Almost as soon as human beings developed writing, they began predicting the imminent end of the world. An Assyrian clay tablet dated to sometime around 2800 B.C. declared that the earth was degenerate “in these latter days” and that the world was “speedily coming to an end.”

Jumping over several hundred thousand similar predictions, I was living in Missoula in 1980 when adherents of a small offshoot of the Baha’i religion, heeding the prophecy of their founder that a nuclear holocaust would occur on April 29, holed up in a basement of a house a few blocks off Orange Street.

The world didn’t end that day, I’m happy to report, but I seem to recall that the sect, or at least its Missoula branch, did.

Over in the Paradise Valley, the Church Universal and Triumphant suffered a blow to its credibility in 1990 when still another nuclear apocalypse, this one predicted by CUT leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet, failed to light up the sky.

You might want to keep those incidents in mind as the nation falls into the grip of 2012 mania. If you haven’t heard, the world is supposed to end on Dec. 21 of that year. Or, at the very least, some awfully bad things are supposed to commence happening on that date.

Let the countdown begin

I won’t bore you with the details (which I don’t really understand anyway), but the gist of it is that the ancient Mayan “long count” calendar comes to an end on Dec. 21, 2012.

As for what is supposed to happen on that date, the Mayans apparently didn’t say. But legions of interpreters, authors and mischief-makers have pointed to solar flares, alignment with a black hole or collision with a “rogue planet” as events that could destroy the earth.

Hollywood has jumped on the bandwagon with “2012,” a doomsday romp starring John Cusack, and the Internet is already getting clogged with end-times drivel. There hasn’t been so much excitement about so little since the Y2K bug.

It is only fair to point out that some people who believe in Mayan prophecies say the end of the calendar doesn’t portend the destruction of the world, only a massive shift in spiritual consciousness.

In the words of Daniel Pinchbeck, the author of “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”: “People are experiencing more synchronicities, more telepathic foretellings, a deeper awareness of how their intention actually inflects what then manifests in their own lives.”

Hmm. It sounds like Mr. Pinchbeck might be visiting from a rogue planet.

For those who do believe that the end is near, I can only say this: Do you really suppose that you are going to be here when the curtain goes down on a 4-billion-year-old planet? It’s an odd kind of vanity but vanity nonetheless, whether you’re waiting for a black hole or Rapture.

On the other hand

Not that I’m completely closed-minded. Anything could happen, I suppose, and if the world does end, I’m willing to concede that it would be a great tragedy. But the universe contains an inconceivably great number of planets — more, scientists estimate, than the number of grains of sand on the one we occupy. And as we saw in the newspaper last week, even the Vatican’s chief astronomer is open to the strong likelihood of some of those planets harboring life.

But what if the Mayans were predicting the end of the universe itself? That leads to the age-old question of whether it will end with a bang or a whimper.

I’m leaning toward whimper. What else would you expect from a universe that is predominantly beige? Several years ago, a couple of astrophysicists from Johns Hopkins University analyzed the light emitted by more than 200,000 galaxies and averaged out the results, ultimately concluding that the color of the universe matches the hue of the most popular shade of pantyhose.

When the universe was young, it was predominantly blue. It has been growing slowly redder as the number of red giant stars has increased. So, as the universe slides toward oblivion — either in 2012 or many billions of years in the future — for the time being it is beige. Other astronomers, trying to be helpful, made suggestions regarding what to call this particular shade of beige. Their ideas included Skyvory, Univeige, Big Bang Buff and Primordial Clam Chowder.

The Johns Hopkins astrophysicists, who certainly earned the right, chose Cosmic Latte as their favorite.

On the morning of Dec. 21, 2012, I think I’ll have a triple-shot cosmic latte. I want to be wide awake, just in case.