Throughout history, humanity has been fixated on its own demise. It seems paradoxical in nature — after all, Darwin proved evolution gives rise during the clamor for survival, yet our apocalyptic daydreams stray from that premise. We find that the lust for the end never dies, but resurfaces, with each new theory inching dangerously close to reality. Where the world once believed in celestial fate and godly intervention, mainstream media today broadcast plain, daunting messages featuring climate change, overpopulation, artificial intelligence, and disease. Apocalypse may not be tired of the spotlight, but we are sick of its reminder, where the words “The End is Nigh’” no longer arouse mania, but the continued lull of life. 

But that summarized hundreds of years far too quickly, so let’s take it from the beginning: how did the apocalyptic dream start, if so ironic, in essence? The answer, simply, is pessimistic storytellers — who were unimpressive, at best. These rudimentary theories looked hopeful besides a modern eschatologist’s vision of the end, as most early predictions were merely blunt narratives of natural disasters and catastrophic events. The fun hadn’t quite started until the real terror settled in, people set the absurdity of sudden death aside, and accepted tragic annihilation as the ultimatum. It’s as if humanity is partly sadistic, for we could have theorized that we would gently drift to a permanent sleep once the world decides its time is due; but no, fire-rain or an everlasting winter would suit our demise far better. 

Yet before all that, the apocalypse wasn’t so much of a bad thing. Prior to generating panic, it was simply a necessity in religious texts. Take, for example, the Bible, the Torah, or the Quran, which — in order to gain the title of an all-knowing, all-encompassing work — each feature a section dedicated to the end of the world. Apocalyptic writers were typically those with overwhelming concerns for the future, and in search of appeasement for the stress of the time period; after all, fear tends to align with greater affinity to an unascertained fate rather than an unsettling reality.

Judaism, for example, favored a comforting conclusion over the catastrophic narrative: a Messianistic Age, with universal peace and prosperity for all. In Jewish literature, such as in the Psalms of the Pharisee, the apocalypse was beautiful. It emerged conjointly with messianism — with the messiah, the world could end softly — and was never intended as a source of anxiety.  Due to its uplifting message, the apocalyptic writer wrote in times of suffering, calling attention to a future that transcends the daily human experience. 

Similarly, both Christianity and Islam found comfort in the apocalypse, conjuring theories close to Jewish notions about the end of the world; The Book of Revelation declared that the world would be destroyed then reconstructed in a utopian state, and The Prophet Muhammed wrote about The Day of Judgement, where all the dead would be revived and judged once more to find their destiny in Heaven or Hell.

Clearly, the three Abrahamic religions paint pictures far from modern Hollywood tales, with paradise now twisted to winged demons, gaping pits into the abyss, and an Antichrist prepared to turn the world on its heels. It poses a question: where did the foundation for doomsday hysteria stem from, and the horrid pictures we’re now so familiar with? Was a peaceful ascension to a perfected world insufficient explanation of the end — if not, too good to be true?

Apocalypse Through Time

There are two answers: one being the oddly alluring nature of death and the unknown; the second being that apocalyptic rhetoric both reflects and fuels the political climate of the time period. A prime example of this was 16th century Italy — in other words, the approximate time frame when Girolamo Savonarola and Niccolò Machiavelli introduced their conflicting apocalyptic values to the rest of the world. 

16th century Florentines hoped to understand the political instability, social tensions, and the expulsion of the Medici family. To an extent, some feared that political tensions would clash until it corrupted the world, and demanded change to prevent the spiral to a doomsday scenario; in response, large political and religious figures wrote about the end of the world. It’s contradictory: if the world feared an apocalypse, why respond with more pessimistic prophecies? The answer is an oxymoron — the prophecies aren’t pessimistic, but instilled apocalyptic hope. Savonarola swiftly conceded to his citizens, arguing the corruption they observe is unavoidable, but despite all crises, catastrophe would abate to unveil a utopian world. His intense preaching allowed him to garner terrified, loyal supporters, proclaiming, “I am the hailstorm that shall break the heads of those who do not take shelter” — wow. Despite the brash nature of his preaching, most of his support revolved around his hope for the end, and that despite adversity, salvation awaits. This optimistic end to the world is precisely what Machiavelli opposed. To Machiavelli, it was foolishness to believe that the end of the world would be a beautiful thing. 

Between Savonarola and Machiavelli, their goals were separate: while Savonarola hoped to instill religious hope in his followers, the Piagnonis, Machiavelli was outwardly anti-Christian and implored citizens to put a collective effort towards governmental stability — yet, it wasn’t just that. Modern historians theorize Machiavelli’s writings were part of a larger mission to obliterate the Catholic Church, and while he was unsuccessful, his demand for change is what accelerated Italy into repair and recovery. Through their inspiration, their followers found peace in Savonarola’s preachings and realistic courses of action from Machiavelli, gradually resolving fears for a fateful future.

Looking beyond Italy, the 17th century saw the crisis shift to England, where Thomas Hobbes emerged as a dominant apocalyptic thinker — though, to some extent, he was also an anti-apocalyptic thinker. Through his life, England lived through an unprecedented political upheaval, enduring the Civil Wars of 1642-46 and 1648-51, a dismantled then reconstructed monarchy, and religious, social, and economic divisions. Amidst the chaos, the English raised the proposition that the English Civil War would signal the Second Coming of Christ (with a twofold effect: generating a fear for the approaching end and a hope for the incoming future), which Hobbes refuted as pure insanity. In fact, Hobbes has been traditionally known to reject most religious apocalyptic notions. He feared these theories greatly, aware of their large capacity to manipulate, delude, dissatisfy, or destabilize a population, and resorted to fighting “apocalypse with apocalypse.” In other words, unlike Machiavelli, rather than proposing a less idealistic apocalypse, Hobbes hoped to shift the population’s entire attention away from a religious apocalypse and towards a secular one. 

Hobbes championed that in order to end up in God’s kingdom, you must focus on the prosperity of the current time period, and by chasing a utopia we only destabilize our population further. It was a powerful way to rethink what politics should revolve around: away from distant possibilities, and towards real, sovereign issues. Though his image for the apocalypse was less comforting than any theory yet, his writings effectively instilled fear for a man-made doomsday, and proved it’s not too late for our society to reverse that fate; the more undesirable the apocalypse, the more desirable our status quo is, thus the more society will fight to preserve it. 

From the 16th to 17th centuries, the apocalypse took two meanings: the former endured the fear for the end of the world, whilst the latter demanded attention towards the utopia that may ensue afterwards. Yet in the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment began, provoking a new line of analysis for the apocalypse. Immanuel Kant defined this era as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” which transformed into his apocalyptic beliefs: most narratives of the end of the world were useful for guiding mankind and fostering our growth, evolving the human race as a whole. 

One apocalyptic belief sprung from famed physician and mathematician, Isaac Newton, who announced (posthumously, in a letter which he never intended to reach the public) that our familiarity ceases by 2060, ascending to the beautiful Second Coming of Christ that Christians have awaited for centuries. However, Newton was not the only figure engrossed in the Bible, searching for subtle messages that could give us a clue at what our end would look like — so were Enlightenment thinkers. With the footing of Hobbes’ secular apocalypse theories, a large rift grew between those still loyal to Christianity and the thinkers that fought to challenge it; on one hand, some like Isaac Newton declared the age-old Christian utopia to ensue, while others anticipated a horrifying eventuality. 

Of those against the typical utopia trope, Kant stood out, proposing the concept of human extinction. Prior to Kant’s contributions to philosophy, the consensus was that even if the human race died out, a species the same or similar to us would inevitably reemerge. Thus, the idea of the complete termination of any species, including humanity, was unfathomable; despite that fossils of extinct species were acknowledged as dead, conceptually, they weren’t irreversibly dead, but ought to return when evolution gives way for their existence once more. If not, it was accepted that the species might be deceased in one region, but lived on in another. However, Kant argued that since we are responsible for the intellect and culture that we create, which isn’t necessarily an irrevocable feature of the universe, it, too, can cease with our extinction. It is possible that upon our perishing, intelligent species may never walk the planet again. The concept was groundbreaking, and added more sparkle and jazz to the end of the world: not only would it be a terrible thing (just as Machiavelli and Hobbes prophesied), but there is no guarantee that life would exist after it. 

Piggybacking off of Kant’s statement about human extinction, in the 19th century, large conflicts such as the Napoleonic Wars and the eruption of Mount Tambora made our elimination more foreseeable than ever. Following, the first dinosaur was discovered then named in 1824, which not only indicated that the world was not thousands, but billions of years old, but further proved Kant’s proposition: if dinosaurs can go extinct, so can we. As the anxiety of an impending doom intensified, Mary Shelley, in The Last Man (1826), created what is commonly referred to as the first post-apocalyptic novel (though specifically written in reference to her overwhelming grief, not her personal fear for an apocalypse). In the spirit of inevitable demise, Shelley’s world was crippled by a slow and relentless plague, a silent force whose symptoms she never bothered to disclose — the plague was merely a metaphor, dedicated to expressing human vulnerability to complete extermination. The novel’s final image, of a lone survivor drifting across an empty earth, was more haunting than any prophecy of judgment or salvation. In it laid the rawest of fears: not just the loss of civilization, but the unspoken horror of being the last to remember it.

Though it may seem like the prospect of a utopian apocalypse had lost its prominence, it hadn’t quite faded, rekindled by those who sought divine finality in an increasingly chaotic world. Among them was William Miller, an American farmer-turned-preacher whose fervent interpretations of the Bible led him to an unshakable certainty: unlike Newton’s distant 2060 prophecy, Miller’s vision was not centuries away, but predicted an apocalyptic fire by “around 1843.” His followers, the Millerites, devotedly clung to his words, selling their possessions and gathering on hillsides in preparation to witness the great reckoning. And yet, when 1843 arrived with no Second Coming in sight, faith did not crumble — rather, it adapted, and the deadline shifted to October 22, 1844. As over 100,000 Christians gathered on hills, excitedly awaiting the return of their savior, they waited until midnight before realizing it was merely a “Great Disappointment.”

By the 20th century, the apocalypse was no longer confined to the pages of religious texts or philosophical speculation — it became a tangible, mechanized force, wrought by human hands. World War I, with its unprecedented scale of destruction, crushed illusions of civilization’s invulnerability. The advent of chemical warfare, mass mobilization, and industrialized death redefined catastrophe, painting a rattling future. As it turned out, the war to “end all wars” hadn’t ended anything, but proved to be a harbinger of greater calamities to come.

If World War I had shaken the world’s faith in civilization’s permanence, World War II shattered it completely. The Holocaust and the firebombing of entire cities introduced new depths of human cruelty, including the ultimate bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Though there is no way to know the exact number, by the end of World War II, nearly 45 million civilians and 15 million militants were dead, including 6 million Jewish people systematically slaughtered; the death tolls were unforeseen, and we could not be more terrified of our own capabilities. No longer was annihilation left to the whims of divine judgment — humanity itself had seized the power to end its own existence in an instant. 

Hans Morgenthau, a foundational thinker in political realism, captured the grimness of the era. For a decade and a half after the first usage of nuclear weapons by the United States, Morgenthau struggled to grapple with the full implications of humankind possessing a weapon so great. He continues with his realistic interpretation of the foreign affairs of the world, declaring that using war as a resolution tactic is common, but typically entails unexpected consequences to leaders — after all, most leaders intended for war to naturally lead into peace. Then, we enter a constant cycle of self destruction because clearly, we would win because we’re us, the enemy would lose because we hate them, and war is simply an irremovable piece of politics, so we must declare it. This links into apocalypticism, even though not directly addressed by Morgenthau, where humanity teeters on the edge of its own annihilation, trapped in the belief that war is both inevitable and necessary, even as the weapons we create threaten to erase us entirely.

Apocalypse in the 21st Century

This is when we question what apocalypse means today: are we talking about eschatology? Planets colliding? Astrology predictions? An alien invasion? No. Instead, it turns out that by the 21st century, the world no longer has the time to think about what happens billions of years into the future — literally. Our world would end before we could even fathom the universe imploding upon itself. 

It is plain to see that apocalyptic talk is nowhere near new to philosophers, but in the modern day, it grows increasingly evident that one particular person favors this rhetoric greatly: Donald J. Trump. He’s our favorite no-nonsense man who garnered the support of millions of undecided voters — now dedicated supporters — through large, dramatic, and apocalyptic statements. Preceding the 2020 election, Trump insisted that if the election did not go his way, Christmas would be cancelled, the economy would crumble, and America would be “finished.” 

Enter: climate change. And its best friend, nuclear war. Not to forget overpopulation, a pandemic outbreak, biological warfare, or even an AI takeover. As it turns out, the first two examples are the two most likely ways the world is going to end, and Trump is doing little to change that. In fact, Varney & Company on Fox Business Network featured an interview with Donald Trump, during which he dismissed climate change as “a hoax.” He continued, “In my opinion, you have a thing called weather, and you go up, and you go down,” he said. “If you look into the 1920s, they were talking about a global freezing, okay? In other words, the globe was going to freeze.” Put differently, climate change is often framed as a blue party manifestation of eco-anxiety, and only persists due to an organized gaslighting coalition resurfacing the issue. There are two problems with that analysis: first, no party wants a scalding hot December, and if denying information ceased its existence then certainly everyone would deny climate change; second, fluctuating temperatures is climate change. 

Across the past decade, in regards to anomaly temperatures, the degrees Fahrenheit above the national average have been escalating, with 2024 bearing the hottest days. As the worldwide temperatures surge, green investments remain stagnant, and our world, for once, truly approaches doomsday.

In an artistic endeavor, the large clock in Union Square, New York City was repurposed in 2020 to project a harrowing countdown: the limited time we have left to slow the proliferation of climate change. Upon its creation, we had no greater than seven years and 102 days to stop our descent to a scalding hell. Since 2020, the number has only gone down, plummeting to four years and 123 days as of the end of February 2025 — perfectly timed to leave our Earth in the gentle hands of President Trump through his four years in office. Forget the potential of an AI invasion, sweeping pandemic, or extraterrestrial creature releasing its wrath upon our planet. Within four years, we may plummet into a dead-end for recovery, naming us the honorable winners of an age-old competition: who will guess the day the apocalypse will arrive? Was it 1999? 2012? Nope, but close — for 500 points, the date may be in our lifetime. 

The persistence of apocalyptic narratives is tied to human curiosity. On a lazy day, we could be spontaneously reminded of the impermanence of our life, which is often followed by a need to discover when that end will be. Yet this dilemma is no longer a distant, unanswerable question, but a response tinged with unease: we know what our apocalypse will look like. After centuries of seeking for the end date of the world, are we now satisfied?

From Savonarola to Hobbes to Trump, philosophers and politicians have used their fair share of apocalyptic rhetoric. But now we enter a new, challenging era, one where this rhetoric crumbles under the pressure of a foreseeable doomsday. The problem extends beyond the Climate Clock: due to the sheer repetitiveness of these apocalyptic phrases, we are desensitized to the world ending, burdening each new generation with the task of helping our planet. Consequently, we are less inclined to action, and more inclined to remain absorbed in present issues; still, how long can we remain frozen in passivity, waiting until it’s too late to stop the irreversible effects of climate change?  

If we are to break free from our inactivity, we must reframe the conversation — not as an abstract inevitability, but as a tangible crisis demanding immediate intervention. The end of the world is not a prophecy, it is a choice, and one we still have the power to prevent. Our world must not end.

The end of the world is not a prophecy, it is a choice, and one we still have the power to prevent. Our world must not end.