But the much larger Sputnik 2 had already carried the dog Laika into orbit, a harbinger of human spaceflight.
"It can require an enormous ego to lead men to their deaths," Thomas writes, arguing that Jones's willingness to ignore the usual rules of naval engagement in the 18th century and to continue to fight despite appalling losses of human life was "a harbinger of the concept, all too familiar in modern times, of total war".
Real-world disasters (hurricanes, earthquakes, wars) have been mirrored in movies about rampant zombies, planetary collisions, killer epidemics and other harbingers of human extinction.
It featured a half-human half-dog creature called the Harbinger, the physical transformation of saintly Jekyll into evil Hyde, and the brutal murder of a couple.
The piece, which used interviews with members of the ever-maligned millennial generation to conclude that—surprise!—it's easier than ever to hook up in the smartphone age, was just one of an endless stream of thinkpieces declaring dating apps the harbinger of the end of human romance.
Jeroen or Hieronymus, our beady-eye harbinger of doom, brings us the bad news about human folly, and the damnation that awaits heedless humanity, then asks with an owlish hoot: what are you going to do about it?
He has been seen, at various times, as a hero and as a villain; as a brilliant theorist who set new directions in thought, and as the harbinger of a cold, rationalistic, and calculative conception of human beings.
But services from firms such as Clari and Base CRM in customer-relationship management, and from startups such as Yoi in human resources, have elements of mobile authenticity that make them harbingers of what is to come.
Our practical tool allows policymakers to use their own realistic baseline values and program projections to assess the relative impact of different interventions to improve the probability and timeliness of detecting early human cases or clusters caused by a novel influenza virus, a possible harbinger of a new pandemic.
The country's ambassador to the UN, François Delattre, called Aleppo "a human tragedy, a black hole destroying all we believe in, but also the harbinger of many more disasters to come".
