The Rapture Didn’t Happen – So What Now?

by Mike Dillinger on May 21, 2011

In the past couple of years since I started monitoring cyberspace like an air traffic controller I have never ran into anything more outragous. On May 16th, Dan Armstrong from ConnectMidMichigan.com broke a story about the prediction of the upcoming “Rapture”. While surfing Google News and reading tabloids of Ahhhnold’s exploits this headline about the “End of Days” caught my eye (yes that is a pun for all you movie buffs). Let’s just say Harold Camping’s career as a prophet was short-lived as the day of May 21st has arrived and absolutley nothing apocolytic has happened.

After posting this eyesore of human logic into the facebook stream the newswires and the rest of the internet found out about the prophesy and let it rip with doomsday shennangans and gags all week. We needed a good laugh because we’ve been having the Armageddon waved in our face for quite some time now. Everything from ”weapons of mass destruction” to the “financial meltdown of 2008″ has prophesized the end of our world as we know it today. Yet, everything is still in the same place much the same as it always has been, and hitting the panic button didn’t do anybody one damn bit of good. The “End of the World” boogieman card has been pulled at the table one too many times. Of course this one last cry would be greeted with wholehearted laughter and skepticism.

So let’s take a look at things a little bit more seriously now that the hour has came and went.

After a phone call to my grandmother the other day I thought about the issue through a more serious prism. She lived through some really trying times from pre-World War II until today. At the end our talk, she started talking about how she believed we were living in “The End of Days”. It took a bit of willpower for me not to roll my eyes at the moment. After all, my grandmother is very religious and doesn’t analyze the world with the logic of a technician. On the other end of the spectrum I can see how she believes the prophecy is coming true. Anyone that watches more than five minutes of conventional news would see nothing but techtonic horror all over the world from rising unemployment, government bankruptcy, warfare, and natural disasters. The fact of the matter is, as long as the human race has been in existence this same thing has been going on. The only difference today is that we have instant telecommunications to beam the bad news right into our homes. Try telling someone landing on the beaches of Normandy during D-Day that the end of days would be prophesized by a radio talk show host in the year 2011 and he probably would of told you that we were living in them now.

So mankind’s final hour isn’t today. There is one major threat that is looming on the horizon, confirmed by scientists and geologists that have half-a-brain on the issue. It looks something like this:

What’s a renewable resource and a non-renewable resource is pretty much elementery school, as a matter of fact it was first grade. This has been a problem since the day I was born and continues to be a problem while ideological camps argue over what should be done about it. The fact that the statistics show that only 1 out of 99 Americans is aware that the majority of the world’s energy supply of oil will be gone in the next fifty years is absolutely perplexing. It won’t be the end of the world quickly, with a fireball from the sky destroying all the non-believers, nor earthquakes leveling the entire world to a pancake. It will be more like a slow croke as our modern technological world begins to run out of energy to fuel itself.

I’m not some bleeding heart tree-hugging environmentalist either. I love my car, just like every other American and the freedom that it brings me. I certainly don’t think the planet needs saving either, the Earth is a big rock that could really care less if we are here or not. We are going to suck all the oil and natural gas out of the planet until there is none left and spew it into the atmosphere over the next forty years and do so pretty much unapolegetically. Our system revolves around fossil fuels so heavily that without a call for rapid infrastructure changes the upcoming energy crises does have the power to end the “modern” world within our children’s or grandchildren’s time. This armegageddon crap is nothing more than signs that our society is adapting to this change which is coming “sooner” rather than “later” like an adolescent child that is having the keys to their car taken from them. The end of our modern and technologically advanced society as “we know it” will be on our doorsteps within another generation without some very advanced technological breakthroughs within the next ten years. When was the last technological breakthrough? All modern devices are nothing more than improvements on existing technology that was developed by the space race fifty years ago. The problem is that our intellectual elite is being shuffled off into the finance or information tech sector so they can pay back their student loans and not into energy research and development.

Without some urgent call for a breakthrough in energy cultivation and development, this change will start to hit us very hard over the next twenty years. The worst thing we can do right now is sit around and panic, we need answers. Hitting the doomsday button over and over does nothing for the advancement of free-thinking and intelligent people around the world. It’s absolute crap, we should laugh at it, and shows signs of an immature humanity that would rather distract from real problems than face them. The time is already passed that we demand an absolute “call to action” for the real problem before it’s too late. So what do I know? I’m merely a technician that serves the machine. Every technician knows that you have to troubleshoot the device from the power source first. It’s the first thing discussed in the manual.