Judgment Day: Today Is The Day Skynet Takes Over

Skynet is about to attack. Maybe

The Terminator series predicts that tomorrow is Judgment Day. But just in case it isn't, the end of the world is a movable feast

By Adam Boult

Are you ready for Skynet? Photograph: SNAP / Rex Features

Thursday, 21 April 2011 is the day when Skynet, villainous super-computer from the Terminator films, is due to launch its assault on mankind. Terminator director James Cameron alerted the world to the significance of the date with a tweet saying: "Instead of machines taking over, we have the very real threat of global warming."

But hold on there James, don't downplay your own prescience. We can worry about global warming and the possibility that robots are going to kill us all. An MoD report has just this week warned that we're heading for an "incremental and involuntary journey towards a Terminator-like reality." The report, the UK Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Systems, says that, given the current rate technological development, "Britain must quickly establish a policy on what will constitute 'acceptable machine behaviour'".

Now as any good science fiction fan knows, "acceptable machine behaviour" has already been established in Asimov's three rules of robotics, the first of which states unambiguously: "A robot may not injure a human being." The military has chosen to completely ignore Asimov's rules (understandably perhaps, given how useless pacifist robots would be in a war), but the Terminator films at least gives us some ideas on how to fight back when our drones go self-aware and turn against us (we're going to need a time machine and a robotic Arnold Schwarzenegger).

If it's neither robots nor global warning that finish us off, there are plenty of other things to worry about, many of which tend to have some other ominous date attached.

Between the ages of eight and 12 I was convinced that the world was going to end in 1997, after my older sister came home from school confidently stating this was the case. The prediction was something to do with Nostradamus, but I became unshakably certain that 1997 was the year mankind would blow itself up with nuclear weapons. Thus for a large part of my childhood I was sure that my later teens would be spent either dead or skulking round a barren radioactive wasteland battling giant mutated rats for the last remaining scraps of food.

As 1997 passed without major incident (in my local area at any rate), there was a new apocalypse on the horizon – 31 December 1999. The millennium bug was going to see computers failing worldwide, planes falling from the sky, nuclear power stations blowing up all over the place ... but again that turned out to be a lot of fuss over nothing.

Now the latest end of the world is due next year, as illustrated in the hilariously far-fetched disaster film 2012. On 21 December 2012 we reach the end point of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which runs from 3114 BC to just before Christmas-after-next. High-profile celebrities have been drawing on the writings of interesting (if not to be taken too literally) thinkers such as Terence McKenna and Daniel Pinchbeck and coming to some alarming conclusions about what the end of the Mayan calendar might represent.

"The precursors to a civilization that's going under are the same, time and time again," warns Mel Gibson. "What's human sacrifice if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason? I just wanna draw the parallels. I don't wanna be a doomsayer, but the Mayan calendar ends in 2012."

Gibson's words are echoed by rapper Lil' Wayne – "The world is about to end as we know it. You can see it already" – and actor Ashton Kutcher, who recently told Men's Health magazine that his physical fitness regimen is "completely tailored around the end of days," and that he stays fit "for no other reason than to save the people I care about".

Who knows, maybe they're right. Maybe the world is about to be devastated by some calamity predicted by the Mayans 5,000 years ago. Or maybe global warming, or nuclear holocaust, or awesome killer cyborgs are set to wipe us all out.

However, given how frequently the end of the world has been incorrectly forecast, it might be wise for Lil' Wayne, Mel, Ashton, and anyone else buying into the 2012 hype not to stake everything on it, just in case they're still around come 2013.