Dorian Lynskey is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day and The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984. His latest, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World is a book about books, music, films, and television that foretell the end of all things.

The world was supposed to end in the 1990s—probably during Y2K, but possibly at any moment prior given the run of biblical prophecies fulfilled to that point, at least according to many of the local ministers, televangelists, and popular authors working with this material at the time. By then Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth was old news, but Frank Peretti was in demand, and the first few Left Behind novels were already best-selling. There was a lot of curiosity about the book of Revelation. The falling stars referenced there might be nuclear missiles, the Pope could be the Anti-Christ. I recall hoping that the end would hold off a little longer, so that I could experience a little more of this fascinating, fallen planet. I was thankful for each new sunrise on the blinds. I didn’t realize the predictions had come around so many times before.  

Unfortunately, as Carl Sagan once put it, “theories that involve the end of the world are not amenable to experimental verification—or, at least, not more than once.”

Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go surveys the human mania for end-times theorizing from the time of Jeremiah to the time of Trump, albeit with emphasis on the media products of the past century or so. Lynskey is interested in cultural artifacts like books, music, movies, and shows, and we have simply been producing more of these more recently. His range is impressive, inspiring readers, listeners, and viewers to read, listen, and view both more widely and more systematically. It’s also the case that the concerns animating the end times impulse have evolved considerably over time—especially after 1945. Lynskey’s narrative hinges on that shift.

There is something endearing and even reassuring about the first part of the story, which covers all of the forecasting prior to Oppenheimer’s bomb. These concern the William-Miller-types, close-reading the Bible and calculating days as years—or however—to pinpoint the exact moment when the trumpets will sound. Though supposedly no one knows the day or the hour, there is something admirable about a prophet who is willing to set firm deadlines and so accept some measure of accountability. Miller chose October 22, 1844, inaugurating what critics termed the Great Disappointment. On May 11, 2011, Harold Camping reprised this experience for his dutiful followers as well. Camping’s evangelical critics scoffed at the precision of his claim, and rightfully so, but they did this while continuing to utter the exact same type of claim in conveniently less precise terms. We are in the end times, they all proclaim. But the end itself draws on indefinitely, and in the meanwhile they keep on collecting tithes.

What’s attractive about the pre-bomb—or non-bomb—narratives is that they do not implicate human behavior directly, and so do us the courtesy of waiving blame. This is true, for example, of asteroid stories like those en vogue during the 90s. If the world gets whacked by an interstellar rock, we aren’t exactly at fault, and there wasn’t much we could have done. And yet it remains interesting to imagine what we would try to do in such a case. Lynskey notes that this imagining can be done thoughtfully (as in 1998’s Deep Impact) or not (as in 1998’s Armageddon) but either way you can feel what you feel and then leave it in the theater.

That comforting distance closes quickly in the second class of narratives, those focused on post-1945 threats that really are out there and, in some cases, really are on the way. There’s this moment in Oppenheimer when the title character is talking with Niels Bohr, who says that the bomb is “not a new weapon, it’s a new world,” a big statement that looks understated in hindsight. As the launchpad of “the Great Acceleration,” 1945 marked the year that human development took off exponentially, pursuing rapid new growth in fields like weaponry, manufacturing, product development, advertising, computers, etc., all the way up through the internet and artificial intelligence, generating new conveniences and comforts and improving quality of life while also placing profound new stress on the planet, heightening inequalities, expelling mountains of waste, and quietly introducing a host of new potential threats—some of them existential. Since 1945, in other words, human activity on earth has been—at least in part—an exercise in cultivating and sidestepping cumulative risks.

Each day, as we go quietly about our lives, nuclear missiles are still siloed around the world, ready for launch. Viral diseases are still evolving, perhaps under active development by bad actors. The carbon concentration of the atmosphere continues to climb, along with global surface temperatures and more powerful weather events. And tech bros in Silicon Valley continue to push relentlessly ahead in their experiments with AI, driven always by the question of can and pausing only occasionally to consider questions of should. These and other variables, taken as a package, persuade Oxford University philosopher Toby Ord that the likelihood of human extinction this century is about one-in-six, the same probability that one dies in a game of Russian Roulette.

The sheer complexity of 21^st century life is certain to confound and likely to overwhelm anyone who tries to form a comprehensive opinion on where it’s all heading. If you want to anticipate our planetary doom, you have options to choose from. Lynskey’s book is comforting—and entertaining—in its faculty for documenting and analyzing the many and varied bad predictions from the past, as well as how these have been represented in popular culture. But it also cautions us that not all threats are created equal, and too much emphasis on the Chicken Littles of old may numb us to wise warnings in our own era. Things don’t have to end entirely to get considerably worse, and there are real opportunities to make things better. Everyone who foresees catastrophe is bound to be wrong until someone is right. If we are inclined to believe that the world will end in our own lifetimes, maybe that’s simply because, for each us, it will.