Asteroid strikes, supernovae blasts and other calamities could take out humanity. But no matter what, a cataclysmic event 1 billion years from now will rob the planet of oxygen, wiping out life.
suggest it would take a truly gigantic space rock to accomplish such a feat. Killing all life on Earth would require an impact that literally boils away the oceans. And only asteroids like Pallas and Vesta — the solar system’s largest — are big enough to do that. There is evidence that. But these days, collisions of such large objects are extremely unlikely.
What could have caused such an extreme event? During the Ordovician period, the continents were one jumbled mass called Gondwana. Most life on Earth still lived in the oceans, but plants were beginning to emerge on land. Then, near the end of the Ordovician, a sweeping climate shift left the supercontinent covered with glaciers. That global cooling alone was enough to start killing off species.
The bright beams of light dubbed gamma-ray bursts may originate in binary star systems, as shown in this illustration. Even if a sudden spate of global cooling sparked the Late Ordovician mass extinction, what set that in motion in the first place? Over the years, numerous astronomers have suggestedGRBs are mysterious events that seem to be the most violent and energetic explosions in the cosmos, and astronomers suspect they’re tied to extreme supernovas.
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