Countdown to the end of the world.

Here's a picture of a beautiful yet slightly menacing part of the CERN supercolider.

You remember that one, the one that's going to destroy the world?

I spoke to a physicist who I work with, and I asked him why, since it's started up successfully, hasn't the world been destroyed.

He tells me that they're only operating at partial power, and that it will take quite some time before they will be able to operate at full power. I asked when it will be at full power, so I'll know when to stop buying milk, and he said a year or so. Uh oh, says I, that means 2012! We know that the world is going to end then! The Maya told us so! Just like the world ended in 1999! And 999! and 666! And every other time some religious nut has decided that it was, in his or her opinion, time to hit the reset button. Guess what? I can tell you when the world is going to end, with much greater certainty than any of the current crop of nut-jobs.

The world will end when the sun expands and becomes a Red Giant Star, in about 5 billion years, so sometime around 3:04 on Friday the 20th of April in the year 5,000,002,009. How did I come up with such a specific date and time? Like all the other prophets before me, I pulled it out of thin air.