Earth-Shattering

CHAPTER 1

CATACLYSMS 101

We’re all oddly drawn to a theme that started in ancient Egypt and Greece and has perennially appeared in folklore. It’s the idea of the phoenix, the creature that emerges from the ashes of a conflagration. The metaphoric implication is that if our world, or at least our culture and all we hold dear, is violently destroyed, something just as vibrant can rise from the ruins.

This has actually happened, not once or twice, but repeatedly. And not just on the local or even planetary level but on epic scales that have rattled the floorless alleyways of the cosmos. We’re talking about cataclysms.

In a way, they’re counterintuitive. A quick study of nature shows that all objects display inertia—a strong tendency to keep doing whatever it is they are already doing. Planets whirl around the sun, and nothing is needed to maintain the motion. Meanwhile the sun, the center of all this respectful planetary circling, carries its obedient retinue through the galaxy at 144 miles a second as it participates in the galaxy’s rotation. The sun and its flock have performed nineteen such circuits since their birth, and, like a mother duck with her ducklings, Sol always returns with the same retinue in tow.

No long-lived observer patiently studying our solar system for millennia would notice anything different with each galaxy rotation. Only if he were armed with a super-telescope and perhaps alerted to be extra-attentive would the onlooker detect a change. “Look at that third planet, the blue one,” he might whisper. “This time around, at some point while it’s been away on its most recent galactic orbit, most of its life was destroyed. It has undergone a cataclysm. And yet now its surface is crawling with strange new organisms. What magic! What will happen next?”

Our ageless observer might be quicker to see that with each galaxy rotation and each return, the sun itself has changed. Each time it completes its 240-million-year circuit of the Milky Way’s core, going beyond the stars of Sagittarius, it returns 2.5 percent more luminous. That’s just a little brighter. The change is as subtle as a 75-watt bulb becoming 77 watts, so our onlooker would have to be sharp indeed to notice this alteration. Only after about four circuits of the galaxy’s core and the passage of a billion years would the brightening of the sun be obvious. Still, even after that protracted interval, the difference would be a mere 10 percent boost. The 75-watt bulb is now 83 watts. But that’s enough to make the third planet too hot. In the past single circuit, all its life has vanished.

A close inspection of that planet and its near neighbors shows that Earth’s large-headed Homo sapiens creatures have built ark-like spacecraft and abandoned their world to colonize the next planet out, the orange one, although life there is proving to be a radiation-filled struggle.

The above scenario is a reasonably accurate look ahead to a time a mere 1.1 billion years from now. The sun will indeed be 10 percent brighter, and all Earth life will indeed be destroyed by the heat, and if we humans still exist, we will surely have fled to the only planet in that anti-sunward direction that has any sort of surface. All others are gaseous and slushy and offer no place to land.

This cataclysm has already happened on our planet, several times. In those previous solar brightenings, epic terrestrial responses followed each luminosity boost. The composition of our planet’s atmosphere changed in such a perfectly appropriate reaction that it might almost seem engineered. It’s as if Gaia—the name for our biosphere when viewed as a single intelligent entity whose constituent plants, animals, biomes, and natural systems function cooperatively—brilliantly reconfigured the surface to comfortably stabilize it despite the extra solar luminosity.

The record reveals other slow changes too, like Earth’s orbital path mutating from a round shape to an elongated egg-shaped track and back again over a 112,000-year period and the twenty-six-millennia alterations in the direction of its axial tilt, both of which dictate the onset and ending of ice ages. And there were more alchemic tricks in nature’s terrestrial handbook. Superimposed on these enormous global alterations and other powerful if snail-paced world-shapers, such as the muscular mountain-building abilities of plate tectonics, are the spices in the saucy story line—the disastrous metamorphoses that were sudden rather than gradual. To Earth’s inhabitants at the time, these were the cataclysms. Widespread death and disruption were their calling cards, events that seemed to be conjured by the notorious Hindu goddess Kali, who preferred to destroy worlds rather than, say, enjoy a snack.

How and when these cataclysms arose, how they changed the planet and its inhabitants, and which ones could be closer to rematerializing than you might imagine is the subject of this book.

People don’t think about cataclysms too often. That could be because it’s anathema to our need for safety, but perhaps it’s also because the topic doesn’t seem relevant to our everyday lives and thus probably requires some Paul Revere type to sound the alarm before people will pay attention.

I’ll volunteer.

A cataclysm is typically an event of surprise and upheaval, and it usually descends on its victims rapidly, although a relatively slow-spreading global epidemic would also qualify (and does, as you’ll see in our pandemic chapters later on). If the word cataclysm has an antonym, it might be safe routine, which is nowhere more exemplified than in modern American life, where events are largely predictable and local movement leisurely.

There’s not much animation out the back window of the typical suburban house, where the panorama resembles a snapshot more than a video. In the neighborhood, leaves may stir in the breeze. Clouds lethargically mutate. Even in bustling cities, motion unfolds at an accessible human clip. Walkers, bike riders, planes above, even the traffic—nothing is too fast to follow. The buildings on one’s block will be there tomorrow. The reassuring steady pace is not likely to change in the foreseeable future.

Even everyday tools and gadgets have been engineered to eliminate surprises and ensure that nothing alarming stirs up the dust. Since humans are famous for not following directions—or even reading those that accompany every new purchase—most devices have built-in idiot-proofing. A portable electric heater? The directions warn against placing it where it might tip over and ignite the carpet. But if you do that anyway? Why, then there’s a safety cutoff switch.

Cars are increasingly built with blind-spot monitors and backup cameras, and designers keep asking how humans can be protected against themselves. There are very few products available to the public that have significant inherent danger. The exceptions to this rule are sufficiently rare that everyone knows what they are. Two of them are chain saws and motorcycles. With such things, a single foolish moment of inattention is enough to produce grievous injury. These items simply cannot be made idiot-proof. Other semi-dangerous products exist too, but most have been grandfathered into our twenty-first-century lives. If bicycles had never been available before and someone proposed to put them on the market today, government safety agencies would never approve them. A flimsy transportation apparatus with no air bags or seat belts meant to be used on the public roads alongside motor vehicles? Are you kidding? No way!

So protective measures keep increasing, and transportation, once one of the most dangerous activities in human endeavor, has never been safer. Even a natural calamity such as an earthquake now encounters buildings and bridges specifically designed to withstand its assault. And anyway, such dramatic natural cataclysms are rare.

All this tranquillity is, thankfully, nature’s rule rather than its exception. If restlessness someday drove humans to leave this planet for a more exciting venue, they’d find most celestial destinations to be even more placid than their home world. An immortal observer on the moon’s surface could wait a million years and still not perceive the slightest change in the dusty lunar terrain other than the sharp-edged inky mountain shadows that gradually lengthen and then shorten in a reliable fortnightly cycle.

The overwhelming majority of celestial acreage is inactive and will remain forever unruffled. More than 90 percent of the visible universe’s current seventy billion trillion suns had non-attention-getting births and are living out their lives in a steady, predictable fashion. When their lives near the end, they do not explode but merely collapse and harmlessly fade to black, as if in a movie’s final scene.

But when cosmic violence does unfold, it more than rattles the neighborhood; it changes the very fabric of the universe, even if these mega-shake-ups lie near the limit of human comprehension.

Most of us don’t know much about pandemonium, and that makes sense, since we’re generally interested in events and circumstances that affect us personally. If you asked people to think of a dozen arbitrary topics, few would involve frenzied life-threatening catastrophes. Their thoughts might first turn to nutrition. Vacation swimming spots. Hollywood gossip. Nature lovers might think of birds or constellations or hiking trails. Even when natural violence makes the front page, people are mostly concerned with the consequences.

A series of wildfires ravages California. The TV news plays video showing flames that are awfully fast in their hypnotic dances, but the fire itself rarely spreads faster than human walking speed. Truly rapid natural motion is something else. Its rarity alone makes it startling. It always grabs our attention, partially because it displaces air and thus produces a sudden accompanying noise, and we mammals are most attentive when multiple senses are simultaneously activated. If the speedy movement involves something small, like a mosquito’s wings beating 440 times a second, the sound is diminutive. The mosquito’s wings produce a whine in the musical pitch of A, which coincidentally is one of the two simultaneous notes that make up a telephone dial tone.¹

If the fast action involves something physically large, like a mile-long bolt of lightning traveling that one mile in a mere 1/6,000 of a second, then the huge mass of displaced superheated air creates a startling 100-to 120-decibel thunderclap if the bolt is nearby. We jump at the extreme noise level but normally do not contemplate its roughly 100-hertz tone bellowing subwooferly at a low bass-clef pitch of G or A.²

The faster the motion and the more massive the object that suddenly changes position, the greater the violence and the more likely the event gains a nomination for inclusion in our narrative. The motion needn’t involve solid things. Much dynamic activity can unfold in the myriad liquid drops in the curvy cubic-kilometer assembly known as a cumulus cloud. A cloud typically weighs a million pounds, and even if its volume were solely a gaseous mass that lacked a liquid component, that much vaporous material abruptly shifting position would produce sufficient violence to attract immediate attention.

Water, which volume for volume is 784 times heavier than air, unleashes great destruction when it rapidly shifts, as was tragically seen in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed a quarter of a million lives. Though we will examine such earthly violence later on, these local ferocities pale in comparison to the events and processes that produce ultrapowerful novas, exploding galaxies, supernovas, and other space-time-warping cataclysms. There is also strange, off-the-radar, newly discovered violence spawned by unlikely mechanisms like extreme magnetism. And we won’t neglect the lesser but still impressive shake-ups in the Earth’s own neighborhood, including the catastrophically explosive birth of our moon.

We’ll unravel the workings of nuclear fusion that culminated in the hydrogen bomb; its surprising mechanisms deserve to be probed in instruction-booklet detail, especially since the bomb’s creation involved nail-biting wrong turns that led to human tragedies that are still largely untold.

We will see what’s behind the ongoing violence that makes four trillion neutrinos zoom through every human eyeball each and every second. And we’ll learn about the ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays from distant cataclysms that are continually bombarding us and discover how they affect our health. We’ll examine our planet’s protective mechanisms and how they nonetheless leave us periodically susceptible to the cosmic sadism that envelops us still.

We will savor the most spectacular of all violent events, the all-time-greatest pyrotechnic displays, by-products of which were the very materials nature used to fashion our brains: the Big Bang itself.

It’s usually a bad entertainment strategy to begin with your highest superlative. What could ever top it? But if I am to offer any sort of timeline, the curtain cannot rise sooner than “at the beginning.” This chronology is also set in stone because if time has any independent reality (which is actually doubtful), it dates to the Big Bang.

The problem, if it can be called that, is that although the Big Bang is popularly visualized as an unimaginably violent explosion, its nature was fundamentally different from everything that followed. An explosion is a sudden outward-rushing paroxysm. A star can explode, and so can a galaxy. In war, all manner of armaments and shells detonate. In all these cases, material is flung outward. The violence is easily ascertained and qualified by the mass and velocity of the outrushing fragments.

Damage is always intimately linked with kinetic energy, which is a fancy way of saying “the power of speed.” Kinetic energy is expressed as mass multiplied by velocity squared. So speed—not the weight of the material being destroyed and not the behavior of the explosive substance—is the supreme damaging factor in an explosion.

But the Big Bang was different. There, nothing was accelerated. Rather, this unimaginable violence solely involved the frenzied expansion of space, of emptiness itself. How that resulted in continued wild motion with consequences felt to this day is a story that has neither a true beginning nor, yet, a decisive denouement.