If you are reading this, that means you “survived” the end of the world. You were able to celebrate the holidays and bring in the new year without the apocalypse happening. The world was predicted to end on December 21, 2012 (12/21/12), because this was the day the ancient Mayan calendar ended. By mid afternoon, when the world was not flooding or burning, as predicted, social media took over and end of the world jokes began trending.
The Mayans weren’t the only ones saying the world was going to end on December 21st. Physicians and astronomers have also foreseen a calamitous event that could destroy the world. The story started that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved to December 2012 and linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012. This caused the new predicted doomsday to be December 21, 2012.
Society seems to be obsessed with predicting the end of the world. There have been hundreds of other claims, whether religious, scientific or just for the fun of gaining recognition, that the world was supposed to end.
Jan 1, 500 and Jan 1, 1000: Early Christians predicted that the world would end on the first day of the year 500. When that didn’t happen, others thought it would occur in the year 1,000.
1980 and April 29, 1987: Leland Jensen, head of a sect of the Persian religion Bahai, took his followers into nuclear fallout shelters in 1980, claiming there would be a nuclear holocaust. When this didn’t happen, he was not discouraged. In 1985, Jensen predicted that Halley’s Comet would enter Earth’s orbit on April 29, 1987 and cause earthquakes before ultimately crashing into the Earth and killing everyone, which of course did not happen.
Jan. 1, 2000: At the end of the millennium some doomsday prognosticators said God would end the world at the turn of the century. Others merely worried about the Y2K computer bug, a problem that existed because most dates in computers were programmed to automatically assume the date began with “19” as in “1977” and “1988.” But when the date was to turn from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000, it was prophesied that computers would be so confused that they would shut down completely. But it ultimately did not cause any problems.
October-November 1982; April 29, 2007: Southern Baptist minister, Pat Robertson, predicted in 1976 that the world would end in October or November of 1982. After that didn’t happen, he tried again a decade later in his 1990 book The New Millennium, he said the world would be destroyed on April 29, 2007. But he was wrong again.
May 21, 2011: The most recent apocalyptic predictions were made by radio host, Harold Camping. According to Camping, about 3 percent of the world’s population would be “raptured,” with the rest suffering through several months of worldwide earthquakes and the ultimate destruction of the earth on October 21. Camping also predicted the world would end in September, 1994 and March 31, 1995. All of his predictions did not come true and he humbly apologized.
Without any truth behind it, when people hear the world is going to end, they begin to believe it and it becomes a popular topic of discussion to joke around about. On the other hand, history is filled with apocalyptic panics in which enthusiasts give away their savings, leave their families, and even commit murder in the belief that there won’t be a tomorrow.
So when will the next “end of the world” occur? One date is in the year 2017 at some point. The Prophet Gabriel supposedly told the Sword of God Brotherhood that the “dying time” will come in 2017. Another date is the year 4,500,000,000 AD. This is when the sun is predicted to burn up. The sun will swell into a red giant star, swallowing planet Earth and this will be the true end of the world. By that time, the world will probably be dying to end.
