The student newspaper of, by, and for Ames High School.

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The student newspaper of, by, and for Ames High School.

The WEB

The student newspaper of, by, and for Ames High School.

The WEB

Apocalypse to occur Saturday

May is usually a time of hope and happiness. Seniors are finally graduating and moving on with their lives, and the rest of us are looking forward to getting a three-month repose from the daily grind of school. But what if this May was the last one we get to experience? What if May is actually a time of doom and destruction? A small group of radical Christians believe that the world is supposed to end on May 21 of this year, and many of them have quit their jobs and sold their homes to prepare, according to NPR. The evidence for this radical claim is supposedly found deep within the pages of the Bible. Believers think that the information supporting our impending doom has at last been revealed to us now that the end times are drawing near. The information that God has supposedly revealed to them is a calendar of significant events in human history on a biblical time scale that starts with creation in 11,013 B.C., goes through Noah’s flood in 4990 B.C. and ends with the rapture (the taking up of the believers into heaven) on May 21, 2011. The actual end of the world should occur on October 21, six months after the rapture. The period between the rapture and the actual end of the world as we know it will be marked by suffering and torment, and it will effectively ruin summer vacation. According to the EBible Fellowship website that proclaims the end times, “God is now opening up His Word because we have arrived at the time of the end. For this reason, it has become very obvious to the serious student of the Bible that we are now living in the last few days of earth’s history. As a matter of fact, because we are living at the end of time, God is now revealing to His people the [apocalyptic information].” However, with all the hype over the end of the world, whatever happened to the other theories on the end times? Previous ideas ranged from a zombie apocalypse to being cut off from the galactic center on December 21, 2012 when the Mayan calendar runs out; not to mention the host of real threats out in the cosmos that could eliminate us at any time. The most immediate threats from outer space come from asteroid impacts that could throw enough dust into the atmosphere to drop global temperatures and destroy our ecosystem. Further out, our destruction could come in the form of a massive solar flare from the sun or a gamma ray burst from a distant neutron star frying the planet. More obscure scenarios include a nearby supernova, or even a rogue black hole passing near our solar system and messing up the orbit of the Earth. Closer to home, super-volcanoes could plunge us into an ice age, or international tensions could spark a nuclear war. There are a huge host of ways the world could end, and there isn’t much we can do about it. In the long run, we are probably in trouble anyway since eventually the sun will die, our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy, and, in the long run, the universe will run out of hydrogen and go dark. Basically, we are all kind of screwed. Unless someone wakes up and realizes it was all a dream…

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