The prospect didn't seem too much fun, and people started selling their homes and such, and booking passage to the moon, where life was controlled, but carefree, and free of annoying vibrations and rolling oranges.
Lunar Real Estate enjoyed a fabulous boom for weeks after the telecast by the scientist, but it was soon "all filled up," and further immigrations would have to await the construction of more Domes to house the newcomers.
The laggards, understandably, raised a fuss about this callous attitude, and went moonward anyway until about two-thirds of the Earth's population was on the moon, the place becoming so hopelessly crowded that people had to half-rent rooms there, sleeping in alternating shifts with other half-renters, and spending their waking hours wandering the streets.
"Things," sighed one realtor to another, "can't get much worse."
And that's when the first meteor landed on Earth. In the general excitement, first about vibrations, then about gravitational fields, then about packing up and going to the moon, most newspapers had pushed to the want-ad pages little articles by eminent astronomers, in which were noted the odd behaviors of certain large planetoids in the asteroid belt between Earth and Mars. These cosmic hunks of rock seemed to be "peeling off" the general formation of the ellipse followed by their fellows, and moving sunward[1] singly or in small homogenous groupings.
Well, the first one landed and left a dent on Earth where the Congo used to be, the shock being felt as far north as Oslo, to add to their vibrational, gravitational and evacuational difficulties.
Scientists on the moon—being as singleminded as scientists anywhere—became ecstatic. At last the mystery of the ages was solved: Who put the pocks in the face of the moon? A Peter W. Merrill Moonplant, of course! They looked down in rapture as meteor after meteor—drawn across the countless miles of space by the pulsating gravity fields, plunged into the Earth, leaving pocks visible to the naked moondweller's eye. And darned if each meteor didn't strike dead center of each plant network.
After about a month, Earth looked almost exactly like the moon had once looked, with the exception of one locale: Australia, and much of the Pacific Ocean surrounding it.
"It will indeed be a titanic meteor that hits there!" the moon scientists enthused. For their careful check of the records showed that only one plant had been found on the whole continent of Australia, toward the eastern coast; which meant that its network probably extended beneath the Pacific itself, with a gigantic field reaching its hungry magnetic fingers into space.