We know that all good things must come to an end. What we don’t always know is how, when, and certainly why. This is definitely the case with the survival of mankind. It seems that everybody is always telling us what the threat of humanity is. We’ve got microwavable meals, cutting down rainforests, the zombie apocalypse, nuclear war, politics, infectious disease, super villains, global warming; basically, we’re done for.
The one daunting power far greater than Lex Luther and Mayan calendars is the cosmos. Asteroids penetrate atmospheres and comets collide with planets. Planets are ejected from orbit and orbital paths can change. Stars die, engulf planets, and even explode. Radiation bursts destroy planets as well as solar systems. Galaxies collide! The more we study the universe the more we realize its immense power and potential. We also recognize how filled with chaos the universe is and how much, but at the same time how little, of this chaos we actually understand. So much happens in the universe and so much of it is still unpredictable to us. The great power of the universe coupled with its chaos and our lack of understanding force a salience of mortality. The universe is beautiful but also kind of scary. The cosmos has the potential to produce awesome forces that threaten the very survival of mankind and our home, Earth.
While the death force of a gamma ray burst may render that of microwavable mac and cheese laughable, in all likeliness humanity will generate its own doom long before the cosmos does. As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said, “ Our planet will remain in orbit around the Sun, along with its planetary brethren, long after Homo sapiens has become extinct by whatever cause.” The Earth will be here for a while, regardless of what we do. It’s a 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-ton iron ball that’s been orbiting the Sun for 4,550,000,000 years. It’s collided with another planet (how the moon was made), been blasted by radiation, and hit by more asteroids than you’ve had hot showers, and yet it’s still here in snug orbit around the Sun.
This blog is focussed on the forces of the cosmos that could bring catastrophic events to humanity all the while assuming that we are still on Earth when they happen. We will be looking at the death force things like asteroids, comets, solar storms, Planet X, The Big Rip theory, cosmic collisions, black holes, and the things that scare me most - electromagnetic pulses and gamma ray bursts.
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