THE JASPER NEWS — MAY 12, 1921
SAYS THAT EARTH IS SPEEDING TO END
Detroit—The world is traveling on its way to destruction at the rate of 600,000 miles a day, so the Rev. George T. Gullen of the West Grand Boulevard M. E. church believes. That was a sure thing, he declared, and further he said there are at least eight other ways in which the old world may come to its end before the fatal ending of the “death journey.”
First, he declared, the axis of the earth might decide to shift about a few degrees, with the result that the oceans would sweep over the dry lands and destroy all life before an ark could be built. If that fails to occur there might be a failure of internal fires and the crust of the earth would absorb all the water and the air. The death of our planet might, on the other hand, be brought about by the heat of the sun dying out and leaving the earth a mass of ice. There was just a possibility that we might all be asphyxiated by the earth passing through the tail of a comet: or this planet might collide with another world wandering through space.
And the end might be brought about by the slowing down or the speeding up of the rate of the earth's rotation on its own axis. The rotation at present is just sufficient to counteract the centripetal force of the sun and if it were slowed down the earth would fly into the sun, starting at the rate of 1,100 miles an hour and be consumed. If the rate of rotation were accelerated the earth would fly out into space into temperature of 400 degrees below zero and the oceans would be frozen to their utmost depths.
