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"  America is a great country because its citizens get to choose not only their own ideologies and their own versions of where their president was born, but also their own apocalypses. No matter that end-of-the-world predictions have been history&amp;#039;s most reliable con, and that the tendency to spout even the most considered contemplations of Armageddon is the sign of an easy mark. As you might have heard, a dismaying number of your fellow citizens believe the Big Event is nigh \u2014 nigh, as in &amp;quot;sometime tomorrow&amp;quot; nigh \u2014 with an even more dismaying number erring on the side of caution and saying Jesus, or an asteroid with our name on it, is going to hold out till 2025. We might not be as optimistic as we once were, but we&amp;#039;re sure optimistic about the prospect of doomsday, with polls consistently showing that about half of all Americans believe that biblical prophecies of the end of the world will come to bloody fruition before the end of this century. (PLUS: The May 21st Doomsday FAQ and Top-Chef Judgment Day Menu &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;) And that&amp;#039;s just the religionists. Such is the American yearn for a customized eschatology that even committed secularists have come up with their own share of apocalyptic scenarios, from Global Warming to Peak Oil, most of which have the advantage of being eminently plausible, even proven, as the polar ice melts, the sea levels rise, the earth divides into extremes of drought and flood, and oil from ever more inaccessible and precarious gushers spills over the increasingly depleted seas. And yet the end is never really near, and despite its scientific pedigree, environmental eschatology will probably prove to be as much a sucker&amp;#039;s game as the theological brand, for what it doesn&amp;#039;t take into account is humanity&amp;#039;s resilience and capacity for invention and adaptation. And so it&amp;#039;s in the spirit of credulity \u2014 in the can-do spirit of Americans who know they&amp;#039;re going to get fleeced at the carnival or the casino and yet insist on their God-given right to do so \u2014 that I propose that May 21 be recognized as National Apocalypse Day. Does that mean the world is going to end tomorrow? Nah \u2014 it means that it&amp;#039;s not, but that all Americans will be given the opportunity to insist that it is, in a manner congenial to their own temperaments and beliefs. And if from the smorgasbord of doomsday possibilities you don&amp;#039;t find anything to your liking \u2014 if the combination of the Christian and Mayan calendars is insufficiently rife with foreboding \u2014 well, I just happen to have a freshly minted apocalypse right here: Peak Humanity. The United States was still celebrating the killing of Osama bin Laden when the United Nations issued its report on Peak Humanity. Except it wasn&amp;#039;t called Peak Humanity; the report the UN issued on May 3 was simply a revision of its previous estimate that the human population of earth would peak at about nine billion in 2100. The new estimate: 10.2 billion. That&amp;#039;s a lot of damned people, especially when one considers that the earth&amp;#039;s present population \u2014 about 6.9 billion, and counting \u2014 is in the process of chewing up the earth&amp;#039;s resources like locusts. But the idea that human overpopulation represents the ultimate doomsday machine is as old as Thomas Malthus, and has generally proven as accurate as the predictions of those guys who killed themselves a few years back wearing tracksuits and Nike sneakers. No, what made the UN report so jarring was its prediction that human population growth would stop just ninety years from now, with the earth inhabited by nearly 50 percent more humans at the dawn of the twenty-second century than inhabit it eleven years into the twenty-first \u2014 with humanity reaching Peak Humanity. What makes the theory of Peak Oil so captivating to doomsayers, after all, is not the idea that the earth is running out of oil. It&amp;#039;s the idea that the earth is rapidly approaching the point when oil production is going to stop increasing \u2014 is going to peak out \u2014 after which prices will go crazy, nations will start scrambling for what&amp;#039;s left, and chaos will ensue. The theory of Peak Oil traffics not only in the specter of a material apocalypse but also in a psychological one, and so it is with Peak Humanity. Since the age of Peak Bubonic Plague in the 1300s, humanity has been relentlessly expanding its numbers, as well as its dominion; what makes the 21st century unprecedented is not simply its unprecedented numbers \u2014 our unceasing expansion guarantees that our numbers are always unprecedented \u2014 but the fact that we are in the process of arriving at a final number, and so have entered a climactic phase in human history. There are libertarian economists who are cautiously optimistic about Peak Humanity, because population growth has generally been good for the material \u2014 if not the ecological \u2014 well-being of the world, and because human invention will profit from a plethora of possible inventors. And there are ecologists who are relieved that the human metastasis is finally going to stop, and who welcome the possibility that sanity will arrive with population stability. But let&amp;#039;s face it: Humanity&amp;#039;s final number is also, by definition, its final sustainable one, and life on earth is going to have to get pretty unpleasant for us to reach it. Already we have succeeded all too well in erasing what was left of the buffer between humanity and nature, leaving us to lurch from catastrophe to catastrophe; add global warming to that already accelerating dynamic, not to mention the possibility of Peak Oil and the inevitability of war, and there is reason to wonder if the end of humanity&amp;#039;s expansion will result in \u2014 or be the result of \u2014 the end of humanity, at least as we know it. As for me: I do not believe that humanity will survive Peak Humanity unless we address the disparities and imbalances that our numbers are exacerbating and that a final number of 10 billion will make unendurable. I also believe that the Democrats, far from shrinking from ecological engagement, should politicize it and make Peak Humanity the moral issue that Republicans have made out of Peak Debt. But hey, that&amp;#039;s why apocalyptic musings are so irresistible: They provide the wolf&amp;#039;s clothing for the sheepish utopianism that is the American birthright. And that&amp;#039;s why we should all make sure to make tomorrow National Apocalypse Day: because by celebrating the American right to say that the end of the world is coming, we are also celebrating the American right to say that the end of the world is coming for everybody but us, and that the Americans whose lifestyles we don&amp;#039;t like had better change them or else they&amp;#039;re going to be cast into seas boiling with blood. Peak Humanity turns out to serve the same purpose as Peak Oil, which serves the same purpose as Global Warming, which serves the same purpose as the Book of Revelations: It provides the same opportunity to ask sinners to repent, and the same opportunity for disappointment when they don&amp;#039;t, and the world goes on anyway. Of course, the difference between my apocalyptic scenario and your apocalyptic scenario is that mine is perfectly reasonable; it is self-evident that what will doom humanity is a peak population of 10.2 billion humans, which is why tomorrow, when the Rapture comes and a billion or so believers are taken up into the arms of Jesus, I will finally breathe a sigh of relief.  RELATED: \u2022 What the Hell Is with May 21st Being Doomsday?  \u2022 20 Top Chefs Pick Their Last Meals for Judgment Day \u2022 Junod on Koran Burning and the American Fundamentalist Dream \u2022 PLUS: More Posts by Tom Junod on The Politics Blog "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a9988/may-21-apocalypse-day-5774135/>