Day Four: The End is Nigh?

It only makes sense that since just about every culture has a creation story, there are a lot of end-of-creation stories as well. End of time, end of the world, or just end of humanity--it just depends on how they view the world. End of the world myths are closely related to afterlife myths in most circumstances, which is why we have them. Like it or not, what we think happens after we die affects how we feel about death.

In India, there's a special sort of calender called the Maha Yuga. It consists of four sections of time in sequence that repeat over and over for most of eternity. One whole sequence makes up about four million years, and each section is around a million, but they get a little shorter as you go down the list. They are as follows:

1. Krita: The golden years when people have contact with the gods. You don't have to live in a house because the weather is great, you can talk to trees that give you food, life is awesome.

2. Treta: Maybe call it the silver years. Life is still good, you can still talk to trees, but there's a bit of evil creeping into society.

3. Dvapara: Starting to get not so happy. People are becoming greedy and corrupt, and we have to grow food and live in houses.

4. Kali: Where we are right now. Life sucks. The world is corrupt, everybody is obsessed with money, sex and power, and there's constant war. Sound familiar?

Revelation from the Bible is a little simpler, but still fairly nasty. The whole world will be destroyed and evil people and things thrown into Hell, and then God will create a new heaven and a new Earth, where everything will be milk and honey and happiness for all of eternity.

So what will the end of the world sound like?
"Grapevine Fires" by Death Cab for Cutie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu4qQKlyF7s