Literature / Death from the Skies

The Universe is trying to kill you.
It's nothing personal. It's trying to kill me too. It's trying to kill everybody.
And it doesn't even have to try very hard.

— From the introduction

A mix of hard science and science fiction written by the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, Death From The Skies! is a book dedicated to astronomical events that could wipe out humanity.

---

This work contains examples of:

• After the End: the dead, half-melted Earth orbiting a red giant Sun.
• Alien Invasion: The berserker probe subverts this a bit, since the probe is not intelligent and its creators are probably long-dead. Also very much a Grey Goo scenario, despite the probe's "children" being macroscopic.
• Alien Sky:
  • Venus and Earth under the red giant Sun, with the Daystar filling the entire sky and occupying a significant fraction of it respectively (see also the "Quotes" section.)
  • The description of the collision and merger of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, as seen from Earth.
  • The pitch-black, starless, night sky of a planet orbiting one of the very few stars that could shine during the Degenerate Era.
• Apocalypse How: Every possible scenario is covered, with some of Plait's situations covering half a dozen of them at once.
• Colony Drop: The asteroid impact described in the very first chapter. The collision that formed the Moon is also mentioned.
• Cosmic Horror Story: there are things that would make Cthulhu crap its pants... and they're real.
• Death World: Earth during the late evolutionary stages of the Sun (no atmosphere, no water, and up to its surface melted), and after the conversion of the latter into a black dwarf when temperatures plummet almost to absolute zero.
• Downer Ending: Whatever happens, assuming current theories hold, the Sun has a time limit, and after that the universe. At some point, the existence of life as we know it has to end. There's no escaping it.

• The End of the World as We Know It: in this case, more literal than usual, when Plait talks about a false vacuum collapse, which would essentially shred the fabric of the entire universe in an ever expanding bubble, replacing it with... something we don't know.
• Eternal Recurrence: Plait suggests the possibility of the false vacuum collapse (see further down) or any other physical process scientists haven't still thought of resetting the Universe and letting a new Big Bang taking place, and so happening again and again. Likewise, if the ekpyrotic Universe scenario is right, the collision of two branes could produce a new Big Bang also re-starting the Universe.
• From Bad to Worse: The solar flare scenario takes place in the dead of winter, knocking out power around the world, and humanity has barely had time to breathe and bury the dead when another nasty-looking patch of sunspots appears...
• Fusion Dance:
  • Collisions between neutron stars, which produce short duration gamma ray bursts (and even if no mentioned a black hole.)
  • Planet formation, as grains of dust in a protoplanetary disk merge to form larger bodies, that fuse to form still larger ones and so on all the way up to planets.
  • The Milky Way-Andromeda merger that forms the Milkomeda galaxy. Much later on, the fall of part of its (dead) stars into its central supermassive black hole.
  • Likewise, the merger of the galaxies that form the Virgo Cluster into a huge one and as per Milkomeda the collapse of its remaining stars on its central black hole.
  • Mergers of brown dwarfs and stellar remnants during the Degenerate Era, that could produce from stars to supernovae or even gamma-ray bursts.
• Grey Goo: In a much larger scale, the self-replicant probes, and especially the spider-like robots that they use to process material to build more of them, that appear in Chapter 6
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: The entire thrust of the book is that, on a cosmic scale, our planet is one out of uncountable trillions. If it disappears tomorrow, the universe won't notice.
• Lethal Lava Land: Earth when the Sun has gone red giant.
• Made of Explodium:
  • The extremely dense and hot helium core of the red giant Sun once it experiments the helium flash and produces as much energy as an entire galaxy for a few seconds, before it re-expands and fuses helium much more calmly. Likewise, helium shell flashes during the Sun's second red giant stage.
  • Either a white dwarf star when it accumulates too much matter from a companion star or a massive star that has ended with an iron core. In both cases, the result is the same: the star goes boom in a supernova, and in a hypernova for the most massive ones up to eleven.
• The Multiverse: The possibility of other Universes beside ours that could have different physical laws, number of dimensions, etc. existing is mentioned in passing. However as we cannot study them physically, for all purposes it is as they did not exist.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Plait is better known as a science writer and professional skeptic, but he has a frighteningly vivid imagination — and his horror stories seem to excite him. (Then again, he is a scientist — geeks in general have strange senses of humor.)
• Planet Destroyer:
  • The black hole that spaghettifies and absorbs Earth, and in the same chapter the much smaller one that messes up the planet a lot before also eating it.
  • The red giant Sun, that will absorb Mercury, possibly Venus too, and even Earth.
• Planet Spaceship: One of the scenarios discussed for the effects of a rogue black hole entering into the Solar System is Earth being freed from Sun's gravitational embrace and sent into interstellar space. Likewise, a supernova explosion could free the planets that were orbiting the star that blew up… assuming they survived such event.
• Recursive Creators: The Von Neumann probes of the narration that starts Chapter 6.
• The Stars Are Going Out: during the heat death of the universe at an excruciatingly slow pace, over an unimaginably long period of time.
• Star Killing: Once iron accumulates in the core of a massive star, such star is doomed.
• Time Abyss: The time needed for stars to go out, which pales next to the years will pass before protons decay, not to mention what will be needed to have black holes evaporating away.
• Wave-Motion Gun:
  • The gamma-ray burst that causes the worst mass extinction event in Earth's history.
  • The collision and fusion of the Milky Way with the Andromeda galaxy has produced a beam of matter and energy that is coming from the merged galaxies' core and will hit Earth…
• Weird Sun: The evolutionary stages of the Sun after it has fused all the hydrogen present on its core: subgiant, red giant, while it's quietly fusing helium on its center, red giant again once core helium has been exhausted, and finally white dwarf cooling to a black dwarf.

---