YMMV / Death from the Skies

• Nightmare Fuel: The book's entire premise is this, but there are some particularly disturbing moments:
  • The radiation deaths of the International Space Station crew as the Earth is hit with radiation and debris from a relatively nearby supernova.
  • The berserker Von Neumann probe that eats the Earth's entire biosphere, with Earth's entire stock of weaponry presumably unable to stop it... and then it sends off new probes to do it to another planet. The final line of the story section is one of the most chilling lines in the entire book: "Man's dream of reaching the stars was finally achieved, but not quite in the manner in which he thought."
  • The excruciating description of the Earth being eaten from within by a tiny black hole the same mass as the planet — it's even squickier than the scenario of a drive-by scarfing by a more typical black hole, which merely spaghettifies the Earth over the space of a couple of days.
• Nightmare Retardant: Phil Plait explains, typically at the end of each chapter, why some of the astronomical events described on the book are not to be feared with reasons including us being able to predict in advance or eventually even stop them (ie, asteroid impacts), being currently impossible (ie, no star able and close to go supernova is currently nearby enough to the Solar System to be a threat for our civilization, much less life), or happening in a future so distant that mankind could have well been extinct for very long (the death of the Sun or the heat death of the Universe.)