A Choice of Catastrophes Read online

  A Choice of Catastrophes

  The disasters that threaten our world

  Isaac Asimov

  Copyright © Isaac Asimov 1979

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Catastrophes of the First Class 1. The Day of Judgement Ragnarok · Messianic Expectations · Millennarianism

  2. The Increase of Entropy The Conservation Laws · Energy Flow · The Second Law of Thermodynamics · Movement at Random

  3. The Closing of the Universe The Galaxies · The Expanding Universe · The Contracting Universe

  4. The Collapse of Stars Gravitation · Black Holes · Quasars · Within Our Galaxy

  PART TWO

  Catastrophes of the Second Class 5. Collisions with the Sun Birth by Close Encounter · Orbiting the Galactic Nucleus · Mini-Black Holes · Antimatter and Free-Planets

  6. The Death of the Sun The Energy-Source · Red Giants · White Dwarfs · Supernovas · Sunspots · Neutrinos

  PART THREE

  Catastrophes of the Third Class 7. The Bombardment of the Earth Extraterrestrial Objects · Comets · Asteroids · Meteorites

  8. The Slowing of the Earth Tides · The Longer Day · The Receding Moon · The Approaching Moon

  9. The Drift of the Crust Internal Heat · Catastrophism · The Moving Continents · Volcanoes · Earthquakes · The Tectonic Future

  10. The Change of Weather The Seasons · Triggering the Glaciers · Orbital Variations · The Arctic Ocean · The Effect of Glaciation

  11. The Removal of Magnetism Cosmic Rays · DNA and Mutations · The Genetic Load · Earth’s Magnetic Field

  PART FOUR

  Catastrophes of the Fourth Class 12. The Competition of Life Large Animals · Small Animals · Infectious Disease · Microorganisms · New Disease

  13. The Conflict of Intelligence Nonhuman Intelligence · War · Barbarians · Gunpowder to Nuclear Bombs

  PART FIVE

  Catastrophes of the Fifth Class 14. The Depletion of Resources Renewable Items · Metals · Pollution · Energy: Old · Energy: New · Energy: Copious

  15. The Dangers of Victory Population · Education · Technology · Computers

  Afterword

  To Robyn and Bill

  may they find Fortune’s face

  a smiling one always

  Introduction

  The word ‘catastrophe’ is from the Greek and it means ‘to turn upside down’. It was originally used to describe the denouement, or climactic end, of a dramatic presentation and it could, of course, be either happy or sad in nature.

  In a comedy, the climax is the happy ending. After a spate of misunderstandings and sorrow, everything is turned upside down when the lovers are suddenly reconciled and reunited. The catastrophe of the comedy is, then, an embrace or a marriage. In a tragedy, the climax is the sad ending. After endless striving, everything is turned upside down when the hero finds that fate and circumstance defeat him. The catastrophe of the tragedy is, then, the death of the hero.

  Since tragedies tend to strike deeper than comedies do and to be more memorable, the word ‘catastrophe’ has come to be associated more with tragic endings than with happy ones. Consequently, it’s now used to describe any final end of a calamitous or disastrous nature—and it is with that kind of catastrophe that this book deals.

  The final end of what? Of ourselves, of course; of the human species. If we regard human history as a tragic drama, then the final death of humanity would be the catastrophe in both the original and the present sense. But what could bring about the end of human history?

  For one thing, the entire universe might so change its properties as to become uninhabitable. If the universe became deadly and if no life could exist anywhere within it, then humanity could not exist either, and that would be something we might call a ‘Catastrophe of the First Class’.

  Naturally, the entire universe need not be involved in something that would suffice to bring about an end to humanity. The universe might be as benign as it now is and yet something might happen to the sun that would make the solar system uninhabitable, in that case, human life might come to an end even though all the rest of the universe might be proceeding on its way smoothly and peacefully. This would be a ‘Catastrophe of the Second Class’.

  To be sure, though the sun might continue to shine as evenly and as benevolently as ever, the Earth itself might undergo the kind of convulsion that would make life impossible upon it. In that case, human life might come to an end even though the solar system continued on its routine round of rotations and revolutions. This would be a ‘Catastrophe of the Third Class’.

  And though Earth might remain warm and pleasant, something might happen upon it that would destroy human life, while leaving at least some other forms of life untouched. In that case, evolution might continue and Earth, with a modified load of life, might flourish—without us. That would be a ‘Catastrophe of the Fourth Class’.

  We might even go one step farther and point out the possibility that human life might continue, but that something would happen that would destroy civilization, interrupting the march of technological advance and condemning humanity to a primitive life—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short-for an indefinite period. This would be a ‘Catastrophe of the Fifth Class’.

  In this book, I will take up all these varieties of catastrophes beginning with the first class and following with the others in order. The catastrophes described will be successively less cosmic—and successively more immediate and dangerous.

  Nor need the picture so drawn be one of unalloyed gloom, since it may well be that there is no catastrophe that is not unavoidable. And certainly the chances of avoiding one increase, if we stare the catastrophe boldly in the face and estimate its dangers.

  PART ONE

  Catastrophes

  of the First Class

  1

  The Day of

  Judgement

  RAGNAROK

  The conviction that the whole universe is coming to an end (the catastrophe of the first class mentioned in the introduction) is an old one, and is, in fact, an important part of Western tradition. One particularly dramatic picture of the end of the world is given to us of the Western tradition in the myths that originated among the Scandinavian peoples.

  The Scandinavian mythology is a reflection of the harsh, subpolar environment in which the hardy Norsemen lived. It is a world in which men and women play a minor part, and in which the drama rests in the conflict between gods and giants, a conflict in which the gods seem at a perpetual disadvantage.

  The frost-giants (the long, cruel Scandinavian winters) are undefeatable, after all, and even within the beleaguered fortress of the gods themselves, Loki (the god of the fire that is so essential in a northern climate) is as tricky and as treacherous as fire itself is. And in the end there comesRagnarok, which means ‘the fatal destiny of the gods’. (This term Richard Wagner made better known as Götterdämmerung, or ‘twilight of the gods’, in his opera of that name.)

  Ragnarok is the final decisive battle of the gods and their enemies. Behind the gods come the heroes of Valhalla who, on Earth, had died in battle. Opposed are the giants and monsters of a cruel nature led by the renegade, Loki. One by one the gods fall, though the monsters and giants—and Loki, too—also die. In the fight, the Earth and the universe perish. The sun and the moon are swallowed by the wolves who have been pursuing them since creation. The Earth catches fire and bakes and cracks in a universal holocaust. Almost as an insignificant side issue to the great battle, life and mankind are wiped out.

  And that should, dramatically, be the end—but it isn’t.

  Somehow a second generation of gods survives; another sun and moon co
me into being; a new Earth arises; a new human pair comes into existence. An anticlimactic happy ending is tacked on to the grand tragedy of destruction. How did this come to be?

  The tale of Ragnarok, as we now have it, is taken from the writings of an Icelandic historian, Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241). By that time, Iceland had been Christianized and the tale of the end of the gods seems to have suffered a strong Christian influence. There were, after all, Christian tales of the death and regeneration of the universe that long antedated the Icelandic tale of Ragnarok, and the Christian tales were, in turn, influenced by those of the Jews.

  MESSIANIC EXPECTATIONS

  While the Davidic kingdom of Judah existed, prior to 586 BC, the Jews were quite certain God was the divine judge who meted out rewards and punishments to individuals in accordance with their deserts. The rewards and punishments were handed out in this life. This confidence did not survive defeat.

  After Judah had been cast down by the Chaldeans under Nebuchadnezzar, after the Temple had been destroyed and many of the Jews brought to exile in Babylonia, there grew up a longing among the exiles for the return of the kingdom and of a king of the old Davidic dynasty. Since such desires, too plainly expressed, represented treason to the new non-Judaic rulers, the habit arose of speaking of the return of the king elliptically. One spoke of ‘the Messiah’; that is, ‘the anointed one’ since the king was anointed with oil as part of the ritual of assuming office.

  The picture of the returning king was idealized as introducing a wonderful golden age and, indeed, the rewards of virtue were removed from the present (where it manifestly was not taking place) and put into a golden future.

  Some verses describing that golden age were placed in the Book of Isaiah, which dealt with the words of a prophet who preached as early as 740 BC. The verses themselves probably came from a later period. Of course, in order to introduce the golden age, the righteous among the population must be advanced to power, and the evildoers must be rendered powerless or even destroyed. Thus:

  And he [God] shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they [the nations] shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more (Isa. 2:4):

  … with righteousness shall he [God] judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked (Isa. 11:4).

  Time passed and the Jews returned from exile, but that brought no relief. There was hostility from their immediate non-Jewish neighbours and they felt helpless against the overwhelming power of the Persians, who now ruled over the land. The Jewish prophets grew all the more graphic, therefore, in their writings about the coming golden age, and particularly about the doom awaiting their enemies.

  The prophet, Joel, writing about 400 BC, said, ‘Alas for the day! for the day of the Lord is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come’ (Joel 1:15). The picture is of the coming of a specific time when God shall judge all the world: ‘I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel…’ (Joel 3:2). This was the first literary expression of a ‘Judgement Day’, a time when God would bring to an end the present order of the world.

  The notion became stronger and more extreme in the second century BC, when the Seleucids, the Greek rulers who had succeeded to the Persian dominion after the time of Alexander the Great, tried to suppress Judaism. The Jews, under the Maccabees, rebelled, and the Book Of Daniel was written to support the rebellion and to promise a glowing future.

  The book drew, in part, on older traditions concerning a prophet, Daniel. Into Daniel’s mouth were placed descriptions of apocalyptic visions.1 God (referred to as ‘the Ancient of days’) makes his appearance to punish the wicked:

  I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed (Dan, 7:13–14).

  This ‘one like the Son of man’ refers to someone in human shape as contrasted to the enemies of Judah who had previously been portrayed in the shape of various beasts. The human shape can be interpreted as representing Judah in the abstract, or the Messiah in particular.

  The Maccabean rebellion was successful and a Judean kingdom was reestablished but this did not bring the golden age, either. However, the prophetic writings kept expectations keen among the Jews over the next couple of centuries. The Day of Judgement remained always about to come; the Messiah was always at hand; the kingdom of righteousness was always on the point of being established.

  The Romans took over from the Maccabees and in the reign of the emperor Tiberius, there was a very popular preacher in Judea named John the Baptist, and the burden of his message was ‘Repent ye; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ (Matt, 3:2).

  With universal expectation thus constantly sharpened, anyone who claimed to be the Messiah was bound to raise a following, and under the Romans there were a number of such claimants who came to nothing, politically. Among such claimants, however, was Jesus of Nazareth, whom a few humble Judeans followed, and who remained faithful even after Jesus had been crucified without a hand lifted to save him. Those who believed in Jesus as the Messiah might have been called ‘Messianics’. However, the language of Jesus’s followers came to be Greek as more and more Gentiles were converted, and in Greek the word for Messiah is ‘Christos’. Jesus’s followers came to be called ‘Christians’.

  The early success in converting Gentiles came through the charismatic missionary preaching of Saul of Tarsus (the Apostle Paul) and beginning with him, Christianity began a career of growth that brought first Rome, then Europe, then much of the world to its banner.

  The early Christians believed that the arrival of Jesus the Messiah (that is ‘Jesus Christ’) meant that the Day of Judgement was at hand. Jesus himself was described as making predictions of an imminent end of the world:

  But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory…. Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. Heaven and earth shall pass away… But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father (Mark 13:24–27, 30–32).

  About AD 50, twenty years after the death of Jesus, the Apostle Paul still expected the Day of Judgement momentarily:

  For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words. But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night (1 Thess. 4:15, 5:2).

  Paul, like Jesus, implied that the Day of Judgement would come soon but was careful not to set an exact date. And, as it happened, the Day of Judgement did not come; the evil were not punished, the ideal kingdom was not set up, and those who believed that Jesus was the Messiah had to content themselves with the feeling that the Messiah would have to come a second time (the ‘Second Coming’) and that then all that had been
foretold would come to pass.

  The Christians were persecuted in Rome under Nero, and on a wider scale under the later emperor Domitian. Just as the Seleucid persecution had brought forth the apocalyptic promises of the Book of Daniel in Old Testament times, so the persecutions of Domitian brought forth the apocalyptic promises of the Book of Revelation in New Testament times. Revelation was probably written in AD 95 during the reign of Domitian.

  In great, and utterly confusing, detail, the Day of Judgement is pictured. There is talk of a final battle between all the forces of evil find the forces of good at a place called Armageddon, though the details aren’t clear (Rev. 16:14–16). Finally, though, ‘I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away…’ (Rev. 21:1).

  It is quite possible, then, that whatever the Scandinavian myth of Ragnarok may have been to begin with, the version that has come to us must owe something to that battle of Armageddon in Revelation with its vision of a regenerated universe. And Revelation in turn owes a great deal to the Book of Daniel.

  MILLENNARIANISM

  The Book of Revelation introduced something new:

  And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years. And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season (Rev. 20:1–3).