The end of the world is a matter of perspective. Within 28 seconds, this article answers the question, is my world ending today?
Harold Camping famously declared in his 1994 book that the world would end that year. His binary world is one of churches and non-churches, and the eternal world for the church-going folk wouldn’t technically end during the Rapture he anticipated. 1995 rolled around and many, many people were still alive that didn’t believe the bible to be more than a poorly translated and often mis-quoted bunch of cut and paste internet quotes from several thousand years before the internet was invented.
In his sequel, he predicted JC’s sequel in 2011 and by May 22nd, everyone realized that it probably wasn’t going to be third time is a charm or a second coming or a first wild stab in the dark for the octogenarian god-botherer. So if today is May 21st, the answer is a resounding “no!” and if it’s after that, it’s still “no!”.
Of course, if your personal consciousness is defined by something other than the collective consciousness that people discuss in the tabloids and on tumblr, then perhaps the end of your personal world could be when the network announces the last season of Jersey Shore. Maybe you have to have a teenage mentality to declare the extinction of humanity to be linked to a reality TV show, but it’s wise not to assume that everyone cares about the latest dresses being worn on the red carpet – aka the popular mentality.
The next contender that life on the planet is about to be extinguished like a burning match thrust into a cold empty vacuum is something to do with 2012 being a year in which the odometer clicks back to zero in the Mayan calendar. If you’ve ever driven an old car past the limits of it’s mile counting apparatus, you may have been surprised to learn that the car didn’t explode, cease to exist or slash through the fabric of the space time continuum like a whirling temporal throwing star. The car largely doesn’t give two rats’ asses about the event, signifying it perhaps with a small whir and click before carrying on about its business of being a non-exploding car.
So, to answer the question, will the world end on this day or that day – I ask this: does it really matter? Not so much. And the answer to the first question is simple: for most people, “No”. For some people “Yes.” (typically 70,000 people die per day)