Archive Gallery: Doomsday Predictions
Death Rays: August 1924
Death-rays were a theoretical electromagnetic weapon popular between the 1920s and 1930s for their supposed ability to remotely power devices and destroy living creatures. Inventors like H. Grindell-Matthews, pictured below, claimed to have invented a “mystery ray apparatus,” capable of paralyzing internal combustion engines of airplanes and automobiles with an invisible beam. Although most experts dismissed the claims of Grindell-Matthews and his counterparts, which included Nikola Tesla, the idea of a death-ray nevertheless captured the imaginations of a public already thrilled by H.G. Wells’ fictional descriptions of extraterrestrials who could zap the world into oblivion.
Like many leading scientists, we were skeptical that a “diabolical beam” could exist, let alone that it would be powerful enough to wipe out human civilization. At the same time, we acknowledged a related technology, wireless power transmission, could make life easier without “dealing electric death” and contributing to global warfare.
Read the full story in “Man’s Most Terrible Invention”
Cosmological Disaster: January 1928
Dr. Dinsmore Alter, a respected American astronomer and meteorologist, predicted that our planet would end in “a gigantic explosion!” As earth neared the end of its time, its surface would crack open into a “vast abyss, until at last the entire globe will be rent asunder.” The subsequent blast would scatter fragments of our planet into the universe, but not for millions and millions of years, Dr. Alter assured us. In between now and the end of the world, humanity would live to see the moon explode, the tides disappear, and Mars collapse into itself. Unless we relocate to another planet, we’ll die out in the Earth’s last ice age, or perhaps during an asteroid collision.
Dr. Alter’s theories, while grim, only reflect what he believed already happened to ancient planets that died long before mankind even evolved. Our solar system can’t guard itself against the ravages of time. As the planet ages, its surface will cool, causing the earth’s crust to shrink and pressurize its hot inner core. As you can imagine, cracks extends thousands of miles into the planet’s center can only lead to a global catastrophe.
Read the full story in “How the World Will End”
Return of the Ice Age: June 1929
Earth has been through 12 ice ages, and while we’re currently in an interglacial period, geologists speculate that the planet will experience another one….40,000 years from now. In 1929, however, Dr. V. Nordmann, from Denmark, reasoned that an ice age could arrive as “early” as 20,000 to 25,000 years from now. These “glacial invasions” could occur for any number of reasons. The sun, often classified as a “variable star,” could brighten and dim like a strobe light in slow-motion. If we’re in the bright period now, the waning period could induce a frigid climate on earth. Or, adjustments in our atmosphere’s carbon dioxide levels could alter the climate dramatically, forcing mankind to gather in tropical areas for relative warmth. As the illustration at left shows, New York City probably wouldn’t survive the ice storms.
Read the full story in “A New Ice Age May Bury Us”
Death of the Sun: March 1929
Earth isn’t the only thing that could grow cold with time. According to the theory of stellar evolution, our sun’s hydrogen core will eventually fizzle out, prompting the sun’s transformation into a red giant. The sun’s luminosity will increase by about 1000 to 10,000 times, while the outer layers of the sun will expand, meaning that the energy emitted from its core will spread over a much larger area, resulting in a cooler surface temperature.
Naturally, such a change in the sun’s composition could spell disaster for life on Earth, but Professor Robert A. Millikan, famed American physicist and a Nobel Prize winner, proposed a more optimistic, albeit far-fetched solution: we could subsist on a second sun. Millikan explained to us that the universe continually repairs itself. When stars and planets die, atoms disintegrate in space, hurtling electrons into the cosmos. Eventually, the electrons find each other and recombine into hydrogen, oxygen, silicon and iron. Over billions of years, these tiny electron clusters will give birth to new suns, so eventually, some distant newborn star will provide our planet with solar energy even as our original sun disintegrates. Before that happens, Millikan surmised, man will have found a way to capture the energy of cosmic rays and to use solar energy, sustaining us even as the sun’s death upheaves our solar system.
Read the full story in “When the Sun Grow Cold”
Solar Collision: October 1936
Here’s one more for the death by cosmic catastrophe camp. Eons ago, before our sun had planets orbiting around it, a wandering star passed by, nearly colliding with it. Using their respective tidal forces, the stars drew long, “flaming cigars of incandescent matter” from each other. The wandering star eventually withdrew, leaving the “flaming streamers” to form the planets in our solar system. Billions of years from now, another wandering star could venture toward our solar system, resulting in that same process. As the illustration shows, Earth would be caught between the two streamers, but not before Pluto, Neptune and Jupiter began to change their orbits. By that time, we’ll have noticed that something’s amiss — the poles would shift, and our atmosphere would heat up from the exposure to two suns. Our oceans would turn into steam, day and night would cease existence, and our planet would vaporize like a drop of water within a furnace.
Read the full story in “How Will the World End?”
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