Is the Earth going to be destroyed by a global calamity?

Actually, there is a good chance of this happening. In fact, one could predict that all life on Earth will be wiped away by some cosmic event. The dinosaurs were made extinct by an asteroid collision sixty five million years ago, and this will happen again, maybe not for millions of years.

Or, it could happen tomorrow. The only thing that saves our butts in this situation is that we are not dumb like the dinosaurs. We’re looking on a constant basis for possible asteroids on a collision course with Earth. Asteroid Impact Avoidance is associated with locating near-Earth objects. There are several groups doing this important work: Spacewatch, Spaceguard, NEOshield, Near-Earth-Object Search, and LINEAR to name a few. The people associated with these projects use telescopes to locate and track objects that pass near Earth’s orbit.

There are several Collision Avoidance Strategies; some propose direct methods, while others suggest indirect schemes. The direct methods involve nuclear bombs, kinetic impact, focused solar energy, laser beams, and conventional rocket engines. All that is needed is a method to change the course of the asteroid so that it misses the Earth.

But, asteroid or comet collision is only one of the ways that life on Earth could be destroyed. We’re staring down the barrel of a very effective annihilation possibility. A Wolf-Rayet star, WR104, is 8,000 light years away and this devil is oriented so that a gamma ray burst from it would hit us square on, and we can’t get the Earth out of the way. Darn!

A Wolf-Rayet star is a massive--at least 20 times the sun’s mass--star with a very high surface temperature, in the range of 30,000 to 200,000 degrees. These stars lose mass at a very high rate and when they lose too much they collapse into a type 1bc supernova, which blasts out a particularly dangerous focused gamma ray burst.

The fact is that WR104 could have already gone supernova and the gamma ray burst hasn’t gotten here yet. It won’t matter. If it does hit us, we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. The gamma ray burst would deplete the ozone layer in the atmosphere and the resultant ultraviolet radiation would fry all life on the planet.

I think that the wildest thing that could destroy the Earth is a black hole. There are billions of these things floating around in our galaxy. Black holes are the result of large stars going supernova and they are ravenous in their appetite for anything in their way. Normally, we can’t see them because they’re black--they don’t emit light. However, when they’re feeding on gas, dust, stars, planets or whatever, black holes do emit plenty of ultraviolet and infrared light because the gas and dust fly around the event horizon at high velocity and heat up to sometimes millions of degrees because of friction. Thus, if a black hole invaded our solar system, we would detect it when it passed through the Ort cloud, which consists of a massive number of would-be comets orbiting the sun out past Neptune as far out as a light year from the sun. However, I’m not sure how we could escape a black hole. They have massive gravity and are the ultimate bullies of the universe. We would have to go to another solar system.

Another major calamity that could destroy life on Earth is massive super volcanoes. There are several of these calderas on the planet, including one at Yellowstone National Park, which sits on top of it.  Yellowstone Park is known for geysers, hot springs that shoot plumes of steam and water high into the air like Old Faithful. The Yellowstone caldera is 28 by 45 miles and is almost a mile deep. If this baby erupts it’s going to be at least a thousand times worst than Mt. St. Helens’ eruption in 1980. If more than one of these massive volcanoes erupted at the same time, we would all be in grave danger. Volcanic eruptions prove that the Earth is still active and dangerous. These types of eruptions in the past are responsible for mass extinctions.

Eventually, the sun will get too hot and the oceans will evaporate making Earth like Venus, a hot uninhabitable planet. The sun increases in luminosity by ten percent every billion years. A ten percent increase in brightness like that would kill all life here on Earth. Maybe this is the way that God will cause the end of things, the apocalypse promised in the Bible. I don’t ascribe to this idea because of the entropy problem. God would have to create a new universe that avoids the entropy (increase in disorder) dilemma in order for us to enjoy eternal life. If you believe in the end-time scenario of the Bible with the Last Judgment depicted in Mathew 25, then you must assume that a worldwide calamity will not take place until the end-time. I can definitely wait for that.

Thanks for reading.