People have been saying the world is ending through all recorded history. At best, it’s more credible now that we have scientific ways, but mostly it’s bellyaching not based in reality.
I suspect old people and their rose-tinted memories might be the reason. If you’re trying to decide if things are worse, better or the same as they used to be, and you just go by hearsay, it’s always going to be skewed towards things getting worse. Then, just extrapolate forward, and the end is neigh.
Empirically things have gotten so much better over living memory in the West it’s not even funny, and things have been more of a random walk over the rest of human history.
People have been saying the world is ending through all recorded history. At best, it’s more credible now that we have scientific ways, but mostly it’s bellyaching not based in reality.
I suspect old people and their rose-tinted memories might be the reason. If you’re trying to decide if things are worse, better or the same as they used to be, and you just go by hearsay, it’s always going to be skewed towards things getting worse. Then, just extrapolate forward, and the end is neigh.
Empirically things have gotten so much better over living memory in the West it’s not even funny, and things have been more of a random walk over the rest of human history.