I lived through another Harold Camping apocalypse and walked away safely, so I can tell my tale. Maybe some of you will think I could leave the old man alone with his delusions, but please be aware that he's been predicting the end of the world since I was six years old. He's been fucking with people's mind for an awful long time. Many gullible people in quest for an answer to the meaning of life have turned their life savings to him, thinking the only important thing would be that most people repent before it's over. He dilapidated complete lives worth of money in silly advertising. So I will bang on the old crook at every opportunity I can.
It's been a pretty uneventful day, as usual when Harry talks about blazing fireballs and doomed sinners. I woke up around nine, wrote my blog post, went to the barber to exchange gruesome partying stories as usual, walked Scarlett, napped and during the evening, I went for dinner with Josie and AT and watched TAKE SHELTER at the AMC Theater, which was genuinely more scary than anything old Harold could say or do. It was a propos, like watching slasher movies on Halloween, which made me think "Really, how is it going to happen?". Let's look at a couple of scenarios.
a. Natural Disaster
I think it's the most likely to happen. See, the Earth has a regulating system. The more intensely you fuck with it, the bigger the disasters. While I don't think ONE big catastrophe will doom mankind, I think if it's bound to happen, it's going to be a streak of events. Imagine a two weeks long hurricane, followed by an eartquake of a record magnitude? Think about what happened to New Orleans during hurricane Katrina and put this time two, over the whole world. While you won't have the end of planet Earth and not even the extinction of mankind, you have a pretty good Mad Max/Fallout scenario.
b. Nuclear War
While I don't disregard the possibility of a nuclear bomb wiping off a country from the map, I doubt that an all-out nuclear conflict will ever happen. Those weapons are way overpowered and could cause way too much destruction way too soon. Populations would turn against their leader, because they would fear a reprisal strike from the enemy. As powerful as it us, too many people have access to nuclear weapons to make any use out of them. They're bound to make the war forever stalemate into those ugly clustered conflicts that we know.
c. Cosmic Disaster
On a long enough time scale, this one WILL eventually happen. The most likely scenario is that the sun will explode in four billion years and burn everything on Earth within thirty minutes. Then it's going to swell to one thirds of the galaxy before shutting down and dying. But it's given a lot of credit to humanity to say we will last that long. Outer space is like a galactic free road in a wasteland. We can get obliterated by anything and turn into a booksmart memory for the next species, like dinosaurs were to us.
d. Godly Intervention
Let's pretend there is an old man on a cloud. According to the Bible, nobody but Jesus has ever seen him. They have seen signs and interpreted nature unto his will. I don't rule out that there is a God (although I don't think he's the old man on the cloud, that guy's name is Zeus), but in case he wants to obliterate mankind, I think he's going to do it through the proper channels (read a., b. and c.) We're going to know it in advance that we fucked up and the time has come and everybody will pit the responsibility on a thousand different scapegoats. So we would never know until we get upstairs. Or downstairs for the naughty ones.
My insider in the banking world explained to me one day that value wasn't set in stone. If nobody believes that a ten dollars bill is worth ten dollars, it's worth nothing. It's just a piece of paper. This is also applicable to Harold Camping. He built the Family Radio network to broadcast the christian message, but instead he used it as a platform to give credibility to his predictions. A nice old man in a suit, foreseeing the end of the world on the radio looks more credible than a crummy old man foreseeing the end of the world in the street. Yet, those two men are saying the same thing.
So when's the next prediction, you old false prophet? So I can feel like I'm riding the bullet's breath on my most quiet day?