Even this modest demand, set out in 1993 by an eminent astronomer, had not been met by 1998—when there was still no dedicated space telescope looking for near-Earth objects. Yet the utility of such a satellite for detecting potentially dangerous comets or asteroids that terrestrial observers would be unable to see—perhaps until it was far too late to mount any effective response—has been obvious since the launch of the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) on 27 January 1983. A cooperative venture involving public funds from the United States, the Netherlands, and the U.K., its primary objective was to carry out a deep-space survey that ultimately produced a catalogue of a quarter of a million infra-red sources “including stars, galaxies, dense interstellar dust clouds, and some unidentified objects.”7 But during its ten months in orbit (the mission ended on 23 November 1983 when the satellite’s supply of coolant ran out), IRAS also spent a little time looking at near-Earth space. There it discovered five new comets undetected by terrestrial astronomers (comets are very hard to see when they approach Earth from the direction of the Sun). One of these, IRAS-Araki-Alcock, was observed by the satellite in May 1983. The reader will recall that it passed within 5 million kilometers of Earth—the closest-known approach by any comet since the visitation of comet Lexell in the eighteenth century.8
What else might IRAS have seen swarming around Earth if it had turned its camera on the comet threat full-time? Or if it had been designed and equipped to observe for longer than ten months?
As rational people who have looked at the evidence with open minds, we genuinely cannot understand why NASA, the organization that is best placed and best funded to do something about the impact threat, has so far done so laughably little. It reminds us of the way that the same organization has responded to the extraordinary challenge of the “monuments” of Mars. In both cases there is a mass of intriguing evidence—whatever it may ultimately prove to mean. And in both cases NASA has steadfastly minimized it.
Is there some sort of conspiracy going on to keep the truth from us about the terminal Mars cataclysm and how it concerns Earth?
On balance we prefer to think not.
What we see is a mind-set, here, not a conspiracy.
And yet …
To be perfectly honest, we will always have a lingering suspicion that there could be something dark and dreadful going on behind the scenes, something much bigger, and much more awful, than a mere conspiracy. The universe is mysterious. Reality itself is mysterious. No human has any true idea whether life has any transcendant purpose or not, whether there is life after death, whether there are such entities as absolute good and absolute evil.
We therefore see no reason to reject out of hand the teaching of the ancients on these matters—which is that man is the fulcrum of a great cosmic conflict. Opposing forces of darkness and light, nihilism and celebration, and hate and love struggle to win victory over man’s soul, because such a victory will decide the fate of this created universe and define the character of all universes yet to be formed. The light gains the upper hand when reason and mind are cultivated among humans, allowing them to turn their attention away from purely material concerns and cultivate the spirit. The darkness responds by interfering in the world to destroy mind and reason and thus frustrate humanity’s spiritual promise and ultimate role in a wider redemption. Again and again, the ancients said, when former races of men had risen to a high level they were cruelly punished and forced to return to a low state.
Thus the Gnostic texts, written down in Egypt in the early centuries of the first millennium after Christ, tell us that the global cataclysm remembered as the Flood of Noah was not inflicted by “God” to punish evil—as the Bible claims—but was worked by the forces of darkness to punish antediluvian humanity for having aspired to a high state of scientific and spiritual development and “to take the light” that was growing among men.9 This the darkness in very large part succeeded in doing. Although there were survivors, most were thrown
into great distraction and into a life of toil, so that mankind might be occupied by worldly affairs, and might not have the opportunity of being devoted to the holy spirit.10
Platos tale of lost Atlantis likewise laments that whenever civilization reaches a high level, opening the way for study and contemplation and matters of the spirit, “the periodic scourge of the deluge descends, and spares none but the unlettered and uncultured” so that human beings forget the past, and all that they have learned, and must “begin again like children.”11
Plato’s narrative rather curiously links the deluge to a “thunderbolt” and to “a variation in the course of heavenly bodies and a consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on Earth.”12
So with global floods, followed by fires and a remembered connection to thunderbolts and the heavens, what we have here sounds like the effects of a multiple-impact bombardment with white-hot bolides falling from the sky and bursting in the air, and others plowing into distant oceans and creating vast tsunamis capable of tearing across continents—sparing, as Plato puts it, only “the herdsmen and shepherds in the mountains.”13
After looking at the cratered and devastated hulk of Mars, there can be no doubt in anybody’s mind that this planet was destroyed by a scourge from heaven. All its potential, whatever it might have become, whatever life or civilization or miracles it might have been home to, stopped right there, right then, and it was all over.
The universe is infinitely mysterious, infinitely various. We therefore do not find it impossible to imagine how some monstrous cosmic intelligence that feeds on negativity and darkness might be nourished and fattened by such an unspeakable tragedy. Indeed it is a supernatural force of exactly this kind that is envisaged in the Gnostic texts as unleashing the flood upon mankind in order to deprive us of our “light.”
How much deeper the universal darkness would become if that little light could be snuffed out forever.
Yet if the Gnostics were right the darkness cannot triumph on its own. It needs and seeks our help, our willingness—our complicity—to achieve the destruction of the light.
ORBITING IN THE TORUS
Prolonged studies of the Taurid meteor stream by dedicated astronomers working on their own time at many different observatories—and borrowing time on telescopes dedicated to other purposes—have begun to produce a picture of a threat that could indeed bring down the darkness. Cloaked in billions of tons of swirling dust, and surrounded by dozens of kilometer-size asteroids, it appears that a huge, inert, almost invisible comet may lie at the core of the stream—a larger fragment from the explosion that spawned Encke more than 5,000 years ago.14
In the last chapter we compared the Taurid stream to a pipe or a tube of rushing debris laid across the path of Earth. But since the stream in fact extends all the way around comet Encke’s elliptical orbit (with all of its contents in continuous rapid motion along that orbit) its true form is that of a tube formed into an ellipse. The shape, in other words, is a three-dimensional ring like a doughnut or a quoit, but with a cross-section of 30 million kilometers. The correct term for such a shape is a torus.15
What else is orbiting in the torus along with “shooting stars” and the 5-kilometer nucleus of periodic comet Encke?
Thirteen Earth-crossing Apollo asteroids, all more than one kilometer in diameter, have been firmly identified.16 Based on calculations widely accepted among astronomers concerning the ratio of discovered to undiscovered asteroids sharing the same orbit, Clube and Napier conclude from this data that there must be a total of
between one and two hundred asteroids of more than a kilometer diameter orbiting within the Taurid meteor stream. It seems clear that we are looking at the debris from the breakup of an extremely large object. The disintegration, or sequence of disintegrations, must have taken place within the past twenty or thirty thousand years, as otherwise the asteroids would have spread around the inner planetary system and be no longer recognizable as a stream.17
In addition to c
omet Encke, there are at least two other comets in the stream—Rudnicki, also thought to be about 5 kilometers in diameter, and the mysterious Apollo object named Oljato, referred to in chapter 21, which has a diameter of about 1.5 kilometers.18 Initially believed to be an asteroid, this extremely dark Earth-crossing projectile has recently begun to show signs, visible in the telescope, of volatility and outgassing, and most astronomers now regard it as an inert comet that is in the process of waking up.19 Comet Encke itself is known to have been inert for a long period, until it suddenly flared into life and was seen by astronomers in 1786.20 It is now understood to alternate regularly, in extended cycles, between its inert and volatile states.
Clube and Napier have backtracked the orbits of Encke and Oljato and found that they were nearly identical until about 10,000 years ago21—roughly the epoch of the second great Ice Age impact. Since we know that Encke was itself the product of a fragmentation event over 5,000 years ago22—at which time it separated from a larger and as yet unidentified parent object—the likely conclusion is that Oljato was also a fragment of that original parent object, which had separated as a result of an earlier disintegration:
It is possible there was a major disintegration of the prime body then, with much debris created of which Comet Encke and Oljato are the largest known bodies, followed by similar disintegrations of the other comets and asteroids of the stream.23
There is what the astronomers call a great deal of “fine structure” within the Taurid stream as a whole—that is, distinct groups of objects can be identified orbiting within the 30-million-kilometer wide tube of the torus. Backtracking these orbits, Clube and Napier note that the meteor group called the northern Taurids seems to have broken away from comet Encke, or perhaps a Taurid asteroid, about a thousand years ago. They conclude that the whole complex, meaning the assorted contents of the entire torus,
seems to be undergoing avalanching self-destruction as the debris accumulate and collide…. This unique complex of debris is undoubtedly the greatest collision hazard facing Earth at the present time. It is likely that hundreds of thousands of bodies, each capable of yielding a multimegaton explosion on Earth, are orbiting within the stream, [author’s emphasis]24
MULTIPLE STREAMS
It is well understood by astronomers that the largest and densest bodies within any stream will concentrate toward its center,25 and it has also been established that the Taurid stream does have a dense core, along the edge of which orbits comet Encke26—towing in its wake a thick disjointed “trail” (as distinct from tail) of debris first observed in 1983 by the invaluable IRAS satellite.27 It is also obvious that the farther one travels from the core the more diffuse, small, and harmless the orbiting particles are likely to be.
In the case of the Taurids this picture is complicated by the fact that two other massive streams of material, again arrayed in the form of gigantic elliptical tubes, are flung out in orbits parallel to the central torus, one stream closer to the Sun at perihelion and one farther away. These are jointly called the Stohl stream (after their Czechoslovakian discoverer) and are believed to have been created by further spectacular disintegration, probably at around 2700 B.C., of a large fragment of the parent giant comet.28 Clube and Napier calculate the mass of meteorites within the Stohl stream as “10 or 20 million million times a million grams” and estimate that “the mass of co-orbiting asteroids is likely to be the same.” Adding in gas and dust that have been lost with the passage of time, they conclude that the mass of material is roughly equivalent to that of a body of 100 kilometers in diameter.29
Further complicating the picture is a completely separate though narrower torus that has the same dynamical characteristics as the orbits of the Taurid and Stohl streams, and which must also once have been part of the same very large progenitor that spawned Encke. What has happened, however, as a result of some powerful event at an unknown date thousands of years in the past, is that the plane of its orbit has been rotated through approximately 90 degrees to the main Taurid and Stohl streams.30 This is the so-called Hephaistos group and includes the Apollo asteroid Hephaistos after which it is named—as the reader will recall, Hephaistos has a diameter of 10 kilometers,31 as big as the K/T impactor that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Five other kilometer-plus asteroids have also been observed traveling with Hephaistos as well as the usual mountains of dust and loosely graded debris.32
The implication is that future discoveries are likely to yield at least another fifty asteroids of kilometer size spread out along the Hephaistos orbit.33
THE UNDETECTED COMPANION
So the overall picture of the Taurid hazard can now be seen to include four separate but intimately related streams of material—the two Stohl streams, the Hephaistos group, and the main Taurid stream with comet Encke as the most visible object. All of these streams derive from the fragmentation of the same original giant comet, and all are on “inter-nested” near-Earth orbits so disposed that our planet passes from one to another during the year—and indeed spends a total of more than four months of each year actually immersed in them.34
Each crossing must be hazardous: we already know that there are very large and menacing objects rushing along in these streams, and it is obvious that many more remain to be detected. It is the Taurid stream itself, however, that Clube and Napier ultimately highlight as the deadliest collision hazard faced by Earth.
This is because their research, now supported by a growing number of astronomers and mathematicians, has highlighted the most terrible danger of all—in the form of an undetected companion to comet Encke that is believed to be orbiting in the very heart of the stream.35 The suspicion that such an object could exist goes back as far as 1940, when Fred Whipple showed that several groups of meteor orbits could not be explained in any other way other than as an ejection of debris from an exceptionally large object in an inclined orbit close to that of comet Encke.36
Further evidence accumulated since Whipple’s time has led the researchers to conclude that such an object does indeed exist. They believe that like Encke and Oljato, the undetected companion is a comet that sometimes—for very long periods—is able to shut itself down.
This happens when pitch-like tars that seethe up continuously from its interior during episodes of outgassing become so copious that they coat the entire outer surface of the nucleus in a thick, hard shell and seal it off completely—perhaps for millennia.37 On the outside all falls silent after the incandescent coma and tail have faded away and the seemingly inert object tears silently through space at a speed of tens of kilometers per second. But at the center the nucleus activity continues, gradually building up pressure. Like an overheated boiler with no release valve the comet eventually explodes from within, breaking into fragments that can become individual comets or crash into planets.
We have seen in chapter 22 that the nucleus of Halley’s comet is so black that it reflects only 4 percent of incidental sunlight.38 It is suspected that in its inert state the nucleus of Encke’s undetected companion may be even blacker—perhaps among the blackest objects in the solar system. Since it would also be surrounded by a dense cloud of meteoritic dust it is legitimate to think of it as a sort of cosmic Stealth missile.
It is difficult to estimate the exact size of this frightful Earth-crossing companion or what its future orbital parameters might be. Nor can we be certain how many other large fragments could be swirling along with it, also cloaked in meteoritic dust. Despite these uncertainties, some attempts have been made, and in 1997 the Italian mathematician Emilio Spedicato reported certain grave conclusions.
The object, he calculated, might be 30 kilometers in diameter.39
Moreover:
Tentative orbital parameters which could lead to its observation are estimated. It is predicted that in the near future (around the year 2030) Earth will cross again that part of the torus which contains the fragments.40
SHIFTING ORBITS
We should hope, devoutly, tha
t Spedicato is not correct about the date—because a collision with an object 30 kilometers in diameter will certainly end all human life, and may indeed unleash sufficient impact energy to sterilize the planet of all life. Some of the astronomers who have built up the evidence we have on comets feel reassured that the fateful intersection will probably not occur for another thousand years.41 Victor Clube is one of them. Others, notably Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, have indicated that according to their calculations another episode of bombardment is on the way and can be expected to hit during the coming century.42
The problem is that nobody can really be sure. Earth’s orbit is constantly, though minutely, shifting in shape, becoming now more or less eccentric (elliptical), now more or less circular. At the same time its perihelion and its aphelion gradually “precess” around the orbit—that is, move backward in relation to the direction of principal rotation. Meanwhile the same celestial mechanics are at work on the torus. The effect is that the points of intersection of the two orbits vary considerably from epoch to epoch, and not only that but also the area of the torus through which Earth passes.43 A transit through the edge of the stream is likely to be tranquil, with consequences limited to nothing more than shooting stars. On the other hand, a transit through or close to the core could result in an almost unimaginable disaster—especially if there should be a collision between Earth and Encke’s dark companion.44
Where are we now?
CLUES OF JUNE
The Mars Mystery Page 30