Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads.
Speaker 2: Today, we're doing something a little different. We are staring
directly into the terrifying physics of planetary failure, just examining
the absolute limits of what the universe can throw at us.
Speaker 1: That's right. Our mission today is to go through a
stack of worst case scenarios, detailing the top ways the
world could go spectacularly immediately wrong.
Speaker 2: And we're not just you know, listing disasters.
Speaker 1: Now, we are extracting the science behind the catastrophe, really
analyzing the sheer scale and the frankly terrifying velocity of
these events.
Speaker 2: And while these scenarios are hypothetical, a kind of cosmic
hit list for twenty twenty six, if you will, the
underlying science.
Speaker 1: Is anything, but it's all real.
Speaker 2: It's all real. We're looking at measurable forces, kinetic energy,
orbital mechanics, planetary chemistry, the sheer density of astronomical objects.
It's an intense exercise in understanding not just how fragile
Earth is, but also it's surprising resilience in some cases.
Speaker 1: And for you listening, this is your shortcut to being
well informed about the ultimate threats. We're going from rogue
comets that are literally older than our Sun, all the
way to the complete sudden disappearance of the air we breathe.
Speaker 2: It's a lot to process, it is.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack this and let's start with the fastest,
most violent threats, the speed demons that come howling in
from outside our own solar system.
Speaker 2: It's a sobering thought, isn't it that not all planet
killers originate in our neighborhood. For well, for millennia, astronomers
only dealt with objects bound by the Sun's gravity.
Speaker 1: Right, things from the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt are.
Speaker 2: Stuff exactly our stuff. Now we have to account for
the astounding reality of interstellar objects or ISOs.
Speaker 1: I find the whole idea of ISOs just fascinating. They're
essentially galacta kitchhikers, right. They get flung out of their
own systems by gravitational chaos, and then they just travel
through the void for what millions.
Speaker 2: Of years billions sometimes until they briefly slice through our domain.
Speaker 1: And for decades they were just theoretical. It was just
an idea that all changed with our first confirmed visitor.
Speaker 2: That would be one I twenty seventeen U, one which
we all know.
Speaker 1: As um oh moa such a great name.
Speaker 2: It's perfect. The Hawaiian name means a messenger from Afar,
arriving first. It really captures the surprise and the significance
of its arrival. It was truly the first confirmed object
we knew was not born here.
Speaker 1: Okay, so how did we know that so definitively? I mean,
what was the dead giveaway?
Speaker 2: It all came down to speed, pure and simple. Most
comets and asteroids that are local to us, they're moving
at a pretty constrained velocity, maybe around twenty kilometers per second.
Speaker 1: Which is still incredibly fast, Oh.
Speaker 2: Incredibly fast. Yeah, But Umua was traveling at speed so
far above that. We're talking at eighty seven kilometers per
second up on leaving the Solar System. That's fifty four
miles a second, a speed so high that it couldn't
possibly be gravitationally bound to our son. That non local velocity.
That was the immediate tip off. It was just visiting.
Speaker 1: But the speed was just the beginning of a mystery,
wasn't it, Because then there was the shape.
Speaker 2: The shape, Yes, it was unlike anything else we routinely see.
Astronomers started describing it as cigar shaped or you know, cylindrical.
Speaker 1: Hot dog, a cosmic hot dog, a.
Speaker 2: Cosmic hot dog exactly, an object that was estimated to
be ten times longer than it was wide. That geometry
is completely atypical compared to the you know, lumpy potato
shaped rocks and ice chunks that we see all the time.
Speaker 1: So you have this weird shape. Plus something else happened
that caused this huge flurry of speculation, and that was
its acceleration.
Speaker 2: Right as Umwa Mus sped past the Sun. It didn't
slow down exactly as Newton's laws predicted. It sped up
just a little, but more than gravity alone could explain.
Speaker 1: And that's where the alien theories started.
Speaker 2: That's where the initial highly dramatic alien hypothesis came from.
Some scientists seriously speculated that this acceleration must be artificial,
like it had engines, or a light sale or solar
sale functioning as a massive thin propulsion system or some
kind of probe. It seemed incredible that our very first
can firmed visitor from beyond might be an engineered craft.
Speaker 1: It really speaks to the human psyche though face, with
something truly new that our physics can't immediately explain. We
just leaped to the most spectacular conclusion possible, of course.
Speaker 2: But after a lot of rigorous scientific scrutiny, the consensus
shifted back toward a natural explanation.
Speaker 1: A less exciting one, but probably more likely.
Speaker 2: Well, it's still pretty exciting. The scientific conclusion confirms it's
almost certainly a comet, but one that uses a very
subtle form of propulsion we rarely get to see. The
acceleration was likely due to hydrogen outgassing.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what does that mean?
Speaker 2: Because onlya had been tumbling through the incredibly cold interstellar
void for millions, maybe billions of years, a layer of
frozen molecular hydrogen likely built up just beneath its surface.
Speaker 1: And as it got close to our sun, that hydrogen
it heated up and vaporized.
Speaker 2: Precisely, that vaporization that outgassing, It acted like a tiny
invisible thruster, pushing it just enough to account for that
extra acceleration.
Speaker 1: And that would also explain why we never saw tail,
which is what you expect from a comet, exactly.
Speaker 2: The comets we usually see outgas things like water or
carbon monoxide ice, which reflects sunlight and create that big
visible coma and tail Oumua's propulsion was silent and nearly invisible.
It was an enigma, but ultimately a natural one.
Speaker 1: So that was the strange fast messenger. But now let's
talk about the real planetbuster in this scenario, the one
that missed us by the smallest of cosmic margins, Comet
three ie at.
Speaker 2: Lists Atlas, the third ISO discovered logged in twenty twenty five.
This one introduced a completely different level of well, frankly
pure terror as a threat.
Speaker 1: Model ooh Mua was small and weird, Atlas was big.
Speaker 2: Atlas was much larger, some estimates say up to five
point six kilometers wide. And it appears to be incredibly ancient.
Speaker 1: And we have to just pause on that for a second.
The age of this thing, our entire Solar system Earth included,
is about four point five.
Speaker 2: Billion years years old and three iatlis.
Speaker 1: The sources suggest it originated in the Milky Ways thick
disc of stars and could be as old as seven
billion years So.
Speaker 2: It's billions of years older than our Sun.
Speaker 1: Think about that, A visitor that predates the Sun arriving
from the you know, the ultraviolent primeval chaos of the
early galaxy. It's basically a fossil from the Milky Ways creation.
Speaker 2: And that extreme age is key to its weird composition.
Scientists detected high levels of puzzling nickel and iron in
the gases around it, a metal rich signature that's highly unusual.
Speaker 1: But it still looked like a comet, right it had
a tail it did.
Speaker 2: It displayed classic cometary features, a visible coma and tail
formed by outgassing water and carbon dioxide ice, a very
strange mix.
Speaker 1: So it's metal rich CO two rich, incredibly old, and
it missed.
Speaker 2: Us, thankfully, Yes, mercifully. Its closest pass was in December
twenty twenty five, a distance of about two hundred and
seventy million.
Speaker 3: Kilometers, which sounds like a lot.
Speaker 2: It is, but in cosmic terms, that was near miss.
It passed within Mars's orbit, missing Mars by a mere
twenty eight million kilometers. We are talking about the difference
of a few degrees of trajectory separating Earth from just
utter annihilation.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go there. Let's step into the hypothetical scenario.
What if three I Atlas had been on a collision course.
The benchmark for this stuff is always the chicksalub asteroid,
the one that killed the dinosaurs.
Speaker 2: Right, chicks Alub was estimated to be around ten kilometers wide.
A massive piece of rock three atlas is roughly half
that size at its maximum estimate maybe five point six kilometers.
Speaker 1: So you'd think, okay, half the size, half the damage.
Speaker 2: That would be the logical assumption. But it assumes they're
moving at the same speed.
Speaker 1: And this is where the terror of an ISO really
comes into play. The physics of kinetic energy the energy
of motion.
Speaker 2: The equation is E equals one half envy squared, velocity
is squared. That means if you double the velocity, you
quadruple the energy.
Speaker 1: And chicks a Lub was a local object, so it
was moving at what twenty kilometers a second roughly, yes.
Speaker 2: But three ialyis being in interstellar traveler was moving three
times faster, sixty one kilometers per second.
Speaker 1: Three times faster. So that's nine times the energy just
from the speed.
Speaker 2: Well, you have a smaller object, but because the velocity
is so high, the impact would strike Earth with four
and a half times the kinetic energy of the chiseel of.
Speaker 1: Impact, four and a half times the dinosaur killer exactly.
Speaker 2: That is a true difference between a local planet killer
and an interstellar one.
Speaker 1: That kind of energy releases just it's beyond human comprehension.
It would be like detonating hundreds of millions of mega
tons of TNT all at once.
Speaker 2: The impact would punch through the atmosphere and barely more
than a second, just vaporizing rock instantly, and.
Speaker 1: The immediate destruction. The sources detail this pretty graphically.
Speaker 2: Yes, the impact point would become a superheated core of plasma.
The initial shock wave would generate super hurricane winds of
a thousand kilometers per hour.
Speaker 1: One thousand kilometers an hour. That's what does that even do?
Speaker 2: It flattens everything, every tree, every building, every life and
form for thousands of kilometers wiped clean.
Speaker 1: And that's before we even get to what happens next.
The material launched into the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Trillions of tons of molten material, vaporized rock magma would
be launched high above the atmosphere. As this stuff ranged
back down across the globe, the entire planet would just
erupt into firestorms. The heat pulse alone would incinerate every
exposed living thing.
Speaker 1: At the same time, the seismic consequences would be just
as bad overwhelming.
Speaker 2: That impact energy would propagate through the planet, causing worldwide
earthquakes that register beyond anything on the conventional Richter scale.
Tectonic plates would shift, triggering massive global volcanic.
Speaker 1: Eruptions, and the tsunamis.
Speaker 2: Gigantic flooding continents hundreds of kilometers inland. It's a full
planetary reset.
Speaker 1: But if you somehow miraculously survived the firestorms, the tsunamis,
and the global convulsion, the long term catastrophe would seal
your fate. The impact winter, a multi year, maybe even
decade long winter.
Speaker 2: All that debris cast into the atmosphere soot, water, vapor,
pulverized rock. It would form a dense, persistent cloud layer.
It would block sunlight for years.
Speaker 1: So photosynthesis would just stop.
Speaker 2: It would hault entirely. Yeah, the global food chain collapses.
On top of that. The atmospheric debris would combine with
water vapor and fall back down as highly corrosive acid rain,
poisoning fresh water systems and frying any surviving plants.
Speaker 1: It's a double layered extinction. The blast kills the unprepared,
and then the cold and darkness starved the survivors.
Speaker 2: But there's a final terrifying chapter in this atlas an area.
We have to remember what it was made of. It
was rich in carbon dioxide.
Speaker 1: Ice, right the CO two.
Speaker 2: Upon impact, all that CO two ice would vaporize instantly,
released into the atmosphere with all the rock and water.
So once the sky is finally cleared and the impact
winter started.
Speaker 1: To subside, all that CO two would still be there.
A massive greenhouse gas.
Speaker 2: Trap, a colossal trap. So you shift from a deep
global nuclear winter freeze to a long scorching recover, a
runaway greenhouse.
Speaker 1: Effect, a total environmental reversal. The few survivors who managed
to cling on through the winter would then face a
hyper scorching planet. It's a complete cycle of destruction.
Speaker 2: The key takeaway here for you is that the true
terror of these interstellar objects isn't their size. It's the
compounding effect of velocity, turning a smaller object into an
existential threat far greater than a local one. We really
dodged a seven billion year old bullet with that one,
all right.
Speaker 1: So if the last segment was about the speed of
cosmic objects, this one is about the slow, but ultimately
catastrophic creep of things on our own planet. We're shifting
focus from the void to a colossal ice mass sitting
right here.
Speaker 2: We're talking about the Thwaits Glacier.
Speaker 1: In West Antarctica. Its nickname is not comforting.
Speaker 2: No, it's aptly called the doomsday glacier. It's an enormous
slab of ice, roughly the size of Florida, holding an
estimated twenty five million cubic kilometers of ice, and the.
Speaker 1: Source is called it a loaded trap, which I think
is a fitting description.
Speaker 2: It's very fitting because of its structure. It rests on
a bedrock slope that dips inward toward the continent. That
makes it uniquely unstable and very vulnerable to warm ocean
water getting underneath it.
Speaker 1: And it's already melting. It's not a future problem, it's
a now problem exactly.
Speaker 2: It currently sheds fifty billion tons of icy year that
contributes a measurable four percent to global sea level rise today.
Speaker 1: But what's the doomsday scenario? What happens if this whole
colossal structure gives way suddenly?
Speaker 2: The sources outline the immediate crisis if th Waits were
to melt completely, that event, just to weights alone, would
cause global sea levels to rise by sixty.
Speaker 1: Centimeters, so about two feet instantly.
Speaker 2: Now two feet might not sound like complete global annihilation,
but it is enough to make major low lying coastal
cities San Francisco, Miami, New Orleans, huge parts of Bangladesh
instantly uninhabitable.
Speaker 1: You'd trigger the largest forced migration in human history overnight.
Speaker 2: An overwhelming strain on global infrastructure. But that's sixty centime
is just the appetizer.
Speaker 1: Because SWAITES is like a cork in a bottle.
Speaker 2: It's the cork holding back the rest of the West
Antarctic ice sheet. And if we consider the cascading effect
of total Antarctic ice loss, well that's the seventy meter catastrophe.
Speaker 1: Seventy meters, that's over two hundred feet.
Speaker 2: Antarctica holds ninety percent of the planet's ice. If that
entire twenty five million cubic kilometers of ice surges into
the oceans, sea levels would rise by that shocking seventy meters.
Speaker 1: The scale of that is just it's unimaginable.
Speaker 2: It really is. Forty percent of the world's population, over
three billion people live in coastal regions that would be
permanently submerged global cities like London, Shanghai, Mumbai, they would
just cease to exist. They'd become shallow seas.
Speaker 1: And you'd had the contamination issue, right, all that salt
water getting into the underground aquifers, poisoning freshwater sources, a.
Speaker 2: Global crisis over drinking water that would affect even elevated
inland communities.
Speaker 1: But this is where we get into some really bizarre physics,
the gravitational paradise.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this for the listener. Yeah, because this
is strange. Sea levels don't rise.
Speaker 1: Uniformly, not when you're dealing with an object as massive
as the Antarctic ice sheet, which weighs twenty four billion megatons.
So how does its weight change the local sea level?
Speaker 2: Think of it this way. That immense weight creates its
own gravitational poll. It's a tiny local gravity well, and
it's drawing the surrounding seawater toward the ice mass. It's
like how the moon creates tides, but constant.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the ice is literally holding the water close
to it.
Speaker 2: Exactly when the ice sheet disappears, that local gravitational pole vanishes.
Speaker 1: Instantly and the water that was being held there is
suddenly released and it flows away.
Speaker 2: It flows away to find a new equilibrium across the planet.
So while distant cities like New York and Rotterdam flood catastrophically,
the sea level right near Antarctica would actually fall.
Speaker 1: That's so counterintuitive.
Speaker 2: It's a strange local counter effect of mass loss amidst
the global deluge. It's a good reminder that the mass
and gravity are the ultimate drivers here, not just volume.
Speaker 1: And beyond the water itself, the melt exposes hidden horrors.
We're not just releasing water, We're releasing millions of years
of biological history locked in the ice in the permafrost.
Speaker 2: The thawing permafrost is a terrifying dual biological threat. You
have ancient bacteria and ancient viruses.
Speaker 1: The bacteria are a concern because of antibiotic resistance right right.
Speaker 2: The sources raise concerns about bacteria that have evolved traits
dangerous to us, including some strains linked to diseases like
cystic fibrosis. But the real issue is that these microbes,
isolated for millennia, could transfer resistance genes to modern bacteria.
Speaker 1: So you could suddenly face a global pandemic where common
infections are completely untreatable. That's a nightmare scenario on top
of an environmental catastrophe.
Speaker 2: And then there's the virus threat. Scientists that document a
DNA viruses that have been frozen for over forty thousand years,
perfectly preserved in the permafrost. As the ground thaws, these viruses,
potentially still viable.
Speaker 1: Get released, a new ancient global pandemic.
Speaker 2: It's a very real biological hazard. But the meltdown also
triggers a massive global climate chain reaction, and this enters
on the ocean circulatory.
Speaker 1: System, the oceanic conveyor belt, the Gulf Stream exactly.
Speaker 2: That influx of cold, fresh melt water directly disrupts it.
The conveyor belt is critical because it transports warm, salty
water from the equator up to the northern latitudes, keeping
places like Europe much warmer than they would otherwise be.
Speaker 1: And the freshwater being less dense. It just sits on
top like a cap and stops the whole system.
Speaker 2: That's the problem. It jams the entire heat transport mechanism.
It causes a radical shift in climate. And this is
where the paradox.
Speaker 3: Comes in, because global warming could cause an ice age,
it could while the melting causes global sea level rise,
The disruption of the Gulf Stream could trigger a rapid
ice age in North America and Western Europe, turning productive
regions into frigid wastelands in a single decade.
Speaker 1: It also starves the ocean.
Speaker 2: The conveyer built doesn't just move heat, it moves nutrients.
It brings nutrient rich water up from the deep ocean floor,
which is vital for phytoplankton, the foundation of the entire
ocean food chain. Less circulation means massive ecosystem collapse.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's briefly touch on the ultimate terrestrial disruption,
the magnitude twenty earthquake.
Speaker 2: Just as a benchmark, a magnitude twenty is a theoretical event.
Geologists consider anything over a ten physically impossible from plate tectonics,
because the earth crust just isn't rigid enough to store
that much energy.
Speaker 1: So to get to a twenty you need an outside force.
Speaker 2: You need something like that three I atless impact we
were just talking about. The energy release would cause a
five full minute convulsion of the ground, ripping continents apart,
initiating global tsunamis and totally transforming Earth's geography.
Speaker 1: It's a vivid picture of planetary instability.
Speaker 2: But it reminds us that while Earth's systems are fragile,
ice sheets melt, current stall, the true immediate existential threats
the ones that can crack the whole planet. They come
from the overwhelming energy of the cosmos.
Speaker 1: We've covered high speed impacts and slow terrestrial collapse. Now
let's explore threats that operate on the scale of gravity itself.
Scenarios that could destabilize our orbit, physically stretch the planet,
or just erase it.
Speaker 2: We are delving into the theoretical black.
Speaker 1: Hole fly by, and what's so unsettling about black holes
is the way their size their event horizon can be
so deceptive compared to their mass.
Speaker 2: Right, we need to distinguish between different classes of black
holes and the specific way each one would annihilate our planet,
because even a near miss can instantly ruin our year.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the smallest hypothetical nightmare, a primordial black hole,
one with the exact mass of Earth.
Speaker 2: Okay, so, despite having the gravity of an entire planet,
this black hole would have an event horizon of just
under two centimeters. It's smaller than a coin. Wow. But
if this tiny hyper dense object were to fly by,
its concentrated gravity would exert mass massive tidal forces.
Speaker 1: And tidal forces are differential gravity. Right, the near side
of the Earth gets pulled harder than the far side.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and that strain would rip the crust, triggering massive tsunamis,
worldwide earthquakes, and volcanic chaos. But the worst impact would
be orbital.
Speaker 1: It would just yank us out of place, like.
Speaker 2: A massive gravitational slingshot. It would instantaneously yank Earth out
of its current life sustaining orbit would either be thrown
inward toward the Sun to be fried, or flung outward
to the asteroid belt for a deep freeze. Either way,
life ends okay.
Speaker 1: Moving up the scale, a stellar mass black hole born
from a giant star, Let's say one that's ten times
the mass of our Sun. It would be about fifty
nine kilometers wide.
Speaker 2: This is the equivalent of a gravitational bullet. If one
were detected entering the outer edge of our solar system
the Kuiper Belt, astronomers would have only five and a
half hours until total chaos.
Speaker 1: Five and a half hours, what would The.
Speaker 2: First signs be gravitational anomalies near Jupiter and Mars planets
suddenly veering off corres, maybe even being torn apart. For Earth,
it would start with a subtle distortion of the night
sky from gravitational lensing, the gravity bending the light around it.
Speaker 1: And then almost instantly, the tidal forces would hit.
Speaker 2: The planet would crack across continents, violent gravity driven tides
washing across the land, global earthquakes erupting all at once.
A flyby is damaging enough, but a direct hit is
one of the most terrifying instantaneous endings imaginable.
Speaker 1: A direct hit from this thing would just pierce the
planet like a needle.
Speaker 2: It wouldn't even slow down. The mass is so immense
and the velocity so high. It would rip straight through
the crust the mantle of the core.
Speaker 1: And how long would that take?
Speaker 2: The timeline is chilling, Just point zero zero four seconds
later it emerges on the other side. The black hole
just leaves, and what's left behind a tunnel of superheated
collapsing matter. The sudden removal of the core would cause
the planet to rapidly implode and rupture. The shock waves
would ignite the atmosphere, boil the oceans, and leave Earth
fundamentally to formed hemorrhaging into space.
Speaker 1: The integrity of the planet would just be gone completely.
Speaker 2: Now, let's consider the next step up, an intermediate mass
black hole, maybe a thousand times the mass of the Sun,
about half the size of Earth itself.
Speaker 1: With this one, a direct hit isn't a piercing it's
an erasure.
Speaker 2: It wouldn't hit Earth like a rock. It would simply
replace this space where Earth used to be. The moment
the planet approached the event horizon, it would be subjected
to those immense tidal forces spaghetification, instant spaghetification, the entire
core gone in an instant, and Earth would just collapse
inward under its own residual gravity.
Speaker 1: And finally, the true celestial monster, Phoenix a star, a
supermassive black hole with a mass of one hundred billion suns.
Speaker 2: The scale of this justifies visualization. Its event horizon is
one hundred times wider than Pluto's entire.
Speaker 1: Orbit, So even before this thing reaches the Kuiper Belt,
its gravity would be warping the fabric of space.
Speaker 2: Neptune and Uranus would start to drest the Sun's hold
on the entire Solar's and would be compromised.
Speaker 1: And at its closest pass, its gravity would overpower the suns.
Speaker 2: Even if just for a few seconds. And this is
where the truly strange effects happen. For that fleeting moment,
the side of Earth facing the black hole would experience
impossible continent high tides.
Speaker 1: But also everything on Earth would feel weightless for a second.
Speaker 2: A momentary sense of free fall. Yes, as the powerful
localized poll temporarily cancels out the planet's own gravity.
Speaker 1: It sounds almost whimsical, but it quickly ends.
Speaker 2: The momentary tidal strain would cause global earthquakes beyond measurement,
shattering the crust, and as the black hole races on
it permanently shatters the Solar System's orbital balance. Earth would
be violently flung out into the.
Speaker 1: Void, ejected to become a rogue planet, drifting toward an
inevitable deep preeze.
Speaker 2: And that brings us to rogue planets themselves, objects not
tied to a star, ejected from their own systems. There
are billions of them in the Milky Way alone.
Speaker 1: A Jupiter sized rogue flying by would be catastrophic. The
gravity would cause massive tidal waves, deep cracking of the
Earth's surface, widespread volcanic eruptions.
Speaker 2: It's a planet size gravitational bomb. Passing by.
Speaker 1: Even a smaller ones, say a mercury sized rogue, would
do immense damage if it passed close enough.
Speaker 2: If it passed at half the distance of our own moon,
you'd have tides eight times higher than today and land
strain causing intense earthquakes and volcanoes. Globally, the whole planet
would feel like it was being squeezed in a colossal
invisible vice.
Speaker 1: And the scenario of two equally massive earths passing close
by that one is almost poetically devastating.
Speaker 2: A brief zero gravity environment, you'd lose the atmosphere and
then an eventual slow motion collision.
Speaker 1: But the source material offer one really captivating whimsical possibility,
the horseshoe orbit.
Speaker 2: This is a real thing. We see it with Saturn's
moons Janus and Epimetheus. Two bodies share the same orbit
without colliding. They continually approach each other then.
Speaker 1: Retreat, So in this fantasy scenario two earths, they would
just forever chase each other.
Speaker 2: It could lead to orbital dynamics where one side of
the planet might experience perpetual summer. It's a marvelous thought experiment,
a travel destination fantasy born from catastrophe.
Speaker 1: But regardless of the size of the rogue, the greatest
hazard is always ejection.
Speaker 2: Always a rogue planet passes by imparts just enough momentum
and shoves Earth out of its orbit entirely. That means
either rapid deep freezing in the blackness of deep space
or incinerating closer to the Sun. The orbital order of
our Solar system is just exquisitely fragile.
Speaker 1: We've explored destruction on astronomical and planetary scales. Now let's
shift to a purely physics based threat that shows how
mass combined with extreme speed can weaponize even the most
innocuous object.
Speaker 2: A tiny needle traveling at near light speed.
Speaker 1: First, we have to lay out the physics barrier here.
Einstein's theory of relativity says achieving one hundred percent light
speed is impossible.
Speaker 2: Right as an object accelerates, its relativistic mass increases, so
you'd need an infinite amount of energy to reach that
final speed limit.
Speaker 1: So for this scenario, we have to assume a highly
advanced alien civilization somehow gets around this, achieving ninety nine
point nine percent of the speed of light.
Speaker 2: At that speed, the kinetic energy is astronomical. Again, it's
equals one half mv squared. Since velocity is squared, its
contribution is exponential at ninety nine point nine percent c.
Even the tiny needle carries kinetic energy equivalent to over
one hundred times of one megaton nuclear bomb.
Speaker 1: It turns a piece of metal into the ultimate weapon
of physics.
Speaker 2: Pretty much.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's run the first impact scenario. It lands in
a densely populated area, say Central Park in New York.
Speaker 2: The moment it hits the atmosphere, the friction and heat
would be so immense that the air itself would turn
into plasma, creating a blinding incandescent trail, and the impact
instantaneous and apocalyptic. The energy release woul vaporize everything nearby, rock, soil, water.
The resulting fireball and shockwave would be massive enough to
flatten buildings and rock nearby states.
Speaker 1: It would register as an earthquake.
Speaker 2: Locally, it would register as a seven point three magnitude
Richter scale quake, collapsing high rise buildings across the city.
Speaker 1: Now, I often wonder about this. What if it plunged
into the ocean? What would happen? Then?
Speaker 2: It would be a spectacular event, no doubt. The explosion
would displace a colossal amount of water, creating a gigantic
plume similar to the one scene during the nineteen forty
six Baker nuclear test, would shot water two kilometers into
the sky.
Speaker 1: So massive explosion of water, does that mean a gigantic
world ending tsunami follows?
Speaker 2: Counterintuitively, no, or at least not the kind of tsunami
we saw in two thousand and four.
Speaker 1: Okay, explain that difference. Why wouldn't one hundred megaton explosion
create a massive wave?
Speaker 2: Megasunamis require geological shifts, a large vertical displacement of the
seabed over a vast area, usually from underwater earthquakes or
massive landslides. Those processes transfer energy efficiently through the entire
column of water.
Speaker 1: Whereas a single point kinetic explosion a single.
Speaker 2: Point explosion, even one this powerful, creates intense localized pressure
and a huge splash. The energy is dissipated mostly as heat, steam,
and localized shockwaves, not a sustained broad geological movement. Mother
Nature is still far more efficient and moving water across continents.
Speaker 1: That's a tiny shred of comfort. However, there's one location
where this needle strike would guarantee a global extinction event, a.
Speaker 2: Direct hit on an active supervolcano.
Speaker 1: This is the ultimate purely physics driven extinction.
Speaker 2: The needle strike would breach the Earth's crust, releasing all
the pent up magma pressure within a massive volcanic system.
The impact would trigger a series of cataclysmic mass volcanic
eruptions globally.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about an event on the scale of
the Toba eruptions seventy four thousand years ago, which nearly
wiped out humanity.
Speaker 2: In this hypervelocity scenario, volcanic ash and sulfur dioxide would
be thrown miles high into the atmosphere, creating a persistent
global stratospheric aerosol layer that would linger for ten years
or more, blocking the.
Speaker 1: Sun, which brings us back to that decade long nuclear winter.
Global temperatures plummet, crops fail, global starvation would be the
ultimate killer.
Speaker 2: The only grim solace in this whole scenario is the
personal takeaway. If you were in the path of that needle,
you'd be instantly incinerated.
Speaker 1: Death would be instantaneous and painless.
Speaker 2: You would not witness the agonizing aftermath. It's perhaps the
most immediate total obliteration scenario we've covered.
Speaker 1: We've looked at external and physical threats. Now, let's examine
the ultimate internal collapse, the sudden disappearance of the air
we breathe. A scenario where Earth starts losing one percent
of its atmospheric oxygen every second.
Speaker 2: And this is terrifying precisely because of its speed. It's
not a slow change that allows for adaptation. This is
an immediate physiological and industrial crisis.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's track the timeline. Thirty seconds in twenty six
percent of our oxygen is gone, leaving a sixteen percent concentration.
Speaker 2: Physiologically, you would feel extreme exhaustion, a desperate gasping for air,
like sudden high altitude sickness. But the immediate systemic catastrophe
is industrial combustion engines. They need about twenty one percent
oxygen to function. At sixteen percent, cars stall, heavy machinery
grinds to a halt, and most critically, planes fall out
of the sky. The world's transportation system just stops dead.
Speaker 1: And since less oxygen means less fire. Electrical grids would
fail as fossil fuel power plants sputter and die.
Speaker 2: Hospitals would face an immediate crisis. People with respiratory and
cardiovascular issues would die instantly as their hearts fail trying
to oxygenate the body.
Speaker 1: Now, let's fast forward to the one minute mark. Fifty
percent of the oxygen is gone, leaving an eleven percent concentration.
Speaker 2: This induces severe hypoxia, universal gasping, short shallow breaths, poor judgment, staggering.
Mass chaos erupts if people realize the air itself is.
Speaker 1: Toxic and what's happening in the oceans.
Speaker 2: The drop in atmosphere pressure causes the oceans to begin degassing,
releasing dissolved gases, including oxygen. This starts killing marine life versly,
creating mass.
Speaker 1: Die offs, and at the same time, the ozone layer,
which is made of oxygen, begins to deplete rapidly.
Speaker 2: Exposing any potential survivors to harmful uv ras, though few
would live long enough for that to matter.
Speaker 1: By the two minute mark, seventy percent of the oxygen
is gone, a mere six percent concentration is left.
Speaker 2: At this point, you have mass fainting unconsciousness, faces turn
ash colored.
Speaker 1: But the sources also explore the absolute extreme, the ultimate
wipeout scenario, not just losing the atmosphere, but the chemical
removal of all oxygen molecules from Earth.
Speaker 2: This collapses life in chemistry instantaneously. Because oxygen is the
chemical backbone of the entire planet.
Speaker 1: The human body is sixty five percent oxygen.
Speaker 2: Every molecule, from water H two oz to the silicon
oxides in the Earth's crust depends on those oxygen bonds.
Without them, water instantly becomes a volatile sea of hydrogen.
Buildings held together by oxygen compounds would crumble to dust.
Speaker 1: The Earth's crust would literally fall apart, that all living
things would become a pulpy molecular mess as the bonds
and our organic structures just fail.
Speaker 2: Eight minutes after this chemical catastrophe starts, ninety nine percent
of all oxygen is gone. The planet is chemically destroyed.
There's no coming back from that.
Speaker 1: But in the slightly less horrific scenario where only the
atmosphere disappears, there are a handful of biological survival specialists.
Speaker 2: The infamous cockroach, which can survive up to forty minutes
without oxygen. More impressively, the naked mole rat can survive
up to eighteen minutes using anaerobic metabolism.
Speaker 1: And then there are the true specialists, facultative anaerobes.
Speaker 2: These are organisms like yeasts, some bacteria, bristleworms, things that
can switch their metabolic process from oxygen respiration to fermentation.
These would be the key to life's potential re evolution.
Speaker 1: But even if life could re evolve, they're facing a
non negotiable time constraint. The Sun is aging in a.
Speaker 2: Mere six hundred million years, its luminosity will increase by
six percent, raising temperatures high enough to trigger a runaway
greenhouse effect and eventually evaporate the oceans. Life would have
to adapt all over again.
Speaker 1: Finally, let's turn to the last great systemic threat, the
loss of our orbital stability, specifically the Moon colliding with Earth.
This is a scenario where the Moon starts heading toward
us over the course of a year.
Speaker 2: The clock starts ticking about three hundred days out when
the Moon is two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers away.
Even at this distance, the tidal forces would increase dramatically
high tides rising up to five meters, instantly flooding coastal cities.
Speaker 1: By two hundred days, the tides are reaching staggering heights
of thirty meters. Coastal infrastructure collapses completely, and at the
same time, the gravitational pull is putting an unimaginable strain
on Earth's crust.
Speaker 2: That increased tidal force on the mantle leads to worldwide
earthquakes and hypervolcanic eruptions. The Pacific Ring of Fire would
become intensely active, But.
Speaker 1: The sources offer a final astonishing twist that avoids a
total hard collision, the Roch limit. Explain the roach limit.
Speaker 2: It's the point where the tidal force is exerted by
a massive body, In this case, Earth overcome the self
gravity holding a smaller body, the Moon together. For us,
that limit is about eighteen thousand kilometers away. Before the
Moon can hit us, Earth's gravity fights.
Speaker 1: Back, so the Moon would rupture and disintegrate.
Speaker 2: You'd be shattered into a colossal ring of debris, from
tiny dust particles to asteroid sized rocks. We'd get a
stunning chaotic ring system, just like Saturn.
Speaker 1: But the consequences of that beautiful ring would be devastating.
Speaker 2: First, frequent intense meteor showers of moon debris would rain
down everywhere. Second, the debris would block out significant sunlight,
affecting photosynthesis and causing immediate global cooling, maybe an eight
degree celsius drop, and.
Speaker 1: All our communication systems would be gone.
Speaker 2: Satellites would be pulverized by the thousands of rocks in
the ring, no GPS, no Internet, nothing.
Speaker 1: And finally, space travel would end completely.
Speaker 2: The Ring system would be an impenetrable high velocity barrier.
Humanity would be permanently grounded, facing a frozen, dark planet
with destroyed infrastructure, a true orbital cage.
Speaker 1: We have covered an astonishing breath of catastrophe today, the
high velocity punch of a seven billion year old comet,
the agonizing collapse of our atmosphere, the instantaneous erasure by
a black hole, and the orbital locked down from a
shattered Moon.
Speaker 2: These scenarios, while designed to push the limits of fear,
they provide incredible insight into the physics that governs our universe.
We see the greatest threats involve the quadratic increase of
energy with velocity, the delicate balance of planetary chemistry, and
the overwhelming power of gravity.
Speaker 1: We can take a slight, almost perverse comfort in the
fact that the most extreme threats, like the light speed
needle or the chemical removal of oxygen, are either impossible
or highly improbable.
Speaker 2: But the underlying science, the rate of ice melt, the
effect of rogue objects, the kinetic energy of ISOs is
very real. Humanity has proven itself remarkably good at two things,
creating disasters and surviving them.
Speaker 1: So we want to leave you with one final, deeply
the unsettling thought experiment that draws on everything we've just discussed.
If you had to choose between two guaranteed scenarios for
the end of the world.
Speaker 2: Scenario A an instantaneous, painless obliteration like that point zero
zero four second black hole core collapse we described, he
simply ceased to exist before your brain could register it.
Speaker 1: Or Scenario B, a year long conscious countdown. You know
the end is coming from the slow creep of a
lunar collision or the certainty of a volcanic winter. It
allows you to prepare to say goodbye and to witness
the slow, agonizing collapse of civilization.
Speaker 2: Instant painless obliteration or the year long conscious countdown. What
is your stand on that choice.
Speaker 1: We want to know what you think. Let us know
in the comments below. Thank you for joining us for
this edition of Thrilling Threads.