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.
These are some long ass sentences my boy
A nuclear bomb destroys a city.
A Gamma Ray Burst destroys a planet.
I think there is either a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode about this.
In real life there are no sources nearby enough to pose any risk within the foreseeable future. Stars take a long time to die. Way before anything that happens that could be dangerous to Earth, there will be a show to be seen and being close it will have been a point of interest. There is a non zero chance there is something a long way away that somehow throws off a very focused beam directly on the Earth. But that chance is so small it’s on par with something like grey goo or you being a Boltzmann brain. Interesting in theory, but not really something that happens.
I was always intrigued by the thought.
Yes you are right about all the current ideas, theories and explanations that we know about so far.
This doesn’t exclude all those other things in the universe that we don’t know about yet.
Very true, you never know what we may find. But as to finding something that actually threatens Earth, I really don’t think so, but it makes for excellent sci-fi storytelling!
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.
Yeah this is a low level worry i have, because why worry about things I can do something about!
