the End of the World - 1st draft

“Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.”
- Charles M. Schulz

The end of the world is upon us.
As we stare over yet another mug of half-burnt coffee and lethargically yawn into the beginning of yet another day of our miserable humdrum lives, the cataclysmic play of cosmic forces makes its way towards our pathetic little world. Come 2012, and by asteroid – or solar storm – or genetically mutated h1n1 – the apocalypse will be here.
The end of the world is upon us.
Of course, it’s been upon us before.
The world presumably ended for the first recorded time in 2800 BC. An Assyrian tablet, found thousands of years later, predicted, “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.”
Retribution, it seems, is why the end of the world keeps cropping up. Retribution – and a strange half-interpretation of dates and numbers.
21st December 2012 is one such date arrived at by calculating from ancient calendars. It has a whole chronology of similar dates preceding it, many of which use religiously significant numbers (like 666, the Number of the Beast) to their advantage.
In 1666 the English clergy, in a nation suffering from the outbreak of plague, predicted the end of the world. When the Great Fire spread across London that year, many believed that the day of reckoning had arrived.
The year 2000, one-third of which integrally gives 666, boasted of dozens of predictions all to itself.
The turn of millennia, of course, is a special attack-point for such predictions. The year 1000 AD also had the entire Christian world waiting for the world to end.
This strange fascination for dates does not, however, extend to all end-of-the-world predictions. Neither do most of these predictions specify exactly how the world will end.
These speculations are left to chance, and sometimes, science, and more often, science fiction.
Nuclear holocaust, the Third World War, alien invasion, astronomical impact, pandemic disease, ecological disaster and cybernetic revolt are perhaps the most recurring themes in apocalyptic fiction and prediction.
Religious themes spill out over fiction and prediction alike. Among Biblical Judgment Days, a few stories create their own versions of the apocalypse, like Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ where a supercomputer generates all of God’s nine billion names to bring an end to the reason for the Universe’s existence – and hence an end of the world – significant in its modernistic confluence of religious and scientific apocalypse.
In this particular story, as in many others, the exact nature of the apocalypse is a direct reflection of the nature of the kind of Universe the plot is set in – a Universe which exists for a single purpose – to list down all the names of God.
Science and its various models of the Universe also set down similar apocalyptic ends.
The Universe that might have begun with a Big Bang might well expand to a thermal death, where all the heat in the Universe has equally distributed itself throughout the Universe and there is no scope for any flow of energy.
The Oscillating Universe might be a never-ending cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches, an alternating morbid cycle of endless beginnings and endings.
And closer to home, the world which we know about – the Earth – will eventually die as its life source –the sun – becomes a Red Giant and swallows up its nearest planets.
From ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust.
About 5 billion years before this happens, however, we are now awaiting 2012: the next big End of the World.