The original doom-and-gloom merchants touting a coming apocalypse were religious seers.
Nowadays, though, faith-based threats of calamity tend to be greeted with a flood of sassy Tweets, rather than waves of panic. “I used to have a job carrying those ‘End of the world’ signs but I got fed up working the ‘nigh’ shift,” was how one comedian put it.
But even as the dread of theological doom has diminished, the apocalyptic worldview has found new ways to trumpet our vulnerability, the most compelling coming with scientific gravitas. We’ve lived through the threat of mutually assured destruction, and now we are grappling with a looming “climate change apocalypse,” predicted for 2100 by the World Bank.
