About apocalyptics...
Just watching an old "Penn & Teller Bullshit" show about the 2012 apocalypse which never happened (I said it was an old one) but was a really big deal at the time.
This started me thinking about just what happens to the lesser Von Danikens and Velikovskis of the world after their dates pass or theories blow up. Some of the have "recalculated" and found the errors, but the new dates and theories didn't work out any better.
I remember the hysteria in some quarters over 2012 (although I suspect much of it was just relieving boredom) but on, say 12/22 2012, do these prophets of doom just fade away, or are they working on something else? What do their believers do?
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Religious nutters claim believers didn't pray hard enough, or were too sinful, or some such nonsense so it becomes their fault that the prophet was wrong and the savior didn't come back, or draw them up into space in their birthday suits.
The 2012 thing was a misinterpretation of a culture we can't fully understand yet. Probably the calendar ended because nobody was able to make the new one. It could have been a coincidence that there was a great alignment with the center of the Milky Way (or whatever happened, I forget the details).
But for all we know, the world did end, and we're the ones who didn't make the cut. I think it would be far crueler if we actually knew it had happened, and all of us weren't worthy.
Maybe aliens on another planet got their turn at being Revelation-ed. 
