It’s The End of The World As We Know It… Again

So apparently, we might all be doomed. Again.

According to Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb—a man who seems to find alien technology in everything from space rocks to his morning cereal— a comet named 3I/ATLAS that is hurtling toward us might actually be “hostile alien technology.” I’m not sure how he knows this, but it probably has something to do with a tinfoil hat and cosmic signals. At any rate, he and an army of TikTok influencers contend we’re all doomed and that we’re no match for the Aliens who will surely destroy our civilization, feast on our blood, and ravage the earth of its resources.

Don’t threaten me with a good time, Dr. Loeb.

I can already picture Bubba in South Georgia loading his shotgun, convinced he’s going to single-handedly save humanity from extraterrestrial annihilation. “Hold my beer, Barbara Jean. I’m gonna show these space varmints what American freedom looks like.” Because if there’s one thing aliens fear, it’s a guy in camouflage cargo shorts with a 12-gauge and an attitude problem.

But here’s the thing about the end of the world: I’ve been there, done that, bought the T-shirt, and returned it for store credit. At this point, I’m a seasoned veteran of apocalyptic disappointments.

My first brush with doomsday came when I was eight years old, standing in the grocery store checkout line. There it was, staring at me from the tabloid rack like a neon sign of terror: “World Will End Tuesday!” The exclamation point really sold it. Little 8-year-old me was absolutely shook. I spent the weekend convinced I’d never see my 9th birthday, which seemed particularly unfair since I hadn’t even gotten to experience the joys of puberty yet.

My parents were so concerned about my existential crisis that they scheduled a meeting with our children’s minister. This sweet lady calmly explained that if the world was truly ending, there would be signs—like water turning to blood, plagues of locusts, that sort of thing. Biblical stuff. Big, obvious, can’t-miss-it stuff.

For the next couple of years, whenever the fear crept back in, I’d sneak to the bathroom and turn on the faucet. Clear water? We’re good. The world gets to keep spinning for another day.

Looking back, my early evangelical paranoia wasn’t really my parents’ fault or even our church’s fault. We were comfortably Methodist and the topic of the end times never really came up. No, I blame Robert Tilton. That man spent years trying to get me to put my grubby little hand on the TV screen at 6:30 a.m., send him money, and threatened me with Hell and the end times if I didn’t comply. Nothing quite prepares you for adult anxiety disorders like a televangelist screaming about damnation before you head off to school each morning. Fortunately, a competing channel started playing Woody Woodpecker when I got a little older. I preferred his antics to Pastor Profit Prophet.

In 1997, the Heaven’s Gate cult decided the world was ending and planned to hitch a ride on the Hale-Bopp comet. I hope they packed their towels and had a particularly satisfying book with the words “Don’t Panic” inscribed on the cover. But alas, 39 people in matching sneakers proved that sometimes the end of the world is really just the end of common sense. The rest of us kept going to work on Monday.

Y2K was my personal favorite apocalypse. We were all going to die because computers couldn’t handle the year 2000. ATMs would explode, planes would fall from the sky, and civilization would crumble because of a date format issue. Back then, before the smartphone, when only half the adults in the country had Internet access, and when half the department stores in this great nation were still running credit cards through a metal machine that went ca-CHONK whenever you made a purchase, we thought society was too dependent on computers to function if they all went on the fritz. Society was prepared for that potential catastrophe and time marched on.

At the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2000 the lights stayed on, the banks still operated, the Internet didn’t go down, and a bunch of people were left with a basement full of stockpiled bottled water. It was clear, by the way, not red.

After 9/11, the doomsday crowd pivoted to dirty bombs. Somewhere, somehow, terrorists were going to detonate a radioactive device and end life as we know it. We were all going to glow in the dark, assuming we survived long enough to glow.

Then came 2003 and the Nibiru scare—a rogue planet supposedly on a collision course with Earth. Apparently, the ancient Sumerians knew all about it, but somehow forgot to leave better directions. Nibiru was going to destroy us all, except it didn’t exist. Minor detail.

I had a coworker who was absolutely convinced the world would end on June 6, 2006—6/6/06, the number of the beast. She didn’t understand why we were all working so hard to put out a newspaper that day when there would be nobody around to read it on June 7. Maybe she believed it wholeheartedly, maybe she just wanted to take the rest of the day off, but the papers got delivered on June 7 and the world kept turning, despite its better judgement.

Throughout the early 2000s, scientists at CERN were apparently going to destroy the universe with their Large Hadron Collider. Doomsdayers were convinced it would rip a hole in spacetime or create a new Big Bang. Because apparently, humans—who are basically ants swimming in the ocean of the universe—have the power to unravel the fabric of reality itself. The hubris was impressive. So was the world’s insistence on continuing to spin.

Then came 2012 and the Mayan calendar apocalypse. By that point, I wasn’t scared anymore. I was ready for it. I wanted to sit in my lawn chair, drink a Coke, and watch the world come to its spectacular end. I was looking forward to having a front-row seat to the end of all days. I didn’t even get a single firework.

In 2020, y’all insisted on trying to stand brooms upright in the middle of rooms and opened a portal to Hell. That’s the year that brought us COVID, murder hornets, wildfires that turned the sky orange, economic collapse, and neighbors turning against neighbors over toilet paper and face masks. It genuinely felt like we were living through the Book of Revelation. Surely this was it—the final chapter of Earth.

But it wasn’t. We’re still here, still arguing about everything, still linking every headline to the end times.

And now we have Dr. Loeb and his alien comet theory. Oh, and the rapture crowd is already saying the comet is a distraction sent by the devil to keep us from noticing that the rapture is coming in November. They think the government will blame Aliens instead of acknowledging the Return of Christ. There’s always a demon behind every bush and always a conspiracy that all these groups and countries who can’t get along to save their lives are somehow in on. This is no different than Heavens Gate. Now there’s a group of folks who thinks they’ll be hitching a ride on this new comet.

I’m sure November will come and go, and we’ll all still be here, wondering what the next end-of-the-world scare will be.

Here’s what I’ve learned from a lifetime of apocalyptic false alarms: It’s never the end of the world. It never is. The world is remarkably resilient, humans are surprisingly adaptable, and doomsday prophets have a perfect track record—of being wrong.

So go ahead, pay your taxes. Get up and go to work. Make plans for next year. You’re not escaping this mortal coil that easily. And if Dr. Loeb is right and the aliens are coming? Maybe there will be enough Bubba’s with shotguns to show E.T. who’s boss.

I’ll be sitting in my lawn chair, drinking a Coke, and waiting for the water to turn red.