That and other admonitions such as "THE END IS NIGH" were common texts carried around Belfast and other places on the backs of believers (or hired men) wearing what are oddly known as sandwich boards. The fears and dire predictions about the effect on our computer systems on the changeover from 1999 to the year 2000 is as nothing compared with the doom forecast this August, it is said, by the physician, astrologer and poet Michel de Nostre-Dame or Nostradamus (1503-66). He is the subject of many books currently on sale in France, and Figaro magazine, a couple of weeks ago, gave its cover and about a dozen pages to his most immediately eyecatching or breathtaking prophesy - namely that (as interpreted by some) this summer will see the destruction of Paris, whether by some heavenly body or by the crashing of the spaceship Mir. Paco Rabanne (yes, the couturier) is said by Figaro to head the list of bestsellers with his book which sees Paris as resembling Hiroshima this summer. He is sure that the spaceship with its radioactive plutonium will crash on Paris some time from mid-July until after the 11th of August, the date of the total eclipse of the Sun. He says that he is recommending all his friends to get at least 60 kilometres from Paris, also that people living in the departments of Gers and Lot-et-Garonne, regions which will be affected by the debris from Mir, to flee those zones. Does he risk causing panic by his words? Or run the risk of ridicule if nothing happens? He answers that his bankers urged him not to publish, and he is aware that he may be regarded as crazy. But if Paris is not destroyed this summer, he feels, it will be perhaps because his prayers have been answered.
Two space scientists, Hubert Reeves and Jean-Pierre Bibring, answer all such allegations - "there is no sense in these predictions of catastrophe" - and go through the scientific reasons why. The writer Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie says Nostradamus was above all a poet, and the very obscurity of his texts makes him more or less comparable to the poets of today, who are also often very obscure, but are far from having his talent. Readers of Figaro in Ireland will doubt that "the end is nigh". Y