The mathematical physicist Lord Kelvin died today in 1907. He speculated that the world would come to a heat-death end within a million years as the sun cools - a date extended to perhaps 10 million years by Camille Flammarion in 1894. As nuclear fusion and cosmology have come to be better understood, this date now rests in the billions of years, but the eventual settling of the universe into a dispersed temperature near absolute zero seems to be its likely fate.
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Today in 1959, "On the Beach" was released, a popular film based on Nevil Shute's novel about the slow death of humanity's few survivors after a global nuclear war.
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For this day in 1996, psychic Sheldan Nidle of the Planetary Activation Organization stated that 16 million spaceships would arrive at Earth along with a host of angels. Afterward, Nidle claimed that the seeming nonappearance of these spaceships had only occurred because they'd made a last-minute decision to spare the world by placing it in a hologram.
