Andromeda Is Coming!

By MAUREEN DOWD

I’ve developed a debilitating case of cosmophobia.

The truth is out there, sure. But so is a lot of other scary, and potentially fatal, stuff.

Perturbed astronomers say that fear of the universe has been growing in the past decade.

I’m worried about those two small asteroids that buzzed the Earth this week, those two big earthquakes in Italy and the countdown to doomsday on Dec. 21, supposedly prophesied in the Mayan calendar. Will Planet X, or Nibiru, collide with the Earth before Christmas? Will a solar flare cause a geomagnetic reversal of the North and South Poles? Will a black hole swallow us up?

It looks to be the hottest spring on record, Fourth of July at Memorial Day as The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore put it. It’s been so boiling, with people getting treated for heat stroke, that it’s redolent of that “Twilight Zone” episode where the Earth spins out of its orbit and moves closer to the Sun and everyone’s burning to death. (Except it turns out to be a dream and the Earth is actually moving farther from the Sun and everyone’s freezing to death.)

Maybe my eschatological tizzy started with “Melancholia,” Lars von Trier’s gorgeous but weird meditation on the annihilation of the Earth by a passing planet. Or seeing the trailer for “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World,” an end-of-days romantic comedy with Steve Carell and Keira Knightley.

But my cataclysmic creeps ratcheted up when I read a book due out next month called “The Age of Miracles,” a debut novel by Karen Thompson Walker that makes you look around more warily as you walk down the street. (One of three apocalypse novels coming out from Random House this summer, it has already been optioned by Hollywood.)

Walker has written a tender coming-of-age novel set at the toxic end of the world. The Earth’s rotation slows and days and nights stretch the length of weeks. The magnetic field shielding the Earth from the Sun’s radiation withers, gravity goes kerflooey and the temperature is either boiling or freezing.

The former book editor got the idea after reading that the 2004 earthquake in Indonesia was so powerful that it changed the shape of the Earth, sped up its rotation and shaved 3 microseconds off each day. (The same thing happened with the Japanese earthquake last year. When the tectonic plates shifted, part of Japan actually moved closer to the U.S. by 13 feet.)

Walker says she checked with a graduate student of astrophysics to add verisimilitude. “For example, I had assumed that the slowing would make gravity feel a little weaker, but I was mistaken,” she said in an e-mail. “The rotation of the Earth is responsible for a very slight counter-gravity (centrifugal) force. That means that if the rotation slowed, gravity on Earth would become ever-so-slightly stronger. Baseballs might not fly quite as far as they used to, and birds and airplanes would be pulled a bit more powerfully toward the Earth.”

Feeling a little jittery, I called David Morrison, the senior scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center  in California, who answers questions online sent from the public to the Web site Ask an Astrobiologist.

Even before archaeologists discovered an extended Mayan calendar in Guatemala earlier this month that debunked the idea that the world is ending in December, Morrison thought the Mayan prophecy was bunk.

People trying to make money are ginning up the hoax, he said. “The worst thing is they really do frighten children, and it’s evil to make up lies to scare children,” he said. “I have at least one e-mail a day from a kid who says he can’t sleep. Some are threatening suicide. I heard about two sets of parents who talked about killing their children and themselves before the date, and a girl hanged herself in England in the fall, worrying over 2012.”

He reassured me that the premises in Walker’s novel and “The Twilight Zone” could not happen. “We can do horrible things to the planet with global warming or nuclear war,” he said. “But we can’t shift the distance to the Sun or slow the rotation.”

Noting the growing cases of cosmophobia, Morrison asked impatiently, “Why is our society so focused on potential disasters?”

Just as I was starting to calm down, he mentioned that the Andromeda galaxy is going to crash into the Milky Way in two billion years. Hearing me keening over the strain of Andromeda, he explained that it would just be two great big fuzzy balls of stars and mostly empty space passing through each other harmlessly over the course of millions of years.

“We’ll just have twice as many stars,” he said. “The end of the world is a really silly concept. It’s been here for four billion years. I can imagine us blowing ourselves up as a civilization, but the planet wouldn’t care.”

How can he be sure?

“I have a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard,” he replied.

O.K. then.

NYT