Part of the Casswiki article series Books
The Cosmic Winter is a book by Victor Clube, published in 1990 in collaboration with astronomer Bill Napier. It runs for 280 pages and consists of seventeen chapters. This book is close to as being an expansion of their first book, The Cosmic Serpent.
In this work, the authors bring forth the role of impact events in creating the cosmic “winters” and the further discussion of the mythological sky gods as evidence of comets in our prehistory era and a look at cometary events towards the present era.
As one read the beginning of this book in a prologue chapter, there will be an experience of a fictional encounter between the Earth and a cometary bombardment and how the United States government would react. Then, the authors pointed out that “a great illusion of cosmic security thus envelopes mankind, one that the ‘establishment’ of Church, State and Academe do nothing to disturb. Persistence in such an illusion will do nothing to alleviate the next Dark Age when it arrives” (p 12-3).[1]
There are three parts of this book, with first part being concerned with the mythologies as the history of comets, such as “sky gods” were being comets in disguises. And, they were seen by ancient human beings in our prehistory periods and they may have misinterpreted these comets as “gods.” Towards the end of this first part, the authors stated that the “swarms of asteroids periodically exist in Earth-crossing orbits and that these are responsible for producing an erratic sequence of cosmic winters, sudden coolings of the globe”[2], which is important to keep in mind.
The Part Two reveals the essential scientific knowledge about the comets and how they can be the cause of “terrestrial” catastrophe as well a look at the periodic meteoroid streams (where Earth passes through late June and Early November annually). The authors further their discussion on Comet Encke, the Tunguska event of 1908, ancient comets as depicted in Chinese records (e.g., symbols), and more on historical comets in our prehistory yet they were being ignored. The authors also mentioned that “our distant ancestors…have been telling us in simple language that celestial catastrophe has struck, probably more than once, but the message has been lost through the ravages of time”.[3]
The final part of this book brings more focus on the scientific evidence of the cosmic events, such as geological, sea-level variations, fossil, ice cores, iridium, Earth’s magnetic field, and the cratering record. And, the final chapter brings home a point of how serious a cosmic impact hazard really is and how likely that our civilization would be “plunged into a New Dark Age.” Will the human race become extinct?
The authors ended this book with one very simple yet most critical line: “There is a need for this book.”