5 Ways The Earth Could End Suddenly | Unveiled

5 Ways the Earth Could End Suddenly

It could be argued that human beings take Earth for granted; that we have a tendency to assume that because our planet has been here for billions of years, it’ll just continue to be here indefinitely. But we also know that nature can be unforgiving, and everything can go wrong in an instant.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re exploring five extraordinary ways that Earth could end suddenly.

We don’t often think about all of the volatile reactions happening inside of our planet during every second of every day… or the sheer number of perfect conditions that need to stay in balance for life, especially human life, to survive. For the sake of our not suffering a constant existential crisis, it’s not something we should overly worry about either. But, really, we are lucky to be here, because there are various things that are totally out of our control that could happen to stop us being here.

For all that we do know, we’re still near-incapable of accurately predicting earthquakes, for example, or hurricanes, or even astronomical disasters. Yes, we often can buy ourselves at least a little time before most of these events hit - by measuring nearby seismic activity or studying weather patterns, for instance - but we can’t with any degree of certainty say that any natural disaster will happen on any given day in the future.

Throughout the history of Earth, most species have learned this the hard way, particularly when it comes to worldwide mass extinction events. More than 99% of all organisms that have ever existed on this planet are now extinct… a lot of them thanks to various mass extinctions in the past, some of which killed more than three quarters of all species. Increasing numbers of scientists actually believe that we’re in the middle of another such extinction event right now; the Holocene event. Nevertheless, even with these massive, literally life-changing situations, whatever’s on Earth is again usually afforded some time - a few thousand years in some cases - for the changes on Earth to play out, and to at least try to adjust. What would be even worse, then, is if Earth somehow instantly ended. But, is that even possible?

Well, as resilient as planets are, there would be total devastation were one to collide with another one. Now, we’re not expecting the likes of Mars or Venus to turn on us anytime soon, but rogue planets are actually quite common in the universe. One Cornell University paper calculated that there could be twice as many of these wayward worlds in space than there are stars, while other studies predict hundreds or thousands more than even that. So, there’s an incredibly, incredibly faint possibility that one such planet could one day drift into our solar system. And, if that were to happen, there’d be an also extremely slim chance that it would cross paths with Earth. It’s not something that scientists are actually expecting to occur, but if it did, and if the rogue planet was big enough, and if it struck us at just the right point, then Earth would suddenly end - smashed into rocky remnants of what it once was.

In today’s world right now, we know there’s a rogue planet about eighty light years away from us that’s around six times as massive as Jupiter. It’s not thought to be heading this way, but say it did drift into our solar system and towards us, then, well, we’d have pretty much no defense against it! In general, rogue planets are a notoriously difficult science… Since they have no home star, there’s no light to illuminate them, making them difficult to see and track - and meaning that there could be many more out there! If one were to breach our particular corner of space, there is another potential outcome for Earth, though, one that thankfully wouldn’t result in a head-on collision and us being turned into dust… but, the alternative would be that the new planet disrupts our orbit enough to eject us out of the solar system entirely - turning Earth into a rogue planet itself! It’s a tough call as to which would be worse!

A much more mysterious way that Earth might meet its end, however, is inside of a black hole - a hypothetical scenario, but one which might be more relevant to real life than we’d care to think! Black holes are still one of the greatest unknowns in science - defying most of our current understanding of physics. We do know, though, that nothing can escape their pull, and if one were to show up close enough to the solar system… then the Earth, the sun and everything else would fall victim to it. Our planet would fall into the black hole, past the event horizon towards the singularity, physically disintegrating and spaghettifying as it goes.

But we’re safe because there aren’t any black holes near us, right? Well, yes… but also not necessarily. According to research published in May 2020, scientists using the La Silla Observatory in Chile have now discovered a black hole “only” 1,000 light years away from us - a virtual “next-door neighbour” in astronomical terms. Importantly, this particular black hole still isn’t close enough to cause us any problems, not by a long shot… but it’s also what’s been called a “dark” black hole, meaning it was only discovered thanks to irregular behaviours demonstrated by other stars around it - rather than by the usual method of observing an accretion disc. According to the team at La Silla, this could mean that there are others just like it, still waiting to be discovered, and potentially even closer to us. Which, if it ever turned out to be true, would not be good news!

That said, getting sucked into a black hole would still take some time; Earth’s unfortunate fate would be sealed instantly, but the actual process is drawn-out and not something that happens overnight. For out-of-nowhere, “one minute we’re here, the next we’re not” destruction, then, there’s vacuum decay. So the theory goes, there’s a chance the universe exists inside something called a false vacuum, an unstable state that could, under certain circumstances, change into a true vacuum state… which, frankly, would be disastrous. If we are in a false vacuum, and if even a small bubble of true vacuum (a kind of purer, more stable version of space) somehow gets inside of that, then we, Earth and everything else would inevitably and unavoidably be toast.

There are a number of things that could possibly happen, and none of them good; the fundamental forces holding everything together could up and vanish, all forms of matter could be destroyed, or the entire universe could experience a sudden gravitational collapse, killing all life instantly. What’s scariest of all, though, is that physicists think that if this did happen, it would just do so at random, at literally any given time - as the result of unpredictable quantum fluctuations. In essence, we’d all be here one moment, then gone in an instant, totally unaware as to what had happened (or what was about to happen). Talk about existential dread! If this worries you, though, rest easy knowing that Physicist Max Tegmark and Philosopher Nick Bostrom have calculated the chances of it (or anything remotely like it) actually happening at one per gigayear...so, very, very unlikely! It’s a frightening thought, but it’s probably not going to become a nightmarish reality!

So, vacuum decay is perhaps the ultimate in “all-destroying astronomical events which are totally out of our hands”, but that doesn’t mean that it’s beyond the realms of possibility for us to just plain destroy our planet all by ourselves. And we could do it quite quickly, too. Humans have experienced rapid technological growth on an unprecedented scale in recent centuries… and while this has brought about improvements, it also makes our continued existence more unstable than ever. Case in point; nuclear weapons. Albert Einstein reportedly said after witnessing the power of nuclear weapons, that he didn’t know what weapons World War III would be fought with, but that World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. He was essentially saying that another world war - a nuclear war - would bring about the end of civilization with its destructive power. As of 2020, nine different nations worldwide have access to nuclear weapons, and there are enough bombs between them all to blow up the entire world more than once.

To warn humanity about the precarious situation our civilization finds itself in, there’s the Doomsday Clock - an indicator of our global vulnerability, overseen by a group of scientists and Nobel laureates. While it also takes into account other threats to our existence - including, more recently, climate change - it was significantly moved to just two minutes from midnight back in 1953, after seeing the US test their first hydrogen bomb - a second-generation nuclear warhead. In January 2020, it was moved to just 100 seconds to midnight… but of all the things it considers could go wrong, nuclear war would be the most instantly devastating. And, while it is unlikely that multiple nuclear explosions could actually disintegrate the Earth itself, they would totally, probably irreparably, transform its atmosphere and environment - with some theories that a resulting nuclear winter would even block out the sun. It would be the end of life as we know it.

However, nature could yet beat humanity to the punch. Across history, volcanic eruptions have proven some of the deadliest natural disasters of all. We’re well aware of their threat, but we can’t usually do much to prevent them from happening. The problem seriously intensifies though when it comes to supervolcanoes. Supervolcanoes are those like Yellowstone in the US or Lake Toba in Indonesia, which have a Volcanic Explosivity Index of 8 - the highest possible rating. Were any one of these incredible volcanoes to blow, then the world would also be in for an incredibly tough, perhaps impossibly tough, time.

Everything within the immediate vicinity of a supervolcanic eruption would be incinerated, while everything for hundreds of miles around would be directly impacted. From there, it’s massive, choking, scorching ash clouds spreading across the global sky, again (according to some theories) with the potential to block out sunlight. Were the likes of Yellowstone to explode, we’re talking a long-lasting, total collapse of the food chain, at best. The Permian-Triassic extinction was potentially caused by such an eruption around 252 million years ago, and that killed about ninety percent of all life on Earth! As with nuclear war, it’s unlikely that a supervolcanic event would cause Earth to physically break apart, but it’s also unlikely that our planet would ever be the same again - with it having been forced through a series of massive and wide-reaching environmental changes.

Luckily, most of these scenarios - at least, the ones we can’t control - are extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon. Unluckily, though, if any of them did happen then humans (as hardy as we are) would certainly struggle to survive. Over its 4.5 billion years, Earth has proven extremely resilient, but even it could be rendered helpless in some scenarios… Nuclear war or a supervolcano; Earth as we know it would end suddenly, but the planet itself stays. With a planetary collision, the shape and structure of Earth could well change, as well as its place in (or out of) the solar system. Were a black hole to suddenly appear nearby, though, then our world would unavoidably disappear into it. And, as for vacuum decay, well, if that transpires then we’d simply be here one moment and gone the next. And those are five ways the Earth could end suddenly.