Adapted from Tower of Light:

In the alleged “1990 prophecy” upon which we frequently comment were the words, “Your era is ending. Soon the world will not be the world you know…” 

The earth was not ready to be sucked into a black hole (or, as per a newer notion, a cloud of “dark energy”), nor was it ready to flip upside down. But major events, huge events, loomed if the prophecy held water, if it bore credibility, because only truly large events or a massive new trend could end the technological era, which implied a radical change in the way we produced goods, generated energy, and fashioned lifestyles. A world we would “not know” indicated an unprecedented shift in landscape. According to the new words in the prophecy, things were going to look different. How could this occur?

It wasn’t a political issue, nor an academic one. It did not have to do with the politics of “climate change.” It had to do with natural shifts. It had to do with how God would let His Creation react to what men were or were not doing — to their morality, to their devotion, or lack thereof. There was the chance that entire island systems would find themselves underwater, that maples in northern zones would die, that all Arctic ice would disappear, and that searing droughts would eventually affect the lives of billions. The weather in New York City would come to resemble more the weather in Philadelphia, or even Virginia—while Upstate New York might be similar to what the weather had been like in southern Connecticut. Farms would sprout where there had been no farming and disappear in places where they had been prominent—a switch that would seem at times  beneficial but that would have a dark underside if it represented a system out of balance.

While something like global warming, or cooling, gradually could cause such effects as the dying off of forests, the spread of grassland, and the migration of animals (as well as humans)—as well as dire shortages of water, which could create chaos, and in all likelihood would create chaos—the tone of the prophecy also implied something swifter, something that in at least certain cases would arrive with the drama of suddenness.

A world we would not know hinted at a change in the natural surroundings, although it was also said in the context of technology. And so one pondered: was a reorientation in the works such that we would no longer be surrounded by so many cell phones and televisions and computers, perhaps not even power lines, if an end to a technological era meant the electricity that powered it?

That was a big prediction: the age of technology would not last, foresaw the 1990 prophecy, in 29 additional and startling words. An incredible era that had begun after the Renaissance, and especially after the French Revolution, in the torrent of physics, chemistry, and biology, peaking with the invention of cars, radios, and then computers, an era in which technology had gained credibility over religion, and had redefined reality, was not going to last—not in its present form, said the message. This was a remarkably bold assertion. There seemed no way that what technology had done could be erased, even in significantly partial measure. There were satellites in orbit, planes across the sky, cables on the floor of the ocean, cell towers at the edge of “remote” forests, pipes snaking beneath our feet. Technology meant “artifice,” it meant the application of science, and especially the industrial arts. This defined our reality. Was the prophecy about industry?

“Many inventions of mankind will be broken down,” the message then continued, “and there will be more of a peasant attitude and way of life everywhere.”

It was the next sentence. Inventions would be broken down. There it was answering at least one question. Inventions were new devices or methods. Yes, it reflected upon un-industrial. Peasant meant simple. We were not simple. We had not been simple for more than a century. We were anything but simple. We did not live in a world that simply forged metal, mixed mortar, shaped clay, wove flaxen, or aged wood. What Christ wore, how He traveled, and how He spoke: that was simple. We wore rayon. We ate synthetic preservatives. We were in an age where matter was being reconstituted. So were life forms — even now humans. We were no longer working with the nature He created but — in a very dangerous manner — altering it.

[resources: Tower of Light]