“Why aren’t you using this telescope to search for
asteroids? Don’t you know that near-earth asteroids are the biggest
threat to the survival of everything, including us, on this planet?”
–
Question at an American Astronomical Society
meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, earlier this year
It looks like the end is “in.” A recent Time magazine
cover story featured a variety of religious teachings on
the Apocalypse, which Newsweek followed
with a cover piece on why people want to go to heaven. The year’s
biggest book may turn out to be the tenth installment of the “Left
Behind” series, a novelized take on the Biblical rapture; book nine
was the best selling novel of 2001.
Then there are asteroid
scares, no doubt the cause of sleepless nights for the man in
Albuquerque. An asteroid the size of a soccer field came within a
third of the distance to the moon in June, which could have struck
at noon. (Sorry. My inner poet slipped out.) In July, British
astronomers predicted a mile-wide asteroid could strike the earth on
February 1, 2019, snuffing any dinosaurs missed by the last big
rock.
NASA
debunked that, but “cannot yet
completely rule out an impact possibility on February 1, 2060.”
This should not be a problem, as a
United Nations report released in advance of the Earth
Summit now in progress in South Africa claims half of us will be
running short of water before then anyway. The rest of its
predictions read like Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 scare-fare standard “The
Population Bomb,” which promised starving Americans dying in the
streets by the mid-1970s.
The most original approach may be that of the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. In a feature reprinted across the country,
the paper turned to a panel of experts to rate various
doomsday movie plots according to their probability of
occurring. I am not sure how one becomes a doomsday expert, but
those chosen gave top marks to “Soylent Green” and “Waterworld.”
“Soylent Green” portrays a planet ravaged by hunger,
which ends after the sudden appearance of a new food supply. The
source is, well, let’s just say Hannibal Lecter would approve.
There is plenty of disagreement on the likelihood of
worldwide food shortages, with doubters citing the tendency of
birthrates to drop and agricultural efficiency to rise as societies
industrialize. In 1998, Dr. Amartyo Sen of India won the Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for showing that famines result
not from a lack of food but inefficient distribution systems and
machinations by governments that can isolate themselves from the
effects. This, he posits, is why famines rarely occur in
democracies.
The selection of “Waterworld” is ironic. The film shows
all but one spit of land covered by hundreds of feet of water,
courtesy of global warming. In reality you could melt every ice
cube on the planet and not raise the ocean by more than a few feet.
The only way such a fate would be possible is by divine
intervention, a la Noah, which the Big Guy has promised not to do
again.
Enter irony: “Rapture,” a Bible-based account of the
last times, tied for the movie least likely to come true.
Throughout the doomsday debate runs a strong theme of
separating the quest for scientific knowledge from religious
understanding. To the contrary, both should be about truth, and,
eventually, wind up in the same place. When they seek anything
else, if science becomes captive to social agendas or religion to
popular culture, they lose their credibility and mission.
Besides, we’re all going to die whether the world ends
with us or not. Perhaps a little time would be better spent
pondering what comes then. |
