The End of the World

How?

The origin of the world is unknown.

When geological time begins, some short thousand million years ago, the earth is already a globe, in shape if not in surface much as now, whirling around a star little different if at all from our sun today; a body with its given size and substance, its allotted place and path in heaven. How it came there is unknown.

Knowing nothing, Man has variously and valiantly guessed. Seven chief guesses jostle for primacy.

The nebular. There was once a great fluid cloud or rotating chaos of fire, far-flung beyond the present orbit of Neptune. Gradually, through prodigious years, it cooled and condensed, at its dwindling fringes throwing off successive rings which became the several planets, while the main mass shrank to form our central sun.

The attractional. The cosmic cloud did not throw matter off, but attracted new matter from outside. These captured masses formed the planets; the nebula itself became the sun.

The meteoric. Millions of meteor-swarms moved nearer together, by progressive agglomeration and concretion formed themselves into solid earths, and by gravitational attraction were drawn within the orbit of one of the stars, our sun.

The tidal. There was once a great star, much greater than the sun now. A still greater star passed near, raised on our star a fierce tide, tore out of him a milliard-mile stream of gas. The outer portion of this stream receded, and split up into the fragments, or condensed into the drops, that are the earth and her sister worlds.

The collisional. Our parent star, most likely a dead star that had been wandering for countless dead years through the infinite, passed not hard by but crashed head on into another star, and in colossal conflagration flamed into new life, a glorious nova for Sirian glasses to behold. The main piece became the sun, small shattered bits the satellites.

The planetesimal. In his turbulent youth the ancestral star, whether lashed to tidal frenzy by some passing body or urged by radioactive excitement of his own, one day burst open the crust new-hardening upon him, and shot forth of his gaseous or fiery self; which particles, or planetesimals, by local convergence formed the planets.

The magical. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

There are variants and combinations of all these guesses, and objections, mathematical or mystical, to all these guesses, and other guesses. In a word, nobody knows. We only know that a beginning our system must once have had.

And since, for the human mind as constituted, the future is even harder to divine than the past, the mode of the ending of the world is a still wider and wilder field for surmise than the mode of its beginning. Nobody knows. We only know that an end there must one day be.

Whatever had a beginning must have an end. It is hard to realize and harder to relish: but the hour will come when the fields and forests, the lands and oceans, the earth and heaven, the whole seen world with man himself by whom it is seen, and all that man has made, the roads and the farms, the towers and the temples, the crowning cities, the glory and vainglory of kingdoms, will be no more, will dissolve into the elements from which they first arose, will vanish forever like a dream—vanish because they are a dream. The race of man may go first or, as some conjecture, may outlive awhile the earth; or race and globe may perish jointly together. But die the world must, and the sides shall know it no more.

Hopes that by some miracle it might be spared are one with man’s same hopes of defeating death: hopes born of cowering fear or towering pride, and fulfilled for no man.

Whom casualty daily besets; the toll of hazard is high, every step forward by mechanical science increasing both the likelihood and the variety of murderous mischance. Who now can be smashed out of life not only as in the good old days by boulder or landslide, but by railway-train or motorcar or airship. Heat or fire may be his end, sunstroke or lightning; or to be struck by shot, or shell, or death-ray; or burned alive, when the spool flares, in dark palaces. Cold may be his portion: he may die of polar courage or of raimentless starvation in city streets. Water may finish him, drowning him in river or lake, wrecking his ship at sea; or desire of water, if he fall of thirst in the desert or fail in his multitudes through drought and following famine.

Whom sickness hourly destroys. This hurdle is stiffer; two-thirds of the field fail to take it. The catalogue too is longer; doctors have fought not more bravely to reduce the numbers borne off by disease than to increase the numbers of diseases. Few will survive the thousand maladies, and if they do there are always the ills man has added for himself to nature’s store: organized hunger which holds nearly half this best of all possible worlds in its cruel grip, and organized slaughter which in open battle alone has recently accounted for two million young men in one year, and will do far better—next time.

A few, a tiny few, can hope to cover the Psalmist’s span, or beyond; a tiny span beyond. Butterfly lives for a summer, rat for a lustrum; horse for a score of years, Homo threescore and ten, eagle fourscore; salmon for a century, carp for two, tortoise, by slowness winning the race, for three. All are clocks wound up for a given maximum run, beyond which, should neither disease nor disaster have first overtaken them, none ever can go.

As with man, so with the earth: certainty tempered by variety. As the one dieth, so dieth the other. Some accident may surprise her: as, under the catastrophic theories of origin, tidal or collisional, it was accident which surprised her into life—but for the chance star that passed that way, there would have been no solar system, no earth, no people, no you, no belovèd me. Some illness of the body may shorten her days. Her death may come through crashing comet or through sudden fire, through heat or through cold, through drought or through many waters. If, however, she elude all chance disasters and decline all modes of premature decay, if she live through till her ultimate possible hour, till the last astronomical inevitabilities that lie in wait, her extremity will be but postponed. She thinks: I shall be a lady forever. But she too is a clock. Time is not for her, and eternity against her. She too is a prey. The final death of this physical world is as sure as the death of the physical body of each one of the creatures upon it.

Here it will be asked in what way the world’s death is most likely to befall? and when? and what after?—sorting and summarizing now with amusement, now with indifference, now with hope, now with bleak terror, the various guesses that have been given in attempted answer by other ages and by our own.

They are guesses, not knowledge. Like its origin, the destiny of the world is unknown.

Comet

From all antiquity, from the first yellow thinkers who compiled the great Chinese Celestial Atlas, and surely from darker and earlier tribes in whose hearts alone the wonder and the fear stood written, people dwelling on this earth have feared or wondered when they looked up at the familiar sky to behold there a serpent, sudden and fiery.

What is a comet? The old astrologers had one sort of answer; the new astronomers have another.

According to the latter, a comet is a heavenly body of debatable origin, gassy composition, and swift and various movement; distinguished indeed by certain minor eccentricities, but otherwise as much without the realm of wizardry and within the ordinary realm of ordered nature as the plain moon herself. It commonly consists of three parts: first, a brilliant central point, kernel or nucleus, starlike to the eye but not starlike in mass; second, surrounding the first and merging into it by misty gradations, a round nebulous haze known as the coma, brush, hair or chevelure. When a comet comes near the sun, this encircling mane heats and dilates, giving birth to the third part, the famous and frightening part, a long luminous appendix known as the streamer or sword or beard (Pliny records twelve shapes, with as many names) or, in modern parlance, as the tail. Many comets, however, have no tail; or only sometimes a tail. Others, proudly multi-caudal, display two tails or several: the six-branched splendour of 1744 preened like a golden peacock across the sky. But all have the nebulous haze or chevelure, and within it the kernel—faery-light, gossamer-harmless say some, none so light or so harmless say others.

The known movements of known comets are also three: elliptic, and these, their ellipse round the sun accomplished, return to the same place after a period that astronomers can calculate, that Halley first calculated; parabolic, and those, coming from the farthest unknown on the arc of an infinite circle, merely salute the sun as they pass, and then fly on, never to return, to the farthest unknown again; or hyperbolic.

Why do they come? We have slight conjecture, beyond the charms of the sun, who when they draw near him gives them extra speed and light in generous measure. Charms that hold danger: for sometimes a universe-wandering or parabolic comet, lured into the solar system, passes near—too near—one of the greater planets, say Jupiter; and suffering the Jovian attraction, is constrained to stay near forever. Proud parabola becomes mean ellipse. He is the prisoner of our system—for as long as our system lasts.

So in brief the modern stargazers, with their telescopes and spectroscopes, and astral photography and spectral analysis to aid them.

To seers of other days comets were not so interesting for what they were as for what they boded. They were objects of omen or presage, sometimes good but much more often bad, fiery destroyers that announced from the heavens fire and destruction on earth, swords of flame that foretokened war, red arrows that were arrows of famine. These dire predictions proved usually right. The old magi knew it long ago, Old Moore knows it now: that few are the days which pass by on this planet without some evil happenings somewhere. So bank on black; ’tis safe to prophesy ill.

Safe indeed! A giant rent the heavens, and Troy town fell. This one, delivers Aristotle, brought the Achaean earthquake; that one the storm of Corinth. One came and twenty years afterward another, and Mithridates of evil fame and poison-proof bowel was born and twenty years afterward was king. Then destinate Rome. One appeared to her in 48 BC—

Non alias coelo ceciderunt plura sereno
Fulgura; nec diri toties arsere cometae—

to usher in her bloodiest civil wars: Caesar and Pompey and those eighteen Rubicon years of slaughter. The proud visitant of 43 was Caesar’s own soul, triumphing through the worlds, ranging through heaven after reigning on earth, come back to tell Rome that with Julius gone she must accomplish her days of tribulation. Artful Augustus was well pleased, for if Julius were a god then his murderers were not homicides but deicides: a notion most helpful to the policy of artful Augustus, by whose gratitude was built a temple to that comet; under whose reign, as first Emperor of mankind, a star in the east proclaimed the young Redeemer of mankind; at whose death, perhaps from the selfsame asp that stung Cleopatra, flared up a star in the west, perhaps the selfsame star that was Caesar.

In the new Christian era, heavenly signs came thick and fast to declare its many disasters. A titan sword pointed down towards Jerusalem, and soon by Titus’ sword the Holy City was laid waste forever. At Christ’s birth-millenary a nine days’ terrible comet came searing the naked firmament of heaven to foretell the final end. The world survived indeed the 1000—and thirty-three years later Christ’s death-millenary, the 1033—but at the cost of such unexampled misery, pestilence and famine that many would have thought Finis Mundi the lesser evil. Thirty-three years later again, and in 1066 the famous Conquest Comet foretold the end of old England, this time truly. In the fourteenth century the Black Death was narrowly heralded. In the fifteenth a falciform monster, less sword than scimitar, proclaimed that the Muslims would conquer Europe. His Holiness the Pope denounced it, issued a bull against it, excommunicated it; then fearfully remembered and piously commanded the revival of an old disused prayer the Angelus, what time each day at noon the church bells should be rung, that the faithful everywhere might unite in synchronous prayer against both Coran and comet. But though the Angelus kept ringing, the Turks kept advancing, following the westward Star that had beckoned them on; kept advancing, they and the star, till together they took Byzantium, defiled St. Sophia, trod on her hundred crosses, and gave her, that was Christ’s, to Muhammad.

Between the sign and the disaster, the shape of the one and the nature of the other, there seems to have been no fixed relation. The only sure nexus the Middle Ages established was that between the fiery visitant and the fate of princes, between comets and lungs; Majesty’s death was announced in the firmament. A list of such announcements would be but a medieval Court Circular. Comets of special malignity, however, may be noted as having ushered to their graves Attila the Scourge of God, Valentinian the Pannonian, Louis the Debonair (innumerable prayers that the king prayed, fasts that he fasted, and churches that he built could postpone the end for only three short years), Richard the Lionhearted, Charles the Bold, and Ferdinand the Catholic. When a monarch chanced to die without the presaging serpent, then one had to be invented. So it was with Charlemagne and the flattery comet of 814 that no man ever saw. When, on the other hand, despite a monster fit for the Emperor himself, Gian Galeazzo Visconti (Earl of Virtue) refused to depart, the scandalized astrologers heaped upon him as he lay in bed such awful descriptions of its awfulness that he died in the end of fright. The astrologers said ’twas of the comet.