Apocalypse Now?

Forgive my blogging about a science-fiction kind of end of the world scenario with this post. Maybe it's because one of my earlier posts had a link to LiveScience's Top Ten Ways To Destroy The Earth, and that link is still fresh in my mind.

According to Space.com, a real death star (ala Star Wars, the 1977 movie) could strike the Earth. It seems that a strange space pinwheel many light-years away might blast our planet with death rays, sometime in the future.

"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel," said researcher Peter Tuthill, an astronomer at the University of Sydney.

The report goes on to say that in that pinwheel are two hot stars in orbit with each other, with gas from their surfaces streaming and colliding. One of the stars is a Wolf-Rayet, the last known phase of a star before going supernova. When it does, it will emit blasts of gamma and cosmic rays along its axis, which, according to the astronomers, is pointed right our way. Even if we are so far away from it, the scientists say the rays can still reach us, which will have adverse effects on our environment and could cause major mass extinctions.

(My first reaction: "Yeah, like the human race isn't already doing enough to the environment on its own. Thanks for the help, Mr. Death Star.")

According to the article, the supernova could occur anytime within the next few hundred thousand years.

This seemed initially like a long time to me, but if you think about it, that's a very short period when you consider how old scientists say the universe is.

I haven't read that many comics, but isn't it the Fantastic Four came about because they were bombarded with cosmic rays? At least, that's what the movie says. And wasn't the Hulk created because Dr. Bruce "You-wouldn't-like-me-when-I'm-angry" Banner got caught in a gamma radiation blast? So after we get hit by this death star, we'll all be divided into five groups: stretching, invisibility, spontaneous combustion, and super-strength variations of either green, or orange-pebbly skin.

I blog about this because this article seems so much like the background of a science-fiction story from the latter part of the pulp era in America. If someone had submitted a tale like this to PGS, laying all the science down in layman's terms like at Space.com, and weaving a well-told story around it, I just might have taken it. Suddenly, something like this is so plausible (the end-of-the-world thingie, I mean, not the stretching or invisibility).

'di na to sci-fi. Realism na 'to. :D