Like the goosebumps produced by horror movies, mankind also apparently prefers being scared by predictions of an imminent end of the world. Hence, the preponderance of doomsday prophets who seize every available opportunity to create a nightmare scenario. That even science is not spared was evident when it was claimed that the experiments with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which produced the Higgs boson, would create tiny black holes capable of swallowing up the earth. So widespread was the fear that even lawsuits were filed against CERN’s pursuit of high-energy particle physics.
The doomsayers were neither the first nor the last of their species. In 2000, their forbears had predicted that the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider would create weird particles called “strangelets”, which would transform the earth into a hot, dense lump of strange matter. Last year’s Mayan end-of-the-world carnival shared with other no-show catastrophes the same level of absurdity.
Although the gap between one fearful forecast and the next is narrowing, it will be safe to predict that man’s innate desire to live on the edge, either in movie halls or while reading ghost stories or discussing an apocalyptic vision, will ensure that the forecasters with a vivid imagination will always have a field day. The media, too, plays its part by providing them with a platform in the absence of “hard” news. Unfortunately, there is a flip side to this tendency to raise fear-mongering to the level of an art form which is capable of holding the attention of an admittedly gullible audience. It is to divert attention from causes of genuine fear, such as that of potentially unsafe nuclear plants. The end of the world will not come with a bang, but the whimper of slow poisoning of the atmosphere over decades and exhaustion of all of the earth’s mineral resources because of reckless exploitation.