Whether it's the loud bangs of a supernova or the whimper of magnetic field exhaustion, Earth and everything on it are doomed.
The universe is a terrifying place, full of existential threats. The earth seems quite solid beneath our feet, but the continued presence of the thin layers of rock, water, and air that sustain our survival is anything but certain. Incoming asteroids, high-flying superflares, and supernovae are just a few of the disasters that can beclose our fragile world.
In the short term, we may be able to manage or mitigate some of these threats. Asteroids can be redirected, and power grids can be reinforced. But as the solar system ages, other apocalyptics are inevitable: the moon spirals out of control, the Earth's magnetosphere collapses, the sun's weakened core. Each represents a countdown to a different apocalypse, some more imminent than others.
Mountains fluttering in space
The most obvious threat is one that has often appeared in countless science fiction stories and movies: an asteroid hitting Earth. Most famously, 66 million years ago, an asteroid miles wide struck the ocean off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, pushing the Earth into chaos. The wildfires that devoured continents and the bone-chilling nuclear winter ended 180 million years of giant reptile domination in the blink of an eye of geological time.
Even assuming that we are able to deflect an incoming object, the challenge remains to find potentially dangerous asteroids within months to years of advance notice. NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Research currently lists only a few worrisome space rocks, but new ones often appear without warning. In 2012, 2019 and 2021, asteroids flew near Earth with only a few days' notice, and they ranged in size from a football field to several city blocks. In 2013, the 11,000-ton Chelyabinsk meteorite crashed through the Russian Ural region**, destroying thousands of buildings and injuring more than 1,000 people, but none of this went unnoticed.
This lack of awareness should be accompanied by the 2025 Chilean Vera CThis began to change with the opening of the Rubin Observatory and the launch of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in 2026. Rubin will be able to survey the entire southern sky every three days, generate 20TB of data per night, and issue an average of 100,000 alerts every 60 seconds about any detected changes, all of which will be processed and shared globally. Roman will have the same crisp sub-arcsecond resolution as Hubble, but with a 100x field of view, generating another mountain of data about changing and moving objects in the sky. When the two join forces, both hemispheres of the sky will be closely watched, from asteroids to supernovae.
PreparationOkayWelcome to the flare
Solar flares are commonplace and generally harmless. They are bursts of light and radiation emitted from areas with strong magnetic fields, with cooler dark spots on the surface of the sun marking their end point. Above sunspots, the sun's magnetic field can stretch for tens of thousands of miles, carrying fibers of extremely hot, magnetically bound plasma. Magnetic field lines store energy like stretched and twisted rubber bands – and when they break, they can release large amounts of plasma, known as coronal mass ejections (CMES). If a CME happens to be aimed at the Earth, the Earth will be hit by a geomagnetic storm a few days later. Most CMEs are harmlessly deflected due to the protective magnetosphere created by the Earth's molten iron cores. But once in a while, a flare hundreds to thousands of times higher than normal intensity — a superflare — strikes at Earth's magnetosphere.
Analysis of radiocarbon spikes preserved in the rings of ancient trees shows that at least six such solar storms have hit Earth in the past 10,000 years. The first such event occurred in 2012, when a radioactive carbon spike in the 774-year-old Japanese willow ring was discovered. Subsequent studies have found that in 993, 663, 5259, 5410 and 7176 bc.e.and four more were found.
For our prehistoric ancestors, these events may have been less remarkable, except for the spectacular aurora show that emerged at unusually low latitudes. But in modern times, the CME from the super-flare poses a serious threat to us. They can disable satellites, collapse GPS systems, and disrupt global communications. The grid can be overloaded and take months to rebuild. Mobile phones, laptops and other electronic devices will survive, but many will be limited by inadequate functional telecommunications facilities. Modern civilization had already experienced these consequences in 1989, when a sizable CME brushed across the globe and triggered a blackout in the US province of Quebec.
We've come a long way in getting to know the Sun more deeply and its activities, but the hyperflare's still an open field. Observations that are expected to help us better understand solar activity include the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter Radio Telescope (ALMA) at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, and the National Academy of Sciences' network of new solar telescopes around the world, such as full-field, continuous observing space observatories. These efforts allow us to understand how the magnetic field in the corona is formed and whether there is some signal that can be before the superflare**. If we can detect solar storms a few days in advance, grid and satellite operators can be prepared to mitigate potential damage.
Bleakof the sun
But even if we can solve the problem of asteroids and solar flares, the Earth will still face the end of the next billion years. Even if the Earth does not disappear next week, the gradual death of the Sun will be the ultimate fate of the Earth and other planets.
Now, the sun is such a powerful nuclear fusion reactor that it burns huge amounts of hydrogen every second, converting it into helium and releasing the equivalent of 100 million nuclear power plants. However, the fuel for this reaction is limited, and when the hydrogen in the center of the sun is depleted, it will begin to convert helium into a heavier element, causing temperatures to rise, with devastating effects on the existence of life on Earth.
In the process, the Sun will turn into a red giant, expand several times its current size, and eventually swallow the Earth. It's not a sudden process, and our planet doesn't turn into a fireball in the blink of an eye. Instead, over time, the sun will become brighter and hotter, eventually causing the Earth's water vapor to evaporate, the atmosphere to disappear, and eventually to melt the earth's crust.
Even before that, life on Earth will become extinct due to the sharp rise in temperature. This may happen billions of years from now, but for us, it's just another form of the end of the earth. We may have seen the light in the distance, but it could also be the complete destruction of the planet.