Time magazine ran a cover story titled 'The End of the World as We Know it?' in January 1999

Relive the millennial panic with 'Surviving Y2K'

This multi-episode series follows host Dan Taberski as he interviews coders, survivalists, conspiracy believers, and others who lived the Y2K scare firsthand—while weaving in his own personal story from 1999, providing a more intimate view of the crisis.

Read an oral history of the Y2K panic

This oral history brings together programmers, engineers, and officials who first identified the date flaw and then spent years alerting the public to the danger and racing to repair millions of lines of code.

The world spent up to $600B to avert the Y2K computer glitch

Early computer programmers used a two-digit code to record years rather than four. With the switch in the year 2000 from '99 to '00, analysts feared databases might fail and prompt outages and financial catastrophe. To prepare, governments and businesses spent an estimated $300B to $600B to mitigate the glitch.

The 2012 Maya-predicted apocalypse didn't really stem from the ancient Mayans

On Dec. 20, 2012, fears of a Mayan-predicted apocalypse gripped Earth, causing panic in some parts of the world, including the stockpiling of vodka in Russia. In this podcast, Maya expert David Stuart—who helped translate some of the relevant Mayan texts—debunks the notion, arguing the Mayan calendar's end marked a cycle, not doomsday.

See how faces on magazine covers have changed over time

This piece examined an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2014, focusing on 327,322 faces from the archive. Read what the researchers learned.

Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of 'War of the Worlds' invoked real panic

The raconteur's teleplay of HG Wells' 1898 science fiction novel presented the plot as a news broadcast, leading some listeners to believe that New Jersey was being invaded by Martians. This retrospective from the National Endowment for the Humanities unpacks how he made it happen, and the media fallout that ensued.

Tracking the accuracy of past and future predictions of the apocalypyse

Religious figures, scientists, technologists and others have long heralded the ending of the world in what in some traditions is called the apocalypse. This site tracks those failed predictions in the past and charts those coming up in the future.

Take a multimedia journey through the thirteen days that nearly ended the world

In October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. This interactive archive from the JFK Library reconstructs those tense days through documents, photos, and secretly recorded conversations from the Kennedy White House.

'Planet Money' debates the financial indicators that defined 2025

In this end-of-year episode, "Planet Money" stages a playful debate over which economic indicators best captured the chaos of 2025—from tariffs to AI bubbles—and which signals may matter most as the US economy heads into 2026.

In 1938, 1.7 million people were fooled into believing a Martian invasion was underway because of a radio play

Orson Welles' realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth, called "The War of the Worlds," caused quite a stir with audiences. The broadcast resulted in panic, with some people in the area where the story took place attempting to flee. It also helped Welles secure a contract with a Hollywood studio, leading to the creation of "Citizen Kane."

Tracing the history of the philosophy of human extinction

Global catastrophe is at the center of much contemporary debate over climate, war, science, technology, and more, and our period is marked by a lurking sense everything we know—including the human species—could end overnight. It wasn't always...

Read the WEF’s Global Risks Report for 2025

The Global Risks Report is the World Economic Forum’s annual assessment of the most pressing threats facing the world. The 2025 edition highlights declining global optimism, deepening geopolitical and economic tensions, and rising social fragmentation across societies.

The Year 2038 problem is the next potential computer time rollover bug

Many older systems store time as a signed 32-bit integer counting seconds since Jan. 1, 1970. That counter maxes out on Jan. 19, 2038—overflowing into negative time and sending clocks back to 1901, potentially crashing any older software that depends on accurate dates.

Dystopian satire became more prominent in the 20th century

Although "anti-utopian" stories have always existed, the international conflicts of World War I and World War II inspired some of dystopian literature’s most influential novels, like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s "We," Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World," and George Orwell’s "1984." In the decades to follow, more writers would follow the example of those early novels, using the dystopian model to critique artificial intelligence, climate change, and more.

Critic Neil Postman argued modern technology is dystopian

Cultural critic Neil Postman argued in 1985's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" that mass media had made the dystopia of Huxley's "Brave New World" a reality. In 1992, he published "Technopoly," a wider critique of the utopian visions of technology or, as Postman calls it, "all of the machinery that takes people out of public arenas and keeps them fixed in their homes."

Mapping fiction's imagined breakdowns of the US after apocalypse

Post-apocalyptic fiction in the US is at least a century old, and how the future is envisioned reflects contemporary anxieties and divisions. This piece examines the various creative maps birthed from the tradition from Jack London's 1912 "The Scarlet Plague," a pandemic novel set in 2073, through Stephen King's "The Stand", dystopian "The Hunger Games," and visions of civil war.

The world, one year after humanity goes extinct

The Earth is so shaped by human action, it's hard to imagine what it would look like without us. This brief, digestible explainer for kids highlights what a humanless world would look like one year after the extinction event.

The dot-com boom sent tech stocks soaring before a historic collapse

A look at the dot-com bubble, when investors poured money into unproven internet startups, driving the Nasdaq to dizzying heights before it crashed by more than 80% after 2000, showing how new technologies can detach markets from reality.

Discovering how the dinosaurs went extinct may have helped avert nuclear war

This NPR Throughline episode explains how the 1980 discovery that an asteroid-driven dust cloud killed the dinosaurs inspired Cold War scientists' fears of "nuclear winter"—a sunlight-blocking aftermath of nuclear war that may have discouraged leaders from launching one.

Wikipedia allows users to vote for what the last article on the site will be

Labeled as "humorous" on the site, the "Last topic pool" page lists various conditions where Wikipedia's final article would be written, including various end-of-the-world scenarios, instances where humanity might cease to exist, cases of Wikipedia becoming corrupted or uneditable, and the possibility of all possible knowledge having been written about.

Bezos has frequently cited a 1999 article titled Amazon.bomb to illustrate how dire the early predictions about Amazon got

Over the years, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos often recalls how wrong the predictions in the 1999 Barron’s cover story were. Among other things, that article declared Amazon’s entire business model to be unsustainable and destined to fail, noting its lack of profit and dependence on a massive amount of capital to fund its growth.

The story of the Wall Street Crash of 1929

The 1920s in the US "roared" with rapid economic growth after the conclusion of World War I. But in October 1929, the bubbly stock markets crashed dramatically, plunging the nation into the decadelong Great Depression.