Exoplanets Suitable for Life

Recently astronomers have discovered planets in orbit around most stars close enough to determine whether they have planets. But of all those billions of planetary systems, which have planets capable of supporting life? At present we do not have the technology to look closely at those systems. Of our own solar system, as far as we can tell, earth is the only one capable of supporting life. There are two other planets that might support life. Mars may have supported life in the past, but so far no concrete evidence of this has discovered. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has a liquid ocean. Perhaps life developed there (if the ocean is water).

So what makes earth unique in the solar system. First, it is not too hot nor too cold to sustain life. Most of the planets and moons further from the sun than Mars are too cold. Mercury and Venus are too hot. Although Venus is not so close to the sun that a temperature within a range to support life is ruled out for that reason. Venus is sometimes regarded as earth's sister planet. Venus is only slightly smaller than Earth (95% of Earth's diameter, 80% of Earth's mass). Because of these similarities, it was thought that below its dense clouds Venus might be very Earth like and might even have life. Unfortunately, we now know that Venus may be the least hospitable place for life in the solar system.

The pressure of Venus' atmosphere at the surface is about the same as the pressure at a depth of one km in Earth's oceans. It is composed mostly of carbon dioxide. There are several layers of clouds many kilometers thick composed of sulfuric acid. These clouds completely obscure our view of the surface. This dense atmosphere produces a runaway greenhouse effect that raises Venus' surface temperature hot enough to melt lead. Venus' surface is actually hotter than Mercury's despite being nearly twice as far from the Sun.

Another factor to support life as we know it is the presence of water. Apparently Mars once had liquid water on its surface, but it no longer does. Another problem with Mars is its thin atmosphere. One possible reason that it no longer has water and air is its small mass. Any smaller planet would likely be completely airless like our own moon.

Hence, it can be seen that although three planets are in a zone capable of supporting life as far as distance from our star (the sun), only one can support life. The other two are too dry. One has an atmosphere that is too thick, the other an atmosphere that is too thin. Thus, it can be seen that planets capable of supporting life are relatively rare. The question is how rare. If ten percent of planets in the galaxy are capable of supporting life, there may be nine billion planet capable of supporting life. If this number is one percent there would nine hundred million; one tenth of one percent , ninety million. That's still a lot of planets capable of supporting life.

What's Beyond the Universe

Have you ever thought about infinity? Or read what modern cosmologists have to say about the universe? Back a few centuries, people who thought about such things figured that the universe consisted of the earth which was surround by crystal spheres. Astronomers (actually astrologers) of those days never wrote about what was outside the outermost crystal sphere. Then came along Copernicus, Galileo and Newton and the universe expanded somewhat to the size of the solar system and the fixed stars out there somewhere; nobody knew how far. When astronomers gazed through more powerful telescopes and other sophisticated gear, suddenly the universe expanded to billions of light years in size.

But how far did it go? Did it stretch on forever? In the early part of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein proposed his Theory of Relativity. This and other discoveries changed everything. Cosmologists began to think of the universe as a great expanding ball (or some other shape) that had a definite limit.

Okay, that is the current view of our universe. But if our universe is a great ball (or some other shape) curved in the fourth dimension, what lies outside of it? Recent articles I have read about what modern cosmologists and physicist think about the universe speak of "multiverses." I wonder what they are like.

Here are some thoughts on the matter. Not all of them are mine. According to one viewpoint,. the universe is defined to be everything, including space and time itself. Since the universe includes all space, there can be nothing "outside" the universe.

However, the Big Bang theory changed the view of cosmologists and others who study such things completely. According to the Big Bang theory, the Big Bang was not an explosion in a preexisting three-dimensional space, with matter and light expanding out into empty space from some central point; instead, matter and energy are understood to fill all of space (i.e. "the universe"), and what's expanding is space ("the universe") itself. But, wait a minute, if it's expanding, what is it expanding into?

The Big Bang theory is based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, which explains that gravity of matter/energy causes space-time to curve. The amount of curve depends on the average density of matter/energy throughout the universe, a consequence of this is that the universe as a whole can be curved, with either positive curvature, zero curvature, or negative curvature.

To visualize a closed universe with positive curvature, drop the dimensions by one. Instead of curved three-dimensional space, picture a two-dimensional universe in which two-dimensional space is curved into a sphere, and "expanding space" means that the sphere is blowing up like a balloon while the bits of two dimensional matter on the surface do not change in size. You can see that if you pasted a bunch of bits of paper on a balloon and then blew it up, each bit would see the other bits receding from it. This is what astronomers observe, when they view distant galaxies.

If you made a movie of the balloon blowing up and play the movie backwards, after a while the size of the sphere approaches zero, all the bits of matter throughout the balloon universe get more and more squished together and approach infinite density as the size approaches zero. This is what the big bang is supposed to be. Of course, this analogy forces you to picture the two dimensional surface of the sphere expanding into a third dimension, and our curved three dimensional space is expanding into four dimensional space. The question becomes what else is in the fourth dimensional space? Other balloons (universes)?

Also, if space is curved in the fourth dimension, what happens if you travel in a straight line as far as you could go? Would you return to your starting point? And if the fourth dimension is time, would you return to the point in time when you started your journey?

On the other hand, J. Bruno wrote: "The center of the universe is everywhere, as well as its border but does not exist anywhere." Thus, the universe has a center that exists everywhere and borders that exist everywhere. Think about this. Does this statement violate any physical or philosophical rules or not? If the answer is "not," the universe is and will stay infinite and isotropic.

Not everyone agrees. According to Stephen Hawkins, a black hole transports information to another universe. Another theory hypothesizes that there are many (perhaps an infinite number of) universes outside our own. In fact, one theory is that there is a larger universe of which our universe is only a part, like an atom of something much larger.

There is also the theory of parallel universes in which a new universe is created whenever two or more possible futures occur. That each possibility creates a new universe which is almost identical to the ones parallel to it except in one the change occurred one way, and in the other, it occurred the other way.

Of course, all this brings up the question of what is the universe composed. When we say that space is curved, what is this curved "space" composed of? Nothing? How can nothing be curved? It seems that there are more questions than answers. For more confusing answers and questions, go to any web site on modern cosmology.

Computers That Learn

One of the great themes of science fiction is the computer that becomes as smart or smarter than a human being although not many novels and movies have been made in which this is the central theme. Off hand I can only think of a couple of movies, Colossus the Forbin Project and HAL in 2001, A Space Odyssey. In most science fiction the thinking machines are robots. At present computers can do many marvelous things, but none can compare with the human brain that makes sense of countless diverse, quickly changing stimuli without effort. Doing what we do with ease is often an impossible task for computers.

Nonetheless, researchers in artificial intelligence are hard at work trying to achieve the goal of computers that think as well or better than a human being. For example, Researchers at the Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London have developed a mathematical model which could significantly improve the automatic recognition and processing of spoken language. In the future, such algorithms that imitate brain mechanisms could help machines perceive the world around them. Perception of its environment would go a long way toward achieving true artificial intelligence.

If you've ever had to deal with a voice activated automated telephone system, you probably realize how difficult it is for a computer to understand even simple words. If you speak a little too quickly or slowly, if your pronunciation is not clear, or if there is background noise, the system fails to understand you.

According to Stefen Kiebel of the Leipzig Max Plank Institute, the brain classifies the various signals from the smallest, fast-changing components such as single sound units like a vowel or consonant up to big, slow-changing elements such as the topic. The significance of the information at various duration levels is probably much greater than previously thought for the processing of perceived information. The brain searches for time dependent structures in the environment to determine what happens next. In this way, the brain can, for example, predict the next sound based on the slower-changing information.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers constructed a mathematical model to imitate, in a highly simplified manner, the brain processes that occur during the comprehension of speech. The processes were described by algorithms that process speech at different duration levels. The model succeeded well. In contrast to other artificial speech recognition devices, it could process speeded up speech sequences. In addition it could predict the next speech sound. If a prediction turned out to be wrong, the model detected the error. This indicates that the model represented processes in a way that was similar to the way the brain functions.

This new approach may be the beginning of a truly intelligent computer.

Armageddon in Science Fiction

One of the most reoccurring themes in science fiction is the end of the world, or at least the end of civilization. It is not surprising since there are many ways that this could actually come about. Also, prophets have been predicting catastrophic disasters from the time men learned to speak to each other. Two popular ones lately are global warming and an asteroid strike. So we have a choice of drowning when the ice caps melt or being smashed to atoms by a big rock.

For a while, when a few people caught bird flu in Asia, pandemics were all the rage. In the latter half of the twentieth century, everyone was betting on an all-out atomic war, but that fizzled when the cold war ended. Recently, I read article about a scientist who said we could all die from a burst of gamma ray radiation from a nearby supernova explosion. As the clock struck midnight ushering in the year 2000, all the computers were supposed go mad because they only had the last two digits of the year and could not distinguish between the twentieth and twenty-first century (which to some people did not start until 2001 anyway.)

Anyway, science fiction authors love to write about Armageddon of one sort or other. Here are some of my personal favorites. There are two by John Brunner. The first is Stand on Zanzibar where civilization is brought to an end because of overpopulation. Overpopulation as threat seems to be no longer in vogue. I guess because there are so many ways of dealing with overpopulation. For example, nuke the excess or give everybody a gun and give them leave to hunt and kill everybody they hate.

The second book by Brunner is The Sheep Look Up which is about pollution. We are pretty certain that is the most likely end that we face.

There are many atomic war novels. These were especially popular during the cold war years. The funniest was the movie Doctor Strangelove, where a deranged general starts world war three because of his erectile dysfunction. I also like the novel On the Beach by Nevil Schute, which was also made into a good movie. In this novel, the last people on earth after an atomic war are living in Australia waiting to die from the radioactivity produced by all those hydrogen bombs going off. Probably my all time favorite about a post apocalyptic world is Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller where a monk finds an artifact from our civilization after civilization has gone back to the dark ages.

One of the more interesting ways that the human race comes to an end is a little known book called The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock. In this short novel, bigotry runs wild so that everyone kills everyone else that is different from himself or herself. It's a real chiller. I got goose bumps reading it.

Invasions by aliens is another possibility that could end the human race. My favorite is Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, where the invaders look like elephants.

An old movie that's fun is When Worlds Collide where a group of scientists and a chosen few race to build a spaceship to escape from a collusion between earth and another planet. The one thing I never quite understood was where the planet they were headed for was located

I liked the TV miniseries The Stand by Stephen King as the survivors of a pandemic meet up at the cabin of an old woman and go fight the devil in Las Vegas.

Of course there are many more great science fiction novels and stories about the Apocalypse, but those were some of my personal favorites, because they each have a slightly odd slant to the end of the world.

I have written one novel about Armageddon myself. It is called Morgaine and Armageddon and has a lot of stuff in it based loosely on The Book of Revelations of the Christian Bible. If you are interested, it is in E-book format and can be obtained from most online E-book sellers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Prophet's of Doom

Recently I watched a program on The History channel in which six "experts" got together to predict the downfall of the United States (and civilization in general perhaps)

in the near future. According to these people, the U.S. and possibly civilization as we know it is on the brink of a major disaster from several sources. It was interesting, but I found that for the most part, their reasoning was completely flawed.

Take the coming oil shortage for example. Okay, at the moment, our chief source of energy is from oil, but it is obvious to anyone who keeps up with technology that there are many ways to obtain energy besides oil. To name a few: biofuel, coal, atomic energy, wind power, geothermal power, solar power, natural gas, garbage, and so forth. Also, by a few easy conservation methods, we could extend the supply of oil by many years. Just recently, I read an article about a tall office building that uses no fossil fuel for either heating or air conditioning and is completely self contained by using solar panels for all of its electrical needs. Also, as the price of oil increases, other methods of energy and conservation will become more popular. Just a year ago, when the price of gasoline shot up to four dollars a gallon in the U.S., high mileage hybrid autos began to sell.

The same is true of water. When clear fresh water becomes scarce, there are many ways of cleaning what we have by such as methods as removing salt from sea water, cleaning polluted water, not polluting it in the first place, etc. I'm sure we'll find a way.

As far as the money crisis goes, inflation and deflation run in cycles. Sure, at times such as the great depression, the recent downturn in the economy, the inflationary period in the 1980s and so forth, it seems that we are the brink of disaster, but things turn around. Much is made of the national debt, but this can be fixed if the politicians really desire it, by either cutting costs in big budget items such as the military or raising taxes on those who can afford to pay them. Or by trying some new ideas such as legalizing drugs and taxing them. This would provide a source of new revenues through taxation and reduce spending on policing. The post office could be privatized.

Then there was this guy Hugo De Gras who believes that artificial intelligent robots and computers will become smarter than humans and take over the world, keeping us at pets. I know that computers can do some marvelous things, for example this Watson beating contestants at Jeopardy, but artificial intelligence has a long way to go before it becomes as smart as people in the ability to respond to unfamiliar unprogrammed situations. And even if it did, certainly we would build in safeguards such as Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics.

The one scenario that was really feasible came from Robert Gleason. He said that the greatest threat was from terrorists using atomic bombs. The knowledge for building such a bomb is readily available, the fissionable material can be easily stolen or bought and the security to guard against such a threat is practically non-existent. Of course, blowing up a major city may be devastating, but it certainly would not bring the United States to its knees.

What I found most troubling about the program was an undercurrent of anti-technology, anti-science to it. For one thing, one of their major assumptions was that the earth is a closed system and that once we run out of some natural resource it's just gone. Hogwash, we have an entire solar system to mine. Or if not, we can find, discover or create substitutes.

I had to shake my head at their solution to the problems they brought up. They proposed that we move out of our great cities and live in small self-contained agrarian villages where all our needs are provided by the local community. In other words, we should return to the way people lived in the middle ages. Are you kidding? Who would want to live like that?

Asteroid Collisions

In recent years, astronomers, paleontologists and geologists have given us one more thing to worry about. That a large meteor or comet may strike the earth and destroy humanity or at least a good portion of it. If a collision occurred between Earth and an asteroid a few kilometers in diameter, it would release as much energy as several million nuclear weapons detonating simultaneously. This would be enough to trigger a nuclear winter. Those who survived the blast might starve to death as all plant life died.

Recently we have seen a spate of science fiction movies with this theme, and it has been a staple of SF and doomsayers for a long time. How real is the threat? That is the question I intend to answer here. Note: Much of the information I gleaned from a Wikipedia article entitled "Impact Event." The Wikipedia has a lot more information about possible asteroid collisions with earth and other planets in the solar system.

Throughout recorded history, hundreds of minor impact events have been reported, with some occurrences causing deaths, injuries, property damage or other significant localized consequences. An impact event in an ocean or sea could create a tsunami that would cause destruction both at sea and on land near a seashore.

Small objects frequently collide with the Earth. There is an inverse relationship between the size of the object and the frequency that such objects hit the earth. Asteroids with a 1 km (0.62 mi) diameter strike the Earth every 500,000 years on average. Large collisions, with 5 km (3 mi) objects, happen approximately once every ten million years. The last known impact of an object of 10 km (6 mi) or more in diameter was at the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs.

Asteroids with diameters of 5 to 10 m (16 to 33 ft) enter the Earth's atmosphere approximately once per year, with as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, approximately 15 kilotons of TNT. Usually they explode in the upper atmosphere, and most or all of the solids are vaporized. Objects with diameters over 50 m (164 ft) strike the Earth approximately once every thousand years, producing explosions comparable to the one known to have detonated above Tunguska in 1908. At least one known asteroid with a diameter of over 1 km (0.62 miles) may collide with Earth on March 16, 2880.

Objects with diameters smaller than 10 m (33 ft) are called meteoroids (or meteorites if they strike the ground). An estimated 500 meteorites reach the surface each year, but only 5 or 6 of these are recovered and made known to scientists.

The most significant recorded impact on earth in recent times was the Tunguska event, which occurred in Siberia, Russia, in 1908. This incident involved an explosion that was probably caused by the airburst of an asteroid or comet 5 to 10 km (3.1 to 6.2 mi) above the Earth's surface. It caused an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 km² (830 sq mi) to be knocked over. In my latest Morgaine novel, Morgaine and the Necromancer, this event plays a part in the plot.

Numerous science fiction stories and novels center around an impact event; possibly the best-selling was the novel Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous with Rama opens with a significant asteroid impact in northern Italy in the year 2077 which gives rise to the Spaceguard Project, which later discovers the Rama spacecraft. In 1992 a Congressional study in the U.S. led to NASA being directed to undertake a Spaceguard Survey with the novel being named as the inspiration for the name to search for Earth-impacting asteroids. This in turn inspired Clarke's 1993 novel The Hammer of God. A variation on the traditional impact story was provided by Jack McDevitt's 1999 novel Moonfall, in which a very large comet travelling at interstellar velocities collides with and partially destroys the Moon, fragments of which then collide with the Earth.

Several disaster movies have also been made: When Worlds Collide (1951) dealt with two planets on a collision course with Earth – the smaller planet a "near miss," causing extensive damage and destruction, followed by a direct hit from the larger planet. Meteor (1979) features small asteroid fragments and a large 8 km (5 mi) wide asteroid heading for Earth. Orbiting U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons platforms are turned away from their respective earthbound targets, and toward the incoming threat. In 1998 two films were released in the United States on the subject of attempting to stop impact events: Touchstone Pictures' Armageddon, about an asteroid; and Paramount/DreamWorks' Deep Impact, about a comet.

The prophesies in the Book of Revelation in the Christian bible seem to indicate that part of the devastation of the Apocalypse will be caused by objects falling from the sky. I used this scenario in the fifth book of my Morgaine series of novels, Morgaine and Armageddon.

Whether a catastrophic asteroid collision with earth will occur within our lifetime is problematical. What is certain is that sooner or later, one will strike. Will we be ready to either divert it or deal with the consequences?

Armageddon

Is it just me, but doesn't it seem that horrendous disasters have been more frequent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? The twentieth century saw a world wide flu epidemic, two world wars, the holocaust, mad dictators who murdered millions, the invention of the atom and hydrogen bombs, the brink of a full scale nuclear war, famines in Africa, pollution, global warming and much more, not to mention natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes. The first six years of the twenty-first century are not starting out much better.

Could it be that the End of Days is at hand? Prophets have been predicting it for a long time. How can we know when it near? Here is my interpretation of Christian Bible prophetic sources related to current events.

The Bible contains many prophecies about the future. The New Testament in particular talks extensively about the return of Jesus Christ to this earth. This is usually called his "second coming." The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 24, is devoted to this topic, as is much of the book of Revelation, and Thessalonians 4:16-18.

One day the disciples came to Jesus and were given a private briefing regarding the signs before his return and of the end of the age, Jesus replied: "Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am the Christ, ' and will deceive many. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains. Matthew 24:3-8

Did this predict the two world wars, the famines in Africa and the many disastrous earthquakes in the past hundred years?

There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea.

Is this about the recent spate of hurricanes?

Then they will deliver you to tribulation, and will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations on account of my name. At that time many will fall away and will deliver up one another and hate one another. Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many.

I don't know about the first part, but doesn't it seem that there are a lot false prophets around. Preachers who pretend to be Christian but preach hate. Recently a famous televangelist told his listeners to pray for someone's death and later stated that a certain dictator should be assassinated. I haven't heard of any exceptions or clauses to the commandment "Thou shalt not kill."

Mark 13:14-28: But when you see the abomination of desolation standing where it should not be then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. And let him who is on the housetop not go down, or enter in, to get anything out of his house; and let him who is in the field not turn back to get his cloak. But woe to those who are with child and to those who nurse babes in those days! But pray that it may not happen in the winter. For those days will be a time of tribulation such as has not occurred since the beginning of creation which God created, until now, and never shall. And unless the Lord had shortened those days, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect whom He chose, He shortened the days. And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here [is] Christ; or, lo, [he is] there; believe [him] not: For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if [it were] possible, even the elect. But take ye heed: behold, I have foretold you all things. But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather togetherhis elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.

Could the references to "the stars of heaven shall fall" be a reference to the collision by a giant meteor or comet that astronomers say is inevitable. In 2004, a small near-Earth asteroid (NEA), made the closest approach to Earth ever recorded. The object, designated 2004 FH, was roughly 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter and passed just 43,000 km (26,500 miles, or about 3.4 Earth diameters) above the Earth's surface on March 18th at 5:08 PM EST. On average, objects about the size of 2004 FH pass within this distance roughly once every two years. Most of these small objects pass by undetected. This particular close approach is unusual only in the sense that scientists knew about it.

A recently rediscovered 400-meter Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) is predicted to pass near the Earth on 13 April 2029. The flyby distance is uncertain and an Earth impact cannot be ruled out. The odds of impact, presently around 1 in 300, are unusual enough to merit special monitoring by astronomers, but should not be of public concern. In all likelihood, the possibility of impact will be eliminated as astronomers track the asteroid.

If an asteroid between 30 - 400 meters actually strikes earth, how much damage would cause? It is estimated that the object that leveled forests in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 was of this scale. Imagine if it hit a populated area.

If an asteroid of size 200 meters hit the ocean (which covers 70% of the Earth), the tsunami would inflict catastrophic destruction of coastal cities and substantial worldwide human casualties along coastlines. An asteroid of one kilometer size striking the Earth would cause a dust cloud which would block out sunlight for at least a year and lead to a deep worldwide winter, exhausting food supplies. The latter is what caused the dinosaur extinction, as well as other major extinctions in geologic time scales. Two hundred meter asteroid hits, far more common than the one kilometer or more strikes, do not show up much in geologic histories since over time their craters are obliterated by erosion.

On March 23, 1989, an asteroid with a kinetic energy of over 1000 one-megaton hydrogen bombs (i.e., about 50,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) was passed very close to Earth. It was discovered by equipment that uses new technology. Named 1989FC, this asteroid was detected after its point of closest approach. Astronomers discovered it had passed as close as it did only after they calculated its orbital path backwards in time. This event brought near Earth asteroids into the political arena.

Luke 21:20-24: But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is at hand. Then let those in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are in the midst of the city depart, and let not those who are in the country enter the city; because these are the days of vengeance, in order that all things which are written may be fulfilled. Woe to those who nurse babes in those days; for there will be great distress upon the land, and wrath to this people, and they will fall by the edge of the sword, and will be led captive into all the nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.

Just think about what is happening in the Mideast these days, and the prophesy seems to refer to current and possible future events in that region. Also note the following prophesy:

Ezekiel 38: 5-7: Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet: Gomer, and all his bands; the house of Togarmah of the north quarters, and all his bands: [and] many people with thee. Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them.

Ezekiel 39: 1-6: Therefore, thou son of man, prophesy against Gog, and say, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I [am] against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: And I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee, and will cause thee to come up from the north parts, and will bring thee upon the mountains of Israel: And I will smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows to fall out of thy right hand. Thou shalt fall upon the mountains of Israel, thou, and all thy bands, and the people that [is] with thee: I will give thee unto the ravenous birds of every sort, and [to] the beasts of the field to be devoured. Thou shalt fall upon the open field: for I have spoken [it], saith the Lord God. And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I [am] the Lord.

Although there is some disagreement among scholars exactly which modern nations this refers to, all the nations in the area where these ancient nations existed in Ezekial's time have mostly Muslim populations today, the extremists of which hate Israel and wish it destroyed.

Joel 3:14-15: The sun and the moon grow dark, and the stars lose their brightness

Matthew 24:29 The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky

Mark 13:24 But in those days, after that tribulation, The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven

These verses seem to refer to nuclear winter, a condition caused by great clouds of dust to form that block out the sun for years, which in turn would cause plant life to fail. This condition could come about from either a full-scale nuclear war or a collision by a large asteroid.

Despite all of the above, the prophesies may not be referring to our modern era at all or may be referring to some future period. After all, Jesus told his disciples, "The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of."

The sixth, seventh and eighth E-books in my Morgaine series are about a fictional Armageddon. They are Morgaine and Armageddon, Morgaine and Moonwood and Morgaine and Nicholas.