THE PREDICTED FATE OF THE EARTH

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · June 3, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 23

THE PREDICTED FATE OF THE EARTH.

The apostle Peter, in his second epistle, announced the approach of the time when “the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth, also, and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” What has modern science to say to the possibility of a catastrophe such as that shadowed forth in a comparatively unscientific age, eighteen centuries ago? Mr. R. A. Proctor, writing in his latest volume, “The Flowers of the Sky,” remarks: “It is no longer a mere fancy that each star is a sun; science has made this an assured fact, which no astronomer thinks of doubting. We know that in certain general respects each star resembles our sun. Each is glowing like our sun with an intense heat. We know that in each star processes resembling in violence those taking place in our own sun must be continually in progress, and that such processes must be accompanied by a noise and tumult, compared with which all the forms of uproar known upon our earth are as absolute silence. The crash of the thunder-bolt, the bellowing of the volcano, the awful groaning of the earthquake, the roar of the hurricane, the reverberating peals of loudest thunder, any of these, and all combined, are as nothing compared with the tumult raging over every square mile, every square yard, of the surface of each one among the stars.”

He proceeds to describe, with considerable circumstantiality, two appearances witnessed in the heavens within the last few years—in 1866, when the tenth magnitude star (that is, four magnitudes below the lowest limit of the naked-eye vision) in the constellation of the Northern Crown, suddenly shone as a second magnitude star, afterward rapidly diminishing in luster, and in 1876, when a new star became visible in constellation Cygnus, subsequently fading again so as to be only perceptible by means of a telescope.

After noting the conclusions deduced from the application of the most approved instruments to these observations, Mr. Proctor remarks: “A change in our own sun, such as affected the star in Cygnus, or that other star in the Northern Crown, would unquestionably destroy every living creature on the face of this earth; nor could any even escape which may exist on the other planets of the solar system. The star in the Northern Crown shone out with more than eight hundred times its former luster; the star in Cygnus, with from five hundred to many thousand times its former luster, according as we take the highest possible estimate of its brightness before the catastrophe, or consider that it may have been very much brighter. Now if our sun were to increase tenfold in brightness, all the higher forms of animal life, and nearly all vegetable life, would inevitably be destroyed on this earth. A few stubborn animalcules might survive, and possibly, a few of the lowest forms of vegetation, but naught else. If the sun increased a hundred-fold in luster, this heat would doubtless sterilize the whole earth. The same would happen in other planets.”—Sunday Magazine.