The scenario of the End Times has been around longer than the internet has been around to propagate it. Which isn't even close to how long Apocalypticism has been around. Bumped into it on reddit, and the definition is really good, within the context of how consuming the topic is. And how it has survived so long.

Apocalypticism is the religious belief that the end of the world is imminent, even within one's own lifetime.

"Religious belief" being the hiccup of course, with this definition from unless we accept the standard Merriam Webster Online definition of religion:

a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith

and presto...we have all arrived where others have since Jesus was around.

Us old farts here have the experience to have seen this all play out across our lifetimes. RE's list, of the faith and ardor that before leaving this mortal coil, FINALLY the results will be revealed to all the non-believers.

But for those of us with age and experience, and paying attention to the history we've lived through, we can't ignore how often these results have been announced, seemed to be occurring, discussed at length.
 
The old Diner, peakoil.com, ROE, dieoff.org and oilcrisis.net going back into the last century. And those are ALL after the stagflation of the late 70's, the Cold War, the Great Dieoff, the world running out of oil proclaimed by Jimmy Carter no less...before the end of the 1980's.

We've been here before. We've been here multiple times, those of us who protested the destruction of the natural world when the Trans-Alaskan pipeline was built, or the development of Prudhoe Bay. We're cheered on Jimmy when he announced the world was running out of oil by the end of the 1980's, believed in Ehrlich when he spoke of the pollution and dying via starvation of large swaths of the world population in 1970.

And all we got were the go-go 80's and a lingering after taste...soon satiated when Colin Campbell himself kicked off a catastrophe of a global peak oil. In 1990. And then within a few short years, internet, the scientific community and their opinion on the topic ran smack into modern disinformation and dissemination of ideas and the merry round picked up some speed once again.

34 years since Colin restarted a kernel of an older idea, and the internet took it, and others, and that first decade of the 21st century sure looked like the time had come. Again.

Everyone here is old now. I asked before, does anyone have kids? Kids might at least mitigate the natural tendency to buy into every world ending event that looks like it is approaching, lending a little optimism to our ideas if only for their sakes...the  apocalypse always just over the horizon...always just off in the future as we continue to wait....just wanting a glimpse so all the fascination won't have been for naught.

Rather than being happy to finally see it, and having failed in attempting to change the world back in the mid-70's and through stagflation, I found it better to just live life. It worked out pretty well. I'll continue doing it until my personal doom arrives, and it won't much matter as to why and how. But it will have been a good ride regardless.