World will end today... (Well it is 9/9/09 - and the doom-mongers are predicting a disaster)



If you're reading this, then it's pretty safe to say that he world hasn't ended.



Today, the ninth day of the ninth month of the ninth year, was heralded by some doomsayers as the end of the planet.

Over the past few weeks, web chatrooms devoted to alien conspiracies, doomsday cults and numerology - the belief that numbers have mystical significance - have been buzzing with talk of 09/09/09.

Some warned of an outbreak of killer swine flu. Others that the world would be sucked into a black hole created by the Cern particle collider in Switzerland.

Doomsayers have predicted in the past that the world will end on 09/09/09

Instead, the most exciting thing likely to happen today is the release of a Beatles computer game and the announcement of a new Apple iPod.



It's been a miserable few years for fans of Armageddon dates. The millennium passed without a single horseman of the apocalypse, while 06/06/06 turned out to be a rather uneventful Tuesday.

Believers had high hopes for 09/09/09, particularly in the UK where 999 is the emergency phone number.



Users of the alien-earth.org website combined Nostrodamus, the Book of Revelation and the Mayan prophecies with fears about the Cern Large Hadron Collider in Geneva in their gloomy predictions.

'Note that 999 is 666 upside down,' wrote one. 'Did Nostrodamus warn us from 400 years ago about creating a Doomsday Machine with the Cern LHC?'

On www.revelation13.net, numerologists were concerned about swine flu. 'The world population officially reaches 6.8billion near November 2009, and Revelation 6:8 is about the fourth horseman, Death, so will death ride then? Could this be a mutation in swine flu H1N1 making it a deadly worldwide plague?

'Note that "nein" in German means "no" so 9-9-9 could mean "no-no-no".'







However, numerologist and 'soul coach' Pauline Rose said: 'Nine is the number of completion so hopefully more positive things will start to happen.

'We have all had a tough nine years and there have been all sorts of tests for people all over the world.'

Scientists said numerology and the belief in special dates was hokum.

Professor Chris French of Goldsmiths, University of London and editor of The Skeptic Magazine, said: 'Numerology, like any other system of divination, has no validity whatsoever with the exception that sometimes your belief that a day is auspicious may affect your behaviour.

'If a deeply superstitious person is anxious about driving on Friday 13th it's possible they may be more likely to crash.

'We are very good at seeking out meaning and patterns in randomness - it's one of the reasons humans are such a successful species. But the price is that we see significance in things that aren't there at all.'