Recently I saw an interesting program on the history channel. It was called “The End of the Earth”. In it, various scientists were playing out, and describing different scenarios for the end of the Earth. Pretty scary and apocalyptic stuff if you ask me.
The different scenarios were as follows:
1) Asteroid / Comet hit:
Do you remember the movies “Armageddon” or “Deep Impact”? Just like in those movies, a rogue asteroid or comet will come hurtling our way, and crash into earth before we even know it. The crash will trigger off explosions of the Hiroshima kind, thousand of kilometres where it hits. Most people will get killed by the atomic blasts.
Those that don’t, needn’t feel left out, for the amount of dust that is raised by the massive explosion/s, will cloud up our atmosphere. The thick cloud of dust will kill most species by suffocation. Those that still don’t die, wait, more is coming. The lucky survivors will then face months of darkness, because the thick dust cloud won’t let any sunlight through. As most of everything on earth depends on the sunlight for sustenance, we are in for a raw deal. Months of sunlight deprivation, will set off cold waves. Plants will perish, water turns to ice, and animals die. And humans? Well, our tinned food won’t help us much here, will it? Welcome to Apocalypse.
There have been many instances in the past where asteroids or comets have come pretty close to hitting earth. Or in fact have hit earth. A similar scenario caused the extinction of dinosaurs millions of years ago. In 1908, a comet or asteroid, half the size of a football field, burst 5 miles in the sky above northern Siberia, in the region of Tunguska, and destroyed everything for hundreds of kilometres. (If you thought football hooligans were bad, imagine what a football field can do.) Luckily, no one lived there, and only the trees and animals were flattened out by the blast.
Had our celestial visitor been late by a few hours, it would have hit Europe or even America. Think about it.
2) Gamma Ray bursts:
Our Sun (or Sol as it’s called) is a yellow dwarf star in one spiral arm of the Milky Way. And Milky Way, our galaxy is but a small galaxy in the entire universe. The Universe has millions of bigger galaxies, consisting of billions of stars. And many stars are much, much bigger than our sun. Doesn’t help our ego, does it? :-) Anyone who claims, “My daddy is bigger than yours” will be disheartened.
Anyway, so as I was saying. There are many stars out there, which are millions of times larger than our poor old yellow Sol. These gargantuan supergiants are so huge that, our entire solar system could be swallowed in their surface area. And when these supergiants use up their fuel, they save the best for last. Scientists have proved that when a supergiant runs out of fuel, it collapses onto itself. This means, all the mass of the huge star will collapse into itself, causing so much density to concentrate onto one small spot, that it creates a black hole.
A black hole is that greedy glutton that keeps everything to itself. It swallows everything, including light. (And until now, I thought a black hole was that fat kid in my school, who ate everything that passed his way, and he was dark to boot. I thought the word ‘ass’ was silent, in the term black hole, and it applied to him.)
But the black hole can’t swallow the entire star. If you try squeezing a lemon tightly into a small ball at a high speed, you’ll find that some juice and matter will squirt out. Similarly, when the star collapses, some energy will shoot out in the form of gamma rays, before most of the star bursts out into a supernova, and later collapses to a black hole.
These gamma rays are like those laser beams that George Lucas used in the Star Wars movies, only much much much brighter, and lethal.
The flash travels at the speed of light, and it will hit earth if we happen to be in its straight path. The flash is billions and trillions of times brighter than the sun. The energy and radiation emitted by the flash will cook up and destroy our Ozone layer. It will then come inside the atmosphere and burn everything in its path. Those who survive will face acid rains, and harmful radiation from the sun, due to the hole left in our atmospherical armour, namely the ozone layer.
Needless to say, not many will survive, and those who do, will be toast, the moment they step out in open air.
3) Demise of the Sun:
Our friendly, life-sustaining Sun uses up hydrogen to create helium, thus giving out energy and heat. It does have a limited supply of hydrogen fuel though, so when it closes in to the final supplies of hydrogen, it will blow out to keep up to the mass that it has lost. And when it does, it will become a giant red star, swallowing the inner orbit planets, namely, Mercury, and/or Venus. It’ll come pretty close to the Earth, and when it does, any guesses what will happen? Microwave time.
The oceans will evaporate; the earth’s crust will cook, and melt. Humans, and anything living, don’t stand a chance, I’m sorry to say. You can run, but you can’t hide. The earth will be a glowing ball of lava. The sun eventually burns out and cools off to become a white dwarf star. The earth will remain behind, but it will be like a burnt out piece of charcoal.
4) The Big Rip:
Many people have heard of this phenomenon, called as “The Big Bang”. Then there was LIGHT. Our entire universe started from one speck, which burst out creating time, space, and everything in it. Scientists have proved that what grew out from one tiny atom has turned to be the universe, the space, the galaxies, stars and everything in it. And it is expanding.
A common analogy would be to consider a balloon. If you imagine the balloon as the universe, the spots on the surface of the balloon would be galaxies. Now if you blow the balloon, it expands, and similarly, the universe is blowing up like the balloon, and the spots on the surface (galaxies) are moving further and further apart from each other. Sounds fascinating, doesn’t it? If you wanna invade a distant galaxy, do it now. For tomorrow it will be further away.
Now back to the balloon. Ask any kid what happens, when you blow a balloon too much. IT BURSTS. The big rip theory claims that our universe will one day expand and burst. And when that happens, a dark energy comes in and disintegrates everything. And I mean everything. All the planets, stars, galaxies, everything will be shattered. All molecules get destroyed. All atoms split up and disintegrate. No more space, no more time. In other words, nothing remains.
Well what remains will be NOTHING.
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The whole point of the program was to tell us of the inevitability of our destruction. The message here is, we are going to die. No matter what.
If you were noticed earlier, the big capital letters at the start of every scenario above, spell into a single word. DOOM. Pretty good touch hey? :-)
My question is, if everything is going to be destroyed, if everything is going to vanish into nothing, then what is the whole point of us being here? Why are we born in this planet? Why have we been given a mind to think? Why all this competition, wars, progress, scientific endeavours, sporting achievements, business hunger? What is the point of all of this, when all we are going to do is die, and nothing will amount to anything. No matter what we do, no matter what we achieve, no matter how much money we earn. All our achievements, families, businesses, houses, toys, everything will be dust. And no one would remember either. Because there would be no one left to remember.
So is this some kind of a celestial joke?
Is there someone out there looking at us going about our fickle lives, hankering after things, and material objects, killing our neighbours for land, food, & oil, creating a dog-eat-dog world here. Is there someone out there watching us and marvelling at our stupidity, ala “The Truman Show”? Is this the real world, or is there something else out there, like the world in “The Matrix” or “The Island”?
Are we really supposed to be serious about life? Because I don’t really see the point in any of this.
What will I achieve if say:
- I climb Mount Everest.
- I become the richest person in the world.
- I become the president of a country.
- I wage wars and kill thousands of people all over something like oil, or land, or a bruised ego.
- I get various educational degrees, and land up in a multinational company, earning lots of money, and a prestigious position.
- I marry someone and raise a family, who in turn will raise a family, and the cycle continues.
- I work my butt off to make sure the family I raise is well sustained.
- I save, and earn more money so I can bling myself up, and keep buying more toys, like, bigger houses, better cars, holiday vacations, jewellery, gadgets, so on and so forth.
- I keep myself under a blanket of debt, (which I created to sustain my black-holey attitude about life) like credit cards, loans, mortgages, and everything else.
What is the point of anything here?
Why? Why? Why?
All that I know is I am going to die.
And so will YOU.
Do YOU have the answer?
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