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The 2012 phenomenon predicted the world would end at the end of the 13th b'ak'tun. The Earth would be destroyed by an asteroid, Nibiru, or some other interplanetary object; an alien invasion ; or a supernova .
Oct 28, 2011 · Ronald Reagan. Prediction Made: 1980. Predicted Date: "this generation" There's ample evidence that for eight years, the leader of the free world believed that the world might end during...
- CBS News
- Overview
- 2012 Maya Apocalypse
- Harold Camping
- True Way
- Halley’s Comet Panic
- Millerism
- Joanna Southcott
- The Prophet Hen of Leeds
- Great Fire of London
- The Great Flood
Religious leaders, scientists, and even a hen (or so it seemed) have been making predictions for the end of the world almost as long as the world has been around. They’ve predicted the destruction of the world through floods, fires, and comets—luckily for us, none of it has come to pass.
December 21, 2012, marked the end of the first “Great Cycle” of the Maya Long Count calendar. Many misinterpreted this to mean an absolute end to the calendar, which tracked time continuously from a date 5,125 years earlier, and doomsday predictions emerged. End-of-the-world scenarios included the Earth colliding with an imaginary planet called Nib...
Among the most prolific modern predictors of end times, Harold Camping has publicly predicted the end of the world as many as 12 times based his interpretations of biblical numerology. In 1992, he published a book, ominously titled 1994?, which predicted the end of the world sometime around that year. Perhaps his most high-profile predication was f...
Taiwanese religious leader Hon-Ming Chen established Chen Tao, or True Way, a religious movement that blended elements of Christianity, Buddhism, UFO conspiracy theories, and Taiwanese folk religion. Chen preached that God would appear on U.S. television channel 18 on March 25, 1988, to announce that he would descend to Earth the following week in ...
Halley’s comet passes by the Earth approximately every 76 years, but the nearness of its approach in 1910 created fear that it would destroy the planet, either by a celestial collision or through the poisonous gasses it was rumoured to contain. A worldwide panic ensued, stoked by the media and such newspaper headlines as “Comet May Kill All Earth L...
Religious leader William Miller began preaching in 1831 that the end of the world as we know it would occur with the second coming of Jesus Christ in 1843. He attracted as many as 100,000 followers who believed that they would be carried off to heaven when the date arrived. When the 1843 prediction failed to materialize, Miller recalculated and det...
Beginning when she was 42 years old, Joanna Southcott reported hearing voices that predicted future events, including the crop failures and famines of 1799 and 1800. She began publishing her own books and eventually developed a following of as many as 100,000 believers. In 1813, she announced that in the following year she would give birth to the s...
In 1806, a domesticated hen in Leeds, England, appeared to lay eggs inscribed with the message “Christ is coming.” Great numbers of people reportedly visited the hen and began to despair of the coming Judgment Day. It was soon discovered, however, that the eggs were not in fact prophetic messages but the work of their owner, who had been writing on...
Because the Bible calls 666 the number of the Beast, many Christians in 17th-century Europe feared the end of the world in the year 1666. The Great London Fire, which lasted from September 2 to September 5 of that year, destroyed much of the city, including 87 parish churches and about 13,000 houses. Many saw it as a fulfillment of the end of the w...
Johannes Stöffler, a respected German mathematician and astrologer, predicted that a great flood would cover the world on February 25, 1524, when all of the known planets would be in alignment under Pisces, a water sign. Hundreds of pamphlets announcing the coming flood were issued and set in motion a general panic; Count von Iggleheim, a German no...
Jan 23, 2024 · CNN — The Doomsday Clock that has been ticking for 77 years is no ordinary clock — it attempts to gauge how close humanity is to destroying the world. On Tuesday, the clock was again set at 90...
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Dec 1, 2022 · From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on Earth is...
Jan 23, 2024 · Over the years, the clock has been set further or closer to midnight according to an increasingly diverse range of threats, from nuclear capabilities to climate change. In January, experts ...
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Jun 28, 2019 · The most mind-boggling controversy in the contemporary philosophy of science is the “doomsday argument,” a claim that a mathematical formula can predict how long the human race will survive. It...
