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The Book of Zachariah has a prophecy about the Lord splitting the Mount of Olives in two in the last days to save Israel at the last battle. I don’t know if that is how it is going to go down, but I like the symbolism of Christ as the second Moses dividing the land to save Israel from its enemies like Moses divided the water to save Israel of old from its enemies.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The Second Coming and the nastiness preceding it is a somewhat passe topic for more intellectual types (although certainly not for the proverbial high priests in conservative small-town branches), I suspect largely because there has been a long history of crying wolf on the subject. Ever since the early Christians people believed that the Second Coming was nigh (although, if we really appreciate deep history of our species and planet and how incredibly long it is, \u201ccoming quickly\u201d could be a relatively long time when measured against our lifespans). We certainly have not been immune to this in our own tradition, including with Joseph Smith, who I have the sense personally thought that the Second Coming was coming sooner rather than later (although others who know more can probably chapter and verse that belief in a primary source somewhere).<\/p>\n Outside our tradition, it seems like every couple of years somebody figures out a clever, unique way to recalculate the numbers in Revelations that shows that the Second Coming is a few years off (as a side, for-fun project after I\u2019m retired I\u2019ve always wanted to do a mathematical history of end-of-the-world calculations).\u00a0While the end of the world is the traditional purview of traditional, conservative religionists, recently a variety of quasi-religious, quasi-scientific, almost new agey beliefs surrounding things like Simulation Hypothesis<\/a> or the Singularity <\/a>have also taken on the apocalypse. One sort of interesting version of this is what is known as the Doomsday Equation<\/a> (or Argument), a subject that I recently read a book about<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Doomsday Argument is, in principle, rather simple. If we assume that the number of people who will ever live is fixed, then all things being equal it is more likely that we would find ourselves in the middle of all people who have ever lived than near the very beginning (or the very end, for that matter). For example, if we become an interplanetary species and there will be quadrillions of humans born before we die off, then it would be quite the coincidence if we happened to find ourselves at the very beginning of history (relatively speaking). On the other hand, if the Second Coming were coming tomorrow, it would likewise be very coincidental that we happen to find ourselves at the very end. The same principle has also been applied to, for example, the survivorship of institutions, companies, Broadway run times, species, and countries. For example, if we roughly assume that we are the middle case, then the United States will survive for about 250 more years. Our survival as a species depends on a lot of different parameters, but in most cases it is unlikely that we will last for more than 20,000 or so more years.<\/p>\n The Church, following this model, will last for about 200 more years, unless the reference case is not years, but total membership, in which case it will be somewhat different. Here is the interesting part\u2014if we believe that the Church will last as an institution until the Second Coming, then that actually puts Doomsday at around 200 to, say, 400 more years. We can also play around with this in terms of other religious parameters. There will be about 300 more temples built, a few more million missionaries sent out, 17 more Presidents of the Church, etc.<\/p>\n