Is it the End of the World or Just Dusty?

I was watching the news this morning when I heard about this strange sight that is pictured to the left. It's an image from a massive dust storm that covered most of Sydney, Australia in a fine orange dust that lasted for most of the day. Residents of the city reported waking up in the morning and looking out to see orange skies and a dull orangish palor to everything. Many believed it to be a sign of a major calamity that had occurred. Popular opinions (before the truth came to be known) was that it was either fallout from a nuclear attack or a sign of the arrival of Armageddon (the event... not the movie). Thankfully it was nothing so forboding and by evening the skies had cleared to show their brilliant blue color but for a few hours it left the city thinking it had been transplanted to Mars.

I got to thinking about how I would have reacted had I been confronted by such a scene. I haven't experienced anything quite like it before. The closest I got to such an event was probably when I was back in high school during a spring thunderstorm and just before it started to pour the wind had kicked up and all the pollen was in the air and the skies around my neighborhood turned green (because of all the trees that surrounded it us). I was rushing to get home before it began pouring and I just remembered getting so much pollen in my face that I was sneezing for almost two hours after getting home. I'm sure it wasn't quite the same experience for those who happened to be in Sydney at the time but I can imagine what they may have been thinking.

I find it fascinating though that so many people assume signs like this to portend the end of the world. I know that many religious texts from around the world contain some description of what the end of the world will be like. Most have commonalities (again giving rise to my belief that all religions are inherently the same they just have different ways of being practiced) which is probably why so many people had the same assumption about what the dust storm may have meant. What further fascinates me about these reactions though is the fact that despite the fact that we now have so many modern technological advancements like weather satellites and scientific knowledge about most of the way in which the world works, so many people can still assume that a dust storm is a sign of the apocalypse.

I suppose it's just proof that no matter how advanced our society may become there will still be that part of us that believes in the mystical or supernatural. We'll believe that something otherworldly is the cause of what's happening rather than turning to science. Perhaps that won't the case for everyone but there are many of us who believe that. In all the news articles I read about the event, there were at least one to two quotations of people who believed it to be the end of the world that was happening. Now that's not the most scientific way to conduct a survey and determine if that's what so many people are really thinking but it's not too far off the mark. It just shows that no matter how much we come to rely on technology, we humans will always retain that bit of superstition as well.