Who said end of world

If this writer were to use the Maya rhetorical device thought to be in Monument 6's inscription, the text might read:. It happened 29 years after the first Yankees victory in the World Series in And so 50 years before the year will occur, the Yankees won the World Series.

Written this way, Stuart notes, the text mentions a future time of historical importance—the year anniversary of the victory—but it does so in reference to the event at hand, i. According to INAH's Gallaga, this structure of Maya texts is what has confused modern minds, given our penchant for literal, straightforward reading.

Even if the Monument 6 inscription refers to a god coming down at the end of Bak'tun 13, it isn't a statement about the end of the world, he said. Read about the rise and fall of the Maya in National Geographic magazine. Saturno, the Boston University archaeologist, agreed that the reference to a specific date is clear in Monument 6, but added that "there's no text that follows and says, Herein will be the end of the world, and the world will end in fire.

That's not anywhere in the text. Related video: Surviving —Preparation. Rather, Saturno said, the hype around stems from dissatisfied Westerners looking to the ancients for guidance, hoping that peoples such as the Maya knew something then that could help us through difficult times now.

In any case, even if the ancient inscriptions explicitly predicted the end of the world, Saturno wouldn't be worried, given the Maya track record with long-range prophecy. All rights reserved. That's just us. Maya Prophecy for End of the World? If this writer were to use the Maya rhetorical device thought to be in Monument 6's inscription, the text might read: "On October 7, , the New York Yankees defeated the Philadelphia Phillies to win the World Series.

They didn't see the Spanish conquest coming. Share Tweet Email. Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city Caracals have learned to hunt around the urban edges of Cape Town, though the predator faces many threats, such as getting hit by cars.

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Africa 54 - November 12, VOA Africa Listen live. Berger, In either case, ultimately, if the unimaginable — whether unimaginably bad or unimaginably good — is just that, ie. In Milton, even in Hell there is something: the infernal flames may issue no light but darkness is visible Milton, [] , and hence perhaps his rather approachable Satan, who is in many ways someone we can understand.

Someone like us. Thus, even if, as Berger supposes, the apocalyptic event divides history into before and after, the narration of what comes after must, by definition, be constructed by those who were present in the time before, and the narrative of what comes afterwards must therefore not only pre-suppose that there is something and someone left after apocalypse, but also that it and they are, even if only by antithesis, partly defined by what preceded them.

At most it may be something completely different, but, whatever that may turn out to be, at that given point it is still something some thing , even if it is ultimately destined to end in nothing no thing , because at that point, at least in our imagination, there is always something to be experienced and someone experiencing it.

In effect, as confirmed by most post-apocalyptic narratives, what tends to follow imagined apocalypse is essentially the past repeated. We can only imagine something that can be articulated in the vocabulary of what we already know.

Adam and Eve lose everything but find a new world in its place. In Milton paradise is lost, but even as the first parents are expelled,. Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose, Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way. Milton, [] A fairer Paradise is founded now For Adam and his chosen Sons, whom thou A Saviour art come down to re-install, Where they shall dwell secure, when time shall be.

And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man , that is , of the angel. Revelation, , italics added.

Strangelove Kubrick, It had been long known that the air which encircled us was a compound of oxygen and nitrogen gases, in the proportion of twenty-one measures of oxygen, and seventy-nine of nitrogen, in every one hundred of the atmosphere. Oxygen, which was the principle of combustion, and the vehicle of heat, was absolutely necessary to the support of animal life, and was the most powerful and energetic agent in nature.

Nitrogen, on the contrary, was incapable of supporting either animal life or flame. An unnatural excess of oxygen would result, it had been ascertained, in just such an elevation of the animal spirits as we had latterly experienced.

It was the pursuit, the extension of the idea, which had engendered awe. What would be the result of a total extraction of the nitrogen? A combustion irresistible, all-devouring, omni-prevalent, immediate; the entire fulfilment, in all their minute and terrible details, of the fiery and horror-inspiring denunciations of the prophecies of the Holy Book.

Why need I paint, Charmion, the now disenchained frenzy of mankind? That tenuity in the comet which had previously inspired us with hope, was now the source of the bitterness of despair. In its impalpable gaseous character we clearly perceived the consummation of Fate. Thus ended all. Poe, In general, however, the general rule stands that only rarely do such scripts end with the equivalent of a blank page or screen.

Absolute destruction, leaving the Earth reduced to fire, stone and sand, has proved to be generally unthinkable, unimaginable in the sense of that which cannot be said or imagined. And after all, even in Poe, there is an afterwards, albeit only in the form of the narration made by Eiros to Charmion in the aftermath of the end of the world. In On the Beach we anticipate an absolute end, but we do not give it words or images. On the other hand, whether because we like to scare ourselves with horror stories or because we sense that in order to avoid something we must first be able to imagine it, the possibility of apocalypse as the prequel to utter obliteration remains a fundamental part of our cultural imagination, acting among other things as a mechanism of self-defence, even if ultimately, as predicted by Wittgenstinian logic, since we have not been there we cannot articulate it.

Bloodmoney , [] and millenarian evangelical Christianity the Book of Revelation; Lindsey, The Late , Great Planet Earth , have all envisaged apocalypse, whether satirically or with a proselytizing agenda, as a critique of existing societies, and usually, as a cleansing process, but always involving the possibility of the resumption of life: either on Earth or extra-terrestrially, in variations of space-stations or other-planet scenarios, or in a religious, metaphysical here-after.

Nonetheless, post-millenarian unorthodoxies, for example, while offering threatening radical difference in the aftermath of apocalypse, and maintaining that escalating sin will inevitably trigger the advent of global cataclysm, also believe in an ensuing Rapture following which the New Jerusalem will be established on Earth and the Kingdom of God will become the property of the righteous who are of course, and without exception, their coreligionists.

Membership of the Rapture club requires, of course, a preceding life of virtue. To this effect, medieval Christianity, for example, punished with death those — Manicheans, Alumbrados and other assorted heretics — who preached that life and conduct on Earth mattered not at all, since salvation and damnation were individually predestined.

For most established creeds, even on Earth, rules are rules. Could this be just in case there is nothing else? Or because whatever there might be in a possible Hereafter is thought to be organized along the same parameters as prevail here and now? Whatever the reasoning, in the end most schools of thought in one way or another make provision for an afterlife that in essence amounts to much the same as what was there before, namely a universe divided into self and other. What follows apocalypse ought to be either nothing or something epistemologically different but in effect almost always turns out to be merely a not-very-revised version of prior realities.

A wide-ranging, surprise nuclear attack on the US in the late s memories of World War II and Hiroshima at that point still fresh on the mind is narrated entirely from the point of view of a woman, Gladys, her two young daughters, and their maid, confined at home while the men are absent in the field of action. The brief glimpses Gladys gets of events in the outside world remind her of her memories of both world wars. Men do not feature significantly, other than those marginalized feminized or at least female-identified by circumstances: a school teacher on the run because, having previously played the role of Cassandra, opposed nuclear armament by the West and warned of the possibility of a nuclear attack on the US, he is now an undesirable; a young doctor too junior to have fully absorbed the lesson of unquestioning obedience to the authorities; and, at the end, the returned husband, wounded, incapacitated and in need of nursing.

Although their outsider status lends these three men a certain amount of charisma, overall the women and girls are left to cope by themselves. These, improbably, in the end succeed where the emergency measures put in place semi-authoritarian, vigilante-style policing, high-tech medicine did not. As the men go and subsequently come back, the only sustainable reality is that of a domesticity maintained by stubbornly clinging to a familiar routine.

When the men return, it is to be supposed, so will the old order. The latter was first broadcast on BBC 2 on 1 August as part of a week of programmes marking the fortieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In The Purple Cloud Shiel, , Adam Jefferson, the last man on Earth, a hero whose name counter-intuitively resonates with the possibility of new beginnings Adam in Genesis named the world, Thomas Jefferson in the newly born USA laid down the outlines of the new nation , travels around the planet setting fire to cities already partly destroyed by poison gas from a volcano which had extinguished life on Earth.

He acts therefore both as witness to the disaster and as participant in the thorough implementation of its final stages. In his travels, however, he meets a second Eve — not a first but a last woman — who may however although this is never confirmed offer the possibility of a new beginning. The Crakers, also known as the Children, are renditions of the Noble Savage and do not understand the dangers of the world.

They also do not understand technology even in its simplest of forms. In his futuristic republic, Crake, somewhat like Plato before him, sought to eliminate the disruptions of emotion: love, lust and jealousy.

He designed the Crakers to mate every three years, a frequency calculated to be sufficient to sustain population size.

No old age, none of those anxieties. The novel is narrated from the point of view of the last man on Earth, Jimmy, now referred to as Snowman, an unlikely holy son chosen by Crake as guardian of the new species following the extinction of himself and the rest of the human race. At the end of the novel, Snowman, abandoned on the beach like a reluctant St. Jimmy delays an encounter with what may be the only other surviving humans on the planet.

The following morning he seeks out the unfathomable trinity. Civilization has been destroyed, and most animal and plant species have become extinct:. They were moving south. The segments of road down there among the dead trees.

Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God, God never spoke. McCarthy, There is no sun, the atmosphere is suffused with ash, the climate has been radically altered and plants no longer grow. In a mockery of earlier consumerist societies, the remnants of humankind now consist mostly of cannibals, who, in a world where there is nothing left and no means of production, capture and eat their own species, in the form of refugees and travellers, themselves driven to scavenging for food.

When the time comes? Can you? Following her departure, the man and the boy set off on their journey in search of the sea in warmer southern climates. In a world of extreme danger in which what is left of humanity has given way to the law of the jungle, they learn that survival may require that they too abdicate their humanity.

In due course the father dies, but after a symbolic three days awaiting almost certain death, the boy encounters not the feared stranger-danger but a family of four including one son and one daughter. They live in a relatively undamaged environment and invite the boy to join them, thus setting up the beginnings of a community at least as promising or even more so than that of the first family in Genesis.

In this instance, and circumventing the unanswered Biblical quandary as to whom, other than their own siblings, were the mates available to the children of Adam and Eve, the boy in The Road will at least be able to reproduce with a girl who is not his blood relative.

Life goes on. When Spring comes, If I am already dead, Flowers will bloom as usual And the trees will be no less green than last Spring. Reality does not need me. If that is the right time for it, when else would it come, other than at the right time?

Therefore, if I die now, I will die happy, Because everything is real and everything is right. They can pray in Latin over my coffin, if they like. If they like they can dance and sing around it. I have no preferences regarding a time when I will no longer be able to have preferences. Whatever will be, when it is, is the thing that will be.

Caeiro, Something also expressed with no need for further words by the Germanic nineteenth-century Romantic imagination in search of new worlds of Caspar David Friedrich. In The Time Machine the protagonist, a scientist identified simply as the Time Traveller, sets off on a journey into the future.

His experience of time travel and the spectacle he witnesses of the evolution of the planet are told in the first-person in a narrative within a narrative.

During his time-travel adventures, the first-person narrator tells of how he observed the sun and the moon traversing the sky and the changes to buildings and landscape around him as he travels through time to the year AD ,, when most of the story takes place, and briefly even further in time. In AD , he finds an apparently peaceful, pastoral community of humans who call themselves the Eloi. The surface perfection of their playful, carefree existence is however shadowed by an inexplicable fear of the night-time hours of darkness.

This, it is revealed, is caused by regular nocturnal attacks by the Morlocks, dwellers in underground caves, who occasionally turn against their masters and literally devour them.

The eventual achievement of this goal had led to a state of stagnation characterized by unimaginative and incurious contentment. With no work to do, humans also become physically weak and small in stature and intellectually disabled. It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. I thought of the physical slightness of the [Eloi], their lack of intelligence, […] and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature.

For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and eroticism, and then come languor and decay.

Wells, [] As the world begins to grow dark, life on Earth comes to an end. I looked about me to see if traces of animal life remained. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. He recounts his experiences to his disbelieving friends, one of whom returns the following day to find that the Time Traveller had left again, this time taking a camera, presumably with the intention of collecting evidence for his claims.

Having witnessed the end of the Earth on his first trip but having omitted to check on the date of his own death, however, he does not return from his second foray into time. An equipment malfunction results in her arrival twenty years later than planned. As twenty-first century Oxford succumbs to a deadly influenza epidemic, Kivrin finds herself in England, the year of the arrival of the Black Death.

While in the twenty-first century medical resources are eventually able to gain control over the flu bacterium, back in the fourteenth century Kivrin is powerless to do anything other than watch as an entire community succumbs to a disease which she knows in the future will be curable.

Jane Waterleigh wakes up in what appears to be a hospital, trapped in a gigantic body she knows is not her own, but with no memory of her past. As her memory gradually returns she recalls taking part in a scientific experiment using a drug thought to trigger alternative states of consciousness.

As she gathers more information, she realizes that she has been propelled into the future, to a society consisting entirely of women, most of whom have never heard of men. In due course she meets a historian who gives her enough information to allow her to deduce that she is now living approximately one and a half centuries after her own time. She learns that shortly after the time of the experiment that led her to where she is now, a scientist, Dr. Perrigan, unintentionally created a virus that killed all the men in the world, leaving only women.

After a period of chaos, famine and widespread social breakdown, the small number of women who at that point had attained an advanced level of education found mainly in the medical profession , had assumed control.

Global social reconstruction leads to the formation of a Christian, four-tiered caste-based society: doctors, mothers, servitors and workers.

Upon returning to her own time the narrator seeks out Dr. Perrigan, just then embarking on the experimental work that in the future will lead to the accidental creation of the virus.

Failing to persuade him of the disastrous consequences that his research will have in the future, she resorts to murder and burns his research papers.

The story concludes with a conversation between two of her colleagues who having succeeded as expert witnesses at her trial in sparing her a charge of murder, saw her placed in a psychiatric hospital on a lesser charge of diminished responsibility. While lamenting the insanity triggered by the experimental drug and commenting in wonder at the intensity of the hallucinations it induced, one of them ponders as an afterthought that Dr.

Waterleigh had never discovered that Dr. Perrigan had left a son, also a biologist and also called Dr. Particularly notable is a lengthy argument between the first-person narrator and the historian as to whether the new all-female society is better than the old one.

The narrative voice in the novel alternates between the third and first persons, the latter in the form of the diary kept by Dr. Theodore Faron, whose name is normally shortened to Theo. The date is , the year when the last human being to be born on Earth was killed in a pub brawl in Buenos Aires. The year before, in , for reasons unknown, the sperm count of men had plummeted to zero world wide. The last generation of children are called Omegas, after the last letter in the Greek alphabet.

Thereafter, as discussed in chapter 5, and as is often the case in end-of-the-world narratives, democracy is abolished in response to global cataclysm, and dictatorship is established. An eventful plot unfolds with the revelation that Julian is pregnant not by her husband but by the now deceased Luke.

Following the deaths of both Xan and Rolf the demiurgically named Theo takes control of Council. The Woman of the Apocalypse appears in Revelation And there was seen another sign in heaven [ And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered: that , when she should be delivered , he might devour her son.

And she brought forth a man child , who was to rule all nations with an iron rod. And her son was taken up to God and to his throne. Thus, as M.