Moreover, comets may strike the earth, as Venus did when it was a comet; in that major catastrophe it was fortunate that Venus is a. slightly smaller body than the earth. A large comet arriving from interstellar spaces may run into one of the planets and push it from its orbit; then chaos may start anew. Also, some dark star, like Jupiter or Saturn, may be in the path of the sun, and may be attracted to the system and cause havoc in it.
The scholarly world assumed that in some hundreds of millions of years the heat of the sun would be exhausted, and then, as Flam-marion frightened his readers, the last pair of human beings would freeze to death in the ice of the equator. But this is far off in the future. In view of modern knowledge that heat is discharged in the process of breaking up atoms, scientists are now prepared to credit the sun with an immense reserve of heat. The fear, if any, is focused on the possibility that the sun may explode; a few minutes later the earth will become aware of this, and robin-bobin
soon thereafter will no longer exist. But the one end, that of freezing, is very remote; the other end, that of explosion, is very improbable; and the world is thought to have billions of peaceful years ahead. It is believed that the world has gone through eons of undisturbed evolution, and equally long eons are before us. Man can go far in such a span of
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time, considering that his entire civilization has endured less than ten thousand years, and in view of the great technological progress he has made in the last century.
The average man is no longer afraid of the end of the world. Man clings to his earthly possessions, registers his landholdings and fences them in; peoples carry on wars to preserve and to enlarge their historical frontiers. Yet the last five or six thousand years have witnessed a series of major catastrophes, each of which displaced the borders of the seas, and some of which caused sea-beds and continents to interchange places, submerging kingdoms, and creating space for new ones.
Cosmic collisions are not divergent phenomena, or phenomena that, in the opinion of some modern philosophers, take place in defiance of what is supposed to be physical laws; they are more in the nature of occurrences implicit in the dynamics of the universe, or, in terms of that philosophy, convergent phenomena.
"Lest by chance restrained by religion,"—and we may read 'science' instead of 'religion'—"you should think that earth and sun, and sky, sea, stars, and moon must needs abide for everlasting, because of their divine body," think of the catastrophes of the past; and then "look upon seas, and lands, and sky; their threefold nature . . . then-three textures so vast, one single day shall hurl to ruin; and the massive form and fabric of the world held up for many years, shall fall headlong."1
"And the whole firmament shall fall on the divine earth and on tne sea: and then shall flow a ceaseless cataract of raging fire, and shall burn land and sea, and the firmament of heaven and the stars and creation itself it shall cast into one molten mass and clean dissolve. Then no more shall there be the luminaries' twinkling orbs, no night, no dawn, no constant days of care, no spring, no summer, no winter, no autumn."2
"A single day will see the burial of all mankind. All that the long forbearance of fortune has produced, all that has been reared to eminence, all that is famous and all that is beautiful, great thrones,
1 Lucretius De rerum natura, v (transl. C. Bailey, 1924).
2 The Sibylline Oracles, transl. Lanchester.
great nations—all will descend into one abyss, will be overthrown in one hour."8
The vehemence of flames will burst asunder the framework of the earth's crust.4
3 Seneca Naturales quaestiones III, xxx (transl. J. Clarke).
* Seneca Epistolae morales, Epistle xcl (transl. R. M. Gummere).
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
Facing Many Problems
IN THIS BOOK, containing the first part of a historical cosmology, I have endeavored to show that two series of cosmic catastrophes took place in historical times, thirty-four and twenty-six centuries ago, and thus only a short time ago not peace but war reigned in the solar system.
All cosmological theories assume that the planets have revolved m their places for billions of years; we claim that they have been traveling along their present orbits for only a few thousand years. We maintain also that one planet—Venus—was formerly a comet and that it joined the family of planets within the memory of mankind, thus offering an explanation of how one of the planets originated. We conjectured that the comet Venus originated in the planet Jupiter; then we found that smaller comets were born in contacts between Venus and Mars, thus offering an explanation of the principle of the origin of the comets of the solar system. That these comets are only a few thousand years old explains why, despite dissipation of the material of their tails in space, they have not yet disintegrated entirely. From the fact that Venus was once a comet we robin-bobin
learned that comets are not nearly immaterial bodies or "rien visible," as was thought because stars are usually seen through their tails and, on the passage of one or two of them in front of the sun, their heads were not perceptible.
We claim that the earth's orbit changed more than once and with it the length of the year; that the geographical position of the terrestrial axis and its astronomical direction changed repeatedly, and that at a recent date the polar star was in the constellation of the Great Bear. The length of the day altered; the polar regions shifted,
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the polar ice became displaced into moderate latitudes, and other regions moved into the polar circles.
We arrived at the conclusion that electrical discharges took place between Venus, Mars, and the earth when, in very close contacts, their atmospheres touched each other; that the magnetic poles of the earth became reversed only a few thousand years ago; and that with the change in the moon's orbit, the length of the month changed too, and repeatedly so. In the period of seven hundred years between the middle of the second millennium before the present era and the eighth century the year consisted of 360 days and the month of almost exactly thirty days, but earlier the day, month, and year were of different lengths.
We offered an explanation of the fact that the nocturnal side of Venus emits as much heat as the sunlit side; and we explained the origin of the canals of Mars and of the craters and seas of lava on the moon as brought about in stress and near collisions.
We believe we came close to solving the problem of mountain building and the irruption of the sea; the exchange of place between sea and land; the rise of new islands and volcanic activity; sudden changes in climate and the destruction of quadrupeds in northern Siberia and the annihilation of entire species; and the cause of earthquakes.
Furthermore, we found that excessive evaporation of water from the surface of the oceans and seas, a phenomenon that was postulated to explain excessive precipitation and formation of ice covers, was caused by extraterrestrial agents. Though in such occurrences we see the origin of the Fimbul winter, we are inclined to regard the erratic boulders and till, or gravel, clay, and sand on the substratum of rock as having been carried, not by ice, but by onrushing gigantic tides caused by change in the rotation of the terrestrial globe; thus have we accounted for moraines that migrated from the equator toward higher latitudes and altitudes (Himalayas) or from the equator across Africa toward the South Pole.
We recognized that the religions of the peoples of the world have a common astral origin. The narrative of the Hebrew Bible concerning the plagues and other wonders of the time of the Exodus is