by Pete Adams

Created on: January 19, 2007   Last Updated: May 11, 2007

Having grown-up during the Cold War, the end of the world has never seemed very far away. As the threat of all-out nuclear warfare between the U.S. and the Soviet Union receded, any sense of relief has been somewhat dampened by a growing awareness that our planet is in increasingly poor ecological shape.

If nuclear warfare and environmental meltdown have not been enough to worry about, there are always the unexpected calamities. A huge meteorite or some other orbit-altering natural disaster could wipe us out at any moment. A new disease could come along and bring about a rapid end to the human presence on Earth.

Then there were some more fanciful concerns. A scientific enterprise might go wrong, creating a black hole or a dangerous quantity of anti-matter. The Mayan calendar might have ended in 2012 because they knew that they were wasting their time after that. Various interpretations of Nostradamus's doggerel that proved the world would end a week on Tuesday. People telling us that God would should His love for the righteous people by destroying His own Creation; or that the prophecies of Revelations would come to pass sooner rather than later.

Had any generation ever found itself confronted with so much imminent doom, I wondered? I talked to my father about it. He told me that when he was a child, during World War 2, he lived in fear of a mustard gas attack. Not world-ending in the wider sense, perhaps, but every bit as world-ending in the personal sense. He told me that Armageddon had seemed to be just around the corner during the Suez crisis. And that the maniacal arms race of the seventies and eighties, which gave me my own first sense of impending doom, had worried him but certainly hadn't felt like anything new.

My father, I'm happy to report, has never been the victim of a mustard gas attack. That said, he did get to witness the almost complete destruction of the city of Coventry by the Luftwaffe. Neither of us died in the fall-out of a political debate between the Americans and the Soviets. We have witnessed all manner of tragedy and disaster but, thankfully, nothing genuinely Apocalyptic.

Looking back further, there was panic as the end of the first millennium approached. Saint Clement was confidently telling people that the world was about to end, way back in the first century. There have been more predictions of the last day of Earth, survived and safely consigned to history than one can shake a stick at. You can find lists of them all over the place; they make very reassuring reading. People, it seems, have always expected the world to end sooner rather than later. Thus far, they have all been wrong to do so. Long may it stay that way.

We live, it would seem, very much on the edge of annihilation. We are, without doubt, surrounded by some very real and present dangers. Somehow, after millennia of warfare, pestilence, famine and wanton abuse of our home planet, we are still here to speculate on when our luck will finally run out. This century, like so many before it, will be make-or-break time for the human race. The form book, thus far, suggests that survival by the skin of our teeth is the most likely outcome but not one that we should take for granted.

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