Scholars Mind

The End Keeps Not Coming

Midnight was coming. The world was on fire and people were dying of a terrible illness. Surely, the end of the world was near—or so thought Londoners in 1666. It was also near in 1844, 1910, 1988, 2000, and 2012. Doomsday predictions come and go more frequently in the social media age, but people have been predicting (and rescheduling) the end of the world for as long as they could hold up signs on street corners. With your team, explore the following instances of imminent doom, and consider: what do they have in common? What leads people to believe them—and what makes a doomsday prediction go viral?

  • The Millerites (1844) | Wodziwob’s visions (1869) | Halley’s Comet Panic (1910)
  • The Jupiter Effect (1974) | Hon-Ming Chen (1988) | The Y2K bug (2000)
  • Large Hadron Collider (2008) | Mayan Apocalypse (2012)

Almost five thousand years of dated endings, and not one of them arrived. What survives is the pattern: a real observation, a fixed date, and somebody with something to sell.

Key concepts

Cognitive Dissonance
The mental discomfort of holding a belief the facts have just crushed — and the strange way believers often resolve it not by dropping the belief but by doubling down. When a doomsday date passes harmlessly, the group frequently recruits harder, not less.

Every work — at a glance

  • The Millerites (1844)

    Followers of William Miller who became convinced the Second Coming would arrive in 1843–1844; when it didn't, the failure became known as the 'Great Disappointment,' a textbook case of a dated prophecy and its aftermath.

+ 26 more works explained inside

What to know

  1. 01
    What do they share? Each starts from something REAL — a comet's actual tail, a genuine calendar rollover, a real new collider — then bolts on two things: a specific date and a catastrophe. True observation, then a speculative leap.

+ 1 more insight inside

Across subjects

Science supplies the sharpest verdict: in almost every case the measurable risk was near zero while the felt risk was total. The cyanogen in Halley's tail was

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

Burning 1666 London, comet pills, Y2K, 2012 — none was right, and each answered a real need for meaning and for a deadline. Harmless folly, or real damage? These scares emptied bank accounts and split families; yet Y2K may have been averted precisely BECAUSE people believed it.

Practice — a sample

SCIReal astrophysicists predicted 1982 earthquakes that never came. Which MOST strongly supports that credentials spread a scare?

  • A The comet pill trade
  • B Gribbin's retraction
  • C Miller's farming background
  • D The Maya's silence
  • E CERN's death threats

Sign in to answer and see why each option is right or wrong.

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