One mildly interesting fact that MANY Christians get wrong:

There is no lead-up to the apocalypse. The Messiah will return "like a thief in the night" and "nobody, except my Father, knows the hour of my return" (I probably butchered those two quotes). Either way, the Bible is pretty clear (as was Jesus): there will be zero indication the apocalypse is coming. None. It'll just... start.

I think they've gotta maybe define what counts as an "Apocalypse." The active "Fourth Turning" hypothesis expects a crisis on the scale of the Civil War. That degree of crisis has happened lots of times. Certainly the Civil War itself was accurately predicted for decades leading up to it.

For anyone curious about academic studies of historical societal collapses, check out Joseph Tainter [1]

> As described in Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. [...] Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).

> When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.

> For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans "solved" this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (as metals, grain, slaves, other materials of value). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory. [...]

> It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

It's missing the January 19, 2038, the unix epoch end. Only 12 years and a bit from now. Very much in our time.

The Limits to Growth book is an interesting read. To quote Box, "All models are wrong, but some are useful". I wouldn't take the dates-ranges estimated from the modelling that seriously, but the modelling assumptions are worth reading about and reflecting on. The overall modelling and dynamics seem pretty plausible to me.

From memory, the rough argument was that society depends upon input flows of energy, resources (metals etc) and food. Society needs to allocate resources and energy to extract these inputs. Energy sources such as fossil fuel reserves are finite stocks, some are cheap to extract (high energy return on energy invested). Over time we consume and deplete the high EROEI reserves and have to move on to consuming the lower EROEI reserves. This means that the fraction of energy society needs to allocate for energy extraction increases over time, so there's less energy for other uses. Similarly, we deplete the cheap to extract stocks of metal required to build and maintain industry, leaving stocks that require higher inputs of metal and energy to extract. Similarly for agricultural yields, as we mine and deplete accumulated stocks of nutrients out of the soil.

The business as usual scenario leading to "overshoot and collapse" behaviour is that we have increasing population, increasing industrial capital and increasing demands for energy, food and resource inputs, while the fraction of energy and resources that need to be allocated to energy, resource and food production grows over time. The fraction of remaining surplus energy and resources that can be allocated to things like education, healthcare, research, art decreases over time. At some point the growing fraction of energy and resources that needs to be allocated to energy and resource extraction becomes so large vs the existing population and industrial base that there simply isn't enough surplus to maintain healthcare, education, research, etc at the same level.

The "Overshoot and collapse" dynamic describes stocks of population, industry etc growing to peaks well beyond sustainable levels before the above dynamics catch up and cause them to rapidly decline.

The researchers did a bunch of modelling of alternative scenarios, exploring how to avoid these "Overshoot and collapse" dynamics.

They seemed to have missed peter turchin

"In 2010, Turchin published research using 40 combined social indicators to predict that there would be worldwide social unrest in the 2020s"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin

Do they specify exactly what qualifies as a successful apocalyptic prediction?

In particular they count a US civil war as an apocalyptic event… lots of countries and societies have been completely wiped out, though, which must(?) be more apocalyptic.

Maybe the point of the site is just that apocalypses tend to happen unexpectedly?

Here's python code to simulate one of the still-active doomsday predictions (The Limits to Growth)

https://github.com/TimSchell98/PyWorld3-03

Was the Bronze Age Collapse a doomsday event? Mount Toba eruption? I think they were.

I'm not saying anyone predicted those or something. It's just that the notion of doomsday is quite vague.

I'm trying to broaden some notions here. Prediction might not be exactly absolute prediction, and doomsday might not be exactly absolute doomsday.

Perhaps some great threats were averted precisely because someone predicted them (for example, the great leaded gasoline poisoning).

People know that they are not living at the start of anything. All through history people imagine they be living near the end of everything.

No one want to live in the middle.

Missing from the list:

1999: Spanish designer Paco Rabanne announces that the Mir space station would crash on and destroy Paris in between the 28 July 1999 lunar eclipse and the 11 August 1999 total solar eclipse, the two somehow interacting to create magnetic interference, leading to the station crashing at 11:22 on the 11, as predicted by a 17th century fresco in some abbey that shows an eclipse, a clock at that hour, and a sentence "you will know the hour of your death but not the day"... Also Mir would have hypothetically contained a Russian atomic bomb, which is what would destroy Paris, and possibly leading to some all-out nuclear war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIsjK7gpSoc

Need a scoreboard for bubbles!

The whole universe may end at any moment without warning. There could be another universe on a collision course and speed so fast you will never know it.

Or we could be living in universe inside like a raindrop of larger universe that may hit the ground and burst any moment.

Where have I heard that name … oh this little apocalypse https://failure.museum/marchfirst/

I've been in the "doomer" camp for over a decade and been surprised how many things I thought were far off in the future have come to fruition earlier.

But, the one thing I always find interesting, philosophically, about believing the world-as-we-know-it is coming to an end is that all of the things people are concerned about will happen no matter what.

Being afraid of the end of the world is ultimately being afraid that we will lose the things we have, that our work will be lost to time and history, that ultimately we will return to a void and all of "this" will have been for nothing.

However, all of that is true either way. You will lose everything you've ever loved over time in life, all the work you've done will be lost to time, in the end all of your efforts will be for nothing and even that won't matter.

The "end of the world" scares people because it forces them to discard the normal tools they use combat these many existential anxieties, but the world continuing to go on doesn't actually resolve any of those anxieties.

the two active predictions with the time frames of <5 years by MIT, and How & Strauss still look scary and not impossible

What qualifies moving from "pending" state to "active". There seem to be many predictions at the bottom that are only a few years out that are not "active" Some are even end of year.

I could see why the ones with several hundred years deadline are "pending"

I'm surprised at the number of famous folk who have predictions, like Christopher Columbus. Gives new context to Thiels recent musings on the Antichrist.

Step 1: become accomplished in some field Step 2: ??? Step 3: write about the anti Christ and predict when it will occur

Are the predictions from the 2nd and later IPCC reports in there? Last I checked they were on track.

Until we have nuclear disarmament, there’s a sword having over us.

It’s bound to happen eventually

Gradually and then suddenly.

Reminds me of the old gem of the Web 1.0 internet that was Exit Mundi

Survival bias. I get this is a joke but...

There are many societies which have collapsed. We can't know who predicted it because they are dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse

And of course, this list will no longer exist after societal collapse.

Basically, the ultimate, "Nothing ever happens" scoreboard [0].

If any of your acquaintances are ever in doubt of anything ever happening, this will be a handy guide for them to consult.

[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-ever-happens

All of these can be summed up as: "Bangs are more interesting than whimpers."

"Days until next prediction might begin". Cute.

A bit in the doomer camp, and what worries me the most are the lifestyle changes needed to not fuck up the climate in the next few hundreds years. I believe I heard that we should slash 7/8th of our emissions (as individuals living a modern lifestyle) to keep the wet bulb temperature in check worldwide by the end of the century. This is, in my opinion, a target that we'll surely miss and it won't be nice.

Europe is already struggling with few millions people trying to enter over several years. I can't imagine what happens when large parts of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh become literally deadly during the hot season. That would displace ~1B people basically at once (if you stay and you don't have Air Conditioning you die). The following turmoil will be like nothing we ever saw before as a species (IMHO).

Very disingenuous to put second-coming style prognostications from religious nutsos in the same list as people trying to use science, pattern analysis, or surveys of scholarly literature to identify when society will gradually break down from writing too many checks the environment or the economy can't cash.

I gotta say I didn't know about this Johnny Silverhand post, but I hope that if these things don't come to fruition he still finds time to stick it to the corpos in the most rockerboy way possible.

One of the currently active events is predicting something on the scale of the Great Depression

I mean that's bad but it's much better than what I picture in my head as an apocalypse

I know this is mostly for fun, but it would be great to see how we are trending on the predications which has more scientific approach to it.

...remember it only takes one to be right!

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It can show 0 successful predictions all it wants, but we'd been through global lockdowns and forced vaccination, there's an ongoing war in Europe with casualties in hundreds of thousands on both sides, Gaza is being demolished by Israel, Internet as we knew it is about to turn into whitelisted fiberoptic/5G TV, surveillance is rampant, and the rise of the global technofascist police state as the public is being entertained by the clown shitshow of top level politicians is not obvious only to those who've been trying to save their sanity by remaining in denial.

Doesn't make much sense given that we wouldn't exist to observe a timeline/reality where doomsday has been realized/effectuated.