What will it look like? I won't know, because the odds are astronomically in favor of my sloughing off this mortal coil before the world comes to an end with either a bang or a whimper.
I am quite sure, however, that there will be no one left to read my books after the end of the world, so I wish, for admittedly narcissistic reasons, that science could come up with a different scenario.

One of the more bizarre American religious developments of recent decades is the growing preoccupation of fundamentalists with the "end times" scenario. Visit raptureready.com
and learn how your more deranged countrymen are preparing to greet the day when Jesus will return to earth on the plain of Armageddon, trailing clouds of glory as he and his angels sic locusts with "hair as the hair of women, and their teeth...as the teeth of lions" on everyone who has not accepted him as the Messiah.

For further gory details, see the Book of Revelation. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid, all you Jews, Muslims, atheists and sane Christians who see Revelation as the work of human lunacy it is rather than as the word of God.

Incredibly, public opinion polls show that around 60 percent of Americans believe that the grisly fantasies in Revelation will come true one day. But the same opinion polls also show that only a third of Americans can name the four gospels, so perhaps they do not even know what is written in the later Book of Revelation. Europeans and Asians are utterly baffled by American beliefs in this regard, since almost no one in other developed countries is ignorant enough to pay the slightest attention to such nonsense.

If someone told you the world was going to end today, you would suggest that he or she see a psychiatrist. If people would only apply the same logic to predictions of supernatural events slated to occur at some unspecified date in the future (or, for that matter, to accounts of supernatural events that are supposed to have taken place in the distant past), America would be a more rational society.

In his "On Faith" commentary last week, Charles W. Colson made the absurd statement that Christians encounter both "hostility" and "discrimination" because they "make a truth claim."
The opinions of the sort of fundamentalist Christians who believe in "the Rapture" elicit
well-justified ridicule and disagreement not only from secularists but from religious believers whose faith makes room for secular knowledge.

One person's "truth claim" is another's page in a textbook of clinical psychological disorders, and belief in the Rapture end-of-the-world scenario offers an excellent example of the latter. Revelation certainly has nothing to do with the Jesus of the gospels (which were written much earlier than the Armageddon script). Unless I have forgotten my scripture, the Sermon on the Mount has nothing to say about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Or did Jesus actually say, "Cursed are the bad people, for they shall see locusts?"

A "truth claim" that has the angels of the Lord of Hosts doing away with everyone who doesn't accept the fundamentalist Christian version of salvation deserves no intellectual respect. Our Constitution requires us to respect people's right to belief that the earth is flat; it does not require us to respect the belief itself.

I am more concerned about the extinction of the human species through its own self-destructive behavior than I am about the demise of the universe--even through the natural process envisaged by science. The physical world can get along very nicely without us for a good long time, but we can't get along without it.

The scientists' black hole certainly sounds less painful than hairy lion-toothed locusts. But, as Saturday Night Live's Emily Litella used to say, "Oh, never mind...."