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DEATH BY A GAMMA RAY BURST?

Joe and Jill Biden came and went.  A lot of unanswered questions about the Lahaina Apocalypse.  A Star Advertiser article this morning about how this all started seems to exonerate Hawaiian Electric as the cause.  The number of deaths stayed steady at 115, with a thousand or so still missing.  A horrid thought is that most of them might forever be unidentified, for the fire was so sudden and hot that it was like an incinerator, and bones were turned to ashes, then scattered by the nearly hurricane speed winds, perhaps making it impossible to determine who is who and what is what. 

Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner group that revolted exactly two months ago, apparently was killed, and probably assassinated, in a plane crash near the town of Kuzhenkino today.  Putin strikes again.  Here is a list of who he has eliminated in suspicious ways.

Surely you will want to watch live from Milwaukee the first Republican presidential debate on Fox News today at 9PM EDT.  Trump will not be there, for he is so far ahead in polls that he can defy the party.  Tomorrow, he will be booked in Atlanta for his coup attempt.  There will be the usual counterpunches by CNN and MSNBC panels from 11 PM to 1 AM.

Every so often I re-look at the existential fate of humanity, and rank the most likely threats to our future existence.  

  • Nuclear war, a series of super volcanic eruptions, global warming, asteroid crash, the ultimate Andromeda Strain and AI have tended to be near the top, with, perhaps a Gamma Ray Burst as the most sudden and fatal.  

  • A couple of months ago, Science News provided their top ten list, with relevant films:
    • #10  alien invasion (The War of the Worlds)
    • #9    asteroid impact (Armageddon)
    • #8    bees all die (Bee Movie)
    • #7   artificial intelligence takeover (The Terminator, The Forbin Project)
    • #6    quantum computing (Sneakers)
    • #5    complexity's instability (The Butterfly Effect)
    • #4    social media (Don't Look Up)
    • #3    pandemics (I Am Legend)
    • #2    nuclear war (Dr. Strangelove)
    • #1    climate change (Princess Mononoke), or you read about my Venus Syndrome.
    • You know, this would make for a fine film series.
  • Wikipedia has an entry on Global Catastrophic Risk.  Two graphics.

Today I focus on something called Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB), a topic I posted on last year.  Some details:
  • A typical burst can produce as much energy as our sun will emit in its entire 10-billion-year existence.
  • While astronomers might see one GRB daily, and that 500 of them occur daily in our universe, it is estimated that a GRB will happen in our galaxy, or nearby one, about once every 5 million years.  
  • A lot more frequent than a giant asteroid crashing into Planet Earth, for the 6-mile-wide beast that killed off the dinosaurs happened 66 million years ago.
  • However, a further requirement for killing off humanity with a GRB is that we need to be in the path of the subsequent fairly narrow beam.  
  • A deadly GRB causing a mass extinction on Earth could have occurred 450 million years ago.
All that said, an article in Scientific American earlier this year--A Flash in the Night by Phil Plait--reported that early in October of 2022, a wave of high-energy radiation swept over our planet from a GRB.
  • To quote Plait:
Short-duration bursts—generally a few seconds long at most—come from two superdense neutron stars colliding and blasting out fierce energy, whereas long-duration ones—lasting several minutes—come from massive stars exploding at the ends of their lives. The core of the star collapses, forming a black hole. A swirling disk of material that wasn’t immediately swallowed by the black hole rapidly forms around it, funneling twin beams of intense energy out into space, one pointing up and the other down, away from the disk. These eat their way through the dying star and erupt outward while the rest of the star explodes as a very powerful supernova.
  • Researchers determined that this was the closest such burst ever seen.  How close?  Two billion light years, or 112.4 billion trillion miles away.
  • There are 25 million galaxies within this sphere in space.
  • Our closest neighbor is the Andromeda Galaxy, about 2.5 million light year away, and there are 30 galaxies within 10 million light years away.  For Planet Earth to be impacted by a GRB from one of them, and be in the beam path, the odds are vanishingly low to cause an extinction event.
  • But as earlier indicated, this could have happened 450 million years ago.

For the record, worry about Putin initiating a nuclear war, or Planet Earth heating up because of us, or AI deciding humans are a liability, but fear not a Gamma Ray Burst in your lifetime.

 - 

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