It is morning on the Left Coast, on the latest predicted day of the Earth's end and so far everything looks disturbingly normal, here at least. We Apocalypse aficionados can only hope and pray that God is playing Whack-A-Mole with the Himalayas.
Wait, was that a tremor?
So what if it was? We Californians have earthquakes on a regular basis, some of them disturbingly large, but none large enough to end the world. So far. Anyway, it was just a trash truck.
Look! Something is hovering outside my window! Is it the phantom planet Niburu, come to shatter our Earth into uninhabitable chunks?
No, it's just another process server. Now I have to finish this blog post hiding under my desk while he knocks away at the door. The guy must have calluses on his knuckles the size of donut holes. It's the price I pay for living in this litigious society, rather than in the Central American rain forest, where many Final Days fans are gathered to witness the Earth's end among my spiritual ancestors, the ghosts of the ancient Mayans. Certainly if I had been alive in those times and found a giant round rock in the jungle I would not have hesitated to carve a prediction for the end of the world on it, because playing a massive practical joke on people a thousand years in the future is one way to show you're having a worthwhile civilization.
But if the world doesn't end, and it looks distinctly non-Armageddonish right now, we are looking at a bleak, no Apocalypse future, at least until somebody else adds up the ages of the Prophets plus the number of letters in the New Testament plus the bust sizes of Kardashian sisters in centimeters or some other such soothsaying arithmetic and comes up with another Biblically inspired date for the air to be let out of this balloon we call Earth, or they find another ancient race that had predicted Doomsday for we moderns long after their civilization had safely sputtered out. Barring that, we humans will have to live in a world with no scheduled planetary collisions or Raptures. A lot of people are going to be disappointed by this, although my creditors have been betting on it.
The only hope remaining for the end of everything is the Computer Game theory of this universe's existence, which is that the entire known cosmos is a computer game being played by advanced beings. The German scientists who are testing this theory seem to think that our universe is being played by a giant, responsible government agency in the Uber-Universe, but there's no way they can know that. It might be being run on the computer of a sneaky, cheating ultra-advanced alien husband, who's just screwing with it until his wife goes to bed so he can resume checking out profiles on plentyofadvancedaliens.com. Or a lonely, shy, physically unattractive Superior Being who hasn't had sex for several billion of our years and is about to click "Exit" on the entire human experience in favor of some incomprehensibly futuristic alien porn.
That Apocalypse is even worse than the current one. It lacks all drama. To be a truly great Apocalypse, the event needs a prophet and believers. Even if you believe in the computer-game model of existence, you can't claim to know when the entire universe is going to go blue screen. There are no Four Horsemen, no moon dripping blood, no creepy ancient predictions, no eternal flames for the wicked, no heaven for the pure of heart. Jesus wouldn't come back. Of course, according to the theory, He was never here in the first place.
We'd merely wink out of existence, to be replaced by the words "Permanent Fatal Error." Which might be appropriate, but the feeling here is that it's not going to happen today.
We'll just mutter something much less self-aware, like "TGIF," and go about our business.
Wait, was that a tremor?
So what if it was? We Californians have earthquakes on a regular basis, some of them disturbingly large, but none large enough to end the world. So far. Anyway, it was just a trash truck.
Look! Something is hovering outside my window! Is it the phantom planet Niburu, come to shatter our Earth into uninhabitable chunks?
No, it's just another process server. Now I have to finish this blog post hiding under my desk while he knocks away at the door. The guy must have calluses on his knuckles the size of donut holes. It's the price I pay for living in this litigious society, rather than in the Central American rain forest, where many Final Days fans are gathered to witness the Earth's end among my spiritual ancestors, the ghosts of the ancient Mayans. Certainly if I had been alive in those times and found a giant round rock in the jungle I would not have hesitated to carve a prediction for the end of the world on it, because playing a massive practical joke on people a thousand years in the future is one way to show you're having a worthwhile civilization.
But if the world doesn't end, and it looks distinctly non-Armageddonish right now, we are looking at a bleak, no Apocalypse future, at least until somebody else adds up the ages of the Prophets plus the number of letters in the New Testament plus the bust sizes of Kardashian sisters in centimeters or some other such soothsaying arithmetic and comes up with another Biblically inspired date for the air to be let out of this balloon we call Earth, or they find another ancient race that had predicted Doomsday for we moderns long after their civilization had safely sputtered out. Barring that, we humans will have to live in a world with no scheduled planetary collisions or Raptures. A lot of people are going to be disappointed by this, although my creditors have been betting on it.
The only hope remaining for the end of everything is the Computer Game theory of this universe's existence, which is that the entire known cosmos is a computer game being played by advanced beings. The German scientists who are testing this theory seem to think that our universe is being played by a giant, responsible government agency in the Uber-Universe, but there's no way they can know that. It might be being run on the computer of a sneaky, cheating ultra-advanced alien husband, who's just screwing with it until his wife goes to bed so he can resume checking out profiles on plentyofadvancedaliens.com. Or a lonely, shy, physically unattractive Superior Being who hasn't had sex for several billion of our years and is about to click "Exit" on the entire human experience in favor of some incomprehensibly futuristic alien porn.
That Apocalypse is even worse than the current one. It lacks all drama. To be a truly great Apocalypse, the event needs a prophet and believers. Even if you believe in the computer-game model of existence, you can't claim to know when the entire universe is going to go blue screen. There are no Four Horsemen, no moon dripping blood, no creepy ancient predictions, no eternal flames for the wicked, no heaven for the pure of heart. Jesus wouldn't come back. Of course, according to the theory, He was never here in the first place.
We'd merely wink out of existence, to be replaced by the words "Permanent Fatal Error." Which might be appropriate, but the feeling here is that it's not going to happen today.
We'll just mutter something much less self-aware, like "TGIF," and go about our business.
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