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.

Side by side with these lesser auguries, throughout all the centuries men held the maximum belief that one day a comet would destroy the whole earth.

In lively contrast, a merry and medley minority, stand the optimist countries and individuals who have thought well of comets. Such were the Greeks, who unlike the sterner Romans deemed them the gods of Olympus sporting in friendly mood across the sky, this one Pallas Athene, that one golden Apollo. Timoleon of Corinth, undecided whether or no to set out on his Sicilian expedition, took a comet as a sign of heaven’s blessing and at once sailed forth for Syracuse, which despite divers hardships and perils he finally captured without the loss of a single man. Such are the viniculturists and vintners of these latter days, with the oenophiles in attendance obedient, who, seeing that one comet year after another proves likewise a good wine year, proclaim cause and effect: to the 1811 comet was ascribed the most famous of all famous ports and the premier vintage ever of the premier Grand Cru ever, the legendary cometary Château Lafite, while it was Donati’s of 1858 that gave that year’s grape its goodness. The Bordelais challenge tradition; they hope for comets.

There were the cynics also. In Rome. Such as Augustus; such as Seneca, who yet seems to tremble a trifle while he mocks; such as Vespasian, who, when told that one boded ill, replied “Yes, but for the king of the Parthians my enemy; I am bald, but he like the comet has a beard.” In London. Such as Queen Elizabeth, who, when they counselled her to stay indoors because a terror was in the sky, stood up, called “Open the window!” and marched forth to see. “Jacta est alea!” she added cryptically, after a good look skyward, and strode back into the room with a smile, and let us hope an oath also, to go on with her business and England’s; such as her right disloyal subject, Henry Howard (Earl of Northampton), who wrote his Preservative Against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies nearly four hundred years ago, and gave a devastating list of comets that had brought no unpleasant results in their train and another list, still more devastating, of unpleasant events that had occurred without comets to cause them. He was at once incarcerated in the Fleet. It may of course have been the Queen’s amorous jealousy; she had caught him exchanging tokens with her sister the Stuart. More likely it was the enmity of the judicial astrologers.

However it may be, his gibes fell, if not on hostile, at least on deaf ears, and he remained an exception; for whether they thought the influence benign or unbenign, almost all men through all the centuries till the last two or three thought it supernatural.

Then, with Bayle the great name of the change, a great change began. Comets were still thought to produce effects on the earth, and these effects were still thought to be chiefly baleful; the change was that they came to be regarded as natural and not supernatural effects, part of the foreordained order of physical things. Comets tampered with the atmosphere; caused curious dry fogs, or over-great heat, or divers sicknesses. The Plague of London in 1665, as the sleeping-sickness epidemic in Japan in our own day, was put down to cometary gases. Thou shalt die in a polluted land.

The utter danger, that a comet would accomplish the end of the whole earth, was not removed; but by honest collision, not by magic.

The nineteenth century’s attitude differed from that of all its predecessors. A comet meant nothing, favourable or unfavourable; it could produce no supernatural results or natural ones either. A world so perfect and so progressive could not be destined for such harm—Providence would not be so foolish—while of goodness it had enough, without help from the heavens. Human reason and human records alike controverted the cometic claims, and however eager to smile at their forebears of the nineteenth, twentieth century students who toil through the long Chinese records or through Pingré must admit that most of the visitors therein so monotonously registered did little to the earth that was worth doing, either good or bad.

The twentieth century began to waver. If “somehow good” lived on, it was flickeringly. Magic was in the air again, and catastrophe. Also new facts. It was demonstrated, for instance, that by means of the shooting stars showered down by comets, or the tenuous matter shed from their tails, new supplies of carbon, the stuff of life, were given to us. Life was thus renewed on the earth, declared optimists. Thus it was kept going or set going everywhere, added enthusiasts; comets were peripatetic creators, Jehovahs itinerant, beneficent bodies bearing carbon and with it organic existence from star to star, in vital permutation, high cosmic interchange, eternal xenogamy of worlds.

Pessimists, on the other hand, though with many a reserve and proviso to prevent themselves looking ridiculous, are returning to a catastrophic view; of a comet not as herald or harbinger of doom—no worthy one announced Armageddon, the 1914 skies spake peace—but as its actual agent. They think that one might strike the earth, or almost; and that if it did, the consequences would be fatal. Or almost.

What would happen?

The answer depends upon many factors: the composition of the comet, its speed, its proximity, the angle at which it struck.

Approaching, it might absorb the oxygen of the atmosphere. We should die, gasping and choking, of asphyxia.

It might absorb the azote, leaving us proportionately too much oxygen. We should live hours of nervous delirious joy, the whole world dancing a saraband or international hornpipe until through over-exultation we attained death cardiac or neurotic.

It might contain some gas to poison the air. The name of the star is called Wormwood. Our end would be velenous.

Its gases might combine and combust with our oxygen, causing conflagration of the air; concremation of our fields, our cities and ourselves.

It might triumph tidally, attracting the seas, pulling them up to cover the earth. The Deluge again; we should drown.

It might whirl up the earth to be its satellite; rock and reel us away.

It might bombard with boulders bigger than islands. Falling, these would chafe the air to unbearable heat; plunging into the sea, would produce tidal waves and worldwide floods; colliding with the land, would bore huge holes through to Gehenna beneath, new craters of burning, wherefrom in every direction cracks in the earth’s rind would radiate, new rows of craters of burning; fire added to fire and both to ravening water.

It might, advancing, cancel the earth’s movement; which, transformed into heat, would suffice to dissolve the globe. We should vanish in instant steam.

The choice is thus various; are the chances many?

Most astronomers answer with a comforting negative. Their contention is this. Space is infinite; the length of the earth’s annual circuit is enormous; comets are not infinite in number; few of them cut the terrestrial orbit. Therefore the arithmetical likelihood of a collision, or of even a nearish encounter, is infinitely small. Arago put the chances of crashing with the central kernel of a wanderer at one in two hundred and eighty-one million, or with some less central part say ten times greater: one in twenty-eight million one hundred thousand. Imagine a vast urn, he says, in which were twenty-eight million white balls meaning us no harm and one black ball condemning us to death. Should we take that one chance seriously? When we put in our hand to draw should we whine and shrink?

Even if the one chance fell, and a comet passed very near, its passage would be too quick to matter. It would have no time to scorch, poison, pull up the seas. In a few seconds it would be infinitely far away again, not having had the physical time to harm us.

Further, even the worst—direct collision—would be survivable. Comets have been weighed in the astrophysician’s balance and found wanting; the scale shows zero. They are but light-clouds, as Xenocrates and Theon of Alexandria called them long ago. The tails may contain vapours and a little meteoric dust, but are some forty-five billion times less dense than air; oftener they contain no substance at all, being a mere optical-electrical effect, as solid as a sunset; and a series of fine sunsets is the worst their swish could do for us. The kernel itself is, at its heaviest, but a diminutive cluster of meteors, impact wherewith could only mean the gay sunsets with a glorious shower of shooting stars thrown in.

These and other astronomical considerations are reinforced by the moral one that anything so unpleasant is also unlikely.

On the opposite side stand opposite arguments.

The comets number millions of millions. Far more, including the parabolic majority, must cut the earth’s orbit than is known. Biela’s comes every seven years to a place where we visit in November. In 1819, in 1832, in 1861—to name but three neighbours in time—the tip of the tail grazed us. In 1832 especially we had the narrowest escape: with the Reform Bill just being voted—extension of the suffrage, redistribution of seats, Weymouth reduced to two members, Old Sarum disfranchised altogether—what a disaster it would have been! In 1770 the earth and the comet were at the same point during the same day; only a few hours divided them from impact. Thus Arago’s one in twenty-eight million is a dubious estimate. One in twenty-eight thousand may be quite as accurate—quite as inaccurate. A disaster avoidable by finite chance alone is not of infinite unlikelihood. Time is boundless. There is time for this.

To end us, no need for a comet to cut our orbit. It might crash with Jupiter, restore him his lost light, make him a sun again; we should be lighted by two suns; human life, inadaptable to eternal day, would perish.

There is reason to believe—if one wants to—that long ago a great comet did strike the earth, sinking Atlantis, causing the Great Drift, ushering in the last ice age. A greater comet may in the future do far worse.

Many are far from rarified. Larger than the earth itself, they are solid and opaque, containing a central mass of rocks and stones and sand as wide as Russia, collision with which would be the catastrophe. Solid they must anyhow be; the gases spectroscopically seen in them would have long ago vanished off into space unless there were a substantial nucleus to hold them gravitationally together. Some heads are as large as three moons.

Among the gases the spectroscope reveals are most deadly poisons.

Their extreme speed would only save us if their passage were distant; in case of crash so much the worse.

These and other astronomical considerations are reinforced by the immoral one that anything so unpleasant is also likely.

The sum of it all is that nobody knows. If destruction by this mode is not to be expected, it is not to be ruled out. We shall lie in our beds without trembling, but we shall respect the fear that inspired our ancestors, and shall ourselves respect—and fear—the next great comet that flames the dark night. Let it be but twice as large and come but twice as near as any of its predecessors, and then let the optimists see. Insane terror will seize them and us all.