End of the world? Not yet

Dubai - The world was supposed to end today; or so it was predicted. The Mayan apocalypse was to destroy the planet, but perhaps the asteroid hurtling through space towards planet Earth has lost its way. All over the world, reports had surfaced of people preparing for the end in their own way with the expiration of the Mayan calendar. However, this isn’t the first time that a predicted apocalypse has proven to be just a rumour or a myth. Over 200 predictions have already been made about the day the world will end. One of the most popular incidents occurred In 2011 when Harold Camping, a radio broadcaster based in California, used numerology to predict that on May 21 devastating earthquakes would be witnessed all over the world, with the end of the world following on October 21. Evidently, his word was wrong. And people fell for his statement regardless of the fact that he had previously predicted the same in 1994 and 1995. Another prediction that the world remembers is the ‘Y2k’ or the ‘Millennium Bug’, which was supposed to be a computer virus that would cause many computers around the globe to malfunction causing major catastrophes and the end of society. It turned out that it was just a concern of the rollover of the calendar with the switch of century. Many computer programs stored years with only two digits and thus programmers were concerned about the switch from ’99’ to ‘00’. In 2009, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) went live in Geneva, Switzerland. In March 2010, the collider reached maximum energy and thus became a cause of concern. Several global groups claimed that the activation of the LHC experiment would bring about the end of the world. However, the experiment was not stopped and in 2012 the LHC had discovered two previously unobserved particles. These are just a few examples of previous predictions. Today, another prediction has been added to the list of these previously failed ones. And, yet, people continue to guess the date the world will come to an end. We’ll just have to wait and see which one proves to be right.