DID WE MISS APOCALYPSE?

"No way to delay that trouble comin' every day."
-- Freak Out!, Frank Zappa

Face it. We're all going to die. Most of us presume that the coming event will be A capella, but some folks out there would disagree. They envision our last day on earth as one big group hug. Whether it comes from a rising thermometer, a cosmic pinball or four strange cowboys on the horizon, doomsday is a theme that never seems to go away.

From street-corner preacher to the Kool Aid man, there's always someone marking his calendar with something like, "Pick up laundry before the end of the world." Call it Apocalypse, call it Armageddon, call it Doomsday; each prophet of doom says it's near, and each says he or she has the secret of survival.

Maybe someday one of these prophets will be right. He or she will throw a dart at the calendar, and it will pierce the date that humanity ceases to exist. The more doomsday predictions there are, the more likely it is that one of them will turn out to be true, and some of these prophets generate date after failed date.

Then again, maybe one of these doomsday predictions has been right already. Maybe, for example, the Rapture has come and gone, all of the good guys are already in heaven, and all that's left down here is us slobs. That would certainly explain all of the bad Ju Ju floating around....

DOOMSDAY DEFINED - OR NOT

When you first look at it, "Doomsday" seems like a fairly simple term. Doomsday is when everybody dies, right? Diving a little deeper, though, results in a great deal of fuzziness.

Nuclear doomsday is fairly specific. Drop some bombs. End life on earth. Doomsday is even more specific for folks that owe taxes: April 15^th, each year. (Your doomsday clock is below.)

Those who believe in the Rapture¹ are actually predicting two doomsdays. When the first doomsday comes, believers are spirited away to Heaven, leaving behind non-believers. In a sense, those who were left behind are the ones who experience doomsday.

For seven years (did someone break a mirror?), life on earth is, well, interesting. Then there's an encore. Christ comes back to see if anyone has learned his or her lesson. If so, that person joins the others in Heaven. Everyone else is sent to Hell. It's not necessarily the end of life as we know it, but it is the end of human life on earth.

Cosmologists think of doomsday being billions of years in the future, when the Universe itself comes to an end. There are competing theories on how this happens. Either the Universe will expand into complete entropy, or it will collapse into a big crunch, or, as a recent theory suggests, it will end ripping apart.²

So how are we going to define "doomsday" on this site? Simple. We're not. We're going to let the term be defined by the context it's being used in. Nothing like a good cop-out.

Owe taxes? Here's how long you have until doomsday:

FIRE AND ICE

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

-- Robert Frost