This is thelast Web View: What we think about when we talk about thefuture,or How I stopped worrying about it and grew to love the Apocalypse.

RED ALERT Don't let pessimism stand in the way of hope.

This message is a message of hope for the future. The point of the Apocalypse is not the end--bang, boom dead nothing. Its point, its whole existence is evolutionary. Nostradamus never spoke of the end of the world. He spoke of a new Golden Age of humanity. What he may have failed to see is that humanity may not exist as we know it today. Or, if it does exist physically much the same as we do now, then certainly our concepts of ourselves and the world will be radically changed. We may not be following Ti and Do to the next level, casting off our human space suits. Heaven Gate's next higher level could never be achieved through suicide. They were never ascetic enough, did not dance themselves into trances, did not hallucinate gods or goddesses. Marshall Applewhite, if he was any sort of Christian, should have learned more from the monks of Skellig Michael than from Whoopi Goldberg on Star Trek.

The UN is trying to repopulate wealthy nations. They need consumers to support developing nations.

In the special 5th Anniversary issue of Wired the future is projected as a great and wondrous time. The long boom of prosperity that we are in is to continue. (This must have been written before the Asian collapse.) The world's population will attain the standard of living of the middle class in wealthy countries. Consumer culture will continue to grow in leaps and bounds. Health care will get better, we will live longer, have less children, eat better, drink cleaner water, control governments through the Internet and finally all but eliminate war and the need for war. Not in my lifetime and not in my son's lifetime. When you have less children there are less consumers to buy the crap they manufacture. If everyone decided they didn't need new sneakers the Asian collapse would become a rout instead of a shakedown. If health care is better and we live longer then we will spend a large part of our lives sucking off the tit of that great health care, because we will get cancer from our irradiated food and our chlorinated water. Of course Wired pushes the rosy picture. It helps bring advertisers into the magazine even as they publish an article that declares that the Net will kill advertising and the Big Media conglomerates. According to Wired the Net will save everything. And this from a magazine that once listed Nicholas Negroponte's email address as negroponte@internet.

The future = leisure for the poor and overwork for the wealthy. The Apocalypse is another commodity.

On the other hand the future is not going to be some 1984-style dystopia. I imagine we will continue on as we are. Our cars will still pollute. Our television will still show reruns of Seinfeld in 25 years. Crime will fluctuate with the rise and fall of the population of teenage boys (and girls to a lesser degree). The Federal government will still be out of step with the country as a whole. The French will call for Jerry Lewis to be canonized. John Paul II will still live, but in reality he will have been assassinated. The Vatican will have hired actors to play him. The Church will never release the third and final prophecy of Fatima which speaks of the end of the Church of Rome as does Nostradamus. We will never know this because we will all be cocooned in our houses watching the complete Jurassic Parks series I-X on enhanced DVD 8 channel sound home theater. And outside where the rumble of a dinosaur shakes the ground like a minor earthquake a lone pedestrian will be stopped by the Police and arrested for walking. The future sounds more like Ray Bradbury mixed with Aldous Huxley than George Orwell or Pamela Anderson Lee in Barb Wire.

The real future, the real Apocalypse will not be a giant Armageddon battle between the forces of good and evil on Earth. The real Apocalypse is not a Beast and the Four Horsemen and the Harlot of Babylon. It is not Quetzalcoatl searching for new limbs to create a new age. It is not a proliferation of angels, people of Atlantis or the Annukai. It is not Shiva reaching down to destroy and create. We must look further out to our own solar system. We must look, possibly to the mythical Planet X, home of the Annukai, whose elliptical orbit brings it close to earth, from beyond Pluto, every 3600 years or so. We must stop thinking of the Biblical prophecies in terms of human-like figures. It is our fellow planets, the comets and asteroids that will change the world, not destroy it. Immanuel Velikovsky, in his Worlds in Collision, proposes that Venus was once a comet that flew close to the Earth and caused the Earth's magnetic poles to flip, great earthquakes to be felt, great floods to cover some lands and leave dry others, and in one case to part a sea so that slaves who were being driven out of Egypt (because they had leprosy) could flee into the Sinai.

Immanuel Velikovsky

It is not hard to accept this as truth when you realize that all the world's great ancient cultures speak of the birth of Venus. Prior to her arrival in the solar system there were only four known planets and one moon. Upon Venus's arrival new calendars had to be created because the Earth had been knocked out of its orbit into a longer one. To the Ancients who witnessed this near hit and the catastrophes that ensued Venus was a herald of doom, a messenger from the gods and goddesses that all was not well. To them Venus appeared in the sky as a demon or a dragon with two horns and a sweeping tail. For eight hundred years mankind worshipped Venus, placating her with human sacrifice, hoping that she would not destroy the world. Captured by the Sun's gravitational pull she orbited wildly in the inner solar system, but then her erratic orbit brought her into contact with Mars. For that "battle" the Earth suffered greatly. It is thought that Mars was much closer to the Earth than it is now. Venus knocked it farther out, pushing the Earth farther out and locked herself into its current orbit as the number two planet. During that second encounter great earthquakes and floods occurred.

2000 is not everyone's Millennium.

Nostradamus predicts a brush with a comet or asteroid that will cause the waters to rise and flood most of Asia and the Great Plains. Africa will be torn asunder and a new channel will run through it. Earthquakes will shake across the globe. The Mayans based their calendar upon a 26,000 year cycle of sunspot activity. Think of the each planet as a magnet and the sun as a power source that shoots out EMFs. If one magnet gets close to another there is bound to be tension. If solar flares and sunspots increase then there is fluctuating electrical magnetic activity that is already known to knock out satellite communication. It is theorized that magnetic disturbances occur around the time of earthquakes. During the week of the planet lineup in early December when all eight planets were in the sky just after sunset fourteen earthquakes occurred around the globe. The week prior there were only seven. The week after there were only seven.

We have already seen two heralds of the coming Apocalypse, two of the four Horsemen. Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp. It is coming and it is coming down fast. And it will be a great thing, whether you survive or not.

Michael McInnis, founder and publisher of Primal Publishing, designs web sites and publishes short story books with Lauren Leja. Web Views7 copyright 1998 Michael McInnis Back to Tension