DOOMSDAY
THE END OF THE WORLD, by Kenneth Heuer; Victor Gollancz, English price 8/6. AN has always been unreasonably interested in the end of the world. Heuer has collected and analysed for our interest the probabilities-collisions with comets, asteroids, stars, or the moon; the explosion of the sun or its death; man’s own folly with his new sub-atomic toys. ... For good measure he begins with a recital of a few of the more recent prophecies of doom, based upon religious. inspiration or astrology. Really important prophecies have placed the end in the year 992 (St. Bernard), 1000, 1186, 1198, 1335, 1524, 1584, and 1588. Nostradamus offers a choice of 1666, 1734, 1886 or 1943. His next preference is for 2038. The belief in Miller's prophecy (1843) seems extraordinary at this distance, but there was a similar panic in many places when the world passed through the tail of Haley’s comet in 1910. From a scientific point of view it’s all a matter of odds against. Very roughly, the odds against the world coming to an end this year are something like this: Star collision, two" hundred thousand billion to one; Moon collision, fifty thousand million to one; death of the sun, twenty thousand million to one. A collision with a comet , would be of merely local importance; we've collided with several already. The hydrogen bomb, even if it began nuclear chain reactions, could not maintain them, so the mere physical earth will not be itself distributed in fragments like the rings of Saturn by anything ‘we do. But radio-active cobalt could bring about the end of all life on the earth. And that is the end of our world, anyway. The intrinsic interest of the subject covers most of the shortcomings of Heuer’s style. He is sometimes trivial where his subject has its own nobility. And I can find no basis in the book for the unwarranted optimism of the last
two sentences. We have no real reason for believing in a perpetual continuance of life. And we have ample evidence to
the contrary.
J. D.
McD.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540402.2.23.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 767, 2 April 1954, Page 12
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347DOOMSDAY New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 767, 2 April 1954, Page 12
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