SOLAR SYSTEM CAN DOOM US
solar sysem can doom us
1.If Jupiter wasn't there
Jupiter isn't just a cool planet with tons of moons around it. Astronomers theorize that our big gassy neighbor is protecting Earth from all the rocks and ice balls floating around in space. If Jupiter disappeared for some reason, whether by natural effects (planets don't last forever) or from something catastrophic like a rogue planet collision, it would doom all life on Earth.
To see why, imagine that Jupiter is a big space vacuum cleaner. Its large gravitational field sucks in a ton of dangerous debris coming from the belts of comets surrounding our solar system, keeping them from going into the inner system. Jupiter is big enough to keep the inner solar system clear of catastrophically big space rocks, like Shoemaker-Levy 9, which was so big it tore a hole in Jupiter's atmosphere.
Although Jupiter does fling many more small pieces of debris at Earth, it deflects or absorbs a lot of the bigger asteroids and comets. Without Jupiter, Earth would be bombarded by much larger asteroids and comets. Even one asteroid impact on Earth could absolutely wreck life. Imagine that happening over and over and over again. Even a mining crew led by Bruce Willis wouldn't be able to save us.
2.If the Moon exploded
What if the Moon got hit by a rogue planet traveling through our solar system or got nuked during a future space war? All those chunks of the Moon would enter orbit. They wouldn't just stay in one place, though, creating a beautiful ring around the Earth like Saturn. The debris would kill us.
Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson explored the idea in his book Seveneves, but a Berkeley scientist ran a simulation to figure out exactly what would happen in the real world. He concluded that the Moon pieces would start colliding with each other almost instantly, smashing themselves into smaller and smaller pieces. This is a runaway reaction called the Kessler syndrome, where pieces of space debris smash themselves into a whole cloud of deadly pieces zipping around the Earth, like we saw in the movie Gravity.
Earth would be surrounded by moon chunks before long, and it would be impossible to travel safely in space without getting smashed to pieces by the deadly rocks. And we'd definitely want to leave the planet. Eventually the Earth would pull all the debris inward, blowing the hell out of the surface and ending all present life in a blaze of fire. Little did we know, our beautiful moon is just a time bomb waiting to annihilate us all.
3.If the Earth stopped spinning
If the Earth stopped spinning, it wouldn't just make days and nights really weird. Actually, we probably wouldn't be around long enough to complain about a messed-up schedule. Before that even happened, we would die by a menagerie of horrifying things.
Let's look at what the oceans would do. Right now, the oceans are in their place due to the centrifugal force caused by our angular momentum and our planet's gravity. Without the spinning, the oceans would migrate to where gravity pulls them: the poles. Just try to picture the oceans themselves moving out to the poles, washing over all the existing land. It would be a flood worse than the Noah story. The equatorial regions of the planet would get uncovered, but everybody else would drown long before they got to use them. (Sorry, all of Canada.)
Not only that, but our atmosphere would keep moving just as it was, at least for a little while. Because most of us wouldn't survive the 1,000 mph supersonic winds that would rip apart life on Earth as the whole atmosphere kept on going, with the air eventually settling down a little more densely at the poles than at the equator. Oh, and the Moon would probably crash into the Earth after all that. No matter how we cut it, if the Earth stops spinning, we're screwed.
4.If the Sun had a major solar storm
The Sun has storms just like Earth … well maybe not exactly like Earth's. Solar storms aren't clouds and rain, they're eruptions of radiation, plasma, and high-speed particles. A big enough one would absolutely annihilate modern life on Earth.
Pretty much everything we rely on in modern society is dependent on electronics, and our tech would take the biggest beating. If the storm was caused by a coronal mass ejection (basically a big chunk of the Sun's outer plasma layers getting blown off and colliding with Earth), the power grid would overload and fail. No more electricity. The storm would also cause an electromagnetic pulse that would fry out electronics, mostly our satellites.
What's really scary about solar storms is that they aren't uncommon, and they have messed up society before. In 1859 a massive solar storm hit Earth, frying telegraph lines and creating such strong auroras that some people could read newsprint by aurora light