What’s going to happen on our planet, that life has vanished completely?

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Что должно случиться на нашей планете, чтобы жизнь исчезла полностью?

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

What’s going to happen on our planet, that life has vanished completely?

The destruction of all life time on our planet is not expected. All the really dangerous objects — huge asteroids and candidate supernovae from Earth, very far away. That is the conclusion of a series of calculations was published in “scientific Reports”.

In the history of Earth has seen many mass extinction, when the planet disappeared a third of the living species. But never has there been such a living was destroyed completely. And if earlier cause mass extinction could only change into inanimate nature, now have reason to fear that it will be handmade due to the use of nuclear weapons.

Scientists focused on the most resistant to extreme conditions of terrestrial organisms animalcules Milnesium tardigradum. Those survive even in open space, keep the pressure in the Mariana trench and well tolerate drying. But even they are likely to die if all the water of the planet is heated to a temperature above 100 degrees Celsius.

To find out what the probability of such a development, a well-known Harvard astrophysicist Abraham Loeb with colleagues from Oxford University have created a virtual model of the planet radius with the Earth and with the same volume of water.

The calculations showed that for boiling all the oceans need 6×1026 joules. It is much more than the amount of heat that is able to allocate nuclear weapons of all countries combined.

Then Loeb and his colleagues decided to bombard the virtual Earth asteroids and blow up nearby (in astronomical terms) a supernova. And found out that the energy that each of these events gave the planet was 6×1026 joules and more, you need a shot of an asteroid with a diameter of 500 kilometers or a supernova explosion is of 0.13 light-years from Earth.

Asteroids of this size have. For example, Vesta: its diameter of 525 kilometers. But she’s in our party does not fly. And the nearest supernova candidate IK Pegasi, is located 150 light years from Earth, that is 1100 times farther than “necessary” to destroy all life. So the earthlings can sleep peacefully. At least tardigrades.

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