There was a fallacy inherent to how they thought. They assumed, unconsciously, that the end of the world would be a perceivable phenomenon. That’s not to say that it was invisible. In fact it was one of the most visible processes. The issue was that it was a process and not a singular event.

Human cognition was such that the average person could not conceptualize the terminus point as a complex series of interlocking events across an extended period of time. At one point later in our research Mirko, one of my handlers, said that, “We can only think of it like a movie -- something that begins and ends in the span of an afternoon.”