by Joe Shea January 7, 2011 THE HUMAN DIE-OFF BRADENTON, Fla. --
Back in late 1979, when I was writing a story called "Notes On
the End of the World" for the L.A. Weekly, then in its first
year of publication, I interviewed a UCLA professor of
astrophysics, who made a statement to me I have never forgotten:
"Nothing in nature," he said, "ever moves in a straight line."
We were talking about the findings a few months earlier by a
Goddard Space Center satellite that found that Earth's magnetic
field had declined from full strength to just 20 percent of
strength at that time. I had asked him if the decline was going
to be consistent, and his reply startled me. Did that mean that
at some point the field begins dropping dramatically, I
wondered? The report from Goddard suggested it could decline to
zero at the rate it was falling - the straight line - in about
1,000 years. But if the rate of decline changed, as the
astrophysicist was carefully hinting, it could come much sooner.
I am proud of the article, which th