Ways the World Could End Are we in danger of being erased from the universe Here we look at the factors that could doom humanity natural disasters, human. Brownfreq worrisome worry worryworryin worrying worse worsened worsens worship worshiped worshipful worshiping worshipped worshippers worshipping worst worstmarked. Search metadata Search full text of books Search TV captions Search archived web sites Advanced Search. BMYRlogo1_82KB.jpg.pagespeed.ic.EFG5k2oMse.jpg' alt='Torrent Model Railroader Magazine' title='Torrent Model Railroader Magazine' />Ways the World Could End Weve had a good run of it. In the 5. 00,0. 00 years Homo sapiens has roamed the land weve built cities, created complex languages, and sent robotic scouts to other planets. Its difficult to imagine it all coming to an end. Yet 9. 9 percent of all species that ever lived have gone extinct, including every one of our hominid ancestors. In 1. 98. 3, British cosmologist Brandon Carter framed the Doomsday argument, a statistical way to judge when we might join them. If humans were to survive a long time and spread through the galaxy, then the total number of people who will ever live might number in the trillions. By pure odds, its unlikely that we would be among the very first hundredth of a percent of all those people. Romance Films "The Wild Thornberrys" Pack Of Thornberrys. Or turn the argument around How likely is it that this generation will be the one unlucky one Something like one fifth of all the people who have ever lived are alive today. The odds of being one of the people to witness doomsday are highest when there is the largest number of witnesses aroundso now is not such an improbable time. Human activity is severely disrupting almost all life on the planet, which surely doesnt help matters. The current rate of extinctions is, by some estimates, 1. HO_Scale_Bachmann_44-tonner.JPG' alt='Torrent Model Railroader Magazine' title='Torrent Model Railroader Magazine' />At present, we may worry about snail darters and red squirrels in abstract terms. But the next statistic on the list could be us. Natural Disasters. Asteroid impact  Once a disaster scenario gets the cheesy Hollywood treatment, its hard to take it seriously. But there is no question that a cosmic interloper will hit Earth, and we wont have to wait millions of years for it to happen. In 1. 90. 8 a 2. 00 foot wide comet fragment slammed into the atmosphere and exploded over the Tunguska region in Siberia, Russia, with nearly 1,0. Hiroshima. Astronomers estimate similar sized events occur every one to three centuries. Benny Peiser, an anthropologist cum pessimist at Liverpool John Moores University in England, claims that impacts have repeatedly disrupted human civilization. As an example, he says one killed 1. Chinese city of Chiing yang in 1. Many scientists question his interpretations Impacts are most likely to occur over the ocean, and small ones that happen over land are most likely to affect unpopulated areas. But with big asteroids, it doesnt matter much where they land. Job Interview Practice Test Why Do You Want This Job Answer this job interview question to determine if you are prepared for a successful job interview. Neutrinos Ghosts of the Universe. Neutrinos and their weird subatomic ways could help us understand highenergy particles, exploding stars and the origins of matter. Browse our quotes collection, once you found your desired one, create beautiful quote as image and share on Facebook, Twitter Pinterest. GUETH chancing sailboarded TIPOLD either extortion undoings DEBRITA receptionists EISON intellects cajoles ROUDABUSH ELIAN molecule MERCKLING unskillful unpeople. Objects more than a half mile widewhich strike Earth every 2. Humans would likely survive, but civilization might not. An asteroid five miles wide would cause major extinctions, like the one that may have marked the end of the age of dinosaurs. For a real chill, look to the Kuiper belt, a zone just beyond Neptune that contains roughly 1. The Kuiper belt sends a steady rain of small comets earthward. If one of the big ones headed right for us, that would be it for pretty much all higher forms of life, even cockroaches. Gamma ray burst  If you could watch the sky with gamma ray vision, you might think you were being stalked by cosmic paparazzi. Once a day or so, you would see a bright flash appear, briefly outshine everything else, then vanish. These gamma ray bursts, astrophysicists recently learned, originate in distant galaxies and are unfathomably powerfulas much as 1. The bursts probably result from the merging of two collapsed stars. Before the cataclysmal event, such a double star might be almost completely undetectable, so wed likely have no advance notice if one is lurking nearby. Once the burst begins, however, there would be no missing its fury. At a distance of 1,0. Earths atmosphere would initially protect us from most of the bursts deadly X rays and gamma rays, but at a cost. The potent radiation would cook the atmosphere, creating nitrogen oxides that would destroy the ozone layer. Without the ozone layer, ultraviolet rays from the sun would reach the surface at nearly full force, causing skin cancer and, more seriously, killing off the tiny photosynthetic plankton in the ocean that provide oxygen to the atmosphere and bolster the bottom of the food chain. All the gamma ray bursts observed so far have been extremely distant, which implies the events are rare. Scientists understand so little about these explosions, however, that its difficult to estimate the likelihood of one detonating in our galactic neighborhood. Collapse of the vacuum  In the book Cats Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut popularized the idea of ice nine, a form of water that is far more stable than the ordinary kind, so it is solid at room temperature. Unleash a bit of it, and suddenly all water on Earth transforms to ice nine and freezes solid. Ice nine was a satirical invention, but an abrupt, disastrous phase transition is a possibility. Very early in the history of the universe, according to a leading cosmological model, empty space was full of energy. This state of affairs, called a false vacuum, was highly precarious. A new, more stable kind of vacuum appeared and, like ice nine, it quickly took over. This transition unleashed a tremendous amount of energy and caused a brief runaway expansion of the cosmos. It is possible that another, even more stable kind of vacuum exists, however. As the universe expands and cools, tiny bubbles of this new kind of vacuum might appear and spread at nearly the speed of light. The laws of physics would change in their wake, and a blast of energy would dash everything to bits. It makes for a beautiful story, but its not very likely, says Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. He says he worries more about threats that scientists are more certain ofsuch as rogue black holes. Rogue black holes  Our galaxy is full of black holes, collapsed stellar corpses just a dozen miles wide. How full Tough question. After all, theyre called black holes for a reason. Their gravity is so strong they swallow everything, even the light that might betray their presence. David Bennett of Notre Dame University in Indiana managed to spot two black holes recently by the way they distorted and amplified the light of ordinary, more distant stars. Based on such observations, and even more on theoretical arguments, researchers guesstimate there are about 1. Milky Way. These objects orbit just like other stars, meaning that it is not terribly likely that one is headed our way. But if a normal star were moving toward us, wed know it. With a black hole there is little warning. A few decades before a close encounter, at most, astronomers would observe a strange perturbation in the orbits of the outer planets. As the effect grew larger, it would be possible to make increasingly precise estimates of the location and mass of the interloper. The black hole wouldnt have to come all that close to Earth to bring ruin just passing through the solar system would distort all of the planets orbits. Earth might get drawn into an elliptical path that would cause extreme climate swings, or it might be ejected from the solar system and go hurtling to a frigid fate in deep space. Giant solar flares  Solar flaresmore properly known as coronal mass ejectionsare enormous magnetic outbursts on the sun that bombard Earth with a torrent of high speed subatomic particles. Earths atmosphere and magnetic field negate the potentially lethal effects of ordinary flares. But while looking through old astronomical records, Bradley Schaefer of Yale University found evidence that some perfectly normal looking, sunlike stars can brighten briefly by up to a factor of 2. Schaefer believes these stellar flickers are caused by superflares, millions of times more powerful than their common cousins. Within a few hours, a superflare on the sun could fry Earth and begin disintegrating the ozone layer see 2. Although there is persuasive evidence that our sun doesnt engage in such excess, scientists dont know why superflares happen at all, or whether our sun could exhibit milder but still disruptive behavior. And while too much solar activity could be deadly, too little of it is problematic as well.