Mankind's Future: An Astronomical View Comets,Ice Ages and Catastrophes

Abstract

The 1758 return of Halley's comet confirmed the standing of Newton's law of gravity and initiated the decline of a catastrophist view of Earth history. There is no good reason why one should have implied the other, but three returns later, the implication appears still to be quite entrenched. This is evidenced in part by reactions over the past three decades to Velikovskian claims. Recent discoveries, however, have thrown new light on old catastrophist conjectures. It now appears that the Galaxy may well control terrestrial evolution, and that it does so catastrophically through the agency of successive giant comets. The most recent of these appears to have left a dense swathe of debris in Earth-crossing orbits; on the time scale of human civilisation, this material constitutes an appreciable and hitherto unrecognised hazard. Such findings now seem likely to affect materially our understanding of recorded history and our quest for survival on this planet.