Arcadia - To that gaunt House of Art which lacks for naught Of all the great things man has saved from Time, The withered body of a girl was brought Dead ere the world's glad youth had touched its prime, And seen by lonely Arabs lying hid In the dim wound of some black pyramid. But when they had unloosed the linen band Which swathed the Egyptian's body,- lo! was found Closed in the wasted hollow of her hand A little seed, which sown in English ground Did wondrous snow of starry blossoms bear, And spread rich odors through our Autumn air. With such strange arts this flower did allure That all forgotten was the asphodel, And the brown bee, the lily's paramour, Forsook the cup where he was wont to dwell, For not a thing of earth it seemed to be, But stolen from some heavenly Arcadia. In vain the sad narcissus, wan and white At its own beauty, hung across the stream, The purple dragon-fly had no delight With its gold-dust to make his wings a-gleam, Ah! no delight the jasmine-bloom to kiss, Or brush the rain-pearls from its eucharist. For love of it the passionate nightingale Forgot the hills of Thrace, the cruel king, And the pale dove no longer cared to sail Through the wet woods at time of blossoming, But round this flower of Egypt sought to float, With silvered wing and amethystine throat. While the hot sun blazed in his tower of blue A cooling wind crept from the land of snows, And the warm south with tender tears of dew Drenched its white leaves when Hesperos uprose Amid those sea-green meadows of the sky On which the scarlet bars of sunset lie. But when o'er wastes of lily-haunted field The tired birds had stayed their amorous tune, And broad and glittering like an argent shield High in the sapphire heavens hung the moon, Did no strange dream or evil memory make Each tremulous petal of its blossoms shake? Ah no! to this bright flower a thousand years Seemed but the lingering of a summer's day, It never knew the tide of cankering fears Which turn a boy's gold hair to withered gray, The dread desire of death it never knew, Or how all folk that they were born must rue. For we to death with pipe and dancing go, Nor would we pass the ivory gate again, As some sad river wearied of its flow Through the dull plains, the haunts of common men, Leaps lover-like into the terrible sea! And counts it gain to die so gloriously. We mar our lordly strength in barren strife With the world's legions led by clamorous care, It never feels decay but gathers life From the pure moonlight and the supreme air, We live beneath Time's wasting sovereignty, I the child of eternity...

Dance of Death - Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves, Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves With all the careless and high-stepping grace, And the extravagant courtesan's thin face. Was slimmer waist e'er in a ball-room wooed? Her floating robe, in royal amplitude, Falls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod. The swarms that hum about her collar-bones As the lascivious streams caress the stones, Conceal from every scornful jest that flies, Her gloomy beauty and her fathomless eyes Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways, Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebrae. O charm of nothing decked in folly! they Who laugh and name you a caricature, They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure, The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone, That is most dear to me, tall skeleton! Come you to trouble with your potent sneer The feast of Life! or are you driven here, To pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir And goad your moving corpse on with a spur? Or do you hope, when sing the violins, And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins, To drive some mocking nightmare far apart, And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart? Fathomless well of fault and foolishness! Eternal alembic of antique distress! Still o'er the curved, white trellis of your sides The dateless, wandering serpent curls and glides. And truth to tell, I fear lest you should find, Among us here, no lover to your mind; Which of these hearts beat for the smile you gave? The charms of horror please none but the brave. Your eyes' black gulf, where awful brooding's stir, Brings giddiness; the prudent revelry Sees, while a horror grips him from beneath, The eternal smile of two white teeth. For he who has not folded in his arms A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms, Reckons not of furbelow, or paint, or scent, When Horror comes the way that Beauty went. O irresistible, with fleshless face, Say to these dancers in their dazzled race, "Proud lovers with the paint above your bones, Ye shall taste death, musk scented skeletons! Withered Antinuclear, dandies with plump faces, Ye varnished cadavers, and Grey Loveless, Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath, Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death. From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream, The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream; They do not see, within the opened sky, The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high In every clime and under every sun, Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run; And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye And mingles with your madness, irony... Adrian Alexis 09/01/14

Nails -

NAILS - I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall Like a calendar in one color. I wear a torn place on my sleeve. It isn't as simple as that.   Between no place of mine and no place of yours You'd have thought I'd know the way by now Just from thinking it over. Oh I know I've no excuse to be stuck here turning Like a mirror on a string, Except it's hardly credible how It all keeps changing. Loss has a wider choice of directions Than the other thing.   As if I had a system I shuffle among the lies Turning them over, if only I could be sure what I'd lost. I uncover my footprints, I Poke them till the eyes open. They don't recall what it looked like. When was I using it last? Was it like a ring or a light Or the autumn pond Which chokes and glitters but Grows colder? It could be all in the mind.  Anyway Nothing seems to bring it back to me.   And I've been to see Your hands as trees borne away on a flood, The same film over and over, And an old one at that, shattering its account To the last of the digits, and nothing And the blank end.   The lightning has shown me the scars of the future.   I've had a long look at someone Alone like a key in a lock Without what it takes to turn.   It isn't as simple as that.   Winter will think back to your lit harvest For which there is no help, and the seed Of eloquence will open its wings When you are gone. But at this moment When the nails are kissing the fingers good-bye And my only Chance is bleeding from me, When my one chance is bleeding, For speaking either truth or comfort I have no more tongue than a wound...

Singularity #II

                         On-line interview 2013, all rights reserved. 

 

 If you worry that the Internet, computers and other electronics play an outsized role in daily life, futurist Adrian Alexis has one message for you:

  This is only the beginning.

 Alexis, who will speak Sunday night at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts as part of the Audi Speaker Series, predicts a high-tech society that makes today's lifestyle look straight out of the Stone Age. As he sees it, people will have tiny computing devices in their bodies, more powerful brains and longer lives. Simply put, the world will be dominated by artificial intelligence.

 The 64-year-old entrepreneur is the leading evangelist of “Singularity,” the idea that machines will spontaneously adopt humanlike characteristics, become vastly more intelligent than people and change mankind forever. One possibility is they'll turn on us and wipe out humanity.

Kurzweil has pegged the transformation for 2045.

“The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be 1 billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today,” he says on singularity.com.

 Kurzweil has written several books and founded a number of technology companies, including FatKat, which develops pattern-recognition systems for financial markets, and Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, which was launched in 1982 and developed a voice-activated word processor. He recently was hired as director of engineering for Google.

You have said that by the 2030s, people will have blood cell-sized computing devices in their bloodstreams and brains that connect directly to off-site computer data servers. What makes you think that?

 We already have computerized devices that are placed inside the body and even connected into the brain, such as neural implants for Parkinson’s disease and cochlear implants for the deaf. These devices can already wirelessly download new software from the cloud. Technology is shrinking at an exponential rate, which I’ve measured at about 100 in 3D volume per decade. At that rate, we will be able to introduce blood cell-sized devices that are robotic and have computers that can communicate wirelessly by the 2030s.

How would such devices be regulated to ensure that outside forces can’t manipulate people’s thoughts and actions through the Internet?

 Privacy and security are already very significant issues, considering the personal and intimate things that people do with their computers. This is an issue we will never be able to cross off our “concern list,” but we’re actually not doing that badly. Relatively few people today complain that they have been significantly damaged by privacy and security breaches. I believe we will be able to keep up with the increasing sophistication of the technology.

What kind of new capabilities could brain connectivity bring to humans? How would it affect people's intelligence, athletic abilities, life spans, reproductive capacity?

 

 We are already much smarter and more productive because of the brain extenders we have, ranging from Google to Wikipedia. When these services went on strike for one day last year to protest the federal Stop Online Piracy Act legislation, I felt like a part of my brain had gone on strike. We are going to literally expand the scope and scale of our neocortex, which is where we do our thinking. Thinking bigger and bolder thoughts will ultimately enable us to overcome the major challenges that our civilization faces.

You have said that you want to bring your father, who died in 1970, back to life. How and when could that be accomplished?

 The idea is to create an avatar that looks and acts like my father, based on the information we have about him, or anyone else. The more information we have about that person, the better the job we can do. The goal would be to pass a “Fredric Kurzweil Turing test,” that is for the avatar to be indistinguishable from the original person to the people who knew that person. In the case of my father, that is becoming an easier test as our memories of him are fading.

Do you believe that humans, using technological advances, could achieve immortality? If so, how? And when?

 The goal is to achieve a tipping point where science is adding more time than is going by. That’s not a guarantee of immortality, but it would change the metaphor of the sands of time running out. I believe we are about 15 years away from such a tipping point.

Could there be a time, as Google co-founder Larry Page said in 2004, that people simply think of a question and their smartphone tells them the answer?

 My project at Google is to help create a technology that will become familiar with your concerns and will find information that will meet your needs without your having to ask for it. For example, it might pop up and present — in your field of view using augmented reality — “you expressed concern about whether vitamin B12 is being absorbed by your cells, here is research released 12 seconds ago that shows a better way to do this.”

A December story in Bloomberg BusinessWeek described you as a “quasi-religious figure” because of your role as the leading advocate for Singularity. A May 2009 Newsweek article about you and Singularity said the “last thing humanity needs right now is an apocalyptic cult masquerading as science.” How do you respond to those descriptions and accusations?

 My research has been a scientific study of technology trends, and my books, such as “The Singularity is Near,” have thousands of scientific citations. It is a thesis based on empirical data and analysis. Of course, any scientific insight will have philosophical implications, but that is not where I started. These sorts of accusations are content-free ad-hominem attacks by people who simply don’t like the conclusions but are unable to criticize my actual arguments.

Will the technological advances you predict change the way we are born? For instance, will be people be born smarter with computerlike brains already in place?

 That’s not likely to be an early development, just as we wait now at least a little while before introducing computers to children. But eventually we will probably augment brains at an early age.

Do you think there could be a time when machines take on minds of their own and wage war with humans? If so, when? And who would win?

 I think human and computer intelligence will be mixed together just as it is now. We have conflicts today between groups of humans that are both enhanced by intelligent technology. A war between a group that used the latest technology and a group of humans who eschewed modern technology would be a very short war.

 

No-Walls Studio Production,
                                          Alexis - 2013

We R the DED

We R the DED

 Something kind of hit me today I looked at you
Wondered if you saw things my way
People will hold me to blame
It hit me today, it hit me today

I'm taking it hard all the time, why don't I pass it by?
Just reply, I've changed your mind

 I'm fighting with the eyes of the lie
Taking it hard, taking it hard, but now

We feel that we are paid for, choking on you nightly
They tell me, "Son, we want you" be elusive, but don't walk far
For we're breaking in the new boys, deceive your next of kin
For your dancing where the dogs decay, defecating ecstasy

You're just an ally of the lecher pro creator for the virgin king
But I love you in your bumpy-bumps and your nimble dress BETRAYALS
Oh, dress yourself, my urchin one, for I hear them on the rails
Because of all I've seen, because of all I've said we are the dead

 One thing kind of touched me today
I looked at you and counted all the times we had laid
Pressing my love through the night
Knowing it's right, knowing it's right

Now I'm hoping some one will care
Living on the breath of a hope to be shared
Trusting on the sums of my love,
That some one will care, some one will care, but no - I ho

 We're today's scrambled creatures locked in tomorrows double feature
Heavens on the pillow, it's silence competes with hell
It's a twenty-four hour service, guaranteed to make you tell
And the streets are full of brass men, bent on getting hung and buried

And the legendary curtains are drawn 'round baby bankrupt
Who sucks you while you're sleeping
It's the theater of financiers, count them, fifteen 'round the table
White and dressed to kill

Oh, caress yourself, my juicy, for my hands have all but whithered
Oh, dress yourself my urchin one, for I hear them on the stairs
Because of all I've seen, because of all I've said
We are the dead - we are dead - we are the dead.

Who am I?

Am I light source without a switch?

What are the cracked images reflected in the bathroom mirror …

I was a De Kneig stylized façade, and then like a space

Permutating-Pompidou-centre - I landed amongst the homogenous coloured jungle of an old city.

I was the plastic-edifice on the set of a movie I never wanted to see.

Now-the-bleak-austerity-of-a-weeping-wall.

Why do the soulless duple clones cling-to-me?

 And the colour supplement contributing pseudo wait on my command.

What is my life?

My portrait is of an-empty-room, a broken-lipstick, a nomad on a journey through time, the-last-call.

I am, an-artist-haunted vis a vis an-artist-haunting.

 

 

 

 

The End of the World

The End of the World -

 

 There's always been good business predicting the end of the world. The "end" of the "world" is pretty badly defined by most supernatural predictions. The rapture, for instance, is really just the beginning of the end, and signals civilization being sent back to the Stone Age for a bit while The Chosen are whisked up to heaven. Meanwhile, predictions of the end of the world in 2012 were wide-ranging, from a comet just tearing Earth in half (the rest of the universe spinning on as usual) to the complete and total end of everything ever. The latter is less scary because it's not as if anything will be around afterwards to care.

  In the case of some of the science-based predictions for how the universe will go on according to our knowledge of physics, there's no "end" as such. Matter and energy still exist, but in their lowest energy and most uniform state: the rub being that this state precludes the interactions needed to produce emergent structures. This includes stars, planets, and intelligent entities capable of experiencing the universe.

Here are some examples, with the predicted date of the end of all things.

Unspecified date

•   Zoroastrianism claims that the end of the world will happen when a comet, called Gochihr, strikes the earth. It will cause all the world's metals to melt and will burn up the world. At the same time, sinners and the pious will pass through this river of molten metal. Sinners will have their sins burnt away and the pious will feel like they're "passing through warm milk."

28^th century BCE

•   The oldest known prediction of the end of the world is recorded on Assyrian tablets: "Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching." Sound familiar?

1^st century CE

•   Early Christianity: Second Coming. Any day now! Revelation: Armageddon. Indeed, the very word "Apocalypse" is the Greek word for revelation.

7^th century

•   Muslims believed in the Qiyamah (Last Judgment) during which time Jesus ⁵ will come to earth, end all wars, and kill ad-Dajjal - the Muslim anti-Christ. Then every person who ever lived will be bodily resurrected, before being judged by God. The faithful go to heaven, and the rest to hell. Apparently there's also room for some "People of the Book," i.e. Jews and Christians.

 

A little grandiose, eh?

16^th century

•   Circa 1504: Painter Sandro Botticelli believed he was living during the End Times/Tribulation, according to an inscription on his painting The Mystical Nativity.
•  1533: Michael Stifel, Judgement Day. A common saying in German for PIDOOMA is to "calculate" or "talk a Stifel."

18^th century

•   1719: Jacob Bernoulli: a comet seen in 1680 would return and collide with the Earth. Said comet hasn't been seen since.
•  
• 19^th century

•  The "Great Disappointment": William Miller predicts the end would come in 1843... Then 1844... Oh. His many thousands of followers were not put off by this utter failure, and some became the Seventh Day Adventists. They are still waiting.
• Native Americans in Spring 1891: All the whites are gonna die really soon!

20^th century

• 1914: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon. 1915: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon. 1918: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon. 1920: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon. 1925: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon. 1941: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.
• 1975: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon. mid-1970s: David Wilkerson: Worldwide economic depression. 1977: William Branham: Destruction of the U.S., termination of all governments into a world government, Second Coming.¹³1977: Pyramidologist Adam Rutherford: Beginning of the Millennium. 1978: Jim Jones took his cult with him.
• 1979-1980: John Todd: Installation of a world government ruled by the Illuminati, with Jimmy Carter as the anti-Christ.
• 1980: Pat Robertson: "A year of sorrow and bloodshed that will have no end soon, for the world is being torn apart, and my kingdom shall rise from the ruins of it."
• 1981: Hal Lindsey: Pre-tribulational rapture.
• 1982: Pat Robertson: Great Tribulation.
• 1982: R.E. McMaster: World War III and/or economic depression, based on cyclical theory.
• 1985: Pat Robertson: Worldwide economic collapse.
• 1988: Hal Lindsey: Second Coming.
• 1988: Edgar Whisenant: Second Coming.
• 1989: Edgar Whisenant: Second Coming. 1990: Elizabeth Clare Prophet: Global thermonuclear war.
• 1991: Louis Farrakhan: The looming Gulf War would be the "War of Armageddon which is the final war."
• 1992: Rollen Stewart: Second Coming.
• 1992: Mission for the Coming Days: Second Coming. 1994: Harold Camping: Second Coming. 1994: Some Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon. 1997: Heaven's Gate: Earth changes and a UFO abduction coinciding with the Hale-Bopp comet. Mass suicide in the hopes of hitching a ride on said UFOs.
• 1997: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon. 1998: The Church of the SubGenius: the Rupture. Every year on July 5th, they meet and party in reverence, certain that it will happen this year. (Recent writings have inverted the year to "8661.")
• 1999-2000: David Wilkerson: Worldwide economic depression. 2000: Y2K: Collapse of civilization.

21^st century

• 2003: George W. Bush claimed that Operation Iraqi Freedom was necessary "to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse." (Plan no longer in progress.)
• 2005-2026: William Strauss and Neil Howe: A crisis period in the U.S. comparable in effect to the American Revolution, Civil War, and Great Depression/WWII.  2007: Hal Lindsey: Second Coming.
• 2007: Pat Robertson: Great Tribulation.
• 2008: Ronald Weinland: Start of the final years of Man's rule on Earth.
• 2008: Sarah Palin: believes she is of the "Final Generation" and will see the End Times during her lifetime. Thankfully, over 9 million Americans disagreed.
• 2008: The Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world with black holes, strangelets or something similarly scary and sciencey. (You can keep up to date with whether this has happened yet here.
• 2009: David Wilkerson: Earth-shattering calamity engulfing the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America experiencing riots and blazing fires. 2011: Harold Camping: Second coming/rapture. May 21st, to be precise. He put up billboards! Later postponed to October 21st, but again nothing came of it. Camping will hold on to the money people sent him for the time being or for good, though followers were encouraged to drain their savings for Camping's campaign funds and many are deeply disappointed.
• 2012: But of course! Un-naturally failed apocalypse, NASA pushed away space rock expected to hit in series of attempts to bombard asteroids in previous years. (They even did this to the moon!) The following trail fell to/passed Earth in early 2013.)
• 2013: 2012 was just a warm up, the real bad stuff starts 2013 or something and it seems Isaac Newton predicted it. 2014: World War III, resurrected Nostradamus prophecy of a fire in the North for the reference of the end of the age of the fifth sun,^[38] believed to be a specific Northern region of a country, current speculation is North Korea, as relative to the resolution of a Pope prediction. Unspecified time during the reign of Pope Francis, the pope succeeding Benedict XVI. Mediaeval Saint Malachy supposedly predicted Peter the Roman (Petrus Romanus) would be the last pope, Rome would be destroyed and a terrible judge would judge his people, The end. Doomsayers have already started shoehorning the new pope into the prediction. 2018: Hal Lindsey: Second Coming.
• 2028: Fred Clark: A tongue-in-cheek offer guaranteeing 15 years of Bible-prophecy hucksterism for four easy payments of $39.99. 2030: Approximate date of a mass extinction event predicted by Bob Geldof. Myles Allen, of Oxford University claims "Competing hyperbole" are unhelpful in understanding real climate change.
• 2035: Asteroid. 2036: More asteroids.
• 2037: Hal Lindsey: Third Coming.
• 2038: Deteteoration of the fundamental older technology that still underlies the most crucial systems today. 2040: Even more asteroids. 2039: End of life, the universe and everything. Also known as the Ascension.

87^th century

•  8661: Updated end of the world date for the Church of the SubGenius (from the original 1998).

112^th century

•  11103: The Doomsday argument, first stated in 1983, predicts that there is a 95% chance that the human species will go extinct within 9120 years.
•  
• 8,000,000^th century

•  According to current models, the Sun is expected to increase in luminosity by 10% in the next 800 million years. This will cause several changes to the climate that will make the continued existence of life on Earth impossible, starting with photosynthetic organisms and eventually killing off all life.
•  
• 50 millionth century

•  5 billion years from now: According to most accepted models of stellar evolution, the sun will eventually run out of hydrogen fuel to fuse into helium and will expand, becoming a red giant as a result. This red giant might get large enough to swallow the Earth's orbit, but even if it doesn't, the Earth will be roasted to a cinder crisp. One school of thought predicts that the drag from the sun's outer gas envelope will cause the Earth to spiral into the sun and crash into its core; but as with all things scientific, there is another school of thought that says this won't happen. It happens on Doctor Who, so that means it will happen unless it doesn't (because of the changes the Doctor made to the timeline). Either way, watch out for Daleks.

200 millionth century

•  20 billion years from now Judging from the current rate of universal inflation — the rate at which the expansion of the universe is accelerating — in 20 billion years, the universe will be expanding so rapidly that atoms will no longer be able to hold on to their electrons. This predicted event is known as the "Big Rip." Blame dark energy.

3×10^{41 st} century

•  3×10⁴³ years from now: estimated time for all nucleons in the observable universe to decay, if the proton half-life takes the largest possible value (10⁴¹ years). This is the Total Existence Failure of the entire universe, anything complex enough to be considered life that would care about it would likely have evaporated to nothing long before this. Out of all the above, this is the most likely.

 

 There's always been good business predicting the end of the world. The "end" of the "world" is pretty badly defined by most supernatural predictions. The rapture, for instance, is really just the beginning of the end, and signals civilization being sent back to the Stone Age for a bit while The Chosen are whisked up to heaven. Meanwhile, predictions of the end of the world in 2012 were wide-ranging, from a comet just tearing Earth in half (the rest of the universe spinning on as usual) to the complete and total end of everything ever. The latter is less scary because it's not as if anything will be around afterwards to care.

 In the case of some of the science-based predictions for how the universe will go on according to our knowledge of physics, there's no "end" as such. Matter and energy still exist, but in their lowest energy and most uniform state: the rub being that this state precludes the interactions needed to produce emergent structures. This includes stars, planets, and intelligent entities capable of experiencing the universe.

Here are some examples, with the predicted date of the end of all things.

Unspecified date

•   Zoroastrianism claims that the end of the world will happen when a comet, called Gochihr, strikes the earth. It will cause all the world's metals to melt and will burn up the world. At the same time, sinners and the pious will pass through this river of molten metal. Sinners will have their sins burnt away and the pious will feel like they're "passing through warm milk."

28^th century BCE

•   The oldest known prediction of the end of the world is recorded on Assyrian tablets: "Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching." Sound familiar?

1^st century CE

• Early Christianity: Second Coming. Any day now!
•  Revelation: Armageddon. Indeed, the very word "Apocalypse" is the Greek word for revelation.

7^th century

•  Muslims believed in the Qiyamah (Last Judgement) during which time Jesus⁵ will come to earth, end all wars, and kill ad-Dajjal - the Muslim anti-Christ. Then every person who ever lived will be bodily resurrected, before being judged by God. The faithful go to heaven, and the rest to hell. Apparently there's also room for some "People of the Book," i.e. Jews and Christians.

 

A little grandiose, eh?

16^th century

•  Circa 1504: Painter Sandro Botticelli believed he was living during the End Times/Tribulation, according to an inscription on his painting The Mystical Nativity.
•  1533: Michael Stifel, Judgement Day.  A common saying in German for PIDOOMA is to "calculate" or "talk a Stifel."

18^th century

• 1719: Jacob Bernoulli: a comet seen in 1680 would return and collide with the Earth. Said comet hasn't been seen since. 19^th century

• The "Great Disappointment": William Miller predicts the end would come in 1843... Then 1844... Oh.  His many thousands of followers were not put off by this utter failure, and some became the Seventh Day Adventists. They're still waiting.
• Native Americans in Spring 1891: All the whites are gonna die really soon!

20^th century

• 1914: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.
• 1915: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.
• 1918: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.
• 1920: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.
• 1925: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.
• 1941: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddoon.
• 1975: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.
• Mid-1970s: David Wilkerson: Worldwide economic depression.
• 1977: William Branham: Destruction of the U.S., termination of all governments into a world government, Second Coming.¹³
• 1977: Pyramidologist Adam Rutherford: Beginning of the Millennium.
• 1978: Jim Jones took his cult with him.
• 1979-1980: John Todd: Installation of a world government ruled by the Illuminati, with Jimmy Carter as the anti-Christ.
• 1980: Pat Robertson: "A year of sorrow and bloodshed that will have no end soon, for the world is being torn apart, and my kingdom shall rise from the ruins of it."
• 1981: Hal Lindsey: Pre-tribulational rapture.
• 1982: Pat Robertson: Great Tribulation.
• 1982: R.E. McMaster: World War III and/or economic depression, based on cyclical theory.  1985: Pat Robertson: Worldwide economic collapse.
• 1988: Hal Lindsey: Second Coming.
• 1988: Edgar Whisenant: Second Coming.
• 1988: Colin Deal: Second Coming.
• 1989: Edgar Whisenant: Second Coming.
• 1990: Elizabeth Clare Prophet: Global thermonuclear war.
• 1991: Louis Farrakhan: The looming Gulf War would be the "War of Armageddon which is the final war."
• 1992: Rollen Stewart: Second Coming.
• 1992: Mission for the Coming Days: Second Coming.
• 1994: Harold Camping: Second Coming.
• 1994: Some Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.
• 1997: Heaven's Gate: Earth changes and a UFO abduction coinciding with the Hale-Bopp comet. Mass suicide in the hopes of hitching a ride on said UFOs.
• 1997: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.
• 1998: The Church of the SubGenius: the Rupture. Every year on July 5th, they meet and party in reverence, certain that it will happen this year. (Recent writings have inverted the year to "8661.")
• 1999-2000: David Wilkerson: Worldwide economic depression.
• 2000: Y2K: Collapse of civilization.

21^st century

• 2003: George W. Bush claimed that Operation Iraqi Freedom was necessary "to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse."  (Plan no longer in progress.)
• 2005-2026: William Strauss and Neil Howe: A crisis period in the U.S. comparable in effect to the American Revolution, Civil War, and Great Depression/WWII.
•  2007: Hal Lindsey: Second Coming.
• 2007: Pat Robertson: Great Tribulation.
• 2008: Ronald Weinland: Start of the final years of Man's rule on Earth.
• 2008: Sarah Palin: believes she is of the "Final Generation" and will see the End Times during her lifetime. Thankfully, over 9 million Americans disagreed.
• 2008: The Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world with black holes, strangelets or something similarly scary and sciencey. (You can keep up to date with whether this has happened yet here.⁾
• 2009: David Wilkerson: Earth-shattering calamity engulfing the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America experiencing riots and blazing fires.
• 2011: Harold Camping: Second coming/rapture. May 21st, to be precise.  He put up billboards!^[32] Later postponed to October 21st, but again nothing came of it. Camping will hold on to the money people sent him for the time being or for good, though followers were encouraged to drain their savings for Camping's campaign funds and many are deeply disappointed.
• 2012: But of course! Un-naturally failed apocalypse, NASA pushed away space rock expected to hit in series of attempts to bombard asteroids in previous years.  (They even did this to the moon!) The following trail fell to/passed Earth in early 2013. ;)
• 2013: 2012 was just a warm up, the real bad stuff starts 2013 or something and it seems Isaac Newton predicted it.
• 2014: World War III, resurrected Nostradamus prophecy of a fire in the North for the reference of the end of the age of the fifth sun, believed to be a specific Northern region of a country, current speculation is North Korea, as relative to the resolution of a Pope prediction.
• Unspecified time during the reign of Pope Francis, the pope succeeding Benedict XVI. Mediaeval Saint Malachy supposedly predicted Peter the Roman (Petrus Romanus) would be the last pope, Rome would be destroyed and a terrible judge would judge his people, the end.  Doomsayers have already started shoehorning the new pope into the prediction.
• 2018: Hal Lindsey: Second Coming.
• 2028: Fred Clark: A tongue-in-cheek offer guaranteeing 15 years of Bible-prophecy hucksterism for four easy payments of $39.99.
• 2030: Approximate date of a mass extinction event predicted by Bob Geldof. Myles Allen, of Oxford University claims "Competing hyperbole" are unhelpful in understanding real climate change.
• 2035: Asteroid.
• 2036: More asteroids.
• 2037: Hal Lindsey: Third Coming.
• 2038: Deteteoration of the fundamental older technology that still underlies the most crucial systems today.
• 2040: Even more asteroids.
• 2039: End of life, the universe and everything. Also known as the Ascension.

87^th century

• 8661: Updated end of the world date for the Church of the SubGenius (from the original 1998).

112^th century

• 11103: The Doomsday argument, first stated in 1983, predicts that there is a 95% chance that the human species will go extinct within 9120 years.
•  
• 8,000,000^th century

• According to current models, the Sun is expected to increase in luminosity by 10% in the next 800 million years. This will cause several changes to the climate that will make the continued existence of life on Earth impossible, starting with photosynthetic organisms and eventually killing off all life.

50 millionth century

• 5 billion years from now: According to most accepted models of stellar evolution, the sun will eventually run out of hydrogen fuel to fuse into helium and will expand, becoming a red giant as a result. This red giant might get large enough to swallow the Earth's orbit, but even if it doesn't, the Earth will be roasted to a cinder crisp. One school of thought predicts that the drag from the sun's outer gas envelope will cause the Earth to spiral into the sun and crash into its core; but as with all things scientific, there is another school of thought that says this won't happen.  It happens on Doctor Who, so that means it will happen unless it doesn't (because of the changes the Doctor made to the timeline). Either way, watch out for Daleks.

200 millionth century

• 20 billion years from now Judging from the current rate of universal inflation — the rate at which the expansion of the universe is accelerating — in 20 billion years, the universe will be expanding so rapidly that atoms will no longer be able to hold on to their electrons. This predicted event is known as the "Big Rip." Blame dark energy.

3×10^{41 st} century

• 3×10⁴³ years from now: estimated time for all nucleons in the observable universe to decay, if the proton half-life takes the largest possible value (10⁴¹ years).  This is the Total Existence Failure of the entire universe, anything complex enough to be considered life that would care about it would likely have evaporated to nothing long before this. Out of all the above, this is the most likely.

 

 THE SECOND COMING

 

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

What a negative waste of time.