Lucifer's Hammer
David Niven and Jerry Pournelle

This book, written about ten years ago, is particularly timely right now due to its subject and recent events. The book imagines an encounter between Earth and a newly discovered comet, the Hamner/Brown comet. This is highly coincidental since the imagined discoverers of the comet are two amateur star gazers, highly reminiscent of the Hale/Bopp discovery.

In any case, the book follows the adventures of one of the discoverers and several of his associates following a catastrophic impact of the comet on Earth. The impact results, most notably in world wide mile high tidal waves (tsunami is the currently favored word) that devastate all coastal areas especially and most importantly for this book, the LA basin. The struggle for survival in the resulting chaos and endless rainstorm occupy the first half of the book. The second and more interesting half, for me, revolves around the various reactions of humans and the actions they result in.

In the first instance a stronghold is established towards which all the main characters gravitate and dominated by a US Senator. This enclave effectively resolves the problems of immediate survival for the residents while utter chaos reigns outside the enclave. But, the survivors outside band into a particularly gruesome gang and begin to threaten the stronghold. As an apparent side plot, there is an effort to save a new nuclear plant in the middle of the new sea that has developed in the San Joachin valley in central California.

Once the rigors of immediate survival are over the authors imagine an interesting argument developing. How should man proceed? The main opposition to the stronghold, a motley crew of soldiers, gang members, and religious fanatics insist that civilization should end forthwith and man should return to the life of an animal, and they are willing to use any sort of violence to see their vision fulfilled. Within the stronghold two factions arise, one imagines a return to feudalism as the safest thing to do while the other concludes that saving industrial civilization is worth the price they will have to pay. Since the writers are technologists, it is no surprise that the industrialists win the day. The rationale for this conclusion is interesting. The authors quote Heinlein's statement to the effect that the Earth is too fragile a basket in which to keep all of humanity's eggs.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, morality resolves to a question of species survival. What tends to increase the chances for species survival is moral, what does not, is not. Therefore, the authors argue that industrial civilization will lead to space exploration and emmigration to another world, thus assuring the survival of humanity, even were the worst to arise. Hale/Bopp places an exclamation point after the statement. It is inevitable that eventually some large object will strike the Earth, though, maybe not for a million years or so. But, if it happened in a hundred years, a long enough time from now that, were we to invest sufficiently in space exploration we could expect to have some minor colonies off planet, wouldn't we have to be judged immoral not to have done so?

I read a column in the paper last week summarizing current theories about objective life in the universe. I use the term "objective" to denote the most important uniqueness of humanity. The one thing that apparently distinguishes us from all other species and that allows the development of technology. The most interesting point made in the column was that, even in a galaxy of billions of stars, even if most of them have planets, even if life will begin on any suitable object, if the duration of objective species is only ten thousand years or so, we would expect zero or one such species at a time. Thus the paucity of intelligible radio signals floating around the galaxy. This seems to me a very rational expectation especially considering the problem of overpopulation that threatens us today. If it is accurate, then we are profoundly threatened since civilization here is roughly ten thousand years old. For these reasons, this book should be taken seriously.