Feeling a little jittery, I called David Morrison, the senior scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, who answers questions online sent from the public to the Web site Ask an Astrobiologist.When Morrison finally had Maureen reassured that most of the fads about ends of the world are just that, "he mentioned that the Andromeda galaxy is going to crash into the Milky Way in two billion years."
This did not thrill Maureen, but Morrison said,
“We’ll just have twice as many stars.... The end of the world is a really silly concept. It’s been here for four billion years. I can imagine us blowing ourselves up as a civilization, but the planet wouldn’t care.”
How can he be sure?
“I have a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard,” he replied.
O.K. then.
