Its implausibilities and outmoded technologies aside, the story offers, allegorically, a preview of something quite likely to befall the planet - and perhaps the whole Milky Way galaxy - at a time very far into the future.

NASA's new Spitzer Space Telescope, a twin of the Hubble that views the universe in the invisible infrared range of light, recently captured images of an event that is surprisingly common in the universe: two galaxies in collision.

Some 68 million light-years away, two galaxies called the Antennae are merging. Though the light picked up now by Spitzer emanated from the colliding duo 68 million years ago, the galaxies smash together still, ripping stars from their orbits and shredding their respective spiral arms into long stellar streamers that dangle in space like gigantic sheer sequined veils of a cosmic dancer.

It turns out the same fate awaits our own galaxy. Andromeda, the Milky Way's nearest neighbor, is headed here on a collision course and, several billion years from now, is expected to rip through the local star system like a wrecking ball.

Such an event, though it would take hundreds of millions of years to unfold, probably would not bode well for the human race - assuming something remotely resembling humans still exists that far into the future. Life can survive under fairly dire circumstances, but it tends to thrive in quietude, which is why Earth teems with life as it revolves around a single, middling-sized star in one of the backwaters of the Milky Way's outer arms, far away from the maelstrom of activity at the galactic center.

The living, evolving creatures inhabiting the third planet from the sun have survived 3 billion years of intermittent, but relatively moderate, comet and asteroid impacts that disrupt Earth's surface and send survivors scurrying underground. When Andromeda arrives in this neck of the galactic woods, however, there will be nowhere to hide. The danger then will not be from objects a few miles wide, but from planets, stars and even black holes disrupted from their orbits. Any such objects that lay on a track toward Terra - lacking any unimaginably advanced defensive technology - would likely mean Armageddon for the world.

Yet even this bleak tale contains a hopeful note. The titanic collision of Andromeda and the Milky Way would mean death to many star systems , but it also would mean new life. Astronomers now know this because the Spitzer telescope's infrared images of the Antennae conflict show, within the enormous clouds of interstellar dust being kicked up, there is a hidden population of new stars emerging.

"We theorized that there were stars forming at that site, but we weren't sure to what degree," said Zhong Wang, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., which compiled the Antennae images. "Now we see that the majority of star-forming activity in both galaxies occurs in the overlap regions where the two meet."

In other words, the two galaxies, which began falling into each other around a common center of gravity about 800 million years ago, are compressing and heating a great deal of usually dormant interstellar matter. As they continue to crash together - inevitably, astronomers think, to form a single, spherical galaxy - they are creating enough gravitational disruption to compress the dust clouds into a vast new generation of stars.

Previous images of the Antennae taken by visible-light telescopes have shown bright pockets of young stars dotting the outer spiral arms. What has been missing is information about events at the center of the galaxies, where the two overlap. There, the visible-light scopes show only a dark cloud of dust.

Spitzer has pierced the veil and revealed thousands upon thousands of brand new stars, each bringing the promise of further stellar evolution - and the possibility of life.

For much of human history, the stars and the galaxy were considered eternal and unchanging, a constant presence within which transient human events unfolded. The persistent and detailed work of astronomers has revealed a far different picture - quite a dynamic one.

Just as naturalists have learned that periodic wildfires are not only inevitable but necessary for the long-term health and vibrancy of forests, so too are galactic collisions for the continuing formation and evolution of stars.

Armageddon becomes Genesis.

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