A Brief History of the End of the World

Deep down, a part of you longs for the end of the world. It's a peculiar side-effect of human consciousness that our awareness of our mortality seems to lead many of us to the ego-indulgent conviction that, not only am I going to die, but everyone else will die with me in a grand, cataclysmic send-off. No one wants the party to go on without them, to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens. It's comforting, in a way, to believe that the story ends with me. How it all began and how it will end are two questions that beguile us, and to which we can never know the answer. But this hasn't stopped every world religion from making eschatological claims about the apocalypse. Nor is it solely the province of religion, as everyone from mathematicians to pyramidologists to astrologers have predicted the end of the world. Even science makes its own claims about the cessation of life on Earth. From the recent past to the far, distant future, here are a few notable predictions of the end of the world.

Christian eschatology is already familiar enough to those of us in the Western world. The other Abrahamic accounts of the end of the world are different, but not meaningfully distinct from the Christian account—and curiously, all three are cunningly vague about when exactly the end will occur. Scandinavian mythology is only marginally less vague, predicting that Ragnarok—the battle royale of the gods at the end of the world—will occur after three freezing winters with no summers in between. Buddhism, meanwhile, is admirably specific, predicting that the end of the Kali Yuga will take place in approximately the year 4600, when seven suns will appear in the sky and burn the Earth to a crisp. (In fact, this has some scientific truth to it, as we shall see.)

Many colorful and too-clever figures throughout history have placed their bets on the date of the apocalypse. The end would occur in the year 395, according to a variety of third century French bishops. When 395 came and went uneventfully, they later revised the date to the year 400, then 500, then 968, then 992. A series of German Anabaptists were convinced the world would end variously in 1525, 1528, and 1534. Martin Luther expected the world to end no later than 1600. Christopher Columbus predicted 1656, then 1658. The Puritan minister Cotton Mather believed the end was nigh in 1697, then 1716, then 1736. We begin to see a trend—that people are undeterred when the end of the world fails to occur as expected. Often, the date is simply revised.

The American Baptist preacher William Miller predicted the second coming of Jesus on March 21, 1844. When that day came and went without incident, Miller revised his prediction to October 22 instead—a day which became known as "the Great Disappointment" when the world did not, in fact, come to an end. Many Millerites had sold all their earthly possessions in expectation of ascending to heaven. Many of them dressed in white robes and climbed nearby mountains to await the Savior. Some Millerites who still kept the faith founded the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which still exists today with a membership of nearly 15 million. The Church shrewdly does not specify an exact date when the advent will occur.

Various predictions of the end of the world coincided with World Wars 1 and 2. Edgar C. Whisenant, a former NASA engineer and student of the Bible, wrote 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988, in which he predicted the end of the world would occur between September 11 and 13, 1988. The book sold millions of copies. When the end of the world failed to occur, he revised his date to 1989, then 1993, then 1994. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam interpreted the 1991 Gulf War to be the "War of Armageddon." The Nation of Islam continues to have some 50,000 adherents.

"This is the 'end of the world' as far as we're concerned—not climactic, but climatic."

Harold Camping was a Christian talk radio personality who was a prolific predictor of the end of the world, claiming that the day of judgment would occur on various dates in 1994 and 1995. His predictions that the world would end on May 21 and, later, October 21 of 2011 received a significant amount of publicity, and led to well-deserved mockery from atheists and Camping's ignominious retirement from broadcasting.

The 2012 craze was somewhat unusual in that it was a pop cultural phenomenon, rather than a religious one. Coinciding with the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012, many predictions were made about the destruction of the Earth in a cataclysmic event, from a collision with the mythical planet of Nibiru to a sudden reversal of the Earth's magnetic polarity. The film 2012 features a special effects extravaganza of earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and tsunamis destroying the Earth. The movie grossed three quarters of a billion dollars at the box office. An Ipsos poll of several countries in May of 2012 found that fully 10% of the public believed that the Mayan calendar heralded the end of the world.

The notorious Russian mystic, Rasputin, predicted that a firestorm would destroy most life on Earth on August 23, 2013. "David Meade," the pseudonymous conspiracy theorist and self-described Christian numerologist, predicted that Nibiru would appear in the sky at some point between September 23 and October 15, 2017. When this didn't happen, he revised his prediction to April 23, 2018. Astrologist and alleged psychic Jeane Dixon, having previously predicted the world would end in 1962, later revised her prediction to 2020—a year that certainly felt like the end of the world.

There aren't as many future predictions, possibly because no one wants to schedule the fireworks for after their own death. F. Kenton Beshore, an obscure American pastor, predicted the world would end in 2021. As of this writing, he has five months to be proven correct. Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi, the Urdu spiritualist and self-proclaimed "messiah" who disappeared off the face of the Earth in 2001, expected the world to end in 2026. (This would bestow renewed relevance onto the David Bowie song, "Five Years.")

At this point, science takes over the end of the world prognostication. The Geological Society expects a supervolcanic eruption to occur within the next 1 million years. It's been hypothesized that every 100 million years, the Earth is hit by an asteroid of comparable size to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. A 2005 article in the journal Biogeosciences Discussions predicts that increasing brightness of the sun and rising surface temperatures on Earth will result in the "mega mass extinction" of the planet's vegetation in a mere 600 to 800 million years.

Over the next 1 to 7 billion years, the sun is expected to grow in size to 256 times larger than it is today, eventually consuming the Earth and vaporizing all vestiges of human endeavor. But rest assured, this will happen long after the sun's scorching heat extinguishes all life on the planet (perhaps you've noticed it getting hotter already). This is the "end of the world" as far as we're concerned—not climactic, but climatic. The gradually-increasing heat and brightness of the sun will trigger a runaway greenhouse effect in approximately 1.1 billion years, rendering the planet as inhospitable as Venus. And in 3.5 billion years, the Earth's oceans and atmosphere will evaporate into space. Life on Earth will be over (if it isn't already wiped out by an asteroid or a supervolcanic eruption, that is).

While the vast majority of end of the world predictions have turned out to be wrong, the Buddha perhaps came the closest to the real thing—give or take a few details—with his prediction of the sun gradually consuming the Earth. Fortunately for us (or perhaps unfortunately for those of us who don't want to miss the fireworks), you and I will be dead long before that happens. We needn't concern ourselves with the apocalypse, or take the Harold Campings of the world seriously when they insist the end is nigh. It hasn't happened yet, and won't happen anytime soon.

The party does go on without us, as Hitchens put it. But not forever.