ExitMundi.nl

» see exitmundi.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I can place the genre without being able to place the site. Pages that explained carefully how everything ends were a fixture of the web I was on from about 1999, usually on a university account, usually one person's obsession laid out in flat HTML with real references at the bottom. ExitMundi was the best-executed one and I never found it, because the audience it actually converted was Dutch and then German, and both of those arrived as books in shops I was never standing in.

Maarten Keulemans put it up in 2001. He was a working science journalist and he wrote the whole thing in English from the Netherlands, which was the deliberate choice that made it a web artifact instead of a national one. The scenarios covered the plausible and the silly at the same register: pandemics and nuclear exchange handled with citations, and zombies handled with the same citations, on the theory that the joke only lands if the physics is right.

It worked well enough to leave the web entirely. In May 2008, AW Bruna published fifty rewritten scenarios in Dutch as Exit Mundi, het einde van de wereld. De beste 50 scenario's, which reached the non-fiction bestseller lists and sold out two editions. The German edition followed in June 2010 from dtv and charted on Der Spiegel's list. In 2011 the German musician Bela B recorded ten of the scenarios as a double CD and then toured the German-speaking countries reading them aloud with music, which is an unusual second life for a website about asteroid impacts.

~ the record ~

~ the fifty ~

The thing that made ExitMundi readable was the refusal to rank its scenarios by how much they deserved to be taken seriously. A gamma-ray burst and a grey-goo accident got the same tone and the same willingness to work out what the sky would look like. Keulemans was a reporter, so each page did the reporter's job of finding out what was actually known and then saying what that implied, and the dark comedy came from the implications rather than from being arch about them.

The reviews on its own front page tell you how it landed. The Darwin Awards called it absolutely worth the time. The Transhumanist called it funny and well-documented. Fringeweb went with "Totally cool... All you've ever wanted to know about meteors, volcanoes, black holes, nukes, climatic shifts and weird molecular disasters", which doubles as an accurate table of contents.

~ nine years without an edit ~

At some point the site stopped changing and simply kept being served. The splash page the Internet Archive fetched on 3 March 2015 is byte-identical to the one it fetched on 3 December 2024, down to the press quotes and the single Enter link. Across those nine years and nine months nobody edited it and nobody switched it off. The inner pages and the images answered the whole time.

The decay was happening at the edges instead. From June 2022 the www host over HTTPS was answering with "Domain Default page. This is a default webpage generated for by Hostingserver", so from mid-2022 onward the secure version of the address was a stranger's server greeting while the plain HTTP version kept handing out the apocalypse. Anyone arriving through a modern browser that preferred HTTPS got the hosting company's furniture.

~ the second week of december ~

The last capture that worked is 3 December 2024. On 14 December 2024 the same address returned 404, and it has returned 404 on every check since, including today. No farewell page went up and no forwarding address was set, and Keulemans, who is still a working science journalist, has said nothing about it anywhere I can find. A site that spent twenty-three years cataloging endings got eleven days of ambiguity and then a status code.

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