roll out of 2011 and into the new year.


A new year that some people believe will end abruptly in 350 days and counting with a confluence of events that includes the end of the Mayan long-count calendar, which stops on Dec. 21, 2012; a collision with a planet called Nibiru (it was supposed to happen years ago, and when it didn’t, believers changed the date); and the belief that the Earth will cross the galactic plane, causing earthquakes of epic proportion, a shift in the magnetic force that will lay us bare to cosmic rays – and subsequent death to all living things. 


Face it. If the cosmic rays come, we’re all screwed. If Nibiru hits, you won’t have time to kiss your own ass goodbye. The Mayans were brilliant astronomers and architects, so are the conspiracy theorists that far off if they proclaim the world ends just because the Mayan calendar flips over to a blank page?


Add to all of this our ever-expanding pop culture obsession with zombie lore, sudden onset climate catastrophe as interpreted by Hollywood and a real sense of malaise caused by the worst economy that most people can remember (and the abiding feeling that things are only going to get worse) and 2012 is shaping up to be one paranoid year.


But it’s a paranoid time overall, says Neil Howe, a historian and economist whose ground-breaking work on generational theory examines how mood eras recur throughout history. We’re already in the middle of moody, crisis-filled era, he says, and in the coming year the crisis is only going to get worse. Older people fixate on the darkness and the doom-and-gloom, evidenced by the fact that Hollywood is controlled by the Baby Boomers. And if you’re under 30, Howe says, you’re the ones who are going to be tasked in the coming year with fixing the whole mess. “We have a fixation on the right that America is decadent and sinful, and on the left that America is hopelessly, terminally dumb,” Howe says. “But either way it leads to one end, either Al Gore’s apocalypse or Pat Buchanan’s.”


No wonder we’re obsessed with the end. I put the question out on Facebook, a modern-age version of an invitation to cocktail party banter. Sudden climate catastrophe, zombie apocalypse, global extinction event: Would you want to survive it? Would you even try?


• • •


“I read [Cormac McCarthy’s] The Road. Ain’t no way I’m walking the tightrope of what’s left of life just to have a pulse.” – Michelle Speer Caldwell, court reporter, Salinas.


“I’m only capable of holding my shit together for 23 minutes in the event of any emergency, so it’s probably best for everyone if I go in the first hit. But I guess I’d try to muster some survival instincts for the sake of humanity. Although I’m pretty sure I’d just be dead weight.” – Robin Wheeler Barber, food writer and blogger, St. Louis, Mo.-area


• • •


If you need proof how deep the obsession with the possibility of the world ending in 2012 runs, Google “2012 disasters.” Within .23 seconds, more than 61 million results pop up. One of the top hits comes from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a page titled “Earth: Your future. Our Mission,” that addresses the question “2012: Beginning of the End or Why the World Won’t End?”


Why does the nation’s space agency, the gang that put a man on the moon, a rover on Mars and a telescope in space, feel the need to address doomsday prophecy? Because boy, they get some questions. How many exactly they can’t say; according to Stephanie Smith, social media specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, questions arrive through multiple channels and go to dozens – if not hundreds – of people who work at NASA. 


“It’s fair enough to say that since 2009, NASA has been bombarded with questions from the public about rumored 2012 disasters,” she emails. 


Those questions are about Nibiru, the nonexistent planet purportedly discovered by ancient Sumarians and the main player in a conspiracy first floated in 1995 by a Wisconsin woman who claims she communicates with extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system via an implant in her brain. About the Mayan calendar’s “end”; the Earth crossing the galactic plane, and the possibility that a meteor will hit the planet – again, all in 2012.


There’s a group at JPL, the California Institute of Technology-managed NASA facility in Pasadena, actually tasked with watching for objects in orbit entering the Earth’s neighborhood. And Don Yeomans, the world-weary (no pun intended) Ph.D. who heads the Near Earth Object Program, swears that if a secret planet was hiding behind the sun or heading toward Earth, scientists just couldn’t keep it hushed up because they’re incapable of keeping a secret. 


They’re too blabby to conspire.


“This whole thing was kicked off by the end of the Mayan calendar,” says Yeomans, a 36-year NASA vet who has an asteroid named after him and plans to appear at next year’s SXSW festival for a panel titled “You Bet Your Asteroid the World Won’t End.” “So many people are saying it and repeating it, that if you say something loud enough and often enough, it’s replaced the need for evidence.”


Yeoman’s approach – a mix of bright humor, a little snark, a lot of brain-power and willingness to answer even seemingly ridiculous questions – has made him something of a defacto spokesman for myth debunking among the space set. But it all has him a little worried – not about the end of the world, but about an educational system that has let humans evolve to a point where they worry about a planet wiping out humanity.


“Clearly, middle America is worried, and it would be too easy to brush this off as whacko when a fair fraction of the population is concerned,” Yeomans says. “It’s a failure of our science education that folks aren’t told, ‘You need evidence – and extraordinary evidence – to back up extraordinary claims.’ 


“When you have 60 million hits saying one thing, and one or two NASA nerds saying ‘This is ridiculous, it’s 60-million-to-2 – and that’s ridiculous,’” he says.


But smart people, when asked about survival philosophy for end times, still talk about it. 


• • •


“I used to want to survive, then the thought of watching others around suffer and die changed my mind. As my sister said, she would want to catch the nuke with her teeth while holding her family’s hands.” – LizBeth Ogiela-Scheck, artist, Bloomington, Ill.


“When I was younger I would have definitely said yes, absolutely I would want to be among the survivors, no matter how bleak the circumstances. But now, as a middle-aged childless person, I would say definitely no. My stake in the future feels limited anyway, I only want to hang around if there’s fun to be had.” – Liz Ridley, novelist/writing coach, Milwaukee, Wis.


• • •


Use a little logic and discount the Mayan calendar conspiracy. (“Does the world end because the kitchen calendar ends and maybe your mother-in-law has heard something from someone?” Yeomans asks. “Then why would it because the Mayan calendar ends?”) Trust the eminently trustworthy Yeomans and his fellow NASA nerds, and Nibiru becomes nothing more than a money-making scheme for that woman in Wisconsin. 


And then take a look at the whole zombie thing. 


You soon realize you’re not really looking at the zombie thing at all. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, seizing on the popularity of zombie stories in books, movies and on television, in May posted a lengthy treatise on zombie preparedness on their website under the byline of former CDC director, Rear Admiral Ali Khan, who established the center’s bioterrorism response program. After offering a brief history of zombies, Khan writes, “So what do you need to do before zombies… or hurricanes or pandemics, for example, actually happen?”


At J&S Surplus in Moss Landing, the zombie preparedness question comes up fairly regularly. And like the CDC’s Khan, J&S general manager Nathan Johnson knows when people ask about the undead, they’re really asking about something else.


“Most people who come in are looking into it lightheartedly. It depends on the person, but what they’re really asking is how to survive without an intact society,” says Johnson, sitting in the middle of the store that’s packed tight with survival gear, camping gear, water purification gear and cases upon cases of knives and swords. The zombie question might be in vogue right now, but Johnson says it reflects people’s concerns about what’s going on in society.


“It offers some side relief from problems that might be real,” he says.


Bunker down at home or head for the hills? Stock up on military-style Meals Ready to Eat (which are good for 10 years and run $90 for a dozen) or assume you can band together and share canned goods with friends and family and ride out a society-collapsing conflict? These are regular discussions at J&S, where one customer, a Santa Cruz doctor whose name Johnson didn’t have on hand, recently bought $1,000 worth of MREs to keep at home “just in case.”


“Even if you have friends you can band together with, will they be able to get to your home, or will you be able to get to theirs?” muses J&S employee Tony Declines-to-Give-His-Last-Name. Dark-eyed, bearded, tense and intense, Tony says he plans to head to the hills and live in the woods if necessary. “By day three in a crisis, you might not be able to make it down the road.”


So what does one really need to have on hand just in case? At a bare minimum, food and water, enough to last for awhile, and a plan to store it, manufacture it or get it, if initial supplies run out. Tony says he doesn’t worry about shelter – “You can make a lean-to in a day if you have to” – and thinks he could survive for awhile on his own.


“Do you prepare or hope? I think you do both,” he says. But almost as quickly as he says it, he changes his mind. “Hope doesn’t really do any good, and luck favors the prepared. The oblivious are screwed.”


As for the touchy subject of self defense, Johnson recommends knives over guns: “Firearms are fine, until you run out of bullets.” 


And then he brings out a nice selection of swords. 


• • •


“I would choose to be around. I function well in emergency situations and would be a good leader if need be.” – Jamie Collins, organic farmer, Carmel


“Definitely would want to live. I’ve got the skills and mindset to survive and nothing makes you feel more alive then having to work for it. You always find out who people truly are when put into stressful and challenging situations, and that cuts through a lot of the b.s. that is polite society as we know it.” – Matt Hanner, construction supervisor, Monterey 


• • •


Tony muses the purported end of the world really won’t be the end, but instead a dramatic societal change. And Howe says the previous decade of unrest, of war abroad, of economic devastation at home – the very things that have led to an obsession with the end of the world – also has produced one great thing: A generation of under-30-year-olds who won’t get fooled again.


“They see the positive in people and believe, ‘Let’s not dwell in hyperbole, on how bad things can get,’” Howe says. “Let’s see what we can do to build something again.”