These are planet Earth’s biggest threats: The catastrophes that could end life as we know it

I’ve got bad news: our only planet (right now) is going to go boom at some point. No, an internet craze is not going to send everyone into a head-spin and cause us all to fall off the edge and into the cosmos, the potential planet-ending reasons are a lot scarier.

1. The Sun expands into a red giant and burns Earth to a crisp

First things first. The big glowball in the sky is one day going to run out of hydrogen, the element that it currently uses to power itself and keep us warm. When that happens, the light will get 10% brighter and begin to evaporate Earth’s water. As the brightness levels increase, water molecules will simply begin to break apart and the hydrogen will escape off into space.

And if you’re still alive after that, the Sun goes into beast mode, swelling into a red giant and expanding out as far as Mars’ orbit, engulfing the Earth completely.

The good news? All of this will take about 1 billion years.

2. A meteor crashes towards Earth, killing all life

It happened to our good friends, the Dinosaurs. While NASA and other space agencies are actively working on missiles that could change the course of potentially fatal space debris, there is still always the threat of a massive interstellar rock coming down and slamming into the Earth.

Should this happen, you’d probably want to be right underneath it and die in an instant, as the consequences of survival sound even more horrifying.

If you don’t die from the shock wave, earthquakes, tsunamis, and firestorms, finding food will become almost impossible as the debris thrown into the atmosphere would change the climate, leading to mass extinctions. Again, think of the poor Dinos.

3. Volcanoes: perhaps the deadliest of them all

You read that right. Volcanoes are in fact the most deadly threat to humanity if we look at the history books.

There have been a record total of 11 extinction level events caused by volcanoes, as the exploding mountains don’t just douse you with lava, fire and hell. They kill by releasing dust, sulphur oxides, and carbon dioxide into the air, all of which combine to collapse food chains by inhibiting photosynthesis, poisoning the land and sea with acid rain, and putting global warming’s effects on 100x speed.

4. Global Warming could turn Earth into Venus

Visit Venus! With surface temperatures around 465°C (869°F), a thick atmosphere of over 96% carbon dioxide, light-reflecting sulphuric acid clouds, atmospheric pressures over 90 times that of Earth and winds of 360 km/h (224 mph),

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (the largest deep-sea mass extinction event in the last 93 million years), the Triassic-Jurassic extinction (goodbye to 75% of all species on Earth), and the Permian-Triassic extinction (which wiped out around 90–96% of marine species) are all attributed to Global Warming, and the event that Trump still thinks isn’t real may well turn our own home into Venus (see above).

5. One person pressing the wrong button. It’s the big red one

You made it this far? You sadist. Here you go, then.

Of course, if we get tired of waiting for volcanoes, Global Warming, tsunamis, meteors and the expanding Sun’s lengthy timeline, then we can just do it ourselves.

Nuclear Winter was described, erm, ‘beautifully’ by Annie Jacobsen in her book ‘Nuclear War: A Scenario’, telling of humanity’s fate after a catastrophic war involving the deadliest weapons ever created. On the postwar situation, she told Vogue:

“With all of these explosions, 330 billion pounds of soot gets lofted into the troposphere. That is enough soot to block out 70 percent of the sun, creating a dramatic temperature plunge up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit, certainly in the mid-latitudes.

Those areas, for example, from Iowa to Ukraine, that whole band of the mid-latitudes, the bodies of water in those areas become frozen over in sheets of ice. With that temperature drop, you have the death of agriculture and that is why nuclear winter after nuclear war will result in what is now estimated to be 5 billion dead."

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