At the office today, one of our copy editors said: “Guess we don’t have to try very hard today, since the world ends tomorrow.”

The world will end someday. Whether through a religious event of when our sun goes supernova.

But if we have learned anything from the extraordinary number of predictions of The End … this one will be wrong just like all the rest.

At The National, we ran a story today about how no one in the UAE seems to think the world will end on Friday because the Maya Long Count Calendar runs out of days. This has been talked about, laughed about … and it has 1) become boring and 2) sparked the usual weird behavior by the same gullible yokels who are eager to believe in any prediction of the end of the world.

The National story quotes at least two Muslims who say the Koran indicates no human knows the final day. Which echoes two verses in the Christian Bible, in Matthew chapter 24, in which Jesus says: “Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”

Also, in Second Peter 3 verse 10: “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

Those haven’t stopped all sorts of semi-Christians from predicting the end of the Earth in centuries past.

Here is a truly enormous list of incorrect predictions/prophecies.

I suggested to the copy editor — who of course had been kidding — that we give the newspaper the same serious level of attention we always do.

Just to be safe — in case the world doesn’t end tomorrow.