Yeah ... I keep imagining this one for all of humanity.
One moment, we're having our usual run of the mill day, everything is either going good or going bad, we're all worried about the economy, billionaires flying around in their private jets, some poor kid is stealing oranges from the market, you're scrolling through some social media feed ... then BAMMMM!
Either one of two things happen to you.
You either get terribly unwell and die immediately or things fall apart around you, hurricane winds, things going crazy and then you die soon after.
Or
You're online and the internet goes screwy ... things aren't working right, then in an hour, most of the internet is gone. You turn on cable tv but most of the channels are now gone. You see one or two emergency channels and they're all talking about some 'event' that happened somewhere far away. Then most tv everywhere goes down too. There are rumours everywhere of Russians have launched nuclear weapons, world war three has started, aliens have landed, Jesus has come back, Armageddon has started ... and then hurricane force winds start blowing everywhere ... things are just tossed around and you either die in the mix or you are one of the lucky ones who happen to be underground ... you won't last a few days and then you die soon after anyway.
Random Gamma Ray Burst has directly hit the planet earth ... it irradiates half the planet where it hit head on, vapourizing the atmosphere and causing violent weather changes and the radiation either immediately killing or slowly sickening every living thing until it all dies including all animals, most fish near the surface, plants and humans ... the other half of the planet didn't get hit by the radiation but now survives just a little longer as half the planet tries to equalize with the other destroyed half.
It's theorized that this is one of the probable causes of several unexplained extinction events in earth's geologic history. And if it ever happened now, we'd have no warning ... and even if we did ... we wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
“Well I’m sure it did but it ain’t no meteor. It’s a big ol’ frozen chunk o’ shit. See them airplanes they dump their toilets 36,000 feet. The stuff freezes and falls to earth. We call 'em Boeing bombs.”
When I was a kid, I remember seeing an ad in my belovedly ridiculous, now defunct Weekly World News for anti-meteorite bracelets. Maybe I should have gotten one.
And if you had also ordered the 'X-Ray Glasses' ... you'd be able to lie in bed at night and see right through your roof to keep on eye out for any falling meteorites
No need for Matt Parker, just anyone who can program and has a textbook covering graph algorithms. Actually the graph is probably small enough it would be easier to do it by hand than to code a solution.
I had to do a double take a few times on my news feed as weird things like wild fires and air plane crashes were being reported in Ontario ...... California!
Add comment