Well, it’s the 14th of February and you know what that means. Yes, that’s right. The world didn’t end on Friday 13th. So, and only because I have half an hour to spend on frivolities, I thought I’d take a look at a few other instances when the world didn’t end.
Gregory of Tours, a French bishop and historian, calculated that the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world would take place between 799–806 CE. Unfortunately, Greg was mistaken but he never found out. He died in 594.
The German astrologer, Johannes Stöffler (crazy name, crazy guy), predicted that a planetary alignment in Pisces on 20 February 1524 would unleash a catastrophic flood and signal the start of the Millennium. I don’t know what Johannes’ qualifications for being an astrologer were, but counting in thousands clearly wasn’t one of them.
The English theologian and philosopher William Whiston predicted that a comet would strike Earth on 16 October 1736, destroying the world. His forecast was taken so seriously, panic and public alarm surged through London (which probably says more about the people of London at that time than it does of anything else). Needless to say, the only disaster to occur was a massive hit to William’s credibility.
French astronomer Camille Flammarion warned that the 1910 passage of Halley’s Comet might fill Earth’s atmosphere with deadly cyanogen gas, potentially extinguishing life. Public panic spread, with vendors selling “comet pills” and gas masks, but Halley’s Comet passed without incident. Camille was, one would guess, severely embarrassed, but Camille probably pointed to the word ‘might’ at those French dinner parties.
Evangelist Wilbur Glenn Voliva, leader of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion (was it only in Zion, or did they have branches everywhere?), predicted the world would end in 1923. When nothing happened, he postponed the date to 1927. Well, we’re all still here Wilbur. Maybe you forgot to divide the first number you thought of?
Herbert W. Armstrong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God (they actually still exist but have changed their name in a decision, probably unrelated, to embarrassment of their founder being repeatedly wrong), told members that the Rapture would occur in 1936, exclusively saving his flock. When it failed, he rescheduled the event. The he rescheduled the event again. And again. Each new failed prediction proved to be as bonkers as Herbert. Despite many failures to predict the end of the world, his church grew into an influential religious movement, thereby proving the adage “you can’t teach stupid”.
In more modern failed predictions, Evangelical activist Rollen Stewart, famous for displaying “John 3:16” signs at televised events, predicted the Rapture would occur on September 28, 1992. Nothing happened in the Rapture series of events, except later that year he was arrested for kidnapping and other crimes.
Radio evangelist Harold Camping predicted the Rapture would occur on September 6, 1994 (you have to admire someone who hangs a specific date on an event). When nothing occurred on 6th September, he immediately revised the date to 29th September 1994. Nothing occurred then either, except TLC got to Number One with Unpretty (and the video features much hand-waving in the style of Cora Corman as seen in the underrated film, Music and Lyrics):
I’m starting to think that some of these soothsayer types might be scammers.
Similarly, the Millenium Bug failed to produce the disasters predicted for 01.01.2000
No banks lost all our money and no planes fell from the sky.
Those of us with a modicum of common sense knew this would be the case… but it didn’t stop me from getting triple overtime by just sitting on my backside throughout the New Year celebrations and confirming it.
I’m sure that a catastrophic disaster will befall the planet at some point, but I’m guessing we’ll only have 4 mins in which to predict it.
It was layers of stuff. On the application layer we disconnected the non-crit systems we hadn’t been able to test until the 3rd party suppliers gave us their test results. The in-house crit systems all got tested; only one failed when we put Dev into a post-millennium sandbox and changed the clocks. On the base end of things, a bunch of system clocks failed on Win servers but the Unix boxes were fine. Funny old world.
The thing with the millennium bug is that it was a non-event because it was addressed before that date. I can tell you with certainty that had the collective software engineers of the world sat on their hands instead, it would have been a very different outcome. Would banks have lost money? Possibly. Would airliners have fallen from the sky? Probably not. But sure as eggs are eggs, various billing systems would have done very interesting things.
Oh yeah, fair point.
I’m sure that those in the know took mitigating steps wherever they could.
Those that didn’t know better, though, took heed of all the scaremongering and got themselves into a right panic over any piece of equipment that had a chip in it… whether that chip knew what the date was, or not. Hence my triple-rate overtime 🙂