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How Could Aliens Blow Up Earth?

Friday, March 8, 2013 11:59

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(Before It's News)

Scientists say that a ten-second burst of gamma rays from a massive star explosion within 6,000 light years from Earth could have triggered a mass extinction hundreds of millions of years ago. In this artist's conception we see the gamma rays hitting the Earth's atmosphere. (The expanding shell is pictured as blue, but gamma rays are actually invisible.) The gamma rays initiate changes in the atmosphere that deplete ozone and create a brown smog of NO2. Credit: NASA

Not quite blowing up the Earth, but certainly destructive: A 2005 study suggested that an exploding star 6,000 light-years away could send gamma rays towards Earth and cause widespread extinction as it sucked away ozone and made smog. Credit: NASA

Earth. It seems so solid and permanent. But really, all you need to do is expand the Sun enough, and the entire planet would melt away. Or worse, find yourself at the mercy of some seriously powerful and angry aliens.

Actually, the beings who destroy Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which first aired on BBC Radio 4 on this day (March 8) in 1978, were not so much angry as logical about their reasons.

In the novel, Earthlings are shocked when extraterrestrial beings — known as the Vogons — arrive with plans to build a hyperspatial express route that runs through Earth’s orbit. The plans for the route were apparently lodged in Alpha Centauri (a star system four light-years away) for the past 50 Earth years, leaving residents of the planet “plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint.”

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Read the rest of How Could Aliens Blow Up Earth? (556 words)

© Elizabeth Howell for Universe Today, 2013. |
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Post tags: antimatter, blow up earth, Death Star, hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, vacuum energy