Doomsday preppers who assemble their bunker and canned food, Lissek believes, are engaged in goal-oriented behaviors, which are a proven therapy in times of trouble. Beyond the universal aspects of fear and our survival response to it, certain personality traits may make individuals more susceptible to believing it's the end of the world. Social psychologist Karen Douglas at the University of Kent studies conspiracy theorists and suspects that her study subjects, in some cases, share attributes with those who believe in an impending apocalypse.
She points out that, although these are essentially two different phenomena, certain apocalyptic beliefs are also at the heart of conspiracy theories—for example, the belief that government agencies know about an impending disaster and are intentionally hiding this fact to prevent panic. Among conspiracy theorists, these convictions of mistrust and impotence make their conspiracies more precious—and real. Relatively few studies exist on the individuals who start and propagate these theories.
Douglas points out that research into the psychology of persuasion has found that those who believe most are also most motivated to broadcast their beliefs. In the Internet age, that's an easier feat than ever before. Steven Schlozman , drawing both from his experiences as a Harvard Medical School child psychiatrist and novelist his first book recounts a zombie apocalypse believes it's the post-apocalyptic landscape that fascinates people most.
They say, 'life would be so simple—I'd shoot some zombies and wouldn't have to go to school,'" Schlozman says. In both literature and in speaking with patients, Schlozman has noticed that people frequently romanticize the end times. They imagine surviving, thriving and going back to nature. Schlozman recently had an experience that eerily echoed Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds broadcast. This needs to be taken into account.
The easiest way to do that is to use human lives, rather than years, as the marker of time. Imagine a complete, chronological list of the human race: every person who ever lived or will have lived, sorted by time of birth. I will again represent it as a horizontal bar. Half the people who will ever live are in the first half of the list. Half are in the second half. These statements are necessarily right, no matter how long or short the list may end up being.
I could be relatively early, if humanity has a long, populous future ahead. This claim will be true for the people in the second half of the list the shaded area. Is it true for me?
Demographers have estimated the total number of people who ever lived at about billion. That means that about billion people were born before me. Currently, about million people are born each year. At that rate, it would take only about years for another billion more people to be born. A sharp decrease in the birthrate could postpone doomsday.
It might mean a global catastrophe leaving a handful of post-apocalyptic survivors. There has been speculation about how future technology might change the human condition.
Genetically or digitally enhanced humans could live for centuries and have few children. Yet even this does not seem to offer an easy out. What the doomsday argument says, fundamentally, is that the human future is not so long and populous as we generally think. Will we resolve our differences, save the planet, and go on to explore the galaxy? Criticisms of the doomsday argument are legion. An illustration: Alice has no idea whether a coin toss will land heads or tails.
She assigns both the same 50 percent chance — using the principle of indifference. Most people go through their daily lives assuming that tomorrow will be a lot like today. No pits of fire will open up, society won't collapse, and the world, most likely, won't end.
The most famous example these days is Harold Camping, a California-based Christian radio broadcaster who believes that May 21, , will mark Judgment Day , ushering in five months of torment for the unsaved until the universe finally ends on Oct.
Camping has bought billboards and dispatched caravans of believers around the country, warning the world of its fate. Camping has made this prediction before, in — it didn't pan out — but the thousands of failed doomsday predictions throughout history are no match for what Lorenzo DiTommaso, a professor of religion at Concordia University in Montreal, calls the "apocalyptic worldview. According to DiTommaso, the apocalyptic worldview isn't uncommon. At the extreme end are people like Camping or Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult that carried out sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in But doomsday appeals to the secular and well-adjusted as well, through books such as Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" Knopf, and movies like "The Terminator" Meanwhile, economic hard times and crises like Japan's earthquake and tsunami have spiked interested in survivalism and "prepping," or stashing food and supplies in preparation for a coming collapse.
Radio and television preacher Harold Camping predicted that the world would end on May 21, He said that only three percent of the population would survive by way of God bringing them into heaven, according to The Washington Post. The popular theory stemmed from the fact that the Mayan calendar supposedly ended on that date after 5, years.
According to legend, the village of Bugarach in France would be the only place on Earth that would be spared. A disaster movie called " " was released in starring John Cusack and Chiwetel Ejiofor, further advancing the theory. David Meade, a conspiracy theorist who calls himself a Christian numerologist, wrote in his book " Planet X — Arrival " that a hidden planet called Nibiru or Planet X would collide with Earth and destroy it on September 23, He said that the date was written in code in the pyramids of Giza , Metro UK reported.
The date came and passed without incident. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.
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