Our Universe Could Destroy Us At Any Moment
Have you ever asked yourself, could our planet be wiped out? The answer to that is yes, and it could happen at any time. There are many different ways our planet could be wiped out, and there are many possibilities with a great number of outcomes.
Getting hit by a rouge planet
One possibility of our own planet getting taken out is by rouge planets. When a planet has for some reason broken free from its orbit, without a star to orbit, it will roam through space recklessly causing all sorts of chaos. Rouge planets are actually more common than you would expect. In fact, rogue planets out number stars 100000 to 1. If one of these planets came hurdling toward earth, it would smash our planet to pieces. Scientists would likely see a rouge planet coming, but that wouldn’t do very much because there isn’t anything we can do to stop it. But could this actually ever happen to us? As a matter of fact, it already has. NASA believes our earth was formed by two rouge planets crashing into each other, and that formed one planet.
The Andromeda Galaxy
Another way our planet could be taken out is by another galaxy. When two galaxies get too close to each other and one is much larger than the other galaxy, the larger one swallows up the smaller one. The closest galaxy to our own, the Andromeda galaxy, is quite larger than the milky way. Andromeda is known for frequently consuming other nearby galaxies. If the milky way were to be consumed, our planet would probably fall out of the suns orbit and earth would be left to suffer. Without the heat from the stars, our planet would reach negative 163 degrees Fahrenheit within a week. That would surely wipe out the human race.
Black Holes
One other possibility of earth meeting its doom is black holes. They are the most powerful things in the universe. If something is on the verge of a black holes grasp, there is no turning back. It will lure the object in and tear it apart. Nothing escapes black holes, not even light. If earth happened to fall into one, the nearby bending of space would stretch us apart thinner and thinner until our atoms ripped apart. There is good news, though. The nearest black hole that we know of is 27,000 light years away. But, thats not considering that some black holes could still be nearby and we just don’t know it because they are very hard to spot. And some blackholes do in-fact move, so you never know, one may come hurdling towards us at some point in the future.
Explosive gamma ray bursts
Black holes are very deadly when they exist, but even their birth could wipe us out completely. When a star dies and it creates a supernova, a blackhole can be formed. When it is formed, an incredible amount of energy is formed along with it and it is released in two massive heat beams called gamma ray bursts. Each of them have as much energy as the energy that will be released by our sun in a billion years. It would be a death sentence if we were anywhere close to one of these bursts. If our planet got hit with one, we would be flash fried and all living things would be killed in an instant. Some researchers believe that a gamma ray burst was the cause of the mass extinction on our planet 450 million years ago, which wiped out 85 percent of life on earth. These gamma ray bursts happen every day, and if one of these bursts occurred in one of the 400 billion stars in the milky way, every planet in our galaxy would be burnt to a crisp. But, we seem to be safe because there aren’t any that we know of in our galaxy.
Getting hit by a meteorite
A very likely scenario for the end of our planet are meteorites. Earth is no stranger to a meteor shower. The most famous occurrence is when the dinosaurs got wiped out. However, that was far from the first space rock to come across earth. At around 3 to 4 billion years BCE our planet was bombarded with 5000 meteorites a day. One meteorite was so powerful that scientists believe it caused the earth to shake for half an hour. At that time there was so much energy released that our planets temperature was raised to 480 degrees celsius, and even the ocean started to boil. A meteor strike in 1908 that was only 60 meters wide was powerful enough to tear 2,000 square kilometers of forest out of the ground. NASA has said that humanity is completely unprepared for a unexpected asteroid strike. Several months of notice wouldn’t even be enough time to stop it.
What would happen if our ozone layer depleted?
Our universe is constantly throwing dangerous rays at us. Our planet is constantly being bombarded by radiation in space. Lucky for us, though, we have a way of protecting ourselves. Our defense system is our ozone layer. It is the only defense we have against the constant damaging radiation, yet we destroy it more and more every day. Scientists seem concerned about the layer getting damaged, but aren’t taking all the measures they can to prevent it, or at least slow the damaging process down. If our ozone layer becomes thinner, there will be very deadly consequences. Scientists predict that cases of cancer, radiation sickness, and brain damage will skyrocket. Without the ozone layers protection, staying outside for more than a few minutes could easily be enough to cause skin cancer. All of our plants would soon cease to exist. Even underwater would not be safe, because UV rays can still penetrate through water. Another consequence of having no ozone layer is blindness. Without the ozone layers protection from the sun, blindness would spread worldwide. Soon after that, we’d all start to die of radiation poisoning, causing the human race to become extinct.
