US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Dave Mosher. Earth is surrounded by a protective magnetic shield, called the magnetosphere. The field is generated by Earth's rotation, which swirls a thick shell of liquid iron and nickel the outer core around a solid ball of metal the inner core , creating a giant electric dynamo.
The magnetosphere deflects energetic particles that emanate from the sun, changing its size and shape as it's hit. The resulting flood of high-energy particles that slam into Earth's air can trigger beautiful auroras, or sometimes disruptive geomagnetic storms.
If and when the core cools, the dynamo shuts off and we lose our magnetosphere — along with protection from solar winds. This would slowly blast our atmosphere into space. Mars — once rich with water and a thick atmosphere — suffered this same fate billions of years ago, leading to the nearly airless, possibly lifeless world we know today.
The sun, and our position relative to it, is perhaps the most important piece of our tenuous existence. But the sun is still a star. And all stars die. And stars die. That won't last forever, though. Billions of years from now the sun will run low on hydrogen and start fusing helium.
It's a more energetic reaction and will push the sun's layers outward, and possibly start pulling the Earth toward the sun. We'd be incinerated and then vaporized.
That or the sun's expansion would push the Earth out of orbit. It'd die frozen as a rogue planet: a world untethered to any star, drifting through the void. Space isn't kind. Planets often get kicked out of their solar systems during formation. According to recent simulations, in fact, rogue planets may outnumber stars in the Milky Way by , to one. One of those rogue planets could drift into the solar system, put Earth into an extreme and inhospitable orbit, or even kick us out of the solar system.
A world that's large enough and drifts close enough could even kick us out of the solar system entirely. Or cause us to collide with a nearby planet, like Venus or Mercury. As a rogue planet, Earth would freeze into an ice ball. A gravitational shove into an elliptical orbit could cause the planet to swing between unimaginable cold and scorching heat.
Instead of just passing by Earth and disrupting its orbit, a drifting world could make a direct hit. It wouldn't be unprecedented. About 4. A new theory suggests the two planets completely vaporized into a rapidly spinning doughnut of gaseous and liquid rock. Over time, the moon and Earth condensed from the chaotic cloud. Hollywood loves death-by-asteroid. Rocks from space can be pretty destructive — a big one probably wiped out the dinosaurs — though it would take a lot of asteroids to properly dispatch the entire planet.
By the time you're nearly done and you're packing our iron core into interstellar moving boxes, it'd be no different than doing the same to a small moon. This entire process can be summarized by a handy equation that relates the energy needed to destroy a planet or in more polite terms, "unbind" it to its mass and radius. The equation assumes a uniform density of the planet under consideration, allowing for a rough estimate. That's a lot of energy. So if you were to somehow capture all the energy output of our nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, coal plants, solar panels and wind farms — leaving absolutely nothing else for anybody else — you would need to wait a trillion years to reach the amount we're talking here.
A trillion years to collect enough energy to completely rip apart the Earth. If you want to be taken seriously as a threatening mad scientist, you need a new plan. After all, our sun will burn out in only 5 billion years, and there wouldn't be much point in destroying the Earth after that, would there? What about the sun? The sun is big and bright and emits a lot of energy. Every second of every day, our star chews through about 4 million tons of hydrogen, fusing it into helium and releasing energy in the form of radiation.
That radiation escapes eventually and blasts its way through space. Most of it is simply lost, doing nothing interesting or useful at all, but some of it strikes the Earth, where it can be harnessed. Algae and plants learned this lesson billions of years ago, and learned how to harness that energy for their own purposes. That energy eventually winds its way up the food chain into your Saturday morning breakfast cereal. So there's a lot of energy from the sun … but is it enough?
If you were to coat the entire surface of the Earth in solar panels, absorbing percent of all that juicy, incoming radiation, it would take you … 18 million years to collect enough energy to unbind our planet. That's certainly a significant step up from the trillion years needed by relying on human-made energy sources, but it's still quite a long haul. Let's hope no superhero finds your secret lair in that time.
There's also a concern that self-replicating nanotech would create a "gray goo" scenario , in which it grows out of control and encroaches upon resources humans depend on, causing mass disruption and potentially civilizational collapse. Watson — champion Jeopardy! The report is also concerned with the possibility of exponential advances in artificial intelligence. Once computer programs grow advanced enough to teach themselves computer science, they could use that knowledge to improve themselves, causing a spiral of ever-increasing superintelligence.
If AI remains friendly to humans, this would be a very good thing indeed, and has the prospect to speed up research in a variety of domains. The risk is that AI has little use for humans and either out of malevolence or perceived necessity destroys us all.
President Obama speaks about climate change at the UN, a perfect case study in the inability of global institutions to save humans from themselves. This is perhaps the vaguest item on the list — a kind of meta-risk. Most of the problems enumerated above would require some kind of global coordinated action to address. Climate change is the most prominent example, but in the future things like nanotech and AI regulation would need to be coordinated internationally.
The danger is that governance structures often fail and sometimes wind up exacerbating the problems they were trying to fix. A policy failure in dealing with a threat that could cause human extinction would thus have hugely negative consequences. Behold the face of Death, Destroyer of Worlds. The first 11 items on the list are risks we can identify as potential threats worth tackling.
There are almost certainly other dangers out there with grave potential impacts that we can't predict. It's hard to even think about how to tackle this problem, but more research into global catastrophic risks could be helpful. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
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Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. An artist's concept of an asteroid impact hitting the early Earth. Just one of many ways we could all die! So the report's authors conducted a scientific literature review and identified 12 plausible ways it could happen: 1 Catastrophic climate change Now imagine this Delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email required. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy.
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