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Wall Street Journal - ‘Earth-Shattering’ Review: Cosmic Calamities

Great cataclysms can bestow great benefits. A Mars-size planet once collided with Earth, creating the necessary conditions for life here.

By Howard Schneider
Feb. 19, 2019

Bob Berman is undeniably tickled by celestial and earthly cataclysms. “I’ll admit it,” he writes, “I’m one of those people who find this stuff fascinating. And I’m determined to create a factual narrative that vividly illustrates these cataclysms, past, present, and future.” And so he has. “Earth-Shattering: Violent Supernovas, Galactic Explosions, Biological Mayhem, Nuclear Meltdowns, and Other Hazards to Life in Our Universe” is blithely engaging, a glittery planetarium that is, for the most part, a stage for astonishing and unnerving spectacles.

As Mr. Berman explains, a cataclysm is “typically an event of surprise and upheaval” that “usually descends on its victims rapidly, although a relatively slow-spreading global epidemic would also qualify.” Human bloodbaths, according to him, require 30 million deaths to earn his cataclysm imprimatur—though he isn’t inflexible about this.

“Earth-Shattering” begins 13.8 billion years ago at the ultimate cataclysm, the Big Bang, “the most spectacular of all violent events.” Unlike explosions—discharges of kinetic energy—the Big Bang “involved the frenzied expansion of space, of emptiness itself.” That expansion is still happening—or, as the author says, “still banging.”

Mr. Berman deftly explains the current scientific consensus about the Big Bang’s cause, history and structure. And he is forthright about what still puzzles most scientists about it, such as “why an entire universe as small as a mustard seed abruptly materialized out of nothingness.” The author also introduces us to one of the book’s motifs: that mind-boggling calamities can end up bestowing great benefits. “The catastrophic destruction of stars, planets, and galactic neighborhoods,” Mr. Berman writes, “like most other cataclysms, creates more good than harm.”

Mr. Berman demonstrates this point with many of the subjects he explores. He tells us of a Mars-size planet called Theia that crashed into ours just before the first living organisms appeared. Theia was completely destroyed; Earth almost was, its crust and mantle wiped out. Fragments of Theia and Earth were hurled into space, eventually merging to become our moon, which “stabilizes Earth’s axial tilt,” enabling seasons and shielding our planet from being mercilessly fried by the sun. This means that the Theia cataclysm ultimately played an important role in permitting life to thrive on Earth. “A very happy ending,” Mr. Berman concludes.

Another example occurred 66 million years ago when our planet was “clobbered by a giant meteor” at least 9 miles wide. The impact, we are told, wiped out “75 percent of the world’s plants and animals”—including all the dinosaurs—and “unleashed the same energy as ten billion Hiroshima bombs.” Yet this devastation would permit the appearance of “a new biological niche that was promptly filled by small warm-blooded creatures” that eventually evolved into Homo sapiens.

Mr. Berman is an astronomer, the former “Night Watchman” columnist for Discover magazine and currently a columnist for Astronomy magazine. He is also the author or co-author of several books on astronomy. I greatly admire his ability to lucidly explain astrophysics to the nonscientist. (His use of the inscrutable, excruciating “grok”—twice—is, however, a bit much.)

The brio that he brings to cosmic havoc makes much of “Earth-Shattering” a delicious guilty pleasure. But for earthly cataclysms unrelated to outer space, not so much. He scrutinizes many of them—the bubonic plague, the Spanish flu, World War II, nuclear attacks, nuclear-power-plant accidents—dutifully but without the same élan. This is understandable. Earthly cataclysms, particularly the episodes of human-initiated mass slaughter, aren’t beguilingly breathtaking, and Mr. Berman knows it. Inevitably, his accounts of egregious Earth-centric afflictions, while never pedantic, are just a little stolid.

A fierce gloom-inducing jolt comes at the end of the book when the author discusses our solar system’s ultimate cataclysm, the decline of our sun and planet. It is an apocalypse without religious trappings, one that is “both absolutely certain and absolutely total.” It will arrive because our dependable sun has been “growing 10 percent more luminous every billion years”: Global temperatures will stabilize “at around 710 degrees” a billion years from now, resulting in the elimination of the Earth’s water and engendering “the obliteration of every form of life on the planet.” Another five billion years after that, our sun, having undergone numerous metamorphoses under the weight of its own gravity and by the discharge of unimaginable quantities of energy, will be reduced to the size of Earth, its nuclear reactions snuffed out. Its greater density, however, will cause Earth to continue in its orbit: The two bodies will “perform their eternal minuet with each other. . . . Their dual blackness [camouflaging] them against the inkiness of space, so any future alien astronomers would be hard-pressed to detect them at all.” And with that, “no further cataclysm can ever befall this inky pair of globes because neither has a future.”

One hopes that earthlings in that future era can somehow escape their demise. Alas, Mr. Berman isn’t sanguine.

Mr. Schneider reviews books for newspapers and magazines.

Appeared in the February 20, 2019, print edition as 'Cosmic Calamities.'