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A GRB close enough to fry Earth would also fry all the other planets in the solar system. Mars won’t help.
by doctor_eval 4y ago
A GRB close enough to fry Earth would also fry all the other planets in the solar system. Mars won’t help.
- sliken 4y agoLife on earth, er outside the oceans would end with sterilization down to 1M. Likely 99.99% or more of humans dead within a year. Mars however is very cold, highly radioactive, practically no atmosphere, and vulnerable to meteor strikes. So to fix all those problems inhabitants would likely be under 1 meter to minimize air leakage, radiation, heat leakage, etc. So it might well be that 99% of people survive a 1M deep sterilization ... only if self sufficient, which does seem a stretch, at least for the next century.
- skykooler 4y agoHow big is a GRB? Would going to Alpha Centauri help? How far would you need to go?
- saagarjha 4y agoA gamma ray burst within several thousand light years of Earth is likely to sterilize it.
- wazzaps 4y agoEven the tardigrades?
- _nalply 4y agoGamma rays are photons. Photons influence matter. One example is infrared which we sense as warmth. I am somewhat fuzzy here, but I imagine that these photons bump into the atoms of our skin such that they tend to shake more vigourously than before. This is heat. I can imagine that gamma rays of a gamma ray burst are plentiful and hard enough to influence the tardigrade matter to an extent to even kill tardigrades. This said I see a way how tardigrades could survive a gamma ray burst. They are inside an asteroid or even inside a Mars-like planet. Even if the gamma rays ablate a significant chunk of the crust, enough will remain to protect the tardigrades. So some tardigrades might be lucky to survive a gamma ray burst nearby. Just speculating here.