If you’re one of the many checking your stockpiles of canned food, saying a prayer or two, or holding your shotgun a little bit tighter, you can relax: the world hasn’t ended. In New Zealand, the clock has struck 12:00 am, bringing about the dreaded December 21, 2012 date, with no signs of doom anywhere to be seen.

Though many still are not convinced that the world will not end on Dec. 21, as the Mayans predicted, until the date hits their own backdoors, this isn’t the first time an end-of-the-world prediction has turned out to be a flop (or the last).

In 1910, The New York Times warned that everyone on the planet might die from toxic gas hitting the Earth from the tail of Halley’s Comet. Later in 1999, people turned to Nostradamus who had written, “The year 1999, seventh month / From the sky will come great king of terror,” to indicate our end of days. But yet here we are, still spending more time than is healthy on the Internet.

In the year 2000, people were convinced the Y2K bug would make lasers shoot out of stoplights. Given some faulty computer coding, many swore that when computers hit the “00” two-numeral code in the program, everything computerized would believe it actually was the year 1900 and so stop working. From nuclear power stations to life-support systems, the industrialized world would stop functioning and end civilization as we know it. Luckily, that didn’t happen.

In 2008, folks both inside and outside the scientific community were nervous that the Large Hadron collider would also bring about the end times. Fears ran that accelerating particles to the speed of light would create a mini black hole. That black hole would first suck up the planet and the universe shortly thereafter. We’re still waiting on that one.

Yet, in other news, many are still not convinced that global warming is real. Go figure.