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The world may be ending, but that's no reason to fret! Be prepared, instead! (That's so catchy we ought to trademark it). Meet the Doomsday "Preppers," survivalists who prepare for the coming Apocalypse and, in some cases, profit at the same time:
ABC's Nightline has more: Link (Warning: auto-start video) | National Geographic series about it: Doomsday Prepper"There's a lot of different things that could happen," Ralston said. "For me, I look at prepping as kind of like insurance. You have car insurance, health insurance, life insurance."
Call it Apocalypse insurance. Ralston turned his family's two-car garage into a staging area. Inside is a trailer, which he keeps packed and ready to go at all times, stockpiles of freeze-dried food, including cartons of canned chicken with a shelf life of 15 years, survival gear, such as a system for purifying polluted water, first aid kits and lots of weapons and ammunition. His son has his own AK-47.
"In the beginning, my wife really wasn't on the same page as I was," Ralston said. "But in reality, the more information I started to give to her, it opened up her eyes to the other potential threats that are out there."
The Bible says in Matthew 24:36 “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” That never stopped people from trying to predict when the world will end. Smithsonian has a list of ten predicted apocalypses from ancient times to 2009 (when this list was first published).
An Assyrian clay tablet dating to around 2800 B.C. bears the inscription: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”
The world hasn’t changed much since then; everyone still wants to write a book. Link
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Science is wonderful of course, but it can also be vaguely terrifying if you take things to their logical (or not so logical) conclusions. Take batteries that run on human blood:
So scientists have developed a battery that is powered by human blood. The idea is a cybernetic power source, to keep your pacemaker or whatever running. But, lets think about this for a second…what do we have way too much of on this planet? People. And what do we have way too little of? Power. A battery that runs on human blood is an easy fix for both of them. Jonathan Swift would be proud of this, screw eating the poor, lets just power all our gadgets with them.
From the Upcoming 
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This list from the Discovery Channel might come in handy to give to someone you know who might get too nervous about the 2012 doomsday predictions and the movie about them. Each scenario is debunked with what scientists really know. For example,
1. Changes in the Sun’s magnetic field will lead to powerful flares.
So what else is new under the sun? The sun goes though a well-documented 11-year sunspot cycle that is driven by its magnetic field entangling, reforming and flipping polarity. Yes, the peak of the next cycle is in 2012 (or 2013), and some predictions suggest it might be 30 to 50 percent stronger than the last peak.
But experts say it will certainly not be the biggest peak ever recorded.
Many religious cults are based on apocalypticism, the belief that the world is going to end. Check out ten such beliefs, their founders, and followers. One such cult is the Panacea Society.
In 1792, part-time fortune teller Joanna Southcott started collecting “divine revelations” and had them sealed in a box with strict instructions to open it only for Jesus. Her followers called themselves Southcottians and were mostly early-19th century Spiritualists. Southcott dramatically announced that she was pregnant with the messiah, Shiloh, whose birth would kill all but her followers. However, Southcott was a 64-year-old virgin who showed no signs of pregnancy. To Southcott’s credit, she began doubting her beliefs when she failed to give birth but died before she was able to do anything about it. The sudden power vacuum among the Southcottians brought out all sorts of leadership, all of whom claimed they could psychically communicate with Southcott’s box, and transformed the Southcottians into a bizarre cult that refused to bury Southcott’s corpse, believing that she would be resurrected. They renamed themselves the Panacea Society under the belief that they had healing powers, and still believe that Shiloh will descend from heaven to reboot the world at a later date.
There are nine other cults profiled at Ty.rannosaur.us. Link
