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Yitzhaq Hayutman holds the key to peace on Earth – it’s on a floppy disk in his pants pocket. With his full white beard, bald pate, and well-pressed khakis, the 61-year-old Israeli cybernetics expert and tech investor looks like Moses done over for a Banana Republic ad. Right now, he’s showing me how he wants to position an airborne hologram over the Dome of the Rock, a gold-capped shrine that’s one of the most holy sites in Islam. “The blimp will go there,” Hayutman says pointing into the blue. “And eventually the Messiah will come.”

Hayutman is excited by the prospect – perhaps too excited. Twenty yards away, two flak-jacketed Israeli police officers finger their machine guns while four plainclothes members of the Islamic Trust – the Muslim force that protects Islam’s holy sites – move cautiously toward us. Violence has a habit of erupting here on the Temple Mount, the world’s most explosive plot of land.

For 1,500 years, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have fought for control of this 35-acre plateau in the heart of Jerusalem. The dispute remains one of the main obstacles to peace in the Middle East. Jewish teachings say that a temple must be built here – many say on the exact spot where the Dome now stands – in order to induce the arrival of the Messiah and the coming of peace on Earth. Fundamentalist Christians interpret this to mean the Second Coming of Christ and actively encourage Jewish building efforts. Muslims categorically oppose any encroachment on their holy site, from which they believe Mohammed ascended to heaven to receive the Koran.

All sides acknowledge that tensions on the hill have the potential to start a war, but Hayutman believes he has found a way to resolve the intractable conflict. “What most people see is that if the Muslims are here, surely there is no temple,” Hayutman says. “They do not understand that technology has given us the tools to realize the prophecy right now.”

He has two big ideas, two ways to engineer the apocalypse. The first: a hovering holographic temple. Hayutman wants to set up an array of high-powered, water-cooled lasers and fire them into a transparent cube suspended beneath a blimp. The ephemeral, flickering image, he says, would fulfill an ancient, widely revered Jewish prophecy that the temple will descend from the heavens as a manifestation of light. Hayutman hopes to finance the project with some of the proceeds from a $20 million patent-infringement suit he and his partners have filed against Palm.

The rest of that money would be poured into Hayutman’s second idea for jump-starting the end-times: a virtual temple within a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The goal is for thousands of people to join in its construction on the Web. Hayutman even wants to display progress reports in the floating hologram as a kind of apocalyptic scoreboard.

Whether it’s a hologram or a cyberstructure, Hayutman believes that a techno temple does away with the need for a physical building. Under his scheme, Jews and Christians would get a biblically accurate temple without razing the Dome of the Rock. A description of his plans is on the floppy disk in his pocket, which he says he will give to me when we leave the Mount.

It may sound crazy, but every other effort at peace has failed, and partisans on all sides are surprisingly open to Hayutman’s proposals. People in the Middle East are used to radicals who carry guns and explosives. Hayutman is a radical who envisions a peaceful, technological advent to the end of the world. For him, the Bible is a Read Me file for Earth 2.0. Some think he’s out of his mind, but in a region where extremists often set the agenda, Hayutman is preparing to click the Install button.

The future Temple which we are expecting, is built and perfected and will be revealed and descend from heaven.
– Talmudic scholar Rashi, 11th century

The first storm of the season has washed boulders and banks of sand onto the narrow road skirting the edge of the Dead Sea. A flash flood courses over the pavement, but Hayutman seems unconcerned.

We are going to meet Ohad Ezrahi, a onetime ultraorthodox rabbi who exiled himself to the desert after falling out with the small right-wing settlement where he lived. Until 1998, Hayutman and Ezrahi had been developing a forerunner to Hayutman’s videogame with financing from the Jewish Agency for Israel, a foundation established to encourage, among other things, tech innovation. Hayutman invested $30,000 of his own money, but the duo halted work when they realized they didn’t have the resources to code an animation engine. Now Hayutman has arranged a meeting with one of the largest technology companies in Israel and needs to upload stills from the sole copy of the game, which Ezrahi has.

The problem is, a river has swallowed the road. When it starts raining in Israel, most people avoid the desert for fear of floods like this. But Hayutman revs the engine of his Daihatsu mini-SUV and launches us into the torrent. A wide arc of water splashes out on either side.We lurch over unseen obstacles, verge on a rollover, and emerge on the other side.

Hayutman’s faith in himself is a little disconcerting, at times annoying, and even terrifying. He talks about flash floods and God for hours without pause while we drive and doesn’t notice when I doze off. When I wake up, he’s still talking. “God has given me a mission,” Hayutman says, speaking in a thoughtful, accented English as rain pounds the windshield. “I am here to show that the temple can be rebuilt peacefully and in such a way that it will bring the beginning of a new age.”

What’s fascinating about his vision of the apocalypse is that it’s not the bloodbath that fundamentalist Christians imagine. It is the end of the current world – with all its inequity and injustice – and the beginning of a new, perfect Earth ruled by the Messiah. The trigger will be a peaceful, technology-fueled spiritual revolution. A velvet apocalypse.

WIRED