Next End of the World: Nov.1, 4006

Clues about the world ending on Nov.1, 4006 are apparently visible in the window above Jesus in Da Vinci's "The Last Supper."

Note to Mayan calendar aficionados: You can hold off on building that flood-proof bunker. For a couple of thousand years.

A researcher in the Vatican archives has added to the long list of proposed arrivals for the End of Times. This time, the date – Nov. 1, 4006 – comes to us via Leonardo da Vinci.

Author Sabrina Sforza Galitzia recently told La Repubblica newspaper that da Vinci hid the prediction in his painting, The Last Supper. According to Sforza Galitzia, there are clues hidden in the central window, or lunette, that hovers above Jesus Christ as he sits with his disciples.

“There is a da Vinci code — it is just not the one made popular by Dan Brown,” Sforza Galitzia said.

In Brown’s novelized version, the painting revealed the marital status of Christ. Sforza Galitzia believes it predicts a global flood that will begin in March 21, 4006 and continue until November, wiping the Earth clean. According to Sforza Galitzia, this will provide humanity (at least, the excellent swimmers among us) with a “new start.”

By their nature, predictions of the Apocalypse tend to work best when telescoped well out into the future.

The next big date on everyone’s Ragnarok calendar is Dec. 21, 2012, when the Mayan calendar ends – or, at least, stops and picks up elsewhere. Some have posited that on that day, a major celestial event will upset the balance of the Earth’s poles, prompting the planet’s mantle to shift, causing widespread devastation.

Enough people were alarmed by the prediction that NASA went so far as to build a webpage to calm people’s fears.

As NASA points out, the 2012 scenario is actually the combining of two fantastical predictions – one that an as-yet undiscovered planet will collide with the Earth. That was supposed to happen in 2003 (oops). Later, it was moved forward to dovetail with the Mayan calendar.

“Nothing bad will happen in 2012,” NASA reassures. “Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.”

There have hundreds of predictions of the End of Times. Most are the work of religious zealots. They would probably do well to read their Bible a little more closely.

“Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away,” Christ says in the Book of Matthew, chapter 24. “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my father only.”