The End is Nigh:

The reader is invited to answer the following multiple-choice question: Which of these prophesied ends of the world, as gleaned from various information sources on the (End of the) World Wide Web, is most likely to occur in the year 2000 or shortly thereafter?

B. The sudden opening of the secret chambers in the Great Pyramid at Giza, with the revelation of secrets that lead to the establishment of Satan as a "public figure," causing the American militia to start a "massive" war that eventually destroys the world, as predicted by Arizona militia leader William Cooper.

C. A worldwide atomic conflagration, as predicted in a hidden message in the Pentateuch.

D. The capture by the CIA of a space alien who crash-landed in the New Mexico desert. The alien proves to have escaped from a planet destroyed by God, who is "furious with His creations everywhere," and is destroying them one by one as he works his way through the galaxies. Next up is... well, take a wild guess.

E. Ice, caused to accumulate by the first alignment in 6,000 years of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, builds up on the South Pole to the point where it tips the world's axis and destroys all life, as predicted in R.W. Noone's Ice, the Ultimate Disaster.

F.The sun takes a turn for the superhot, melting the polar ice caps and flooding the world, sending to Hell all but the genuinely repentant, as foretold in three scrolls found in Noah's Ark, which was unearthed more or less intact on a slope of Turkey's Mount Ararat.

G.At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, computers of all sizes and shapes the world over begin failing, as the "millennium bug" or "Y2K bug" comes alive inside the machines. Mainframe, midi-, mini-, and personal computers are joined in the collapse by computer chips embedded in automobiles, airplanes, elevators, medical machinery, and various other machines and appliances in a widespread conflagration that rapidly spreads to the point where it ends civilization as we know it. Electricity and telephone service is halted. Financial markets and the world banking system collapse. Prison doors suddenly pop open, turning loose hordes of monsters. Hospitals cease operating—sometimes in midoperation—and patients die. Worldwide depression, famine, and anarchy result. So it is foretold by legions of computer engineers.

This bizarre turn of events will be caused by the practice in computer programming of using only the last two digits of a year—86 for 1986, for example—in software code. When the date clicks over to 00, computers and computerized machinery will read the date as 1900, with devastating consequences.

The catastrophe can be avoided, say the folks at http://www.earthascending.com/ maya/Cal_Index.html, if we would only stop using the unnatural Gregorian calendar, an "artificial time" calendar "which the accidents of history happened to impose on humankind.... The Y2K computer crisis is inseparable from the question of calendar reform.... The Gregorian 12-month calendar and the related artificial timing device, the 60-minute mechanical clock, are both based on the erroneous assumption that measurements of space may be used to measure time. This error in time... leads to the artificial and mechanical 12:60 timing frequency upon which all of modern human civilization is based. The result is a self-destructive society addicted to mechanized speed, increasingly at odds with nature, and so short-sighted in its infatuation with technology that it has written its own death-wish: Y2K." If we would only switch to "the regular measure of the Perpetual 13-Moon Calendar," as devised by the Mayans, we would fall into the rhythms of the natural world, shed our pretensions, and be saved.

Well, almost. It turns out that this solution will only buy us 12 more years, because...

H. The Mayan calendar begins with the birth of Venus and ends 13 "baktun cycles" later, at Winter Solstice 2012. And the end of the calendar brings with it the end of the world.

Now for the results of your test:If you answered A, B,D, E, F, or H, you've been spending far too much time on the Internet. If you answered G, you have passed the chiliastic straight-face test, and have won the right to read on.

The obvious reason to believe in the Millennium Bug scenario and throw out the others is the credibility—and the ubiquity—of Y2K doomsayers. While the other end-of-the-world stories are propounded by the usual suspects—murky biblical passages, cave-dwelling survivalists, interpreters of cryptic papal pronouncements, wacko writers—the Y2K scenario is predicted by thousands of computer hardware and software engineers, eminently rational and scientific types who figure to be dispassionate in the face of irrational fear and mass hysteria. We tend not to associate superstition with spreadsheets.

The engineers have been joined by choruses of sober-faced lawyers, financial managers, government officials, and Defense Department officers who keep cranking out relentlessly analytical reports on the current state of the nation's computer systems, the high cost and complexity of repairing them in time, and the utter unlikelihood that catastrophe can be averted. The US government's Defense Logistics Agency, for example, breaks down the problem into numbers that sound daunting, to say the least. DLA says that it has 39,577,427 lines of code in its various computer systems, underlying 60,000 programs, 33,416 screens, 236,271 files, and 10,379 database tables. The system is a patchwork using 77 computer languages, 35 different hardware platforms, 16 operating systems, and 311 commercial software packages. After having inspected 5 million lines of code, the DLA finds that between 1 percent and 5 percent of it must be rewritten, at a cost of between $1 and $8 per line, in order to forestall a bite from the millennium bug.