100 Skills You'll Need for the End of the World

In my first class as a high school freshman, I entered the room to find every

inch of every blackboard covered with numbers. Huh? The teacher, a biblical

scholar, tried to get us to guess what the numbers were. Lottery numbers?

Algebraic formulas? Secret codes? No. They were dates, we could tell that

much, but for what?

Eventually he explained that these were all dates on which someone,

likely a prophet, had predicted that the world would end. Since then, we’ve

survived a predicted apocalypse a few times, from midnight 1999 to the

2012 Mayan calendar deadline, and so far we’re safe.

One thing is certain: we don’t know when or if the world will end. But we

also don’t know what the future may bring, and we can’t expect things to

stay exactly as they are. The possibility that catastrophic changes wrought

by war or disease or a random meteor strike or, most urgently, climate

change will come in our lifetime seems very real. As does the possibility that

such changes — or efforts to avoid them — will require us to live closer to

the land, closer to one another, and farther from our touch screens and

shiny, fast vehicles ..