There ’s niggling doubt we dwell in strange fourth dimension . Take a quick look back at the past few class of current intimacy and you ’ll see a repulsion show of disorientate and depressing event : the COVID-19 pandemic , rising wealth inequality , change political polarisation , racial oppressiveness , the tarry scourge of nuclear war , an ever - intensifying climate crisis , continued ruination of our natural surroundings , and a trill - up of geopolitical power .
It ’s no surprisal that so many people seem to believe that we are know on the brink ofa global societal collapse . Things are indeed unsteady at the second , but this doom - depend upon multiplication of humans is not alone with their apocalyptical anxiousness .
A warm glance of quotes from the preceding millennia will discover that mankind has often believed that society has lead to the dog and the end times are close .
Rightly orwrongly , the Medieval Age is not often regarded as an epoch of shine optimism – and it look like many people at the time felt the same .
Pope Innocent III ( born 1161 CE ) issaid to havepredicted that the world would come to an close in 1284 . Why ? because it would mark 666 years after the rise of Islam in 618 . unluckily , he cash in one’s chips in1216 and was unable to see how wrong he was .
The Black Deathwiped out over 100 million masses in Eurasia and North Africa in the fourteenth century , so it ’s hardly scandalous to get a line that people at the meter were not brim with optimism about world ’s future .
“ No bells tolled,”wrotea chronicler in the city of Siena , modern - day Italy , “ and nobody weep no matter what his red because almost everyone expected death … . And people enjoin and believed , ‘ This is the end of the humankind ’ . ”
Martin Luther , the German priest known for starting the Protestant reclamation in the 16th century CE , lived at a time when new and radical ideas were shaking up the condition quo . He wasalso convincedthe end of the world was close :
" Things are go toward their death , " Luther wrote in 1528 . " I trust the last 24-hour interval will not be long check , not over a hundred twelvemonth . ”
The 17th century wasa truly unrelenting time to be alive . This century was riddled with bloody warfare , capriciously cold weather , social turmoil , and economic topsy-turvydom , leading some historiographer to dub this period “ The General Crisis ” .
One of the nastiest periods of this century was the Thirty Years ' War , a conflict centered around the Holy Roman Empire from 1618 to 1648 that was one of the most destructive war in European history .
In 1643 , amid the Thirty Years ' War , a pamphlet from Spain explained : " This seems to be one of the epochs in which every country is turned upside down , lead some great minds to suspect that we are approaching the end of the world . "
Over in China around the downslope of the Ming Dynasty in 1641 , a documentreportedlyreads : “ Among all the unusual occurrences of disaster and rebellion , there had never been anything bad than this . ”
Heinz von Foerster was an Austrian - American physicist - cum - philosopher . In a1960 Science article , he penned a date for the end of humanness due to overpopulation on Friday , November 13 , 2026 .
“ At this date , human universe will approach infinity if it grows as it has acquire in the last two millennium , ” he write .
The paper was essentially a tongue - in - impertinence trick , but many scholars of the post - war geological era wereterrifiedofoverpopulation . In 1968 , Professor Paul R Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich write the hugely influential bookThe Population Bomb , which predict universal dearth in the 1970s and eighties due to overpopulation .
“ The struggle to fertilize all of humanness is over . In the 1970s century of million of mass will starve to last in spite of any clangor programme embarked upon now , " the Scripture reads . “ Nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate . ”
The alarmist overpopulation collapse did n’t go on , but some scholar still argue the book raised some progeny thatcontinue to go unresolved .
In the final year of the twentieth century , many of the humans ’s greatest minds worried that a global collapse was impendent due to the " millenary glitch " . It was feared that reckoner organisation and electronically controlled equipment would be ineffectual to right dress their date after December 31 , 1999 , raising the hypothesis of catastrophic substructure collapse around the world .
" When people say to me , ' Is the world going to make out to an end ? ' I say , ' I do n’t know . ' I do n’t know whether this will be a gibbousness in the route – that ’s the most optimistic assessment of what we ’ve got , a fairly serious bump in the route … or whether this will , in fact , trigger a major worldwide recession with absolutely devastating economical consequences in some parts of the world , ” Senator Robert F. Bennett ( R - Utah ) , chair of the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem , said in a speechin 1998 .
As you no doubt guessed , 2000 struck and nothing happened .
Then there was 2012 . Around this time , it was wide reported that the end particular date of a 5,126 - year - prospicient cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar would occur on December 21 , 2012 . A few bold imaginations smashed this story with another erroneous story submit that Nibiru , a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians , was channelise toward Earth . Once again , these predictions fell flat .
" [ It ] was a misconception from the very beginning,“saidDr John Carlson , managing director of the Center for Archaeoastronomy . " The Maya calendar did not cease on Dec. 21 , 2012 , and there were no Maya prophecies foretelling the closing of the world on that engagement . "
