The end of the world has weighed heavily on the mind of humankind since we emerged onto the 4.5-billion-year-old planet we call home some 200,000 years ago. Variations on the apocalypse have coursed through every form of expression since we started painting on cave walls, blinking into each dawn, cowering from storms and eclipses, imagining all-powerful gods to whom we might appeal for benevolence and mercy.
A kind of existential angst and sometimes outright terror underlies much of the literature and other arts that have emerged over the eons to grapple with the specter of not only our own lives ending, but the final destruction of the world.
Indeed, our powerful, sometimes outright narcissistic sense of Self should probably be forgiven for wondering whether the world should even go on without us—how dare it?!
Read MoreThese ‘prophets’ tend to have one hand pointing to an exact date of doom and their other in th...
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