“Dear Jesus did not come”… and other days the world was meant to end.

2009 is going to be a very big year. There’ll be famine, zombie hordes, nuclear hellfire, all-singing-all-dancing tween-legions, Necro-Mutants, an outbreak of weaponised smallpox—and that’s just what’s happening in the cinemas. Of course there’ll be non-fictional challenges too: The global economy is poised delicately on the edge of the abyss, mother earth palavers in agony, and the price of cheese is outrageous. But gather, children, and I will tell you a story: a story about all the other days the world was supposed to end. This tale starts 2000 years ago, and ends 5 billion years in the future, so bring snacks.

1.1 In ancient Israel there lived a man named Jesus who said many things, “Love one another,” “Get lots of fibre.” One of the things he said was that the world would end soon. “I say unto you,” he said, “there be some standing here who shall not taste of death ‘til they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” It was the worst best-man speech ever, and the bride was livid.

1.2 There were people even before Jesus who foresaw the end: the wailing, the gnashing, the soiling. Archaeologists found an Assyrian tablet on which was engraved a warning: “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common. I for one will be voting conservative.” But Jesus was the main one.

1.3 Jesus was the inspiration for a man called Montanus. Montanus was a charismatic preacher, wont to speak in tongues—but knowledgably— and he travelled the land with two women, Priscilla, and Maximilla. In 155 AD he formed his own group—they called themselves the Montanists—and despite the failure of all his prophecies, and despite being denounced by the church and cast into the mountains, his group endured for centuries beyond his death and formed the template for modern Pentecostalism.

1.4 Christians had high hopes for the end of the first Millennium. This would be the time when it all came together. The predictions of Book of Revelations, the last book of the Old Testament, had long held them in rapture. They described in detail the end days: the epochs of the church; the judgments; the one-thousand-year reign of Messiah; the last test of Mankind’s sinful nature by the loosing of Satan; the destruction of the current heavens and the earth, to be recreated as a “New Heaven and New Earth.” Then, the final, triumphal return of “Classic Earth”. It’s all in there.

2.1 But the thousandth year came and went. Nothing. In 1284 Pope Innocent III predicted the Second Coming. He based his prediction on the date of the birth of Islam, then added 666. Then he took the afternoon off.

2.1 In 1524 a group of London astrologers convinced some 20,000 people to abandon their homes for high ground in anticipation of a second Great Flood that would start from the Thames. The flood never came. In 1648 the Turkish rabbi Sabbatai Zevi, having studied the Kabbalah, predicted that the Messiah would make a triumphant return in 1648, and, astonishingly, that his name would be Sabbatai Zevi. With 1648 having come and gone Sabbatai revised his estimate to …

2.2 … 1666. This would be the year. Definitely. It’s easy to look back on the hysteria of the time with a sense of smug superiority, but I would like you to imagine yourself opening the front door of your small flat in Shoreditch to find plague victims piled high in the streets, streets that are literally on fire, all during a year containing the figures commonly accepted as the biblical Number of the Beast, and then to say to yourself: “Probably nothing to worry about.” 1666 is an object lesson in not believing bollocks about the end of the world.

2.3 William Miller, an American Baptist preacher, prophesied that Jesus Christ would return to the earth during the year 1844. Jesus did not make his appointment, and October 22, 1844, became known as “The Great Disappointment.” Henry Emmons, a Millerite, wrote, “I waited all Tuesday and dear Jesus did not come. I waited all the forenoon of Wednesday, and was well in body as I ever was, but after 12 o’clock I began to feel faint, and before dark I needed someone to help me up to my chamber, as my natural strength was leaving me very fast, and I lay prostrate for 2 days without any pain–sick with disappointment.”

3.1 And so came the 20th Century, an age that would bring more disappointment than we could reasonably handle. The First World War was known as “The war to end all wars that specifically involve a Kaiser,” but the end bit is often truncated. When the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, some scientists on the Manhattan Project worried that it might superheat the atmosphere and incinerate all life on Earth. Shows what they knew.

3.2 In 1955, a Chicago housewife, Mrs. Marion Keech, was sent a message from alien beings on the planet Clarion. They revealed that the world would end in a great flood before dawn on December 21. Keech and her followers left their jobs, schools, spouses, gave away money and possessions, and waited for their departure on the flying saucer. Her progress was closely watched by a group of social philosophers who used the events as an example of what they termed “Cognitive Dissonance”. Leon Festinger and his colleagues correctly predicted that when the arrival of the aliens failed to materialise, Mrs. Keech and her friends would rationalize the events and minimise the ego-damage of failure by mounting an enthusiastic effort at proselytising, an attempt to regain some social standing and lessen the pain of disconfirmation.

3.3 To understand the power of cognitive dissonance in our age, just exchange the words “arrival of the aliens” with “success in Iraq,” and “Mrs. Keech and her friends” with “Bush and Blair,” in the last sentence of the paragraph above.

3.4 In February, 1962, a close grouping of the visible planets during a total eclipse of the Sun was thought to be a portent of the birth of Sheryl Crow.

3.5 On November 2, 1983, NATO began Operation Able Archer 83, a ten-day exercise that spanned Western Europe. It simulated a period of conflict escalation, culminating in a coordinated nuclear release. The realistic nature of the exercise led some in the USSR to believe that the exercise was a clever ruse, obscuring preparations for an actual first strike, so the Soviets readied their nuclear forces and placed air units in East Germany and Poland on alert. This relatively obscure incident is considered by many historians to be the closest the world has come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Which we kind of forgot to mention.

3.6 The Heaven's Gate group achieved notoriety in 1997 when one of its founders convinced 38 followers to commit mass suicide. The chosen ones believed that their souls would be transported onto a spaceship, which they said was hiding behind a comet.

4.1 The new millennium would usher in an era of scientific enlightenment that would have scant tolerance for the hysteria of ages past. In the year 2000 there would be no fire or brimstone, no apocalyptic equestrians, and no spacecraft. We simply believed that when the new-year ticked over, aircraft would fall from the sky and our dishwasher would try to eat us.

4.2 High School Musical is an American television franchise charting the highs and lows of two juniors from rival cliques – Troy Bolton (Zac Efron), captain of the basketball team, and Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens), a beautiful and shy transfer student who excels in math and science. Although not often cited as a portent of the coming apocalypse, the tortured smiles and loose-limbed spasmings of this tribe of wailing acne-zombies is seen by some to be the most obvious sign yet of the impending end times.

4.3 The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest particle accelerator. It is 27 Kilometres long and is loosely based on a design conceived by Stephen Hawking while lying in a darkened room and listening to Afrika Bambaata’s Dark Matter Moving at the Speed of Light. The launch of the LHC sparked fears among the public that it would cause the world to be sucked into a black hole. This prospect was so frightening to some that protests were held, court injunctions were filed, and a girl in India took her own life rather than face the grim prospect of a black hole death. They haven’t even started the real experiments yet.

5.1 Now we race toward a future full of chaos and uncertainty, of that I am certain. The economy has imploded, food riots are sweeping the developing world, Al Qaeda is rumoured to be filming a TV movie called High School Jihad. The folks at 2007rapture.com have bought a new domain: 2009-rapture.com. ‘THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH COULD HAPPEN, THIS YEAR, 2009,’ the site announces. There are flocks of animated doves and a photo of Jesus embracing another man under the headline ‘YES, I AM COMING QUICKLY!’ proving that, though Armageddon is painful, it can still provide big laughs.

2012 is held by apocalypticists to be a particularly big year. The Mayan calendar completes its thirteenth b'ak'tun cycle, and 433 Eros, the second-largest Near Earth Object on record, will pass Earth at 0.1790 astronomical units (26,778,019 km). The last transit of Venus will occur, and the sun will reverse its polarity after reaching the end of the current 11-year sunspot cycle. In the book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Daniel Pinchbeck proposes a global psychic awakening in the year 2012, and the creation of a noosphere—which is an atmosphere consisting entirely of flatulence. Plus, the numbers in 2012 add up to 5, which is a number.

5.2 The fact is that no one knows when the end is coming. But we should prepare, get our Rapture kit together: water holifier, shotgun, flame-retardent undergarments, Kevorkian machine, a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. “No way am I abandoning another bloody house!” you’ll say, and I take your point. But my prediction is that the world will definitely, absolutely end in the year 1,148,782,431. Then, our Sun will increase its output by 10%, broiling away the oceans, destroying all life. In 5 billion years our Sun will spend its remaining fuel and die, leaving the black cinder of our planet floating in the cold infinity of space. Around this time, an advanced being a billion light-years away will suddenly leap from his chair and shout: “F***! I was supposed to pick up those humans in that commune in Nebraska!”