In the late 1990s, the colourful fashion designer Paco Rabanne had annonced the end of the fashion world (e.g. Paris) for August 11th, 1999, after he had a vision of people in flames jumping into the river Seine, and after reading too much Nostradamus. According to him, the space station Mir was to fall on Paris and destroy everything.
Most people made fun of his predictions, and rightly so. A group of skepdics even organized a public cocktail for the "survivors" on August 11th, at 11 o'clock, just in front of Paco Rabanne's shop, in the middle of Paris. 200 people attended the meeting.
Regarding the recurring "end of times" fears, I'd like to share the reflexions of a taoist monk I met in China 4 years ago. His position is interesting because of the tension between traditionalism and modernism which underpins it.
First of all, this man believed very much in UFOs and space-made crop circles (due to an overexposition to YouTube videos, which is a Fortean phenomenon in itself given that he lived in the wilderness of a country who strictly controls the Internet) ! In this regard, he was rather a man of his times. In spite of the large number of apocalyptic predictions told in the Taoist Canon (= compilation of sacred texts), he did not believe in the end of the world. And here is why : according to him the spiritual world was overcrowded with beings waiting to take on physical bodies. In order to provide them with these bodies, the world had to endure. Otherwise, all these roaming, embryonic spirits would have to remain homeless forever.
So, although eccentric, his argument could be seen as a variation of Lavoisier's law (in chemistry) as sumarized by the sentence "nothing is created, nor destroyed, everything transforms".