Traveling at the speed of light, Earth would have no warning of the shower of radiation that would decimate half the planet’s life forms and atmosphere.
Traveling at the speed of light, Earth would have no warning of the shower of radiation that would decimate half the planet’s life forms and atmosphere.
One of the ideas that interested me was how galactic events affected our geological history. There are many notable extinction events since the formation of life on the planet and they come with some definitive or logical explanations … namely the five great extinction events … but there were minor extinctions that also occurred in between and many of them don’t have a direct explanation that correlate to what was obviously happening on the planet, which leads to only considering a major extraterrestrial, solar or galactic event.
Yes! One of the cooler theories I’ve heard is the position of our solar system in the galaxy could play a role in extinction level events in the past. As the sun orbits throughout the Milky-way, it comes across denser and less dense areas. In a dense region there could be other stars passing close (like still light years away, but close astronomically). This can disturb objects in the Oort cloud, which can lead to more impact events in the inner solar system. There’s also other theories floating about. I haven’t seen as much proof as I would like to, but it sure is interesting
It makes you imagine that we all exist inside an infinite slow moving cosmic soup of some kind.