The end of the world came and went with an anticlimactic fizzle, as apparently it always does. But this time everyone was surprised.
While the more absurd existential panics arise from simple quirks of timekeeping like Y2K or 2012, this was the other kind. It was the kind where NASA issues an official, cautiously-worded statement. This was the sort of threat where scientists go on the news to try to explain it in layman's terms. Where the news anchor asks questions like, "So, Doctor McScientist, what should we actually expect to happen a week from next Thursday?" And then the guest uses a lot of long words to say he has no idea, but with extra science.
All the best terrors come from space. It's dangerous enough to be a real threat, but uncertain enough that we rarely give much thought to the true apocalyptic scale of what's possible. And for the most part, we've stopped worrying. The world has shrugged off so many potential dangers from space that it's no longer worth mentioning. Solar storms and asteroid close encounters no longer even make the front page. But this time was different.
This time everyone was properly scared. All flights were grounded, worldwide, as a precaution. Special emergency communication networks had been set up, ones that didn't use radio signals, just in case. Most businesses were closed, schools took the whole week off, and people generally stayed home. Nobody was actually sure what would happen, nobody had the foggiest idea what was even going to cause the disaster. But everyone was dead certain it was coming. This thing, whatever it was, had hit several planets already, and there was no doubt that we were next.
It affected Saturn about 10 months ago. At the time it wasn't seen as something to be scared about, just a series of odd coincidences. Then it hit Jupiter about five months later, and then the same thing happened 97 days after that on Mars. The rovers, the probes, the satellites, everything just died, all at the same time. Nobody knew why. Nobody had even a remotely reasonable guess. It wasn't just the cause that was a mystery; they couldn't even be sure of what the effect was. The anomaly could be doing anything from blocking radio transmissions to fundamentally altering the physics of every world it passed through. There was no shortage of hypotheses, but not a single one that made sense.
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By then we had at least figured out when to expect it to reach us. Given Earth's position in the solar system and the sun's movement through the galaxy, the scientific consensus was that we had 46 days before Earth would reach the same patch of space.
Earth prepared. Earth watched. Earth waited. Earth stocked up on extra toilet paper; some lessons are never forgotten.
And yet, somehow, the scheduled apocalypse came and went, just like that, without so much as a cosmic groan.
The situation wasn't helped by the fact that the people of this world had already become thoroughly desensitized to predictions of calamity. The world never actually ends. The apocalypse doesn't actually ever come. It never has. And by extrapolation, it therefore never will. No matter how many times we ring the bell and call upon the world to prepare, the end is never truly nigh, not for real. Tomorrow will always be, more or less, pretty much like today.
At the same time, that desensitization made it all the more amazing that the world had, just this once, taken the threat so seriously and organized such a concerted response. It's a testament to how ironclad the evidence had been, how reputable the sources, and how realistic the threat. And in the face of such evidence, it's curious that we somehow managed to get things so wrong. In the face of such preparation, it was embarrassing that we somehow managed to flub the most important prediction of our world's history.
The "somehow", it turned out, was simple. The scientific consensus had indicated a margin of error of about 35 hours, give or take. But that particular detail wasn't very well understood by reporters. The news media had simplified that estimate to the day right in the middle, and had reported the end of the world as simply, "Thursday." It was easier. It was also wrong.
The world, as we understood it, was still ending. It was just ending a day late.