© Marijus Auruskevicius / Dreamstime.comDoomsdayers have many ideas about when and how the world will end.
Most people go through their daily lives assuming that tomorrow will be a lot like today. No pits of fire will open up, society won't collapse, and the world, most likely, won't end.
But for others, doom has a certain appeal.
The most famous example these days is Harold Camping, a California-based Christian radio broadcaster who believes that May 21, 2011, will mark
Judgment Day, ushering in five months of torment for the unsaved until the universe finally ends on Oct. 21. Camping has bought billboards and dispatched caravans of believers around the country, warning the world of its fate.
"It's going to be a wonderful, wonderful day," Camping told a
San Francisco Chronicle reporter last June.
Camping has made this prediction before, in 1994 -
it didn't pan out - but the thousands of failed doomsday predictions throughout history are no match for what Lorenzo DiTommaso, a professor of religion at Concordia University in Montreal, calls the "apocalyptic worldview."
"It's a very persistent and potent way of understanding the world," DiTommaso told LiveScience.