[quote]chillain wrote:
[excerpt from The Last Three Minutes, by Paul Davies]
The date: August 21, 2126
The place: Earth
Across the planet a despairing population attempts to hide. For billions there is nowhere to go. Some people flee deep underground, desperately seeking out caves and disused mine shafts, or take to the sea in submarines. Others go on the rampage, murderous and uncaring. Most just sit, sullen and bemused, waiting for the end.
High in the sky, a huge shaft of light is etched into the fabric of the heavens. What began as a slender pencil of softly radiating nebulosity has swollen day by day to form a maelstrom of gas boiling into the vacuum of space. At the apex of a vapor trail lies a dark, misshapen, menacing lump. The diminutive head of the comet belies its enormous destructive power. It is closing on planet Earth at a staggering 40,000 miles per hour, 10 miles every second, a trillion tons of ice and rock, destined to strike at seventy times the speed of sound.
Mankind can only watch and wait. The scientists, who have long since abandoned their telescopes in the face of the inevitable, quietly shut down their computers. The endless simulations of disaster are still too uncertain, and their conclusions are too alarming to release to the public anyway. Some scientists have prepared elaborate survival strategies, using their technical knowledge to gain advantage over their fellow citizens. Others plan to observe the cataclysm as carefully as possible, maintaining their role as true scientists to the very end, transmitting data to time capsules buried deep in the Earth. For posterity…
The moment of impact approaches. All over the world, millions of people nervously check their watches. The last three minutes.
Directly above ground zero, the sky splits open. A thousand cubic miles of air are blasted aside. A finger of searing flame wider than a city arcs groundward and fifteen seconds later lances the Earth. The planet shudders with the force of ten thousand earthquakes. A shock wave of displaced air sweeps over the surface of the globe, flattening all structures, pulverizing everything in its path. The flat terrain around the impact site rises in a ring of liquid mountains several miles high, exposing the bowels of the Earth in a crater a hundred miles across. The wall of molten rock ripples outward, tossing the landscape about like a blanket flicked in slow motion.
Within the crater itself, trillions of tons of rock are vaporized. Much more is splashed aloft, some of it flung out into space. Still more is pitched across half a continent to rain down hundreds or even thousands of miles away, wreaking massive destruction on all beneath. Some of the molten ejecta falls into the ocean, raising huge tsunamis that add to the spreading turmoil. A vast column of dusty debris fans out into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun across the whole planet. Now the sunlight is replaced by the sinister, flickering glare of a billion meteors, roasting the ground below with their searing heat, as displaced material plunges back from space into the atmosphere…
[/quote]
More please.
