I recently watched the “Oppenheimer” movie about the development of the Atomic Bomb. In it they address the possibility that exploding a bomb will ignite the entire atmosphere of the earth … the best they could come up with was “a nonzero probability”. Reassuring.

I’m not sure who the movie had doing these calculations, but a former co-worker of mine early in his career was a junior colleague of Richard Hamming (he of Hamming code fame). Hamming was at Los Alomos during the Manhattan project. I was told (long before the movie) that he was the one that had run those numbers (not fact checking the story I was told).

I tell you that to tell you this. Bulfinch’s Mythology, in the 19th century, summarizing Ovid’s version of ancient Greek myths has this

Jupiter … burned with anger … announcing his intention to destroy the whole of [the world’s] inhabitants … he took a thunderbolt and was about to launch it at the world, and destroy it by burning; but recollected the danger that such a conflagration might set heaven itself on fire and changed his plan …. [and sent a flood instead]

I think somebody on the Manhattan project had been reading Ovid.