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However, fortunately, they were very wide of the mark.
What is it that makes people to attempt to predict disasters? Is it because they are trying to warn people or because they wish to scare people? Scare people, I think and thereby gain advantage over the naive.
These apocalyptic prophesies go back thousands of years and even appear in the Bible.
Their only raison d'etre is to terrify people and so gain money, power and influence over them.
Even the millennium bug turned out not to be a problem with computers functioning perfectly well after midnight despite claims by 'computer experts' that there would be a worldwide crash of stupendous importance.
The computer industry made a fortune out of scaring businesses and individuals with their deceit.
That was the scam of the Nineties to end all scams! So why all the publicity? Was it simply the dawn of a new millennium, which caused so many to make prophesies on this date rather than stick to their normal common sense? Yes, I think.
People saw the opportunity of a lifetime to rip others off and they jumped at it.
Needless to say there were hundreds of prophesies made ranging from the arrival of aliens and the Second Coming of Christ to aircraft crashes.
None of which came true.
Here are a couple of those less than accurate prophesies: May 5th was the day upon which all the planets lined up.
The prediction was that the gravitational force of all these heavenly bodies in alignment would cause massive earthquakes, huge tides and volcanic eruptions.
A lot of people also predicted that the shifting of the poles would occur during 2000 and that this would cause disastrous events such as high tides, widespread electrical failure and computer failures, which would mean economic failure for the larger countries and insurance firms.
I do not know what you think, but perhaps instead of worrying about the demise of the world (most doom-mongers have decided on the year 2012 for the obliteration of the world) we should work together to make the best of the time we have left on this planet, as well as ensuring that we pass the planet on to the next generation in the same condition as we received it.
If we behave in this way, we may hold off the day of reckoning for a long while yet.
We are far more likely to undergo apocalypse through nuclear war, global warming and events which are preventable and within our control, than cosmic events which we have little control over such as asteroids or the Sun's turning into a red dwarf and ultimately exploding.
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