Apocalypse 2012 was born in 1996.
Google "end of the world 2012" and you'll score some 4.18 billion hits — websites, blogs, articles, tweets: yes, the world will end before the year is out; no, it won't; it must; it can't. Search Amazon's website and you'll unearth 2,729 pertinent book titles. "Mayan Horror: How to Survive the End of the World in 2012"; "End of the World: It is Happening"; "Doomsday 2012: The Maya Calendar and the History of the End of the World"; "Apocalypse 2012 Cookbook" — and so on and so on.
NASA, the U.S. space agency, has a website called "Ask an Astrobiologist." The astrobiologist is NASA senior scientist David Morrison, who told National Geographic News in 2009 he had received thousands of queries, many of them from "people who are genuinely frightened. I've had two teenagers who were considering killing themselves because they didn't want to be around when the world ends. Two women in the last two weeks said they were contemplating killing their children and themselves so they wouldn't have to suffer through the end of the world."