Dialogue: Prophets of doom let down again

By KATE BELGRAVE

I'm kicking back with the Auckland Observatory's chief presenter, Andrew Buckingham, enjoying yet another of astronomy's galloping anti-climaxes.

He and I are discussing the fact that the world did not end on Friday, as quite a number of people predicted.

What I'm trying to find out from Mr Buckingham is the exact number of fruitcakes he gets through here - the doomsday prophets, the alien abductees, the pregnant virgins and so on. I want to see whether his numbers tally with mine.

For weeks now, otherwise quite sane people have been telling me, in all seriousness, that all the planets would line up on May 5, and (I trust my jargon is correct) start sucking. After resisting so hard for so long, Earth would finally slap into Pluto. Pow.

This crisis was to manifest itself in your neighbourhood in the form of killer winds, tidal waves, ice ages - events that I suspected I could do nothing to influence. Still, I guess forewarned is forearmed.

(Full marks, too, to doomsday prophets for getting back on that ever-bucking horse after the millennium disappointment. I'd hide for 1000 years if I bowled one that wide.)

It's the number of people who are interested that fascinates me. Mr Buckingham tells me that the observatory took thousands of calls in the weeks leading up to the big non-event. A lot of people were just interested, of course. Still, I can't help wondering why.

Not that the day was completely empty of thrills.

"Someone worked out that if you measured high tide, the tide might be three-tenths of a millimetre higher [than it normally is]." Mr Buckingham thinks about this for a minute. "Or perhaps it was three-hundredths of a millimetre," he says.

(I suspect that this is why I have something of a soft spot for science types - they're so good at minimalism. It's something you rarely see these days. Everybody else is hanging out to ride an asteroid; science types send you 20 press releases when the moss they're growing sprouts one little flower. It's cute.)

Not everyone who rang the observatory was a lunatic, of course. A lot of people rang because "they'd heard about something happening" - they knew some nutter who was stockpiling baked beans and wondered, given the obsessive nature of the stockpiling, if the nutter knew something they did not.

Others wanted to know if it were possible to see the planets as they formed their celestial queue. (Alas, things weren't much chop for these punters, either. Apparently, you couldn't see the planets - or indeed your hand in front of your face - because all the planets were behind the sun.)

Other callers seemed quite happy with their version of reality. Mr Buckingham tells me, for instance, about one lady who rang up, concerned about the circular light she could see prancing in the heavens. It turned out to be a spotlight - it was just too cloudy to see the beam. She liked her version best, though. It seems that she stuck with it a bit longer than she should have.

Bless her. She's not the only one who sees what she wants to see. A lot of people are deeply deluded. We have this tendency to think big, rather than sensibly.

We're inclined to miss the point. We take millennium doomsday merchants seriously (hands up who wrote a Y2K cheque) but write off as cranks people who try to save the environment by travelling to work on push-bikes. (I can hardly point the finger here - I'd never date anyone who didn't drive a car.)

This is the best era for doomsday cranks since Noah's. Even scientists are cashing in. Remember that essay/book-thing written by Bill Joy, the supposedly sane software man? In it, he announced that technological advance would lead to "something like extinction" of human beings within two generations.

Please tell me you don't have a copy of this by your bed.