by Mark Shainblum The ancient Vikings called it Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods. Medieval Christians called it the Battle of Armageddon or the End of Days. Twentieth century rationalists knew it as Atomic War or Nuclear Winter or the heat death of the universe. Call it what you will, doomsday myths seem as intrinsic and as necessary to the human psyche as creation myths. Just as the Book of Genesis or Darwin's Origin of Species provide us with a mythological Chapter One - it's arguable that as a species or a culture we also crave a glimpse at the last line, too.

Several years ago, the McLuhan Centre for Media Studies in Toronto went so far as to suggest that the nuclear arms race was not an entirely bad thing; that it provided our secular/industrial civilization with a doomsday myth as real to us as Armageddon was to 13th century Europeans. And make no mistake, to the feudal dirt farmer and his manorial lord alike, Armageddon was very real.

Even the notion of a scientific doomsday did not truly start with the modern age. As long ago as 1798, Thomas Malthus rationally and scientifically predicted the end of humanity. As we would say now, he crunched the numbers, studied birth and death rates, looked at agricultural production in his society, and came to the not-so-startling conclusion that the human race was doomed. Population growth was outstripping food production at an alarming rate, and Malthus' future could hold nothing but global famine, the death of millions, and the collapse of civilization.

It's not so much that Malthus was wrong as he was not in possession of all the facts. He could not predict the radical social changes and vastly improved agricultural technologies that would allow us to wring far greater yields from the same amount of land. And in the end, it mattered little. Malthus fulfilled his function. He was an oracle who perhaps prevented his doomsday simply by predicting it. This is also the conceit of science fiction writers. We claim not to be trying to predict the future. Our role -- we say -- is to look at current trends and ask "What happens if this goes on?" We are literary canaries in the mineshaft, we test dangerous ideas and new technologies before they get loose in society at large.

But maybe we're fooling ourselves. Maybe, like Malthus, at core we are just providers of alternate doomsdays for those who no longer believe in the Church's version of the way the world will end, but who still crave an end. And as the decade and the century and the millennium wind down, we are deluged with doomsdays of all sorts. We are afraid of genetically engineered "frankenfood" and the relentless pace of technological change. We are afraid of Bill Gates and the far right. In Road Stories for the Flesh-Eating Future, a documentary by filmmaker Lewis Cohen, Montreal-based futurists Arthur and Marilouise Krokker baldly state that we have already sown the seeds of our own destruction, that we are building a digital species which will one day replace us. This is science fiction in reverse-gear, the anti-robot-paranoia of Isaac Asimov's short stories of the 1940's suddenly made real.

And then we come that most perfect of all possible Armageddons, perfect because it actually works and we built it ourselves. We call it Y2K or the Millennium Bug, and lest you think it a minor doomsday in comparison to Ragnarok or global warming, consider this simple fact: averting a Year 2000 meltdown has already cost the global economy more than the Second World War. And that's in per capita, adjusted terms.

Though many of us are already sick of the word "millennium" and cheerfully dismiss the significance of the four-digit clickover that will happen in 39 days from the time of this writing, the year 2000 is extremely significant in mythological terms. For a thousand years the year 2000 stood there as an immovable and distant gateway to the future. It was almost shorthand, a code-word, for the world to come. Whatever was on this side of the gate was still encompassable, comprehensible, knowable. As long as our years started with the number "one," we could still make sense of the world. In late 1930s a popular science fiction radio show was called Beyond 2000, yet an early- '90s TV science program from New Zealand had the same title. As recently as 1995, movies were being still being made about futuristic 1999s with flying cars and high-tech CD-players that could record human thoughts. 1999 was still the near future, even if it were only four years away. 2000, five years away, was too distant and too scary to mess with. Safer to stay on this side of the divide.

Like the mythical arrow described by the Greek philosopher Xeno -- which could never truly strike its target because it had to cross an infinite number of points to get there -- it's possible that we never truly believed that the year 2000 would actually arrive. And perhaps that's why we created the Millennium Bug. On some levels it really was a mistake, of course. But just as many personal mistakes reflect deep-seated conflicts in the subconscious, Y2K is a reflection of the collective unconscious. Deep down there, in that place in the human soul where we acknowledge myths and heroes and doomsdays on a level uncomplicated by rationality - we understood the need for a real doomsday to accompany that Earth-shattering four-digit clickover.

Other cultures at other times carved their doomsday myths into clay tablets, inscribed them onto animal skins or set them in cold, mechanical type. We've written ours in a string of ones and zeroes. If the universe wouldn't cooperate and provide us with a doomsday conveniently synchronized to our arbitrary methods of timekeeping, we would simply have to build one ourselves.