The world will end tomorrow, according to some interpretations of the Mayan calendar. That's Friday, Dec. 21.
And that's fine with me. It should be clear to anyone with the brain capacity of a dinosaur that the human race has outlived its usefulness. It's time to admit that our existence has been a failure by almost any measurement and to gracefully accept our collective doom.
The signs of civilization's demise are everywhere: Wars rage, people starve, children suffer, despots rule, ice caps melt, forests disappear and the outlook is for more of the same, or worse.
If our civilization was a lab experiment, it would have been dumped into the toilet long ago and flushed away by a celestial hazmat team. What apparently seemed like the right mix of ingredients to create a benevolent and compassionate mankind turned out to be toxic. I wouldn't be surprised if the first living thing that crawled out of the primordial ooze formed by those ingredients sucker punched the second living thing and stole its lunch.
The Mayans, with remarkable clarity, saw the downward trajectory human history was taking thousands of years ago and calculated its shelf life down to a few days before this not-so-merry Christmas. The prediction looks accurate to me, based on the state of our current affairs, and I don't think we should do a lot of whining about it. We've been given the figurative rope and instead of making it into an attractive holiday bow we've hung ourselves with it.
It's our own fault. We've had millennia to try to overcome our homicidal instincts but every time the human race takes a step toward rationality, we decide to settle minor differences with a war in which thousands or millions of innocents are killed or one ethnic group decides to exterminate another for reasons neither one can remember — it's always something.
We're a menace to the universe and not the kind of neighbor any sensible inhabited planet would want to have.
I don't think the Mayans told anyone how the world will come to its well-deserved end — not that it really matters — but the mother of all explosions seems most likely. The massive and combustible reservoir of bad karma, bad vibes and bile that has accumulated from our unspeakable behavior can be contained for only so long.
With a flash and a bang, our ill-conceived planet will become just another supernova, and not a trace or a memory will be left of what used to be the third planet from the sun.
But the end of our world will have a silver lining: It will be the best Christmas present the rest of the universe could receive.
Bill Federman is a Times Union editor. His email address is bfederman@timesunion.com.