• Question: Do you think there might be a small chance that the world will blow up

    Asked by anon-225397 to Paul, Nawapat, Simon, Selen, Natalie, Katy on 13 Nov 2019. This question was also asked by anon-224667, anon-225187, anon-225183.
    • Photo: Paul Laurance-Young

      Paul Laurance-Young answered on 13 Nov 2019:

      In a few billion years when the sun expands to swallow the nearby planets – possibly.
      By then we’ll all be kicking back on some distant tropical paradise world

    • Photo: Nawapat Kaweeyanun

      Nawapat Kaweeyanun answered on 13 Nov 2019:

      Fortunately that chance is really small. Asteroids and nuclear bombs won’t be able to blow us up – they are really small compared to how big the Earth actually is. To blow up the Earth, we would need something more gigantic like an exploding star, but we don’t have any dangerous neighbour star so we are good. So no need to worry about the Earth blowing up any time soon! We have a more urgent problem of keeping the Earth livable though ….

    • Photo: Katy Bruce

      Katy Bruce answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      I’m so pleased our space physicist answered this one before me – thanks Nawapat! I don’t know enough about space science to give an informed response but my educated guess would be, yes, probably, but not in our lifetimes fortunately!

    • Photo: Natalie Fowler

      Natalie Fowler answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      Thank goodness we have Nawapat to answer these questions! I think if my patient asked me this I would try to reassure them that it won’t be a problem in our lifetime!

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