It’s just a matter of time.
It’s an ancient Greek word for the final event or the end of time.
My own certainty of an end of days is that our star we like to call the Sun is 4.5 billion years old and has about another seven or eight billion years left in it before things get messy.
The sun is busily fusing hydrogen atoms together to make helium. This fusion process creates vast amounts of energy, which gives us life on Earth.
Scientists are trying to crack the ability to control fusion here on Earth to create a viable and sustainable source of energy without the drawbacks of nuclear fission, such as the danger of accidents and radioactive by-products, but are not there yet.
However, in seven or eight billion years the Sun will have fused all the hydrogen it has and the helium will collapse in on itself. Compressing a gas generates heat from all that pressure and the Sun will bloat into a red giant. In doing so it will engulf the inner planets; Mercury, Venus and, yes, Earth.
Then we really will know that global warming has come.
Throughout history there have been a steady stream of humans who have predicted the end of the world sooner than this and hunkered down to wait for the inevitable. Finally, being disappointed then relieved then completely foolish before moving to another town where no one knows them.
Most if not all religions preach an end of the world.
Norse mythology calls it Ragnarok. The Sun and Moon will disappear from the sky and poison will fill the air. Dead will rise from the ground and there will be widespread despair. I’d be more than despairing; I’d be crapping myself.
The Buddha might not be too far off the mark as he predicted seven suns appearing in the skies and burning Earth up.
Christianity has various forms of the end of days depending on your denomination. They vary on just what will happen and when but all versions have it sounding very unpleasant, especially if you belong to the wrong group.
In 1843 William Miller, a Baptist preacher, made several predictions the world was to end in a few months. When it didn’t, his followers called that period The Great Disappointment.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses predicted the end of the world was nigh several times during the 20th century but haven’t got it right to date.
Harold Camping is one of my favourite poor predictors of the end of the world. He predicted it many times, made a lot of money from donations and eventually died in 2013 at 92. The end had come for him at least.
Last week saw yet another sad case of several souls who had hunkered down waiting for the world to come to its end then figuring they could be wrong.
This time in the Netherlands, which is somewhat surprising because the Dutch are usually a solid and sensible lot though the man is reported as Austrian.
A 58-year-old bloke took his six young children down into a basement nine years earlier to sit it out. The children now range in age from 16 to 25 and believed no one else was alive. He has done a terrible thing depriving his own children of a decent childhood.
It seems the father kept them down there and grew vegetables and farmed some animals around his isolated rural house to feed them.
The eldest son seems to have had enough and walked to the nearest pub where he ordered five beers and asked for help. He hadn’t had a haircut in nine years and was very unkempt.
The father appears to have had a slight stroke and is in police custody to answer some questions.
The rest of us can be safe in the knowledge that the imminent end of all things is very unlikely and so make the most of living in the here and now.
