It’s the end of the world. Again

The Ancient Mayan ‘long calendar’ stops in 2012, suggesting we’re all doomed. Bring it on, says Daniel Kalder — we’ve been predicting the End for three millennia: why stop now?

For two months now, Roland Emmerich’s wrathful CGI God has been killing billions in the name of the Holy Box Office in the film 2012. Having already caused carnage with aliens, an ice age and Godzilla, this time Emmerich took his cue from the Ancient Mayans, whose ‘long calendar’ purportedly stops in 2012. But not only is the End nigh, it’s hugely profitable — 2012 raked in £140 million globally in three days. With numbers like that it’s no surprise that a multitude of apocalypses are in the pipeline: whether humorous (Woody Harrelson battles the undead in Zombieland) or depressing (father and son trek across a post-apocalyptic wasteland in The Road) it’s boom time for doom time.

And as if in response to the silver screen, the real news has been apocalyptic as well. Secular prophets armed with statistics and graphs warn us daily of a new Deluge, coming as punishment for our crimes against the planet. Israel’s stand-off with Iran is written about as if an escalation into full-scale nuclear war is a given. Swine flu is the new Black Death.

So — are we doomed? Well, sometimes I think we’d like to think we are. We like to work ourselves up into an End Times panic, spreading gloom and blame. But a quick look at the history of Apocalypse should be reassuring.

Remember the so-called Millennium Bug, a glitch in our computer systems that was going to plunge us back into the Dark Ages at the start of the year 2000. Instead, nothing happened. The curious thing was that Russia and Italy, which had taken no preventative measures against this catastrophe, were as unaffected as the USA and the UK, where government had spent billions averting doomsday.