In 1959, Lucinda Embry hears whispers while staring at the Sun. When her idea to make a time capsule is chosen by the school, each child draws what they believe that the future will look like. Lucinda writes a page of seemingly random numbers for the time capsule, which is to be opened in fifty years. Lucinda's teacher calls for the pupils to finish, but Lucinda continues until her teacher takes the page off her desk unfinished. Lucinda goes missing after the time capsule is dedicated, and is found in a utility closet, scratching numbers into the door with her fingernails bleeding.
In 2009, Caleb Koestler is attending the elementary school where Lucinda used to go. When the time capsule is opened, Caleb is supposed to read and write about some of the capsule's contents. He is given Lucinda's page of numbers. His widowed father, John, an astrophysics professor at MIT, notices that the numbers have a set of sequences, with digits referring to the dates and death tolls of disasters over the last fifty years, including 911012996, representing the date and death toll of the September 11 attacks. The last three sets of digits on the page are dated in the immediate future.
In the following days, a car drives by the family home, containing two strangers. They give Caleb a small black stone.
John witnesses a plane crash on a freeway on the day that the paper predicted that a disaster would occur. He unsuccessfully tries to save several victims. He then learns that the remaining unexplained digits on the paper are the geographic coordinates of the location of each disaster predicted on the paper. Caleb has a vision of one of the strangers in his bedroom. He looks through the window and sees the forest outside his room ablaze, with animals running from the fire.
John meets Lucinda's daughter, Diana, and her granddaughter, Abby. After hearing about the events that happened, Diana becomes apprehensive and scared. John then gives up his son to his sister. Soon afterward, a major derailment occurs on the New York City Subway, which John fails to prevent. Diana then believes John and visits him. She says that her mother used to hear voices, and that the next and last date in the document, October 19, was the day Lucinda always said Diana would die. Searching Lucinda's mobile home, they find pictures of the disasters she predicted, a copy of Matthäus Merian's engraving of Ezekiel's "chariot vision", and a pile of small smooth stones near Lucinda's bed. The last number in the document appears at first to be "33", but they notice that it is really "EE" written backward. They determine that EE means "Everyone Else", representing an Extinction Level Event.
The next day, Abby shows John that she has colored in the sun on the Ezekiel's "Chariot vision" engraving. After seeing the image, John gets a revelation as he realizes that this could be how the world will end. He rushes them to the MIT observatory, where he discovers that a massive solar flare will soon reach Earth, making it virtually uninhabitable. John and Diana debate over how to prepare for the solar flare. Diana leaves with both children. As Diana stops at a nearby gas station, an emergency broadcast is transmitted to alert the world of the solar flare. While Diana is on the phone with John, the strangers take the children. Diana chases after them, but her car is hit by a truck. John, rushing to catch up with them, arrives just as Diana dies, and finds the black stone in Diana's hand. He goes back to Lucinda's mobile home, finding the children and the strangers waiting in a dry river bed covered with similar black stones. A space ship descends from the sky, and the strangers beckon the children to depart with them. After John is denied entry, he embraces his son one last time before allowing him to leave and the ship departs with the children. Many similar space ships leave the Earth.
The next morning, John drives to his estranged father's home as the world descends into anarchy from the pending disaster. John and his family embrace as the flare wave ignites the Earth, killing all life on the surface. Caleb and Abby are deposited on an Earth-like planet, and they walk towards a large tree in the middle of a field while the other space ships land nearby.
