In a universe filled with the spectacular and bizarre, life on planet Earth may be exposed to a deadly threat. It is called a gamma ray burst. and even if one happens at a vast distance from the solar system, it could destroy us.
It would irradiate Earth as if a hundred thousand atom bombs had gone off just outside our atmosphere. Derek Fox, Astrophysicist, Penn State University
The GRB lasts anywhere from 2 to 100 seconds. Its power may be understood by showing how it would affect the Earth. 6000 light years away, it could cause a mass extinction, as a GRB may have done in the ancient past.
"It's like having 3000 megatons of bombs go off in the Earth's atmosphere simultaneously."
But what if it happened closer? Instead of 6000 light years, just 1000.
"The megatonnage would be about like 100,000 megatons of nuclear bombs. It's like standing a couple of miles from the Hiroshima bomb, everywhere on the surface of the Earth."
There might be an event within 100 light years. Then things get very very bad. It blows away the atmosphere, creates tidal waves, and starts to melt the surface of the Earth. Now if you want to get even more extreme, you could say, 'what about the nearest star?' There is a one chance in a million in the life of the Earth that something might happen as close as Alpha Centauri. and then you would truly incinerate the Earth. It would be left -- the rocky part and everything would be left -- but it would be billions and billions of megatons, as they say." Stan Woosley, Astrophysicist, Univ. of Ca., Santa Cruz
"There are dangerous places, certainly very energetic phenomena, that are a lot more powerful than atomic bombs being detonated -- infinitely more powerful." Feryal Ozel, University of Arizona
It was the most famous eruption on earth. The force was thousands of times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Another larger explosion hit at precisely 6:42 am. Then, another, an hour and 38 minutes later.
"Volcanoes that have this type of behavior often are compared to many nuclear bombs exploding all at once -- that's their power. " Dr, Ken Wohletz, Los Alamos National Laboratory
To date, however, geologists have found no physical evidence of a huge eruptions of Krakatoa in 416 AD. But some researchers claim to have found geological clues indicating a massive eruption in 535 AD, 119 year later. They believe that the ancient text in the Book of Kings was referring to the 535 AD eruption.
"The entire event was the equivalent in terms of energy of many hundreds of millions of Hiroshima bombs." David Keys, author, Catastrophe
"This is called the Apple II House. This was one of the structures built to support a test that was detonated about a mile and a quarter in that direction."
The intention was to calculate what would happen if nuclear bombs fell on America. How for would the effects of the blasts reach? How would civilian homes hold up?
"And it was actually detonated on a tower, 500 feet tall, at a yield of about one and a half times that of the Hiroshima blast -- 29 kilotons." Joe Martz, Los Alamos Laboratory
"This is the Sedan crater. The purpose of this test was to answer a very basic question -- how big a hole can we make with a nuclear weapon? The purposes were peaceful -- to do civil engineering -- the excavation of harbors or canals with nuclear weapons. This was created by a 105 kiloton detonation. That's about 5 times the size of Hiroshima. It detonated with a force of over 200 million pounds of explosive. From rim to rim, you're looking at about a quarter mile across, and it's a little more than 300 feet deep." Joe Martz, Los Alamos Laboratory
At 5:30 the following morning, the first of four truly cataclysmic explosions occurred on Krakatoa. The volcano erupted, literally ripping itself apart, in an explosion equivalent to the power of a thousand atomic bombs.
No atomic bomb blast can rival the sound that the final eruption made. The shockwaves from the explosion reverberated around the globe seven times and were still detectable five days later.
"The Marr volcano forms in a very unique [sic] fashion. It forms by large steam explosions. Now the steam explosions here were caused by rising magma hitting ground water, causing the ground water to flash into steam and large explosions. Now, when I say large, I really mean large. The crater gives evidence of explosions being up to as many as 50 times larger than the explosions over Hiroshima." Ken Wohletz, Volcanologist, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Each second inside the sun, 600 million tons of hydrogen are fused into 595 million tons of helium. That 5 million tons of mass lost in the process is converted into energy equal to 1 billion one-megaton hydrogen bombs. That's every second.
When a sunspot unleashes its magnetic energy, what results are the most colossal explosions in the solar system: solar flares. A single flare releases as much as a billion megatons of energy, the combined power of a million volcanic eruptions on Earth.
"They appear as these very bright regions, and they're so bright because the temperature is so high, on the order of ten million degrees. And they can last for hours. But the energy is massive." Holly Gilbert, Rice University
"The whole explosion is equivalent to millions of nuclear bombs leaving the surface of the sun all at once." Robert Roy Britt, livescience.com
As the comet hurtles toward earth, a missile races toward the comet. It carries a nuclear warhead 800 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Mankind awaits the outcome.
editor's note: in this fictional hypothetical, the bomb does not work. FUCKED!
"That equation [E=mc2] shows that every piece of matter in our universe has stored within it a fantastic amount of energy. The speed of light, for example, is about 300 million meters per second. You multiply that by itself and you get 90 quadrillion. So in other words, what is matter? In some sense, matter is nothing but the condensation of vast amounts of energy. So in other words, if you could unlock, somehow unlock all the energy stored within my pen, that would erupt with a force comparable to an atomic bomb." Michio Kaku, Physicist, CUNY
editor's note: bonus appearance by Moaning Myrtle as Einstein's wife!
So what if the one possibility actually happened? What kind of damage could an asteroid the size of the Rose Bowl do?
"If Apophis did impact, it would impact at around seven and a half miles per second, and all that energy has to go somewhere. It would leave a blast area of around 60 to 100 miles across, and it would dissipate energy about equal to 100 nuclear bombs going off at the same time." Jon Giorgini, Nasa/JPL
