Scientists and storytellers are often in the same business: trying to imagine futures that haven't yet happened. Across cultures and centuries, human beings have continually feared, predicted, and in some cases nearly brought about their own annihilation; still, the apocalypse keeps failing to arrive. This course takes a hard look at our long-standing obsession with the end times, asking what that obsession reveals about us—our fears, our need for meaning, our remarkable capacity for both creation and destruction—and whether reckoning with it honestly might help us navigate the dangers that truly do loom. Along the way, we will treat apocalyptic prediction as a case study in empirical reasoning, examining how hypotheses about catastrophe are formed and tested, as well as what happens when strongly held convictions about the end of the world collide with, or masquerade as, scientific truth. What counts as evidence when fear and belief are in the mix? Does imagining the end serve some deeper psychological or social purpose? How can we use data and observation to distinguish productive alarm from the seductive comfort of doom? And why has knowing the facts so rarely been enough to change our behavior? To answer these questions, we will move across a wide, interdisciplinary terrain, from ancient flood myths and millenarian movements to modern apocalyptic fiction, from contemporary conspiracy theories and the psychology of doomsday fervor to the existential risks posed by nuclear war, widespread famine, and artificial intelligence. We will ask why the apocalypse has been so spectacularly overpredicted, what it means that we keep reaching for these narratives anyway, and how humanity might cultivate the foresight and moral imagination to confront the threats that are, in fact, real.