4,500,000,000 AD – The World Ends

Mark my words, you haven’t heard the last of the apocalyptic prophesies.

The day after Dec. 21, 2012, I’ll bet a bunch of Mayans were rolling in their graves – the ones who bought into it at least.

The world didn’t end – again.

It didn’t end in 2000 as at least a dozen famous foretellers feared, and there were no shortage of apocalyptic dates before that.

In fact all throughout history there were people calling it quits for the rest of us. According to Wikipedia, the Romans had at least two predictions a few hundred years apart that their great city would be destroyed long before the Roman Empire actually fell.

The date 500 AD was chosen as doomsday by three dudes with really cool names: Hippolytus of Rome, Sextus Julius Africanus and Irenaeus. Evidently Sextus revised his date to 800 AD. The seer was likely visioning into the future and decided to copy preacher Harold Camping, whose May 21, 2011, prediction didn’t pan out. Camping offered up a new prediction for later that year. The last word on Camping, whose end-of-times dates in the mid-1990s also required periodic revising, was that he doesn’t do that anymore.

Various Christians, including Pope Sylvester II, predicted 1000 AD would be the end, and hundreds of years later reformer Martin Luther predicted the world would end by 1600. Other dates with an apocalypse attached to them include 1666 and 1700. In modern times preacher Pat Robertson offered up 1982 as the end, while a Baha’i sect founder, Leland Jenson, said Halley’s Comet would wipe out the Earth in 1988.

Let’s all take solace: it seems we have a bit of a breather and a handful of good years without any solid evidence that it’s all about to head south. Next up is 2017, which is the date evidently passed on by the Prophet Gabriel to the Sword of God Brotherhood. Other judgment dates we’re heading for include 2022, 2023 and 2033.

In fact, get ready for a nail-biting decade coming up. Psychic Jeane Dixon said the world will end sometime between 2020 and 2037, although like Camping and Sextus, Dixon had previously made some revisions when the end literally came to pass.

My money’s on 4,500,000,000 AD (plus or minus a couple hundred million years). That is roughly when our sun is expected to grow into a red giant. In so doing our life-giving star will likely take out much of the inner solar system, including Earth.

Let’s just hope the Mother Ship gets here and snatches us up in time!