Posted
May 19, 2015
Actually,
every day of the year, we could celebrate cosmic non-collisions, because space is huge and collisions large enough to get excited
about are pretty rare.
But
in 1910, astronomers predicted that the Earth was going to pass
through the tail of Halley's comet for six hours on May 19.
And
although most astronomers assured people that the comet's tail was
very thin, very rarefied – a bit of gas and dust blown out by the
solar wind for millions of miles – there was one astronomer who
said something a little bit different:
He
suggested that the comet's tail, which spectrographs had shown
contained cyanogen, might poison all life on the planet!
The
astronomer who made that scary prediction was Camille Flammarion. In
his lifetime, he made a lot of suggestions and held a lot of beliefs
that weren't backed by any evidence. For example, he wrote that
dwellers on Mars had tried to communicate with the Earth in the past;
he believed that human souls (and alien souls, too!) were
reincarnated on many different planets, in the bodies of many
different sorts of creatures; he believed in telepathy. And yet,
Flammarion did seem to honor evidence and the scientific method. He
studied mediums and seances, apparently very open to the possibility
that these were ways of contacting souls of the dearly departed, but
he concluded that all mediums cheat.
At
any rate, thanks to Flammarion's cyanogen-snuffing-out-life-on-Earth
pronouncement, a lot of people panicked. Many people spent money on
trying to survive the comet tail; they bought gas masks and
anti-comet pills and even anti-comet umbrellas! Some people feared
that the tail would bring deadly influenza, rather than poison gas,
and some farmers neglected to plant their crops, and some people
neglected to do their own work, as these people prepared for the end
of the world.
(By
the way, I'm not sure that surviving the comet tail would be such a
good idea, if the rest of life on Earth died. I mean, unless people
were going to purchase tiny gas masks for every leaf on local apple
trees, and anti-comet umbrellas for every corn plant, and so forth –
wouldn't it be better to die along with everything else than to
slowly starve to death?)
Once
the day came, and Earth passed through Halley's tail, of course
nothing happened.
Well,
nothing detectable happened to the Earth's lower atmosphere or to all
the various lifeforms. But people created some havoc, for sure. Four
different people contacted Flammarion to report smelling some
disturbing odors—the smell of burning vegetables, one person
claimed, or a marshy or chemical smell, according to others. In
China, some people wouldn't go outside for half a day, and they
wouldn't drink water in case it had been poisoned by the comet's
“vapors.” People in Tennessee waited with their prophet for the
end of the world, at noon, and a preacher in Pennsylvania filled his
congregation with terror about the destruction the comet was
bringing.
By
the way, in case you are wondering, the world didn't end.
The
next day, people read that a religious group in Oklahoma, the
so-called “Sacred Followers,” had attempted to sacrifice a
virgin in order to save the Earth. They also read that, thankfully,
the police stopped them! – But nowadays scholars think that,
despite the newspaper story, this didn't actually happen.
So
today is the anniversary of “– Excitement! - Danger! - Cosmic
Catastrophe! - oh, wait, never mind!”
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on this date:
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