The world ended on Jan. 1, 2000.
It was a computer calculation error: a simple mistake that damaged technology worldwide. If only dates weren’t automatically abbreviated to two digits. Even the software and hardware purchased by many couldn’t stop the disaster.
The world ended again on May 21, 2011.
Radio preacher Harold Camping had all the facts, straight from careful numerical calculations applied directly to Bible readings, which proved Judgment Day was approaching. He shared his findings and the stockpiles piled up, but it wasn’t enough.
The world ends again on Dec. 21, 2012.
The sun will cross points with the midpoint of the Milky Way, a powerful lineup that will create a pole shift or a huge black hole, or maybe Planet X (Nibiru) will collide with Earth. Perhaps solar flares will erupt from the sun, disrupting the global power grid.
Of course there’s proof: if everyone’s saying it, it must be true. And everyone knows the world is going to end.
“The world is not going to end,” sophomore Anurup Krishna said. “Since people have preached about how the world has ended in the past ten times before, it’s obviously not going to happen now. There’s really no scientific evidence behind it. I guess they [people] automatically don’t look into it; they just immediately assume things.”
Okay, so maybe people have accepted the truth. Let’s face it: the stomach-churning fear that swirled around the time “2012” came to theaters has finally subsided, and people are beginning to recognize reality. Dec. 21 is not doomsday, and, more importantly, finals still count.
But there was a time when the planet was abuzz with gossip and haunted by fear, and there are still people today preparing for the end. Even those who have lived through three apocalypses will hide away in fear the second a new date is set. The bigger question is what causes people to stray from logical thoughts. Should we blame the media? After all, it is the fastest way to spread news, entertainment and fear.
“We complicate things with science fiction stories and movies that display the end,” school psychiatrist Cathy Kerr said. “All these things have us looking at our world and perhaps realizing that it cannot survive forever.”
Should we blame psychology? According to the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, humans are the only creatures thought to understand all life inevitably ends, and it isn’t surprising that dying is a common fear among them.
“Fear of death is really the fear of the unknown,” Kerr said. “Even people with strong religious beliefs of an afterlife may fear death or the dying process. It is scary because it is unknown, unexperienced and final.”
Should we just blame humanity itself? Maybe believing anything seen or heard is simply human nature. And it wouldn’t be unrealistic to assume that people create apocalyptic scares simply for attention.
“Older cultures, if you go back thousands of years, made up stories to explain natural phenomena because they didn’t understand the science,” band teacher Ed Protzman said. “We actually do the same thing in reverse. We think that they knew something about the end of the world in a mystical way because we just don’t have enough information about them.”
Unfortunately, the end-of-the-world scares are just the beginning of the thoughtlessness society now encourages. Politics are turning into cat fights, and voters are antagonizing whoever has been called more names. Whether it’s deciding who to vote for or believing in a doomsday, people have stopped thinking for themselves. The more technology we accumulate, the more it happens—throughout preschool and well through adulthood.
Now, we can push these problems away until tomorrow. Or the next generation.
Not to say all faith in humanity is lost; not every prediction has caused such chaos. No one worried about George Orwell’s prediction in his novel “1984,” where the government could control people because they believed anything they heard.
Then again, that’s a ridiculous idea.