10 End-Of-The-World Prophecies That Didn't Come True

9. Halley's Comet Was Supposed To End Everything In 1910

Camille Flammarion chatted a lot of sh*t. A French astronomer and author, he was best known for writing dozens of titles that were alternately labelled as science fiction and science fact, but you may as well have put them both on that first shelf for all of the verifiable facts Flammarion was putting down on paper. Like his claim that Martians had tried to communicate with the Earth in the past, or that a seven-tailed comet was going to pass through the Milky Way in 1907, or when he predicted that the appearance of Halley's Comet on 20 April, 1910, €œwould impregnate that atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet.€ Nice science there, Flammarion. To be fair to him, he didn't actually say that this would destroy the Earth itself, just all life on it. The planet itself would still exist, just...full of dead bodies. Or it would have done if his prediction hadn't kicked off public hysteria, involving the production of €œcomet pills€ to protect against toxic gases. And the fact it didn't happen.