In my second blog post I explained that Lev Grossman states, fear is an underlying cause of our obsession with the end of the world, in his article "Apocalypse New" from Time Magazine Arts. Ecconomic uncertainty has been know to cause people to jump from highrise office windows. I also believe that having loved ones away at war would cause fear in a large number of people. Since both these subjects have the ability to cause fear it seems logical for me to compair their dates against dooms day predictions.
The first source I turned to was Thayer Watkins of the San Jose State University Department of Economics and his website page "Economic History of The United States". Watkins lists nine periods of time America has been in a poor economic state (depression or recession). In five out of nine depressions or recessions people believed that the world was going to keep right on spinning. I would say that these statistics make the ups and downs of the economy an unlikely candidate as the sole cause of Chicken Little like attitudes.
Next, to find out the dates of American wars I decided to use the Navy Department Library website and its page titled "American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics." I have found that only the three most recent wars, from the Vietnam War to the current the War on Terror, are the only three that coincide with any predictions of the apocalypse. That makes a ratio of wars that had predictions during their span to the that didn’t three to nine, and very likely not a cause for the fear which grips citizens so strongly as to make them predict the end of the planet.
So as it turns out, I’m pretty good at finding out what doesn’t cause people to forecast the end of the world. However, I have yet to find the answer to what does cause people to panic. I am left wondering if this is something some people are predisposed toward? Are people perhaps too distracted during times of war, extreme poverty, and sever natural disasters to have time to worry about Armageddon? I have been quite certain up until this point that there has to be some combination of EXTERNAL stimuli, but so far I feel our imaginations are stimulated by a war we battle within ourselves rather than those we fight against others.
Sources:
Watkins, Thayer, "Economic History of The United States" sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins., n.d.
Fischer, Hannah, "American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics." www.history.navy.mil/library/online/american, 13, July, 2005
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So wars and economic downturns are not signs of the apocalypse. I guess this makes me breath a little easier but I must say, I'm not much of a doomsday kind of person to where I'm always wondering when it's going to happen. I do beleive the world as we know it is going to end, but I think it will be due to our sun dying out billions of years from now. But by then, we will have most likely moved on to a new planet(s). I am curious about what our scientists say about this scenario?
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