The universe is a pretty cool place to live in. We have some awesome things going for us like gravity and a bunch of other forces that keep us from flying apart. However, as nice as it is to be alive and as kind as it may seem to be living on our lovely rock flying through space at unfathomable speeds, there are a whole lot of weird things out that, under the right circumstances, would pretty much end us.
Check out these Ten Ways the Universe is Trying to Kill You
10. Our Sun Exploding
I’m not saying anytime soon, but one day. The fact of the matter is that our star, the Sun, is not really much different than the majority of other stars out there and that’s both incredibly cool and incredibly scary. We’ll get to some funky star behaviors in a bit, but for right now, you should probably know that one day the Sun will expand and swallow up the Earth before giving out a really big planet-scented burp and blasting all our atoms into space. It’s not going to happen for billions of years yet, so there’s really no immediate danger, but it is an inevitability.
9. And the Moon is Already Trying to Bail
Are you familiar with something known as ‘weather’? If so, you already inadvertently know a lot about how important the Moon is and what it means to us. It might seem like a really beautiful and romantic rock floating in the sky, but it’s a whole lot more than that. The gravity between the Moon and the Earth create tides, which sloshes water around and helps create weather cycles (along with the Sun, which we already know is gunning for us). However, the Moon is moving away from the Earth ever so slowly like a junior high couple at a school dance who’ve finally made contact only to see a teacher coming round yelling about leaving space for Jesus. Eventually, it will slip away and well, we’re not sure what will happen then but chances are it won’t be too good.
8. We Live in a Virtual Minefield
The thing about space is that boundaries aren’t what you think they are, which could surprise you. The Earth’s atmosphere extends far enough that we pretty much don’t actually go to real space unless we’re trying to set foot on another heavenly body. Unfortunately that’s true of a lot of things – including the Sun which has its own enormous atmosphere. But what we really need to be on guard for is the asteroid belt that is more or less just past Mars. More or less being the key operator there. That’s where all those comets intent on wiping out all life come from. The only things really keeping them from going haywire and launching an all-out attack is Mars and Jupiter acting as shepherd planets. Though, they definitely dropped the ball with that dinosaur fiasco.
7. To the Universe, We’re Bacteria
We are fragile. Life is basically a really complex set of chemical reactions trying with vigor to continue reacting. The universe has a bunch of that going on but so little of it is actually alive and so much of it can kill us. We can only breathe a precise mixture of gasses for example or else we die. We can only be exposed to a prices spectrum of radiation or we die. We can only eat a limited range of elements or we die. And if we don’t get those things, we still die. It’s actually pretty frightening when you compare the lifespan of a star to a person. We aren’t even a blink and they can pretty much live through anything except catastrophic implosions – and even then they just turn into deadly deadly beacons.
6. No Seriously. Deadly Deadly Beacons.
When a star is precisely the right size and goes supernova, instead of turning into a tiny red dwarf after blowing us, or even a white dwarf, it can turn into something called a pulsar. These are bodies who are incredibly dense and usually come about once iron (the heaviest element that can result from fusion) collapses in on itself with enough mass. It messes up the magnetic fields of the star and instead of just blowing off its entire atmosphere and dying gracefully it throws a crazy fit and spits out huge packets of radiation in pulses, hence the name. That radiation, if it were to hit Earth, would pretty much obliterate anything. Luckily, they aren’t exactly common and we’re in a nice suburban part of the galaxy, so we really don’t have to worry too much.
5. Until We Collide with Andromeda
Andromeda is a pretty cool scifi series and also a galaxy that will eventually collide with our own. It’s happening incredibly slowly in terms of our lifetime, but it does point out the ever-changing nature of the universe. Everything is always moving and there are weird things we still don’t understand or that are too far to actually really study beyond their light. Not to mention the light we do get is old. But, we do know that eventually Andromeda and the Milky Way will collide. Apparently it’s a totally normal thing.
4. And So Are the Super massive Black Holes that Result
They sound sexy and fun coming out of Matthew Bellamy, but super massive black holes are actually what hold our galaxies together to a degree. Their intense gravity helps keep up us all in orbit until they decide to suck us up and eat us. Which, actually isn’t a thing because you have to pass the event horizon to get sucked into a black hole even if it is qualified as super massive. Still, the idea of that at the center of the every galaxy is pretty creepy. What’s creepier is that black holes evaporate so one day it won’t be there anymore and then who know what will happen!
3. The Earth is Still Doing Its Best Too
Global warming is a thing, but it’s a thing on all planets. We already have crazy weather that tries to kill us all the time, but our atmosphere actually traps heat naturally. It’s been warming up since the ice age and probably will wind up getting pretty hot before it decides to tip the other way again, and chances are we’ll have to adapt or face the consequences or we could always go try to find another planet.
2. Only Everything in Space is Basically Forever Away
Space is made of, well space. Stuff is actually made of more space than actual stuff, but once you get to our size, it’s useless to bother really trying to get to deep space. Even if we could travel at the speed of light, our bodies just aren’t designed to travel through time that way and we probably would die. Meaning the only real option is the long way round and unfortunately, we just don’t have the lifespan to survive the distance. Finding another planet we could live on just like that is already pretty slim, but finding a nice, young star close enough to actually trek all our stuff over is virtually impossible. We’re just too far.
1. The Universe is Going to Die Anyway
Even if we survive all the danger of space, there is one thing we can never survive and that is the death of the universe. It might come from a big crunch where everything gets pulled back into a singularity, or it might be a big freeze or who knows what, but it’s generally agreed that the universe is finite in time at the very least. It kind of sucks, but at the very least, you can be happy that it won’t happen for a very very long time and as we’ve already established, you definitely won’t live long enough to see the universe die.
