by thenewgreen

The story of Halley’s Comet also offers us a warning, especially meaningful in this moment of global uncertainty. We are living amid a human-made “infodemic” of misinformation surrounding the novel coronavirus and the vaccines we have created to hold the pathogen at bay. It is helpful to know that even in 1910, when Halley’s Comet returned—and was known to be an astronomical body orbiting in our solar system—there were those who saw it as an agent of our civilization’s demise. They were convinced that chemicals from the comet’s tail would seep into our atmosphere and kill us all.