Saturday, December 27, 1997

Buying the farm: End of world as we know it

By Dale McFeatters

For a people who engage in seemingly nonstop Save the Planet campaigns, we take a suspicious relish in contemplating the really hideous ways it will come to an end.

This season, thanks to the hundreds of millions of dollars we've spent on the Hubble Space Telescopes, we can see actual pictures of what it will look like the day our solar system buys the celestial farm.

The pictures of dying stars show beautiful, festive clouds of brightly colored gas, soaring in elegant hourglass and pinwheel shapes. Live fast; die young -- galactically speaking, of course; leave a beautiful corpse.

The astronomers and the science writers who cover them soon grow tired of talking about abstract white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, red giants and other remote ways of coming to a fiery end. To give the story a little more impact, they like to apply these findings to Earth.

AP's science writer gleefully noted the pictures show "how the Earth may be burnt to a crisp" and quotes an astronomer who just as happily says, "The Earth will probably get cooked to a cinder and then freeze," rather like dinner on a winter camping trip.

The theory is that the sun will explode into a red giant, whose superheated gases will consume the Earth and then suck what's left of our little planet into a 30-billion degree nuclear furnace. But the pictures will be spectacular.

None of this is supposed to happen, the scientists say, for another 5 billion or 6 billion years. The or bothers me, suggesting an element of uncertainty as if the doom date might just as easily be "5 billion years or Thursday."

If the estimate of the average star's life span being 10 billion years is correct, we're over halfway home.

In another bit of holiday alarmism, another astronomical study measured the distance of the Earth from the moon within one inch. The measurements were made using lasers and mirrors left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts. That's when our space program amounted to something instead of sending Maytag repairmen armed with duct tape to keep that orbiting double-wide known as the Mir from crashing back into the Russian trailer park from whence it came.

Even though the moon is big and hard to miss, it's good that scientists can pinpoint its location, or so you think until you read farther into the story and find that the moon is moving farther away, 2,100 miles in the last 900 million years.

And what does that foretell? As always, the end of the world.

The Earth's rotation slows and finally stops. The sun explodes. We're a cinder. The moon is a cinder. Everything goes into the furnace. Great pictures. The same old story.

There is only one comforting thought. As the Earth's rotation slows, the day-night cycle will become one month. The prospect of five months between weekends is too horrible to contemplate and so the end cannot come soon enough. Don't forget to stock up on film.

Scripps Howard News Service