Such an accident, a collision actual or virtual with another sun, would probably occur with some dark star; of which we sketched the ultimate results in our first chapter. The immediate ones would be of a most disastrous kind. For prefatory to the new birth would be the dissolution to make such resurrection possible. Destruction might come direct, or indirectly through the Sun. For though the Sun would be the tramp’s objective point, we might inadvertently find ourselves in the way. The choice would be purely academic; between being powdered, or deorbited and burnt up. So remote is this contingency that it need cause us no immediate alarm, as I carefully pointed out. But so strong is the instinct of self-preservation and so pleasurable the sensation of spreading appalling news, that the press of America, and incidentally Europe, took fire, with the result, so I have been written, that by the time the pictured catastrophe reached the Pacific “it had assumed the dimensions of a first magnitude fact.” This is the first way in which our world may come by its death. It is possible, but unlikely. For our Earth, long before that, is morally certain to perish otherwise. The second mode is one, incident to the very constitution of our solar system. It follows as a direct outcome of that system’s mechanical evolution, and may be properly designated, therefore, as due to natural causes. It might be diagnosed as death by paralysis. For such it resembles in human beings, palsy of individual movement afflicting a planet instead of a man.