Judgment Day May 21: When will the world actually end?
Judgment Day May 21: Harold Camping, the head of the Family Radio broadcasting network, has calculated that the apocalypse will begin on May 21. Do his numbers add up for a judgment day this weekend?
Will the world actually explode on May 21? There's no way to prove that it won't! One man says Judgment Day is coming this Saturday.
NASA/Newscom/File
As you may have learned from one of the 2,000 billboards worldwide, May 21, 2011, is Judgment Day, upon which the righteous – which totals 3 percent of humanity – will be whisked away to the sweet hereafter, leaving the rest of us to weather five months of extreme natural disasters until Oct. 21, whereupon God destroys the entire universe and everyone left in it.
At least that's what Harold Camping says. The head of Family Radio broadcasting network, which boasts 150 outlets in the United States, has what his website calls "infallible, absolute proof" that there's no point in making plans for Memorial Day weekend. It goes like this:
Camping says that because Jesus was crucified on Friday, April 1, 33 AD, and that it takes exactly 365.2422 days for the earth to complete one orbit of the sun, we can conclude that, on April 1, 2011, Jesus was crucified exactly 722,449.07 days ago. Add 51 days to this to get to May 1, and you get a figure of 722,500.07.
