The Prophetic Blackout?

As I was writing a comment on someone else's blog this morning in regards to 2012 prophecies (see the blog here), I got to thinking about predictions beyond 2012. Are there any? There doesn't seem to be many.

Now some prophecies regarding 2012 are just prophecies concerning the time around the year 2012, and don't necessarily pinpoint an exact date. What I was interested in is specific dates pinpointed after the year 2012 (or at least time periods well beyond the year 2012). Here is what I found:

• 2016 - Professor Lloyd Cunningdale and students find a time capsule in the Sierra Nevada Mountains that was left by the Donner party that includes predictions for the future. One prediction says that in the future, there would be biological warfare, and a disease from the biological warfare will eliminate humanity in the year 2016. This report comes from the Weekly World News...so it shouldn't be taken seriously.
• 2034 - This prediction is based on a time calculation that says the covenant God made with Abraham and the new covenant with Christ must be of equal length (2000 years). The year of Christ's death and resurrection is where the new 2000 years start, so the date calculated to be the end is 2034. There's of course, nothing in the Bible that says both covenants are supposed to be of the same length. And the precise dates for some of those events are hard to know for certain, so its hard to actually calculate the end if you don't know the exact moment in time you are supposed to start from. Besides, Christ said not to bother calculating the date of the end; only the Father knew that.
• 2047 - This prediction says the world will end at 3:28 AM, September 14th, 2047. Basically, this prediction isn't even intended to be taken seriously. It says that if people don't discard their plastic conformity and 'normalcy,' the 'gods' will withdraw their protection. At that point, rainbow colored alien lemurs will attack the entire human race and beat them to death with gigantic burritos.

I found those dates here.

I also found a question on Yahoo Answers regarding predictions after the year 2012. One person claimed Nostradamus said the world would end on 3797. It seems Nostradamus predictions have a tendency to get interpreted different ways though based on the vagueness of his predictions. Another person said that the year 2038 is when the Unix time keeping system wrapped around. Basically it would be like the Y2k problem, except it would only affect Unix and Linux operating systems.

So not much there either.

I looked up Edgar Cayce predictions to see if I could find anything specifically targeting a date after the year 2012, but the only thing I came across was a prediction that he would be reborn in the year 2100 AD (although he made like 14,000 predictions, so it's possible I may have missed something...but a lot of his predictions were for individuals anyways).

I also tried various google searches for end times dates after the year 2012, but it seemed that no matter how I worded the search, the results always focused on the year 2012 itself. When I tried searching without the year 2012 in the search terms, I found this website. But none of the predictions it lists are all that interesting. Mostly just more people trying to set a date for when the Biblical prophecies will happen, or when an asteroid 'might' hit the earth.

There are of course, predictions regarding the end of times where no specific date is set...the best example are the Biblical prophecies. If something does happen in 2012, I doubt it will be the return of Christ. Christ said not to bother trying to predict when he will return, so with so many people looking towards the year 2012, I doubt that will be the year of his return. However, that doesn't mean that something else big couldn't happen.

So it seems there are not that many predictions for the distant future. Nor are there all that many for the relatively near future after the year 2012. So again, I must ask, why is there so much pointing to the year 2012? I'm not really one to jump on the prophetic dating bandwagon...I realize there are many end time prophecies in the past that never played out, and I wasn't concerned about the Y2k problem around the year 2000. But I guess this 2012 phenomena intrigues me because there are so many cultures from the past that looked forward to this time or a time encompassing it. These predictions span different religions and cultures; it's not limited to any specific religious sect or regional superstition. There's also a lot of people today saying that we are on the verge of a spiritual awakening that is already in motion. So why 2012? And why doesn't there seem to be many predictions for the endtimes after 2012? Is it a prophetic blackout?

I imagine if the year 2012 comes and goes without incident, someone will come along and pull a new prediction out of the woodwork for the end of times though. But for those who are skeptical of anything significant happening in the year 2012, bear in mind there are plenty of psychos out there with access to nukes and deadly viruses. Someone could unleash these on the world in the year 2012 whether it was 'intended' to happen or not. They may just use the date as an excuse to unleash their wrath. Communication infrastructures could be sabotaged too. After all that...comes martial law. So yeah...that could be pretty bad.