In 1832, our planet is known to have actually passed through the tails of comets, but nothing came of it. What would happen if we unfortunately encountered the actual nucleus of one is a question more easily asked than answered.

Pearson's Magazine (1900)

When Worlds Collide

Every now and again since about the early 19^th century a new asteroid or comet would be discovered and some crude calculations would show that it would pass near the Earth.  In the popular press this would soon be changed from "pass" to "hit" and a minor panic would ensue before cooler heads prevailed.  Sometimes the body in question didn't even have to be in danger of hitting the Earth.  In 1910 the Earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet, which caused no end of excitement when people learned that the comet's tail contained deadly cyanogen gas.  The fact that the tail was so diffuse that only an expert could tell it from hard vacuum didn't seem to matter much and hawkers of oxygen bottles and "comet pills" had a profitable little day.

But what about when something the size of a planet shows up making a bee line for Times Square?  This is one of those nasty little scenarios that you really can't do a whole lot about, because it's pretty much a matter of Earth, planet: BOOM, unless the planet in question is Mongo and your name happens to be Flash Gordon. 

The only way that you can get anything interesting out of colliding planets is to either a) deal with how to prevent it, which is pretty much avoiding the issue, or b) talk about how to get the heck out of the neighbourhood before your planet gets the finger.  

This is basically the plot of When Worlds Collide by Phillip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, which was published in 1932, and the George Pal film version in 1951.  In this take on the problem, the offending body that will do for the Earth just happens to be dragging along an Earth type planet in tow that will, by astonishing coincidence, plop right into Earth's orbit after the old homestead has been reduced to gravel. A load of scientists with remarkable foresight and maddeningly glossed over technical developments manage to build a space ark that carries a handful of refugees and assorted livestock to the new world.  In the novel, which was authored by a pair of pulp writers who were trying desperately to create "adult" fiction, this was accompanied by some of the most overwrought dialogue and a plot that reads like it was dropped into a Cuissinart.  The film, on the other hand, is so straightforward and so sanitised that it manages to make the end of the world positively mundane.

Maybe it was their way of easing our hypothetical loss.

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