No.10 - Isaac Newton's Scribbled Prediction
If physics is the mother of all sciences and Isaac Newton is the father of physics, you can understand why the Royal Society considers Newton the most important scientist in history. His 1687 Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica introduced the world to the laws of motion and universal gravitation, but in reality these were the pursuits of a young man. In fact, Newton spent the bulk of his life as an apocalyptic thinker who scoured the Bible looking for insight into the end of the world. Although he had expressly avoided putting a date to his interpretations, in 2003, news hit that on one occasion he did. Near the end of his life, in an offhand calculation written on the back of an envelope, he suggested the year 2060.
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No.9 - The Witch Hunter's Predictions
The Puritan preacher Cotton Mather might have been good at stirring up anti-witch sentiment, but the man was a flop when it came to predicting the end of the world. Mather, who preached at the First Church of Boston, gave his flock no fewer than four such dates, beginning with the year 1697.
When 1697 came and went, he fiddled with the numbers and arrived at 1736. Likely realizing this was too far in the future to pay him any dividends, he revised it to 1716. When that year came and went, he shifted it ahead to 1717. He should have considered himself lucky that he hadn't been accused of stupidity and hanged like a witch. Instead, he kept insisting that the end was imminent, only quitting in 1728 when death itself succeeded in silencing him.
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No.8 - Thirteen-Grandma Guilt Trip Prophecy
In 2004, a New York City event called the Grandmother's Counsel brought together 13 select grandmothers from around the globe, elders who held high status in their communities. Their meeting, they said, had been prophesied hundreds of years ago, and yes, they knew they were a little tardy, but they brought with them a singular and terrifying message: "The end is near."
This terrifying doomsday prediction has many wondering whether this whole fiasco could have been avoided if a few grandchildren had been a little better about responding to grandma's letters.
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No.7 - Ron The Prophet's Last Great Day
In case you were concerned that nobody was looking at 2010 as a potential candidate for the end of the world, take heart: it appears that author and minister Ronald Weinland has in fact done just that. Having only been made a prophet by God in 1997, Weinland has worked overtime to predict the end, and in his second book, 2008 - God's Final Witness, he seems to very loosely point to a nebulous date in 2010, the "last great day," when billions will die. Weinland might want to reconsider his apocalypse; after all, he is the owner of The-End.com, which is a pretty damn good URL (not something you would want to give up prematurely). Plus, his overwhelming arrogance makes him the kind of person no one would want to spend eternity with anyway.
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No.6 - Pope Innocent's Number Of The Beast
Pope Innocent III eschewed modesty; his power-mad pontificate -- which reigned from 1198 to 1216 -- redefined the role of the pope as something closer to demigod than human. He saw himself as Melchizedek, the biblical priest-king, and hated Islam so much that he insisted that Muslims (and Jews) wear certain clothing for easier identification. He equated the prophet Muhammad with the alleged beast of The Book of Revelation, going so far as to predict the world's end in 1284, a figure he reached by adding 666 to 618, the year he calculated Islam had been founded. His encyclical Quia Maior called for the Fifth Crusade, meaning Innocent's III prophecy was likely little more than papal propaganda to get the troops jazzed to give their lives over to yet another military endeavor.
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No.5 - The Third Fuzzy Secret Of Fatima
In 1917, 10-year-old Portuguese peasant Lucia Santos, along with her two cousins, claimed that they were being visited by a hazy, chatty image of the Virgin Mary.
Over a decade later, Lucia, now a nun, began writing her memoirs, in which she said, for the first time, that the ghost had imparted to her three secret predictions, the third of which was so horrible that it was kept from the public for almost seven decades -- plenty of time for rampant public speculation, which leaned toward the idea that it foretold the end of the world. The secret was revealed in 2000, exposing Santos as a student from the Nostradamus school of prophecy; the secret was so vague that it could be read to predict the end of anything, from the end of the world to the end of 8-tracks.
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No.4 - Michael Travesser's Halloween Armageddon
On the night of October 31, 2007, an extraordinary thing happened: the end of the world was caught on tape, and it can be viewed right now at Hulu. This apparent contradiction was made possible by a UK film crew, recording footage for The End of the World Cult, a documentary on the Lord Our Righteousness Church, led by a self-proclaimed messiah named Wayne Bent, who calls himself Michael Travesser. Fears of a planned mass suicide that Halloween night proved to be unfounded when, shortly after midnight, Travesser is seen leading his inexplicably giddy and plainly not-dead flock out of a building on the compound and toward the camera crew. Today, Travesser sits in a New Mexico prison, a convicted child molester and unsuccessful doomsday predictor.
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No.3 - Y2K
As doomsday prophecies go, Y2K was the perfect storm. It brought together a number of rousing elements: Frankenstein-like fears of man-made technology gone awry, the end of a millennium, disaster imagery on a biblical scale, even an exact moment of doom: 12:00 a.m. on January 1, 2000.
Instead, Y2K became the most lucrative doomsday in history. High-end estimates of how much money was spent trying to "fix" the problem reach a mind-blowing $600 billion. In the final analysis, Y2K proved the opposite of what so many feared: It proved that successful global cooperation was indeed possible in the face of a global threat.
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No.2 - The 2012 Mayan Prophecy
What began as a manipulative sleight-of-hand, the Mayan calendrics prediction for the end of the world in December 2012 has turned into the most egregious eschatological pile-on that history has ever had the misfortune to witness. 2012 no longer belongs purely to the Mayan-calendar folks and their many followers; it is now the gathering place for asteroid impacters, planet Nibiru-believers, Nostradamus groupies, and fans of magnetic field reversals, gamma ray bursts, planetary realignments, and any other kind of anomaly in the universe you can dream up.
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No.1 - The Great Disappointment
This is not only the best name in the long history of eschatology, it's the only name that should ever be used.
Baptist preacher William Miller led his flock into 1844 on the wings of a poignant dream: that the Second Coming, starring Christ himself and featuring nothing less than the realizations of the Book of Revelation, was imminent. Although Miller was reluctant to offer an actual date, he eventually relented, agreeing to October 22, 1844. By the following day, the Millerite movement was as good as dead
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