This Could Destroy All Life on Earth

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]What if I told you there are explosions happening in space right now that could destroy all life on Earth? Basically, what happens is when massive stars run out of fuel, they collapse in on themselves, and most of them explode in all directions, like you would think.

[00:00:15]But some of them get really big, like bigger than our entire solar system big, and they can crush themselves down to the size of a city in a fraction of a second. This creates an unbelievable amount of energy, which gets shot into space as huge beams of light. They're called gamma-ray bursts, and they are deadly, but probably not for the reasons you think. Here's the thing. It wouldn't be anything dramatic like vaporizing the oceans or blowing up the planet. What it would do is instantly destroy the ozone layer, which would leave us exposed to the sun's ultraviolet radiation that would slowly cook every living thing from the inside out. But what really gets me is that it's probably already happened before. About 450 million years ago, something wiped out 85% of all life on Earth, and nobody could explain it, >> [music] >> but experts now reckon it was a gamma-ray burst, one invisible beam of light that probably lasted less than a second, and almost everything alive was doomed. Now, don't panic, but there's a massive star called WR 104, about 8,000 light-years away, that's already starting to collapse. And because of the way it's tilted on its axis, its gamma-ray beams would be headed straight for Earth. But don't worry, 8,000 light-years is a long way away.