Maybe it’s some innate collective desire people have of lamenting the current state of things, and somehow hoping it can get better. A lot of these kinds of predictions in the past were not actually about destruction and the end of it all. Many of these beliefs had spiritual and religious factors that drove them, making me think that people were looking and wanting rebirth or renewal, in some form or another, much like the Christian Apocalypse. In fact a lot of beliefs are still like this, although I’d be surprised to see a religious organization predicting the end of everything on a mass scale. Cults and sects happen, but not to the magnitude of modern science related apocalypses, at least not over here anyways.
Modern ones may also include this kind of stuff…like science messing up and throwing the world into anarchy, making it fresh for a new start…or the 2012 prediction which seems to include a lot of aftermath predictions that are not unlike basic zombie movie scenarios. Because 2012 is said to have nature fucking it all up, but there is nothing that says that all humans shall automatically perish.
Maybe it’s some dormant desire for things to be better than they are, kind of like what I personally think such predictions, older ones, once were.
Of course these days most people don’t take it so seriously…but the predictions are still made periodically, so that says something.
I’m guessing the styles and types of end of the worlds are closely related to what we see every day and how we live, (they are drawn from our every day environment) and I can’t say that the intent behind all of them are the same…but some human factor certainly does drive them. It certainly has to, since so many predictions have been made but, obviously, none have ever occured. Yet it’s still a fascination, for lack of better word, among many.