All those attempts at explaining the fall of civilizations are needlessly intricate because the cause is always this single one: abundance. It's that simple, as history clearly shows in all cases. After an initial Heroic Age comes an "embarrassment of riches", "l'embarras du choix", the accumulation of much material wealth, which turns us into sybarites with revolting habits. The time comes when there is no need for altruism and bravery anymore. Plenty is poison for the mind. It tends to spoil one's character.
First it was in Mesopotamia, with Babylon, as the thundering Hebrew chronicles attest, then it was the Classical West, with Greece and Rome, now it's Modern Europe and its imitators, all of that in two-millennia jumps, so that, if the pattern keeps repeating, the global modernity will presently collapse unless something exceptional happens, like an invasion of space aliens who will save us and stop the endlessly repeating story.
If they enslave us there could be a War of the Worlds, with a germ that will make the invaders go back to their lair, as in the H.G. Wells novel. Then there would come another slow, painful, 2000-yr. uphill Sisyphean struggle to reach the summit once again, and there might be no fourth time because we will have finally learned the lesson, which will have taken about 8,000 years, or much longer if it's true that there was a Mu, a Lemuria and an Atlantis in continents that were swallowed by the sea.
The Egyptians told the Greeks that they, the Egyptians, had managed to emigrate just before Atlantis was destroyed by several earthquakes. The recent idea that this catastrophe was the one that wrecked the Mediterranean island of Santorini must be discarded because Atlantis was located beyond the Pillars of Hercules (what we now call the "Strait of Gibraltar"), much farther away, in the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, the Santorini event was a volcanic supereruption, not a series of earthquakes.
China has always had its own endless cycle of (mostly, but not for the Uighurs, the Tibetans and the Han dissidents) peaceful, prosperous unity, as in the present moment, followed by civil wars and chaos, but now the West has disrupted it and dragged China into the Caucasian Cycle. The entire planet is already a single ecosystem, on its way to a collective disaster. (As a matter of fact, the whole Universe is a single ecosystem, with destructive cosmic rays and ETs going back and forth all over the place.) Maybe, as with the dinos, a huge space rock will hasten the tragic dénouement.
It would all seem to be a grand systaltic pulsation, like that of an oscillating Universe, but not for devout Christians. They have it all neatly figured out. In chronological order ...
1) ... the world economy will presently collapse. This starts the Endtimes.
2) The ensuing tension causes a nuclear war and then a "nuclear winter" (to borrow Carl Sagan's concept) with three days of utter darkness.
3) An asteroid or a comet hits us and causes geologic upheavals that destroy continents and create new ones. There will be a second devastating hit. Only one third of all humankind survives this and the war.
4) The Antichrist, whose supernatural powers will amaze everyone, manages to bring peace and establishes a single government and a single religion with the help of the United Nations, which is a creation of the Devil, but will rule for only three and a half years, just before ...
5) ... the Second Coming, which starts a thousand-year Earthly Paradise (cp. the Thousand-Year Reich, which lasted only 12 years [1933-1945]).
6) After those marvelous thousand years, Satan is let loose once again, only to be defeated, forevermore this time.
7) The Final Judgement takes place and the Earth is de-orbited and thrown into outer space, a dead planet devoid of life, so that life on Earth will last only another thousand years after the Endtimes.
(Nothing is said about the Sun, so assume that it will shine during the second half of its life, another four and a half billion years, on a lonely Solar System, or maybe the germs in the Martian caves and lava tubes will evolve and eventually another humankind will appear. There is still plenty of time for that. No problem at all.)
This is all explained in messages given by the Virgin Mary to very many people in the last nearly 200 yrs., but now a Chilean woman called Mercedes Miranda has published several books with countermessages in which Jesus tells that he will never come back, which implies that the apocalyptic scenario is "fake news" and that we will go "per ardua ad astra", through difficulties to the stars, as the British Royal Air Force slogan says. Amen.
Why won't he ever come back?
"Everyone would approach me to ask for a personal favor, and no one would come to me to ask what they must do so that humankind will recover its health and peace. (...)
(...)
"(...) if you ask for a miraculous sign, others will ask for ten, and others for one hundred, and so my mission would never bear its fruit if it were to turn into a circus where I and a few others would be the magicians and the actors and the rest, the great majority, would be the spectators, and as always happens in all shows, the searchlights would fall on the actors and the spectators would remain in the dark.
(...)
"Tell everybody that if I knew that humankind were to understand me and would change its ways I would show myself before everyone this very moment, but it wouldn't happen that way. They are not prepared to receive me and so my presence would not be useful for everybody.
"If I were among you once again, that would not be enough to make you loving, peaceful, generous and guileless. You would only use me according to your selfish convenience and would continue to be materialistic, individualistic, separatist and anarchic. You would continue to be superficial and stubborn.
"It is not my presence what will transform you and free you from pain, but the understanding of my Message of Love.
(...)
"Don't try to do any miracles or to ask for miracles because I did many of them and they were of no use for the comprehension of my mission."
I'm including that passage, not because I'm sure it's authentic, which it might very well be, for all I know, but because if she's channeling a demon then it's a very clever one that can sound fantastically convincing and reasonable.
A former classmate of mine whose parents were Texan Baptist Fundamentalists but who is now a Messianic Jew and still a Fundamentalist believes that the apparitions of the Virgin Mary are all Satanic events, that demons can also do miraculous healings and that the devotion to her is an imitation of the ancient Hebrew adoration of a goddess called "Queen of Heaven". This is disturbing, even worse than a J.P. Lovecraft story with a tentacled Cthulu.
Messianic Jews are not really Jews but entirely Christian, and so they have chosen an inadequate name to describe themselves. It manages to fool neither Jews nor goys. Nevertheless, she's the only real friend I have ever had and in my solitude I miss her company because she lives far away, in Houston and Amarillo.
She's mild and gentle, so I stopped trying to convince her that she is horribly mistaken. She dislikes the concept of the Bible Belt, but that region is as real as the Corn Belt, the Cotton Belt and the Fruit Belt are for farmers in the U.S.
The laws of Nature as revealed by scientists, even though some of them are atheists and unaware of the Full Truth, are unadulterated Holy Writ, whereas the Sacred Scriptures of most or all religions have been slyly modified by the priestly castes, who are always a part of the ruling class and use them as a tool for achieving social control.
Some of the naïve people who swallow whole their toxic mixture of truths and lies have been making comments here, which is the only reason I had for throwing this furious speech at them. If it sounds like a sermon then I guess that's what it is, but I won't apologize because several people in the forums here also do a lot of preaching, even though it's secular preaching, mostly.
Anyway, I was rudely shoved into the fray. All I wanted to do was read about White Gladis and her brave pod of killer whales that has been sinking boats, but that report had a link to one on the idea of sea mammals going back to dry land, and that one, a link to the one about reverse evolution, all of which reminded me of my three college semesters of Biology in my youth before turning on, tuning in and dropping out, as Prof. Dr. Timothy Leary suggested we all had to do, so I ended up here decades later ranting like a madman. Go blame Prof. Leary for the mess.
Feel free to make a wild movie, a novel, or a TV series, or all three, based on the rant, if I am given 30 percent of the profits and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue.