1. Simon bar Giora, 66-70 CE
One of the earliest recorded predictions of the end of the world came from Simon bar Giora, a member of the Jewish Essenes sect. These years were a period in which the Jews of Judea rose up against the Romans who were in control of the area. The prediction ran that this fight would be the actual end times battle that presaged the coming of the Messiah.
2. Nostradamus, 1555
The French astrologer and physician Michel de Nostredame, popularly known as Nostradamus, first published You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. in 1555. The book consisted of 942 quatrains (four-line poems), each of which was reputed to contain a prophecy. While it’s been in consistent print for years and the book is frequently cited for its claims about the end of the world, Nostradamus made no such prediction in the text. Scholars and skeptics argue that the quatrains are vague and can be made to meet a number of historical events with minimal effort. A 1981 film called The Man Who Saw Tomorrow repopularized the predictions, and it also added a projected end-time date of 2037. When the film was remade in 1991, the end-time prediction was omitted.3. Mother Shipton, 1873-1881
The Post’s Archives Director You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. in 2011. A new collection of the 16th century oracle’s visions was published in 1873; despite the fact that the publisher later admitted he made the whole thing up, people still bought into prediction that the world would end in 1881 as it said in the book. Contemporary evidence seems to indicate that it did not.
4. Harold Camping, 1994-2011
Harold Camping was an evangelist and president of Family Radio. The station group reached, at one time, over 150 U.S. radio markets. Family Radio began operating in 1958; Camping hosted Open Forum, a live call-in show, beginning in 1961. Camping would make a number of “end of the world” predictions, giving specific dates that kept moving; those dates would eventually include: September 6, 1994; September 29, 1994; October 2, 1994; March 31, 1995; May 21, 2011 (for The Rapture); and October 21, 2011.
It was the twin-billing of the May 21, 2011 Rapture date (nine years ago today!) and the October 21, 2011 “end of the world” date that generated a vast amount of attention outside of Family Radio. The company had devised a huge campaign beginning in 2010 to publicize the prediction and date. While many Christian groups rejected the campaign and date and others found it worthy of derision, some people took it very seriously and sold their belongings or quit their jobs. When May 21 came and went without incident, Camping appeared on May 23 to issue a revised prediction that the Rapture and end of the world would both occur on October 21. Camping retired soon after the world kept turning on October 21, and he died in 2013. Over time, Family Radio has removed the original prediction episode and more or less scrubbed his programs and ceased the sale of his literature.
5. Y2K, 2000
Less a prediction of the end of the world and more of a prediction of the collapse of civilization, Y2K Mania ran on the backs of two things: people who thought the world would end when the calendar flipped to 2000, and those who were convinced that the Y2K bug would wreck the world at the stroke of midnight. In case you don’t remember, the Y2K bug was the result a computer coding and programming time-saver that used six digits to account for a date (for example, 09/01/91). However, it was feared that after midnight on New Year’s Eve, programming would go wrong as the numbers flipped and zeroed out to a spot where machines might “believe” that they were operating on a wrong or previous date. A massive effort at many levels of business was undertaken to fix the glitch across numerous platforms in case things did go wrong and affect banking or other computers. The impending situation kicked off a “prepper” wave as some people stockpiled water, guns, and other supplies. When the calendar flipped from 1999 to 2000, a few bugs happened here and there, but the world (and the vast majority of its electronic systems) spun on.