mch

THE CONSTANT OF NINEVEH 39
tidal waves and earthquakes on our planet. Some even predict
that California will break off along fie San Andreas fault and
fall into the Pacific.
For me, a resident of San Diego, such thought is not very reassuring,
but neither does it upset me much, since I have decided
to retire to Tahiti anyway. However, for sheer fun, I have made
some calculations to see how much influence the combined gravitational
forces of the various planets could exert on our earth.
As everybody knows the gravitational force is directly proportional
to the product of the masses of the objects and inversely
proportional to the square of the distance between them. The
planet that exerts the strongest attraction on earth is Venus, but
this force is no more than 1/180 of the gravitational pull of the
moon. Jupiter has about V4 the pull of Venus; Mars is about one
hundred times weaker, Saturn the same as Mars, and finally
Pluto has but one two-millionth part of the gravity that the moon
exerts on earth. So we see that no matter how close the planets
pull together, no marked influence will be felt here on earth.
In comparison with the attraction of our moon and sun, the
influence of the planets is negligible. Anyway, we hardly have
reason to worry about the great conjunction of the nine planets
in 1982 because such conjunctions occur every 179 years and the
last one, in 1803, produced neither tidal waves nor earthquakes.
Some might ask why the comets are not included in the tablets
of Nineveh. It seems to me that that is not an oversight. There
is
just so much space on a tablet and the comets had to be left
out. The comets that return frequently to our system do not
prove the Constant of Nineveh, but calculations on some of these
long-distance voyagers show remarkable results. Halley's comet,
which v^dll pass through its closest point to the sun in 1986,
makes exactly 81,000 orbits in 2,268 million days—a number that
should be familiar to you by now—once more it is
of Nineveh.
the Constant
I could not close this chapter without a word or two about the
possible existence of some more planets out beyond Pluto. At
this moment there are to the best of my knowledge at least three
candidates. First there is
the planet which Brady named Proserpine—the
same name that our ancestors gave to this body. According
to him, the planet is sixty-four times farther away from