End of the world today: When, why and how American Christian pastor Chris McCann claims Earth will be annihilated

Details are sparse about when exactly the event will happen — but there's not much you can do, anyway

A photo taken on August 13, 2015 shows poeple queuing at the entrance to the Armageddon attraction at The Walt Disney Studios park of Disneyland Paris in Marne-la-Vallee (AFP PHOTO / BERTRAND GUAY)

The world is set to come to an end at some point today, according to an American pastor.

Chris McCann, who leads and founded the eBible Fellowship, has said in a series of podcasts that the apocalypse is coming today. Some of the details are a bit sketchy, but McCann seems fairly certain.

Here's everything you need to know about today's events:

When is it scheduled for?

Chris McCann hasn’t said much about when exactly “the world will pass away”, only saying that it’s likely to happen today.

But McCann and his eBible Fellowship are based in Philadelphia. Because that’s fairly far west, it’ll be quite late for much of the world that 7 October comes to an end — and it could presumably happen any time until then:

But some areas are further west. It won’t stop being 7 October anywhere until a bit later:

How will it happen?

“With fire”, apparently.

McCann has said: “God destroyed the first Earth with water, by a flood, in the days of Noah. And he says he’ll not do that again, not by water. But he does say in 2nd Peter 3 that he’ll destroy it by fire.”

How did the date come about?

It’s actually the result of a past failed prediction. Another Christian radio host called Harold Camping originally predicted that the end of the world would come on 21 May, 2011. But it didn’t, and Camping became something of a laughing stock.

McCann claimed that date was in fact the beginning of a period of judgement days, which would last 1,600 days. So he added that period of time to the original date and we ended up here.

So there’s still time to get ready?

No, apparently not. That day in 2011 was when God stopped deciding which people are going to get to survive today.

Are we all going to die?

Probably not.

Even McCann has admitted that ““There’s a strong likelihood that this will happen,” but that there’s an unlikely possibility that it will not.”

We’ve had our fair share of apocalyptic predictions — including from McCann’s hero, Camping — and we’ve got through all of them OK in the past.

It’s thought that the physical rock that we live on and call the Earth will come to an end in about 7.5-billion years, when the sun will grow so big and hot that it will swallow it up.

But humanity is likely to come an end long before then. If climate change or other unpredictable events like an asteroid don’t wipe us out, the expanding sun will make all life extinct in about a billion years.

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