Space fears out of this world
Planet will survive whatever humans do to destroy themselves
WASHINGTON – I’ve developed a debilitating case of cosmophobia.
The truth is out there, sure. But so is a lot of other scary, and potentially fatal, stuff.
Perturbed astronomers say that fear of the universe has been growing in the past decade.
I’m worried about those two small asteroids that buzzed the Earth this week, those two big earthquakes in Italy and the countdown to doomsday on Dec. 21, supposedly prophesied in the Mayan calendar. Will Planet X, or Nibiru, collide with the Earth before Christmas? Will a solar flare cause a geomagnetic reversal of the north and south poles? Will a black hole swallow us up?
It looks to be the hottest spring on record — so boiling, with people getting treated for heat stroke, that it’s redolent of that Twilight Zone episode where the Earth spins out of its orbit and moves closer to the sun and everyone’s burning to death. (Except it turns out to be a dream and the Earth is actually moving farther from the sun and everyone’s freezing to death.)
Maybe my eschatological tizzy started with Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s gorgeous but weird meditation on the annihilation of the Earth by a passing planet. Or seeing the trailer for Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, a romantic comedy with Steve Carell and Keira Knightley.
But my cataclysmic creeps ratcheted up when I read a book due out next month called The Age of Miracles, a debut novel by Karen Thompson Walker that makes you look around more warily as you walk down the street. (One of three apocalypse novels coming out from Random House this summer, it has already been optioned by Hollywood.)
Walker has written a tender coming-of-age novel set at the toxic end of the world. The Earth’s rotation slows and days and nights stretch the length of weeks. The magnetic field shielding the Earth from the sun’s radiation withers, gravity goes kerflooey and the temperature is either boiling or freezing.
The former book editor says she checked with a graduate student of astrophysics to add verisimilitude. “For example, I had assumed that the slowing would make gravity feel a little weaker, but I was mistaken,” she said in an email. “The rotation of the Earth is responsible for a very slight countergravity (centrifugal) force. That means that if the rotation slowed, gravity on Earth would become ever-so-slightly stronger. Baseballs might not fly quite as far as they used to, and birds and airplanes would be pulled a bit more powerfully toward the Earth.”
Feeling a little jittery, I called David Morrison, the senior scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, who answers questions online sent from the public to the website Ask an Astrobiologist.
Even before archaeologists discovered an extended Mayan calendar in Guatemala earlier this month that debunked the idea that the world is ending in December, Morrison thought the Mayan prophesy was bunk.
People trying to make money are ginning up the hoax, he said. “The worst thing is they really do frighten children, and it’s evil to make up lies to scare children.”
He reassured me that the premises in Walker’s novel and The Twilight Zone could not happen.
“We can do horrible things to the planet with global warming or nuclear war,” he said. “But we can’t shift the distance to the sun or slow the rotation.”
Noting the growing cases of cosmophobia, Morrison asked impatiently, “Why is our society so focused on potential disasters?”
Just as I was starting to calm down, he mentioned that the Andromeda galaxy is going to crash into the Milky Way in two billion years. Hearing me keening over the strain of Andromeda, he explained that it would just be two great big fuzzy balls of stars and mostly empty space passing through each other harmlessly.
“We’ll just have twice as many stars,” he said. “The end of the world is a really silly concept. It’s been here for four billion years. I can imagine us blowing ourselves up as a civilization, but the planet wouldn’t care.” How can he be sure? “I have a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard,” he replied.
OK then.