World Fails To Spontaneously End, Again

If you're reading this, you have already figured out that the Rapture has not come.

Normally, this would go without saying. But today it's apparently news. For the second time in a short while.

How many times do we have to go over this? How many times does the world have to not end before people get the point? How many times do we have to hear that the world will end "soon" before we start asking these people to stop predicting things? I understand you only really need to be right once, but come on now. This isn't predicting. This is throwing a dartboard at a calendar.

And how many people do we have to hear predict the end of the world more than once?

A cursory search of all the times the world has been predicted to end but failed turns up so many entries that I quickly lost count trying to pin down an exact number. All I can say for certain is that we are numbering in the hundreds. It's not even worth my time to try and pin down an exact count.

There is a culture, the Piraha tribe in the Amazon, that has no word for any number beyond two, and just refers to any number bigger than that as "many". (And 'one' and 'two' aren't necessarily one and two, but rather relative values, more akin to small, medium and large.) This is that. There are "many" predictions.

Let's just put it this way. Here's a list of failed end-of-the-world predictions, with the restriction that all the predictions were set for 1998.

Not that this will stop anyone from bringing up the Mayans and December 21, 2012. Or, when that prediction gets proven wrong too, simply moving on to some other guy who will predict the Rapture will come just in time for New Year's.