Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the South Point Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. Flickr/Gage Skidmore. Some rights reserved.From time to time throughout history, prophecies of doom have warned us of the approaching apocalypse. Most religions have an end-of-days component in which the world as we know it will be swept away, either to be reborn with suitable moral improvements or, as in the Theravada branch of Buddhism, to be finally destroyed in a conflagration.
Some bold prophets have even ventured to predict the date of our extinction. Pope Sylvester II assured the faithful that they and everyone else would expire on 1 January of the year 1000; while one of his successors, the aptly-named Innocent III settled on 1284. Martin Luther, Christopher Columbus, Nostradamus (Michel de Nostredame), and Isaac Newton, are among the better-known apocalyptic sooth-sayers, Jim Jones and Charles Manson among the most sinister, while New England Puritan minister Cotton Mather and Herbert Armstrong (founder of the Worldwide Church of God) figure among the most indefatigable — happy to revise their predictions when their chosen extinction date passes without incident and they find themselves still alive on the following morning.
A modern variation on the theme was the widely-believed prognosis of computer meltdown on 1 January 2000; and we have been assured by a newspaper as respectable as the Guardian that interstellar detritus will soon put paid to us, although the most recent extinction attributable to outer space is that of an Egyptian dog in 1912.
