Date: December 19, 2010

Title: 2012: New Opportunities

Podcaster: Bill Hudson and Tiare Rivera

Links: 2012hoax.org is a website dedicated to debunking the “2012 Doomsday” hoax.

SETI.cl is a website dedicated to bringing translations of current scientific literature and articles to Spanish-speaking countries.

Description: Bill Hudson from 2012hoax.org and Tiare Rivera from SETI.cl discuss a project that they have been collaborating on: Using the discussion about the 2012 doomsday hoax to educate children in critical thinking skills.

Bio: Bill Hudson is an amateur astronomer located in California. He is the founder of 2012hoax.org, and has spent the last two years trying to stem the tide of the 2012 doomsday nonsense.

Tiare Rivera is an amateur astronomer located in Chile. She is the co-founder of SETI.cl, and is dedicated to inspire and educate new generations by giving them access to SETI, astronomy and scientific information translated into Spanish.

Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Wayne Robertson, who encourages you to join him in supporting this great podcast.

Additional sponsorship for this episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” has also been provided by Wayne Robertson, who encourages you to join him in supporting this great podcast.

Transcript:

2012: New Opportunities

Bill: Hello again, this is Bill Hudson with 2012hoax.org

Tiare: … and this is Tiare Rivera with seti.cl …

Bill: … and today we’re talking about a joint project between our two groups that has both of us very excited! Tiare, why don’t you tell everybody what we’ve been up to?

Tiare: There is an amazing need for scientific and educational materials in central and South America. Science is not stressed enough in schools. It is frequently a problem here in Chile that there are not enough students interested in Science, because that is an area that the schools do not stress. So I wanted to create a brochure that could be used to address a specific concern among school kids – the 2012 doomsday rumors – and also introduce the school kids to the scientific method and critical thinking. I wanted something short and easy to understand that could be handed out to school children.

Bill: So, Tiare approached me with this question: Could I write the text for a brochure to be given to students, regarding the 2012 doomsday nonsense, that would also stress critical thinking? Something that would use the so-called “2012 phenomenon” to open a discussion with the kids as far as what is real, and what is not, and how to think critically about claims that they might hear? I thought I could, and so I gave it a shot.

Tiare: And we have taken Bill’s text and have translated it into Spanish. We have also contacted an illustrator who is making pictures for the brochures.

Bill: Very soon we’ll have a single page resource for teachers that can be printed out, and given to students whenever they have a question about 2012.

Tiare: In English and in Spanish!

Bill: Yes, in both languages! This will be available for download from both websites in both languages, and if anybody else out there wants to translate it into another language, we’d be happy to have that happen too!

Bill: So, Tiare, tell everybody about seti.cl… who are you, what do you do, and why do you do it?

Tiare: Well, I’m a person who is interested in science and education, who did not study science or teaching, so I have a different perspective on the lack of both areas in South America and my country. There is a huge problem with public education here and I have been able to see it, as an amateur astronomer and as person who worked in a school. So, I started to give talks in different schools with different economic realities, so you can see the future of those kids and how the lack of education creates a pattern of poverty among people. Therefore I created a website dedicated to translating scientific articles into Spanish and now many people are collaborating with me. BUT that is not enough, so now I’m working on different activities in schools to be able to work with kids in that environment. I give talks, and I recently started to work with a portable planetarium which allows me to have direct contact with kids, and I’m organizing with a tourist observatory to hold the first scientific and astronomical camp on Southern Chile, which is a place that is not used to hearing about science and astronomy.

So as you can imagine, there are not many people doing this, it’s kind of crazy, because you stop having a normal job and become one of the strange race of people called “entrepreneurs”.

Bill: And how did you become interested in 2012?

Tiare: Well, the first question that I hear from kids is: “are there any aliens?” especially during the planetarium shows, they ask;: “Are there any aliens inside the planetarium?”, then the second question is about 2012 and they have a small and distant concern about it. It’s not the same intensity than in your country, but still it’s something to be aware of. And that’s why I proposed that we create this brochure.

The idea of this brochure it’s to make an open project, so if there is another illustrator out there who is interested on making more drawing or more designs to it, you are welcome to do it. We will see it, approve it or not and then publish it on the website, with your credits of course.

Bill: We have set up the brochure as a tri-fold brochure that can either be printed on plain paper or on the stock ‘Tri-Fold Brochure’ paper you can find in office supply stores. The coverage of the topics is very short and general, but we address four specific areas of the 2012 doomsday rumors, and we also dedicate one panel to introducing the kinds of questions that people should ask when they hear a claim being made, and we show them where to get further information.

The first thing someone sees when they open the brochure is a panel on the Mayan calendar, which is probably the biggest part of the 2012 hoax. That panel says:

“Some people have said that the calendar of the ancient Maya comes to an end on December 21st, 2012, and that this means that the world will end on that date.

The ancient Maya lived in what is now part of Mexico and Guatemala. They had several different kinds of calendars. One of their calendars reaches a round number in the year 2012, very much like our calendar reached a round number on January 1st, 2000. Because of this, some people speculate that the Maya thought that the world would end on that day. However, based on the writing that the Maya left behind, they did not think that this date was important at all, and certainly not the end of the world.

There is a panel on “Things in Space” which covers alignments, solar flares, and rogue planets, and one on “Things on the Earth” which covers earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and pole shifts, and one on “Man Made Things” which covers the Large Hadron Collider.

And last but not least, there is a panel titled “Ask Yourself This” with a short list of questions that people should think about when evaluating a claim, basically the “6 W’s”: How, Who, What, Why, When and Where.

● How does this person know this information? Did they research it themselves or did they get it from someone else?
● Who is this person? Does this person have the knowledge to be able to say this?
● What is this person saying? Does it fit with what others say about this same topic?
● Why would this person say this? Do they have a personal or financial interest? Are they on TV or trying to sell you something?
● When did this person say this? Is this current knowledge?
● Where would they get this information? Would they reasonably have access to it?

These are obviously just a start, but they are some of the basic questions that kids, and even adults, should be asking themselves when they are evaluating a claim.

Tiare: We have 2 years to take this idea out of kids heads, so we need collaboration from everyone who is somehow concerned about what media and pseudo-scientists are doing to the next generation…

Bill: Thanks for listening, and thanks for supporting the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast.

Tiare: Thank you!

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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