Just For Fun / Apocalypse Day Planner

Aw man, I missed it.

"But about that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven nor the Son, but only the Father."

— Matthew 24:36, The Bible (New International Version), disavowing the contents of this very page.

Writers are fond of putting precise dates on the Apocalypse. There's really nothing more dramatic than The End of the World as We Know It, but claiming that it will occur just 20 Minutes into the Future isn't quite as dramatic as saying it will occur in precisely Six Years, Eight Months, Seven Days ... and counting.

So one might propose that if all the movies, Video Games and other media depicting the world's destruction were correct, we'd be seeing the world ending at least once a week, and especially on dates that appear numerically significant.

Related to I Want My Jetpack (though in all seriousness, sometimes not even villains want an Earth-Shattering Kaboom).

For more information on fictional world history, see Grand Unified Timeline and The Movie Timeline. And for information about non-fictional predictions, Wikipedia has their own list, too. Rational Wiki also has a list where many recent crank predictions can be found.

Of course, the real problem with this page is... if it happens, most of us will be destroyed anyway.

Unmarked spoilers here! You've been warned!

The Earth has already been destroyed on:

• Circa 2,400,000,000-2,100,000,000 BC: The Great Oxygenation Event. Turns out the day where the world was blessed with oxygen also ended up causing the end of anaerobic life forms before they could even evolve beyond bacteria.
• Circa 445,000,000 BC: The first major mass extinction of Earth after the Cambrian Explosion that killed 85% of all life at the time before they could step on land. Would later be known by humans as the Ordivician Extinction.
• Circa 372,000,000 BC: The Devounian Extinction and the second major mass extinction which ended up wreaking havoc on the primordial seas and killing 70% of life. Even the hardy trilobites barely clung on before they were finished off by...
• Circa 250,000,000 BC: Permian-Triassic Extinction (AKA, the Great Dying). Killed 90-95% of all life at the time and is currently the closest the real world has ever come close to ending.
• Circa 200,000,000 BC: Triassic-Jurassic Extinction. This ended up with the death of 75% of life, but hey, it also gave us the age of dinosaurs.
• Circa 65,000,000 BC: Bye-bye non-avian dinosaurs.
• Circa 150,000 BC: Battlestar Galactica (2003) - Robot War (different "Earth")
• Circa 100,000 BC: Halo - Forerunners devolved humanity from a fairly advanced interstellar species to stone age primitives.
• 1911: Doctor Who - desolated by the godlike Osirian Sutekh in an alternate timeline and in orbit around a dead sun. (If you want to be technical, it could have been anywhere between 1911 and 1980) ^note Doctor Who is on this list a lot, being the Trope Namer for Timey-Wimey Ball
• 1940s-1950: The Last Man on Earth (1924) (though it's just all men from 14 to up)
• 18 Aug 1951: The Sarah Jane Adventures - The Trickster manifesting himself through a weak point in spacetime in an alternate timeline.
• 1961: On the Beach: Multi-player nuclear war breaks out (three major powers and an assortment of not-so-major powers are involved). The Northern Hemisphere is now devoid of human life. Radiation is spreading southward, killing off humans and animals as it goes.
• November 1961: The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "The Midnight Sun": Earth's orbit has destabilized and is due to hurtle into the Sun. Only it was All Just a Dream: It's actually rapidly moving away from the Sun.
• 19 November 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis ignites into global nuclear war, at least in one reality in "Ur", in the Stephen King collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
• 1963: The Doctor Who adventure game City of the Daleks - desolated by the Daleks in an alternate timeline with all of humanity bar Amy Pond wiped out.
• 1963: On the Beach - Radiation that has been spreading around the world and progressing steadily southward, wiping out human and most animal life in the process, reaches Melbourne, Australia (the southmost major city) and points further south. Humans are now extinct.
• 1964: Dr. Strangelove - Slim Pickens slams a nuke into the earth, triggering a nuclear war.
• August 19, 1966: "The Time Machine (1960)'' - The world is ravaged by World War 3.
• 1973: In the Terro-Human Future History, a nuclear war occurs, but civilization is rebuilt by the Terran Federation.
• 198-: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Earth Mk. 1 is destroyed by Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
• Summer 1981: Dr Bloodmoney - Nuclear war caused by an insane scientist.
• 1981: Wasteland 2010: A dimensional rift called "The Tear" opens over Earth, causing "The Changing", a series of disasters that turns the world into "an untamed planet of ruined cities, mutated creatures, man-eating plants and powerful magic."
• 1983: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (though it's just all cats and dogs - presumably including lions, wolves etc)
• 26 May 1983: Threads - Civilization destroyed by nuclear war. (Alternatively, this happened in 1988 since 26 May fell on a Thursday in both years. The film was first broadcast in 1984, and 1983 and 1988 are the closest years whose calendar matches the dates shown onscreen.)
• 26 Sept 1983: 1983: Doomsday - The Cold War goes hot, devastating much of the planet.
• Feb 1985: Crimes of the Future (though it's just all women from age 12 to up)
• 22 Nov 1987: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - Earth is devastated by nuclear war.
• 22 Dec 1987: The New Universe/The Pitt: Ken Connell tries to rid himself of the power of the Star Brand. In the process, he accidentally destroys his hometown of Pittsburgh (which becomes known as "The Black Event") and plunges the world into war.
• 16 Jul 1988: AKIRA - World War III initiated by the destruction of Tokyo. (This was actually the date the movie premiered.)
• A Few Years From Now: Mad Max sets the end of the world sometime in the late 80's or early 90's, as a result of global wars caused by peak oil, eventually culminating in an all-out nuclear war.
• July 1990: Sliders - The Middle East released a virus that kills almost every male human on Earth in an alternate universe.
• 199X: Nuclear war turns the world into a Desert Punk wasteland prior to the events of Fist of the North Star.
• June 6, 1991: The Catastrophe in Snatcher. Was later retconned to 1996.
• Dec 1992: Battle for the Planet of the Apes - Nuclear war caused by apes.
• 1993: Sex Mission - Nuclear war causes all the males to die out.
• 1994: Thundarr the Barbarian - A rogue planet passes between the Earth and the Moon, causing worldwide destruction and chaos.
• June to August, 1995: The war between the Fithp and humans in Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. In June, the Fithp open with kinetic weapons launched from orbit; in July, The USSR and USA launch Nuclear strikes on Fithp bases on Earth, doing a considerable damage; in August the Fithp drop the Foot (a nearly planet-killer level asteroid) into the Indian Ocean, devastating most of the world with tsunamis, dust- and ash-falls, and a global salty rainstorm
• July 2 to 4, 1996: Independence Day - Aliens destroy most major cities but humanity fight back.
• 1996-1997: A plague swept the Earth in 12 Monkeys.
• 1997: A Wind Named Amnesia - Wind caused all human memories to disappear forever, turning them into cavemen.
• 29 Aug 1997: Terminator - Nuclear war initiated by Skynet, the majority of humanity dies in the first few hours, and the survivors are hunted by Skynets robotic creations.
• 1 Oct 1997: Crystalis: END DAY, nuclear war breaks out, the survivors regress to a primitive society and rediscover magic. A select few people survive the war in suspended animation.
• 4 Feb 1998: Dexter's Laboratory - Asteroids destroy the Earth. Boy geniuses Dexter and Mandark are too busy bickering with eachother to save it.
• 17 Mar 1998: Emberverse: The Change takes place. Electrical currents stop flowing; internal combustion engines and anything requiring pressurization ceases to function; gunpowder no longer works; and nuclear reactions fail to go critical. Industrialized civilization collapses, and 90% of the human population is killed or starves to death before the end of the year.
• 5 Jul 1998: According to The Church Of The Subgenius, this is "X-Day", when alien invaders will destroy all the "normals" while church members will be rescued by "alien sex goddesses". Any discrepancy with the current non-apocalyptic state of the world is due to it not being 1998 yet, which is caused by "The Conspiracy" messing with the calendar.
• January 1, 1999: Countdown - Everyone but all teenagers and young adults turn into black puddles.
• 1999: X1999
• 1999: Alien invasion in X-COM: UFO Defense
• 30 June 1999: South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut: Satan rises and plunges the world into 2000 years of darkness.
• 21 July 1999: Occult Academy
• Heavily implied to be 13-19 Aug 1999: Maya Amano is killed and Nyarlathotep destroys Earth in Persona 2: Innocent Sin.
• 9/9/99: Queen Millennia (although it was avoided)
• 13 Sep 1999: Space: 1999: Earth isn't actually destroyed but the loss of the moon causes massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
• 200X: Half-Life. The Resonance Cascade happens and thousands of aliens from Xen teleport onto Earth and portal storms ravage the planet. This later attracts the Combine who enslave what is left of humanity. By the end of Half-Life 2 nearly all native wildlife has been destroyed, most of humanity dead and a sizable Zombie Apocalypse occurring.
• 01 Jan 2000: The Millennium Bug destroys the world, mostly due to the incompetence of Homer Simpson.
• 13 Sep 2000: Neon Genesis Evangelion. (This is a Shout-Out to Space: 1999.) Actually, on second thought, not destroyed, just devastated, though possibly in terminal decline.
• 03 Jan to 06 May 2001: Battletanx: Nuclear war initiated by men after a plague kills 99.9 percent of women.
• 7 Jul 2002: Y: The Last Man A virus (or something) wipes out almost every male of every species on earth.
• 14 Mar 2003: Without Warning: The bulk of the population of the United States is wiped out by an large energy field called "The Wave".
• 25 May 2004: UFO Aftermath
• 24 Jul 2004: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines - Nuclear war initiated by Skynet. Just a bit late.
• 2005: In Greg Bear's book Eon, World War III happens somewhere during this year.
• 24 Dec 2005: .hack (though it's just all the computers).
• 1 Oct 2006: Jericho (2006) - Nuclear war destroys most of all American cities.
• 22 Jun 2007: Creation of the Spiral Zone by a renegade military scientist.
• 7 Jul 2007: Haruhi Suzumiya destroyed the original universe and made it into something more interesting. Or she might have created it from scratch. It's not known for certain. The exact date is not known either, but 7/7/7 seems likely for a number of reasons.
• 7 Aug 2007: Odyssey 5 - The crew of Odyssey 5 witnesses Earth-Shattering Kaboom; is sent back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
• 2008: Reign of Fire: Dragons emerge from the depths of the Earth and ravage the planet.
• 24 April 2008 (minus.) (You knew it was inevitable.)
• 10 Sep 2008: The Earth Advisory Board.
• April 13 2009: Homestuck. All life on Earth is wiped out by meteor strikes. Centuries later, Earth is recolonized by the Exiles.
• May 2009: Supernatural. All of the seals were broken and Lucifer walked free, which allowed the demons to take over the world.
• 1 June 2009: Dark Angel (though it's just all the computer and communications systems in the United States).
• 19 Oct 2009: Knowing. A super solar flare burst from the sun, destroyed the ozone layer and engulfed the world in flames. Those who weren't killed in the fire died from radiation that punctured a mile into the planet's crust.
• 20XX: Power Rangers RPM. Destruction of 90% of population and 100% of biosphere of an alternate Earth by a sentient computer virus, probably using nuclear-carpet bombing. Exact date unknown, but given the series' custom of taking place roughly when it was aired, 2008 is likely (it was aired in 2009, and the destruction happened a year into the backstory).
• 2010: The alien Zentran forces obliterate much of the Earth's surface in Super Dimension Fortress Macross.
• 5 Mar 2010: The Fall, in Persona 3's bad ending. (Approximate date - might be a bit later)
• 2011: An asteroid hits the Earth, rendering it a wasteland almost as uninhabitable as planet Mars. (Remnants)
• 2 Mar 2011: Party Rock Anthem is released by LMFAO, turning everyone into dance zombies.
• 21 April 2011: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Yet ANOTHER Skynet-initiated Nuclear War.
• 11 Nov 2011: In Homestuck's Act 6, the alien infiltration of Earth becomes public.
• 21 Dec 2012: According to The X-Files and various other works listed under Mayan Doomsday. See also the Mayan Calendar example under "Real Life".
  • And the movie 2012, however, contextually, it happened five months earlier than the prediction, forcing the Olympics to be canceled.
  • Date of the invasion in Universe at War
• 2013 Metro 2033 - The world is nuked to pieces.
• Summer 2014: Newsflesh - Engineered viruses meant as cures for cancer and the common cold accidentally meet and form a new virus that does serve the parent viruses' intended purposes. Unfortunately, they also cause a global Zombie Apocalypse.
• 1 Mar 2015: Date of the invasion in the reboot of XCOM.
• 1 Jan 2016: Neon Genesis Evangelion - (Again. Sort of. Maybe.)
• 14 Feb 2016: Ghostbusters II - At least according to Peter Venkman's talk-show guest. As Venkman puts it: "Valentine's day. Bummer."
• 26 Apr 2016: SCP Foundation - SCP-2935 infects a universe, instantly killing all life and life-like phenomena.
• 12 Dec 2016: "The End", according to Dyson Frost's multiple flashforwards in FlashForward (2009). Every timeline he's seen apparently ends on this date, implying that he at least believes an unspecified world-ending event will occur.
• 20 Apr 2017: SCP Foundation - SCP-3002 infection has spread to all of humanity, eradicating their consciousness.
• 6 June 2017: "Summer Thunder", in the Stephen King collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, is set in the aftermath of a massively multi-player nuclear war. The initial exchange, between India and Pakistan, takes place on the 5th, but everyone else, including such groups as the Chechens, gets into the act the next day. It takes a few months, but all the humans and animals die from radiation.
• October 2017: Terminator Genisys - Yet ANOTHER, ANOTHER Skynet-initiated Nuclear War.
• 3 June 2019: Dr. STONE. Petrification of the entire population of Earth.
• 1 Feb 2020: SCP Foundation - On this date, the SCP Foundation's mission is changed from securing, containing and protecting anomalous items to ensuring the eradication of humanity.

The Earth is still scheduled or predicted to be destroyed on:

• 202X: Shin Megami Tensei I - The remains of the post-nuclear, demon-ridden Earth are covered by a great flood.
• 2029: Zero Escape - On New Years, a virus named Radical-6 is released into the world, causing those who become infected to committ suicide. In an attempt to stop the spread of the virus, a group of terrorists detonates all the world's antimatter power plants on the 13th of April, causing a nuclear winter on top of it. Six billion die as a result of these events, with the remaining 2 billion unfortunate enough to survive left to scavange and fight for what little resources remain on a mostly destroyed earth.
• 23 Aug 2029: Rage (2011) - Earth is hit by the Apophis asteroid.
• 9 Aug 2034: SCP Foundation - The nonexistence of SCP-5956 causes a temporal paradox which obliterates the timeline.
• 2040: XCOM Terror From The Deep - Alien war destroys the economy, poisons the environment and culls the human population down to an endangered species.
• 8 Sep 2040: The Long War - The Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, permanently affecting Earth's climate. Thankfully, most of the affected can simply escape to parallel Earths.
• 2041: Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, due to the Chaos Dunk (not entirely destroyed, however)
• 5 July 2057: Astra Lost in Space - Earth is hit by a meteorite 300km in diameter, wiping out all life.
• 2060: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: Not exactly destroyed. We don't really know what happened after this point (since it's when the colonists left for Planet), but whatever it is, it's bad.
• November 2064: Horizon Zero Dawn: The Faro Plague, a swarm of self-replicating killer robots powered by biomass complete the destruction of the human race and consume or poison all life on the planet, rendering it an uninhabitable, lifeless rock. A few hundred survivors in underground bunkers will die of natural causes or suicide over the next few decades. The friendly A.I.s of Project Zero Dawn will eventually shut down the robots, clean-up the biosphere, and re-seed the planet with life, but not for another few hundred years.
• 2070: Judge Dredd: U.S. President Robert L. Booth goes to war with the entire world. Thanks to a laser defence system, the megacities survive with limited damage, but the rest of the world is nuked into submission.
• 23 Oct 2077: Fallout series: The decades-long Resource Wars finally culminate in an all-out nuclear war between the U.S and China. The remnants of the ruling elite of the former Unites States, known as the Enclave, survive unscathed on special shelter converted from an oil platform off the California coast, as does a few thousand others lucky enough to be relocated to uncompromised Vaults. Other survivors make it through the war, only to find themselves subject to horrific mutations from radiation or traces of the Forced Evolutionary Virus.
• 2080: 11/22/63: Estimated date at which the Earth breaks up and becomes a second asteroid belt, after over a century of massive earthquakes and nuclear bombings.
• 2084: Robotron: 2084: Humankind invents a race of robots who deem humans inferior and wipe them out.
• 2085: Warzone 2100: The American Kill Sat NASDA develops an apparent systems fault and hits major cities around the world with nuclear missiles. The other countries blame it on the US and things go south from there.
• 22 Dec 2098: In Rifts a minor nuclear war on the Winter Solstice during a major planetary alignment results in solar system spanning devastation and magic returning, turning Earth into a crossroads of the "Megaverse".
• 20XX: Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): The Xorda attacks Earth, virtually destroying human civilization.
• January 1st, 2101: BlazBlue: The Black Beast, a destructive being of pure magic emerges from a Cauldron in Japan and proceeds to nearly drive humanity to extinction.
• 2103: In the CoDominium universe, Earth is rendered nearly uninhabitable by the Great Patriotic Wars, destroying interstellar civilization.
• 2105: WALL•E: The Earth is abandoned by humanity due to the mountains of garbage making it temporarily too toxic to support organic life.
• 2146: X-Universe series: Rogue terraforming drones bombard Earth with comets and asteroids (though Earth's military manages to keep this to Planetary/Societal Disruption).
• 2150: Earth 2150: Earth is destroyed after an escalating war caused the Eurasian Dynasty to detonate experimental nuclear weapons on the North Pole, resulting in Earth being pushed out of orbit and spiralling into the sun. Whether you are an ED or LC soldier, or UCS robot doesn't matter: if you don't get off Earth using your side's evacuation fleet, prepare to get fried, melted, and finally burned.
• 2155: Star Trek: Enterprise: Earth was destroyed by a Xindi superweapon in the alternate timeline.
• 2186: Earth is ground zero for this cycle's Reaper invasion of the galaxy. Only Commander Shepard stands any chance of stopping them.
• 2188: the "Starcrash" of Star Pirates occurs as a result of two asteroids being accidentally flung by gravity casters into Earth. Complete and total destruction of Earth, leaving it as only a debris field between Venus and Mars.
• January 2200: BlazBlue: Chronophantasma: The Day of Reckoning. Izanami, Yuuki Terumi and Relius Clover fatally poison the world and all of humanity with raw magic, trapping their souls in an enormous monolith to summon the Highlander.
• 2308: The Big Mistake of the Hyperion Cantos (Dating is a bit finicky, but this is the most likely date).
• 2335: The SD Lucifer destroys Earth in the alternate timeline in Blue Planet. May happen at the hands of the Vishnans in the prime timeline sometime around 2387.
• 2388: Earth was destroyed by the Grigari in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel, "The War of the Prophets," in the alternate timeline.
• 2422: Homestuck: What's left of the earth from 2009 is destroyed alongside with the rest of our universe.
• 2430: The Gbaba break through humanity's final defenses and eliminate all human life in the Sol System (other human-colonized worlds had already been wiped out). Unknown to them, one of the final attacks made by the Federation Navy had been a cover for the escape of a remnant of humanity, who would eventually settle the world known as Safehold.
• 2517 (Several Generations Before?): Firefly (or possibly the Earth just ran dangerously low of resources... the shadow puppet seems to think something happened).
• Jul 14, 9:38 PM, 2520: The Stone-Like is unearthed and proceeds to wipe out all life on Earth in a brilliant flash of light.
• 2668: The Kilrathi nearly destroy Earth in Wing Commander, leveling its largest population centers with antimatter bombs but failing to finish the planet off with their Strontium-90 nukes.
• 30th Century: Doctor Who: Earth is left lifeless for several millennia by solar flares.
• 2993 (give or take a few or several years) - Earth is plunged into eternal winter, waiting for Eternal Sailor Moon to rise and save it, found Crystal Tokyo and become Neo-Queen Serenity.
• 3028: Titan A.E..: Alien energy beings spin the Earth until it splits apart.
• 3620: The Songs of Distant Earth: the Sun goes nova destroying the Solar System.
• 3700: Isaac Asimov's Robots and Empire: Irradiation of the Earth begins.
• 3955: Astronaut George Taylor detonates the Alpha-Omega Bomb and destroys the Earth (Beneath the Planet of the Apes).
• 4004 The year of the Ginnungagap in James Blish's Cities in Flight series (though given as 4104 is some revised editions). Just before the universe ends, the protagonist detonates a new Big Bang, using his own body as the raw material for the new universe.
• August 31st, 11.58 PM, 4500: Microsoft Outlook's calendar ends. The ancient Seattleites were rarely wrong in their predictions.
• 5 Jul 8661: Alternate date for X-Day, according to some members of the Church of the Subgenius (the original date apparently being read upside down).
• circa 41000: Warhammer 40,000. The relentless tides of aliens, mutants and heretics begin to overwhelm the Imperium Of Man, leading to the eventual destruction of Terra (or maybe not).
• 1002261: Babylon 5. The Sun goes supernova (implied to be due to hostile action). The entire human population has evacuated after becoming energy beings.
• 5000000000: Doctor Who. The Sun will expand and devour Earth.
  • This is only the final destruction of Earth in Doctor Who. Previously it will have been rendered uninhabitable due to solar flares. Probably twice.
• 576000003575: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The date in which the Universe is destroyed. Seen from the row seats at the Milliways restaurant (and remember to open a bank account and put on it a penny, letting accruing interests to pile up as years go by so you can pay for the admission).

People in Real Life think the Earth has been/will be destroyed on:

• ca. 2800 BCE: Supposedly, an Assyrian clay tablet dating to approximately 2800 BC was unearthed bearing the words "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common."
  • The quote actually originated from a 1908 bicycling magazine.
• Somewhere between 30 - 100AD: early Christians believed that the end of the world would happen within their lifetime, due to a "cryptic" statement from Jesus that his followers would "not taste death" before the second coming of Christ.
• 1033 AD Many Christians of the time believed that Christ would come 1000 years after his death (even though this is probably not even the right year for that).
• 21 Mar 1843: Millerite Christians believed the world would end this date. Later amended to 21 Mar 1844, 18 Apr 1844 and 22 Oct 1844. See The Great Disappointment.
• 1881: 16th century prophetess Mother Shipton supposed predicted that, "The world to an end shall come, In eighteen hundred and eighty one." Actually, this poem wasn't written by Mother Shipton at all. It was a hoax invented by Charles Hindley in 1862.
• 1910: The appearance of Halley's Comet. Irresponsible newspapers played up the recent discovery that comet tails contained poison and created a panic. Gullible people bought gas masks, "anti-comet pills", and "anti-comet umbrellas".
• 1914: Jehovah's Witnesses think the world started ending this year.
• June-July 1945: At the Trinity test site, some of the researchers harbored worries that the detonation of the Trinity device could ignite the entire atmosphere of the Earth. On the up side, that would have put an end to World War II...
• October 14 - 28, 1962: The period of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which people believed was the start of World War III, and as such, the beginning of the end of humanity as they knew it.
• 1975: It was never official doctrine, but many Jehovah's Witnesses believed the world would end in this year, having calculated it was exactly 6,000 years after Adam's creation. It was rather a case of enthusiasm beats sense, containing several logical errors even within the framework of Jehovah's Witness belief. For instance, Adam was given a large project to do before Eve was even created.
  • Jossed: The basis for the calculation (the idea that the creative days have fixed length) was later dropped.
• September 6, 1994: Some Christians predicted this was the date, but after it came and went it was changed to May 21, 2011. See Below.
• August 11, 1999, as predicted by Nostradamus.
• 01 Jan 2000: Experts predicted anything from mild inconvenience to the collapse of society as the Y2K bug (allegedly) crippled computers worldwide by confusing the year 1900 with the year 2000. This was also a popular day for apocalyptic cults to think the world would end.
• May 5, 2000: According to the 1994 telecast of Ancient Prophecies, the Great Pyramid predicted the end of the world on this date.
  • A book called 5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster predicted that an alignment of 5 planets would cause worldwide catastrophe.
• 06 Jun 2006: Also a popular date for cults to think the world would end.
• January 19-20, 2008: A small group of people on the GameFAQs' Paranormal/Conspiracy Board believed that a giant meteor was going to destroy Earth on either the 19th or 20th. Considering the source it's not all too surprising that we lived to see the 21st.
• May 21, 2011: According to the surprisingly large "Family Radio" organization of Christians, this date is when the world ends...
  • ... Then when it got jossed, the head of "Family Radio" hand waved that it was actually October 21, 2011 that would be the end of the world.
    • Jossed again; don't know what they're going to say now.
    • Probably not much...
    • Randy Savage gave his life to prevent this apocalypse.
• 21 Dec 2012: The Mayan calendar ends, and some believe the world will end, even if the Mayans themselves didn't.
  • And of course, the Mayans didn't. The calendar event coming in 2012 has happened several times throughout history. It's rare, but it's more like what the beginning of the millennium was to us than the end of their calendar.
  • Jossed.
• 23 September 2015: Another date that circulated the internet briefly. Unsurprisingly, the world didn't end then either.
• 23 September 2017: See above, mostly Nibiru-related claims for this one.
• 2029: Potential impact by the asteroid Apophis. Later ruled out by additional calculations.
• 2036: If Apophis misses, this is when it swings around for a second shot. Later ruled out by additional calculations.
• 19 Jan 2038: Experts predict anything from mild inconvenience to the collapse of society as Y2K's big brother steps in and resets all clocks based on 32-bit UNIX timestamps to -2147483648 (which corresponds to December 13, 1901)).
• 2807 or 11,103: In 1983, astrophysicist Brandon Carter proposed that that human race had a 95% chance of extinction in 9,120 years, based on probabilistic reasoning now codified as the Doomsday Argument. The blog What If? further uses the same argument to suggest that, if one assumes the world's population reaches 9 billion and holds there until the estimated 2.2 trillion humans through all of history are accumulated (Carter's calculation estimated a total timeless human population of 1.2 trillion), there's about a 50/50 chance the last humans will live around the 29th Century (What If's 95% chance threshold is around 16,000 years). Your estimates may vary depending on assumptions made about things like how many humans have ever lived in the past, the distribution of those humans' lives (there are seven times as many humans alive today than just two centuries ago)^note Also, while most world population forecasts have a leveling off at around 8-10 billion by 2100, it doesn't seem quite as reasonable to just assume that it will still be true 7 or 8 centuries into the future., human life expectancy now and in the future, and how reasonable you find taking past patterns and applying it to the future (e.g., we're less than 70 years into an age where nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction became a thing).
• in 100,000 years: When the next ice age is supposed to arrive at its earliest, once anthropogenic global warming finally wears out.
• in 1 billion years: Temperatures on Earth become too hot to support complex life. Only bacteria and the like will remain.
• in 2.8 billion years (if not before): Earth becomes too hot to support even simple life.
• in 7.5 billion years: When the Sun is expected to turn into a red giant (5 billion years to exhaust its central hydrogen supply plus 2.5 billion years to reach full red giant status), possibly engulfing Earth in the process, before finally becoming a white dwarf and fading away.
• in 50 billion years: If the universe is a closed universe i.e. the 3-D space that our universe occupies curves back in on itself forming an ellipsoid boundary, and the universe’s expansion due to dark energy maintains its current rate of increase of acceleration (acceleration increases with time), then The Big Rip will occur in 50 billion years. The Big Rip will at first shatter space time into pockets, then everything in those pockets will get ripped apart into atoms, then atoms rip apart, then nucleons rip apart and finally all that will be left are fundamental particles, assuming that even space-time itself was not torn apart. However, most astrophysicists don’t believe that the universe is a bounded closed universe. An alternative without runaway dark energy is that it became attractive causing the Universe to collapse on itself in a Big Crunch, going back to the original singularity and maybe "rebooting" in a new Big Bang.
• in 180 billion years: When the white dwarf remains of the Sun stop glowing. This assumes Earth's orbit has been adjusted to keep it in the habitable zone throughout the Sun's expansion into a red giant and subsequent shrinkage into a white dwarf. The proposed orbital adjustment method is repeated gravitational slingshot of loose material in the Solar system. It has been calculated that there is enough loose material. By far the least realistic point of this proposal is the requirement for a civilisation to last long enough, and provide funding consistently enough, for the multiple-millenia periods of throwing rocks around to adjust Earth's orbit^note And that even if it was possible to survive the late phases of Sun's evolution before the white dwarf stage, when its luminosity will change too fast for this method to be feasible, there would come a point in which the Sun's white dwarf habitable zone will be so narrow as its luminosity decreases that it would pretty much impractical to put Earth there due to reasons as the white dwarf's Roche limit and its tidal forces.
• in 292 billion years: If there're still 64-bit Unix systems (or their alien equivalents) running by then, and the Universe still exists, in the year 292,277,026,596 clocks will reset producing an equivalent of the already described Year 2038 problem.
• in one hundred trillion (1 followed by 14 zeros) years: All stars, even their cooling corpses (white dwarfs, etc), are expected to have burned out plunging the Universe into darkness. Collisions between brown dwarfs^note  Celestial bodies not enough massive to have started nuclear fusion or dead stars may produce from new stars to supernovae or gamma-ray bursts for a long time to come, but they'll be extremely few and far between.
• in a quattordecillion (1 followed by 45 zeros) years: If the standard model of proton decay is correct, then the Earth, humans, stars, planets and pretty much all elements we are so familiar with, cannot physically exist any more because protons will not exist anymore. So, anything that isn’t already singularities (Black holes) —white dwarves and neutron stars being composed of protons and neutrons are not inmune to this, even if will have decayed into at the very least, mesons.

May Happen At Any Moment:

• Left Behind tells us the rapture will happen "tomorrow" and it's pretty much all downhill from there for a good seven years, but as we all know, tomorrow never comes!
• Australia, at least according to Mad Max will be taken out "A Few Years From Now."
• Azathoth could destroy the world at any moment, and wouldn't even notice. Bummer.
• A Supervolcano blows up, most likely in Yellowstone. Best case scenario would be the destruction of most of western North America. That's the best case scenario.
  • Worst case scenario? The whole world dies from volcanic ash. Ouch.
• Despite the introduction of nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaties (say that five times fast), enough live/active nuclear weapons still exist to wipe out the entire human race, depending on when they're dropped. We just can't take them apart as fast as we made them.
• A massive solar storm hits us with a huge mass of charged particles, which interact with the Earth's magnetic field, sending huge currents along high voltage power cables, saturating transformer cores and melting them... all across the globe. Repairs could take months, during which access to food and water becomes a problem since so much of the developed world's infrastructure depends on electricity. The USA might even become a third-world country.
• The technological singularity, where artificial intelligence will be created that's smarter than humans and build machines even more intelligent than themselves. Thus, such machines could easily overpower humanity with superior smarts. Most scholars who study this singularity predict it will happen sometime within this century, and all of them say it can suddenly happen any moment. More than a few even believe it will happen this generation of people. In other words, be ready for The Second Renaissance.
• Iji: An alien race known as Tasen Alpha Strike the Earth, annihilating most of the life there.
• False Vacuum Decay. Would destroy the entire universe at light speed. (And this is just one example from the Wonderful Wacky World of Quantum Physics.)

May ALREADY have happened:

• Scientists trying to discover what 'time' actually is, have come up with a number of theories, one of which is that at any moment time could just stop, and the entire universe will be stuck in one final moment for eternity.
  • However, this theory also predicts that this won't happen until long after the Earth itself ceases to exist.
  • One theory of time is that every 5.4x10^-44 seconds, the entire universe is destroyed and then a very similar one is created in its place. This sets some sort of record for most apocalypses.
• According to astronomers, the binary star WR 104's rotational axis is aimed in Earth's general direction (between 16° and 40°) and is capable of firing a gamma ray burst. Thing is, WR 104 is 8000 lightyears away which means the state we see the star in is the state it was in 8000 years ago. Due to gamma ray bursts moving at light speed, the star may have already gone supernova and fired one off - and we'd have zero advance warning until the gamma ray burst actually hits us. Just a ten second long burst would irradiate the hemisphere facing the star and blow away a full quarter of the ozone layer, leaving those surviving open for even more cosmic radiation. And if that still wouldn't be enough, it could also screw around with the chemical composition of the atmosphere to create nitrogen-dioxide and plunge the planet into a nuclear winter^note A bit of Nightmare Retardant: it's not clear if WR 104 will go GRB and even the axis may be misaligned with us. Now, the bad news: there are at least two other stars -WR 102 and WR 142- more likely to end that way and the orientation of their rotational axes are not known. Have a nice day.
• If you're any species on Earth other than H. sapiens, odds are good that this trope began for you the moment that the human species started lighting brushfires and planting seeds in the ashes. Biologists consider our own era to be the latest of the Great Mass Extinctions.

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I Remember When All This Will Be Again.

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