"Let's get this over with."

It’s always the end of the world somewhere. The defenders of Masada were dead sure that their struggle would bring about the arrival of the Messiah. Jacob Bernoulli predicted a comet would destroy the Earth in 1719. (The guy they mention when explaining airplane wings was his nephew.) TV preacher Pat Robertson said the world would end in 1982. There still live among us dotards who recall that whole Y2K kerfuffle. Seeing that extinction is apt to entail a lot less work than survival, predicting the imminent end of all things may be seen as a kind of wishful thinking.