John of Toledo, a Church Cardinal, predicted the world would end in 1186 after a planetary alignment in the constellation Libra during the month of September. Reportedly, only a few humans were to survive this ultimate cataclysm. Records are spotty, but historical records show humanity marched on after 1186.

In 1524, astrologers in England predicted that a great flood would wash over London. Some 20,000 people fled their homes. One Prior even stockpiled enough supplies in a fortress to wait out the flood for some two months. That same year, a great flood was scheduled to strike Germany. Many people built boats, including one Count von Iggleheim, who built a three story ark. When 1524 turned out to be a drier than expected year, Londoners rescheduled their flood for 1624 and a German mob stoned the count to death.

In 1665, the great plague killed off 20% of London’s population. When the great fire destroyed over 85 percent of homes in London in 1666, plenty of people really did think the end was nigh. In the aftermath, locals blamed a Catholic plot while abroad some saw the fire as Divine retribution for the burning of a Dutch town in the Second Anglo-Dutch war. Meanwhile in Turkey, self proclaimed Messiah Rabi Sabbatai Zevi, who proclaimed himself such in 1648 heralded the end of the world. He was arrested and given a choice between death and conversion to Islam. He chose the latter.

In 1850, Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, a Chinese schoolteacher, had a vision. In his vision, God appointed Hung, the brother of Jesus Christ, a slayer of demons. Hung kick started the Taping rebellion, an uprising against the Manchu dynasty. The subsequent civil war would kill 25 million people.

In the early 20^th century, World Wars I and II combined killed over 70,000,000 people – more than 20 of the global population when the letters of Toledo were circulating in the late 1100’s.

In 1980, Pat Robertson declared that judgment would be passed on the world by the end of 1982. Robertson later blamed liberals, gays and pro-choice advocates for hurricane Katrina and blamed the recent Haitian earthquake on a pact with the devil Haitians made during their revolt against the French.

During the Y2K scare, my cousin’s next door neighbor, prepared for the worst. He stockpiled supplies, filling his 2.5 car garage from the floor to the ceiling with food and water, two wood burning stoves, two gas generators, guns and gasoline. He also emptied all of his money from banks and other financial institutions and converted it into silver and gold. Apparently, he didn’t say much on January 1, 2001.

On December 21, 2012, the world as we know it will end due to a major war, magnetic pole shift, collision with a giant asteroid, the reappearance of planet x, a great cosmic shift in consciousness, a dimensional rift, or any number of other phenomena. It’s even possible that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider will create a mini black hole that will suck the Earth into oblivion from the inside out.

It’s estimated there are more than 1,000 potentially hazardous objects floating around the solar system large enough to cause significant or cataclysmic damage to the Earth. 75,000 years ago, it’s believed the Toba Catastrophe, a supervolcanic eruption, nearly killed off the early human race, leaving under 10,000 survivors. Numerous similar supervolcanos dot the Earth. There are hundreds of diseases we know little about that could quickly mutate and spread worldwide, killing billions. The doomsday clock is always ticking and seemingly never far from midnight.

A friend once told me that Armageddon doesn’t come quickly because it builds slowly. Humans have been building that end since the beginning. We’re so quick to shout the sky is falling, it’s a wonder we’ve even bothered to attempt to stick around as long as we have.

My generation was raised on the prophecy that life as we know it would derail and only a small few would survive to sleep in the ashes and envy the dead. We hid under our desks in grade school from the commies while our parents covered our ears to shut out the rock music poisoning our minds. California was to slide into the ocean while the New Madrid fault line would rip a hole through the Midwest and the East Coast would be buried under a tidal wave.

Once the Berlin Wall fell and capitalism danced triumphant in the ruins of Godless communism, the west was free to spread peace in the Middle East behind the barrel of a gun and inflate a bubble for us to kick back and celebrate the end of history. At least, for awhile. Soon enough, the apocalypse came knocking at our door again, bringing our nightmares to life via the specter of terrorism. Once again, life as we know it faces a threat we could never have predicted, one so onerous we need to burn several villages to save them. Since our very way of life hangs in the balance, our leaders and talking heads decided it better for us to light the fires ourselves. In the midst of the political turmoil that teeters the world on the edge of the end, the planet itself is falling apart. Of course, the jury is still out on that, because there’s a bubble we need to keep inflated.

There’s always a beast, always an anti-Christ, always an asteroid careening towards the planet while a supervolcano quietly awaits to explode. Near the year 800, the and abbot of Santo Toribio, then part of the kingdom of Asturias in what is now Spain, predicted the world would end on Easter. On the dawn of Easter morning, hundreds of peasants gathered at the abbey to wait for the end. After a day and a half past – no one ate or drank a thing – they just waited. Finally, a peasant called Ordonius is said to have exclaimed: “Let us eat and drink, so that if the End of the World comes we are full!” It’s not the accidental end we should worry about, it’s the end that’s engineered.

Written by Aaron Cynic