A blast from space...
And there's nowhere to hide.
It's the cosmic death beam of a gamma-ray burst.
- We're talking about a silent killer
that has massive amounts of radiation.
- Whatever survives at this point
is a roll of the dice.
Will you be ready...
when doomsday strikes?
Can any of us survive?
Every week, NASA detects deadly laser beams
of energy in outer space
known as gamma-ray bursts.
Some scientists believe
one may have struck Earth 440 million years ago,
killing off 2/3 of all species.
If one hit Earth today...
would you survive?
- Basically, you've just walked into Armageddon.
- The exposure basically starts destroying cells.
Things start to shut down.
- This is the last and brightest moment
you'll ever witness in your life.
San Juan, Puerto Rico.
As a container ship heads into port,
every eye on deck is drawn
to the bizarre light flashes on the eastern horizon.
They morph into a fantastic light show of greens and blues,
something usually seen near the Arctic Circle.
- You'll begin to see the northern lights,
which is really bizarre.
The aurora borealis,
these beautiful arcs of red and green and violet
will be shimmering through the atmosphere.
What would you think happened?
Meanwhile, 7,000 miles to the east,
in Paris...
a much more intense phenomenon takes place.
- Think about being a tourist in Paris.
You see the Eiffel Tower, and you're looking up at it,
and then there's this bright flash in the sky
that's growing brighter and brighter.
- This flash of light would grow rapidly in intensity
to the point where it would be blindingly bright.
- This is the brightest thing you have ever seen
until your retina stops working.
- I think the only thing that would be anywhere near this
would be a thermonuclear bomb
going off fairly close to them
and looking straight at it.
What has triggered this massive burst of energy
in Earth's skies?
Long ago, more than 1,200 trillion miles away,
two dead stars circled each other in deep space.
With a combined gravitational pull
four billion times greater than the Earth's,
the two stars collided,
triggering a devastating gamma-ray burst.
- There's an impact...
And because of the extremely high densities
and their extremely high gravitational force,
there's just a huge amount of energy that's released.
- A gamma-ray burst is the most colossal explosion
in the universe,
second only to the creation of the universe itself,
the big bang.
The energy released is so titanic
that it can outshine an entire galaxy
of hundreds of billions of stars.
The gamma rays,
the most energetic type of radiation
in the universe,
shot out in two powerful concentrated beams.
Now, after 200 years of space travel,
the gamma-ray burst is quickly approaching our atmosphere,
and planet Earth is right in the crosshairs.
- If the rotational axis were pointing at Earth,
the results would be devastating.
Since the 1990s,
ground- and satellite-based telescopes have spotted
the radiation from hundreds of distant gamma-ray bursts...
But only at the moment the radiation reaches Earth.
So humanity has no advanced warning
of the catastrophe that is about to strike.
- This is Mission Control, Houston,
onboard the International Space Station.
250 miles above Earth's surface,
the International Space Station flies over Europe
at 17,000 miles per hour.
Suddenly, there's a power blackout.
Deadly radiation streams into the space station.
The gamma-ray burst claims its first victims.
- The astronauts would be exposed
to an onslaught of energetic gamma rays.
- They're gonna be sickened and dying, and really,
not much they can do about it.
The side of the planet
facing the gamma-ray burst
is in the impact zone
and will take a direct hit.
That zone includes Africa,
the Middle East, parts of Russia,
and all of Europe.
In Madrid's famous Plaza Mayor,
sightseers stroll
beneath a hot afternoon sun.
The open-air plaza offers no protection from the heat
or the danger that's headed their way.
At Galveston Beach, Texas, families take advantage
of the cool morning temperatures.
They are in the non-impact zone,
the side of the Earth opposite
from the fast-approaching GRB.
The beachgoers are in no danger for the moment.
Traveling at the speed of light,
the gamma-ray burst is milliseconds from Earth,
and our atmosphere will be the first line of defense.
- We take the atmosphere for granted.
We don't even think about it during the day.
But it protects all life on the planet Earth,
and it's extremely delicate and very thin.
- The atmosphere protects us
from high-energy radiation from space
that's always coming in,
and so that protective blanket really shields us
from a lot of the dangerous radiation
that's out there.
But this is no ordinary cosmic radiation.
It's the most powerful in the universe.
- These gamma-ray bursts
have millions of electron volts of energy
concentrated in a tiny, narrow beam.
- The initial burst would be the equivalent
of detonating a one-megaton nuclear warhead
over every square mile of the impacted side.
A one-megaton nuclear device
is 80 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
- The atmosphere won't be able to hold its own.
It'll be destroyed.
As the gamma-ray burst slams into the Earth...
It instantly engulfs Europe,
Africa,
and the Middle East
in a blast of radiation
that lasts just two seconds.
In Paris, on the Champs-Elysées...
The massive white flash
permanently blinds anyone
staring directly at the blast.
Within seconds,
electrical transformers explode.
Cell phones and radios short-circuit.
Cars, buses, and trains
come to a halt.
- When the gamma-ray burst hits the atmosphere,
at that point, electrons are stripped off atoms,
creating a wall of electric fields
that then create the electromagnetic pulse.
Now we're talking about massive
short-circuiting on the planet Earth.
Meanwhile, in the United States of America,
the dawn light reveals a world unchanged.
- If you were on the other side of the Earth at the moment
that the gamma-ray burst arrives,
initially, you wouldn't really notice anything.
It would just be business as usual.
At the National Space Science Center
in Huntsville, Alabama,
a scientist is teleconferencing with a colleague
at the Max Planck Institute near Munich, Germany.
- I want to see some numbers.
The teams jointly monitor
the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
- Several years ago, NASA launched the Fermi mission.
That is a satellite specifically designed
to home in on gamma-ray bursts in outer space.
We search it out.
We scan the heavens, looking for these things.
Suddenly, the German video feed goes dark.
340 miles above,
hurtling through space at 17,000 miles per hour,
the Fermi telescope is hit
by the electromagnetic pulse.
The satellite's sensor does its job...
and confirms the gamma-ray burst
on the other side of the world.
- Fermi's designed to handle that kind of radiation,
but this is gonna be an unprecedented level
of that radiation.
So they would immediately record that,
and the spacecraft would send that data to the ground.
The Huntsville scientists
begin to alert government officials,
but there's already been significant damage.
In the first seconds of the blast,
hundreds of millions of people
from Paris to South Africa
have lost all electronic communications
and witnessed the brightest flash of light
ever seen on Earth.
But it's what they can't see
that now threatens to kill them all.
The Earth is under attack.
The most powerful radiation in the universe,
a gamma-ray burst from two colliding stars,
has slammed into our planet at the speed of light.
Can humanity survive a direct hit?
- In the few milliseconds that a gamma-ray burst like this
takes place, it emits more energy
than our own sun has emitted
through the entire history of the universe.
Africa, the Middle East, and Europe
are in the immediate impact zone
of the gamma-ray burst,
and no one knows what just happened.
International superpowers wonder
if this is the first strike of a nuclear war.
Off the coast of Italy,
the U.S. ballistic missile submarine "Louisiana"
is on high alert.
- Are you picking up anything? - Negative.
Coded communications
instruct the commanding officer
to raise the launch readiness level
and await further orders.
- Aye, aye.
- Bring us full port to 12 degrees.
- Battle stations.
On land, in Madrid,
a wave of panic rushes over the crowd
at the Plaza Mayor.
The intense flash of light and power outage sparks chaos.
- Help!
- At first, you may think this is a fantastic light show
until you realize that the worst is yet to come
because of all the radiation filling up the atmosphere.
- Gamma radiation is what we call ionizing radiation.
It knocks electrons off of atoms.
- So when that happens, there's charge buildup,
and that charge has to balance out in some way,
and one way that happens is through lightning.
Across the hemisphere,
brilliant bolts of lightning
and crashing thunder fill the skies.
In Paris, the Eiffel Tower
suddenly becomes a massive lightning rod.
- This is like a hellscape of a lightning storm.
This is so much lightning that the amount of fires
that will be raging out of control
will immediately overcome
any sort of municipal fire department.
This is the beginning of absolute chaos.
- Help!
In the impact zone,
millions suddenly cringe in pain.
People collapse.
Some are dead in seconds.
Others struggle to survive against the inevitable.
- If you're on the surface of Earth,
you will experience a shower of muon particles
that will be several times the lethal dose.
Muons are charged particles
created when the gamma radiation interacts
with atoms high in the atmosphere.
Deadly showers of radioactive muons
rain down across the entire impact zone.
- Someone who gets this blast of radiation
is gonna have the same kind of radiation poisoning
that we've seen in nuclear explosions.
The exposure basically starts destroying cells.
Things start to shut down.
They're gonna have immediate sickness.
Their body systems are likely to be very damaged.
Organs may start to shut down pretty quickly, within minutes,
and basically fatality right away.
There's not much anyone could really do.
Your first responders, they're gonna be getting sick too.
In Madrid, Paris, Cairo,
and across the entire impact zone,
people taking refuge in office buildings and homes
find there is no escape from the gamma-ray burst.
- Muons are very penetrating.
They'll pass right through buildings, no problem.
30,000 feet in the air
isn't any safer.
High above the burning landscape of Europe
and the Mediterranean,
hundreds of commercial aircraft are still in flight
without navigation systems to guide them.
The showers of muon radiation are so powerful,
they penetrate the aircraft,
killing everyone onboard.
How far will this deadly gamma radiation
spread across the globe?
Will any of us survive?
25 years ago,
scientists began monitoring gamma-ray bursts,
deadly radioactive beams that come from deep space.
What if one slammed into planet Earth today?
Without warning, hundreds of millions
have already died in the impact zone
that includes Africa, the Middle East,
and Europe...
Many of them victims
of overwhelming radiation poisoning.
- Basically, you've just walked into Armageddon.
- Gamma radiation is what we call
ionizing radiation.
It destroys the compounds and the tissues of your body
and kills you almost instantly.
- So immediately, the central nervous system
will obliterated and destroyed.
So life as we know it on that part of Earth
will disappear immediately.
The U.S. navy ballistic missile
submarine, "Louisiana,"
preparing for what military leaders
think might be nuclear war,
cruises submerged off the coast of Italy.
The vessel is on high alert,
poised to launch a retaliatory missile strike
on an unknown enemy.
But the launch will never happen...
Because everyone aboard...
is dead.
High-energy muon radiation particles
can penetrate water
up to a depth of nearly one mile.
Even the heartiest creatures in Earth's oceans
are not safe.
- The more complex organisms like whales,
dolphins, large fish...
They're gonna experience a really immediate impact.
Their systems are gonna start shutting down
just like people's would.
On the vast grasslands
of Africa's Serengeti,
mammals suffer the same fate.
But not everything perishes.
- Insects are extremely resistant to radiation,
so they have a tremendous capability to repair the damage.
A big fraction of the radiated population will survive.
Deep below the impact zone,
a handful of humans
have also survived the gamma-ray burst.
From the Boulby Mine,
the second-deepest hard rock mine in Europe,
a group of workers doesn't realize
that the 4,000 feet of earth and solid rock
has saved their lives.
When they arrive on the surface,
they emerge to a vision of hell on Earth.
Now their survival depends on finding
sources of food and water
in a burned and lifeless continent.
As lightning storms illuminate the skies
over Mumbai's famous Colaba Causeway street market...
Shoppers are unaware of the cosmic radiation
that's falling all around them.
While mankind in the impact zone is nearly extinct...
Those living on the edges have better odds of surviving.
From the streets of Mumbai...
- Try. Here.
To the container ship in Puerto Rico,
the radiation falling down is far less damaging.
For those that act quickly,
there is a way to beat the odds of cancer onset.
Removing clothes and shoes
eliminates about 90% of external contamination.
Washing with soap and water
also removes radiation particles from the skin.
As millions fight to survive
on the edges of the gamma-ray inferno,
in North and South America,
massive food shortages
threaten to take down the rest of humanity.
- As time goes by, as the hours turn to days and weeks,
eventually, the chaos envelops
the entire planet.
Some scientists believe
that 440 million years ago...
Earth was hit by a gamma-ray burst,
or GRB, a deadly beam of radiation
that devastated life on the planet.
Could you survive if we were struck
by a gamma-ray burst again?
In the first minutes after the disaster,
billions of people are already dead or dying
in the impact zone,
an area including Africa,
Europe, and the Middle East.
- Essentially, life on the side of the impact
has been extinguished.
In northern England,
the lone survivors are a group of miners
who weathered the blast under 4,000 feet of earth and rock.
Now they travel the countryside,
living off canned and other preserved goods,
but they don't realize that the gamma-ray burst
has poisoned their food supply.
- So gamma-ray bursts
at these intensities can produce radioactive
or activated isotopes from the food
that can be very dangerous.
The miners' lifeline is thin,
and it's only a matter of time.
In the Americas,
on the side of Earth opposite the impact zone,
the situation is desperate.
After the gamma-ray burst's electromagnetic pulse
zapped electronics...
A global power blackout went into effect.
For people in Atlanta,
Seattle,
Rio de Janeiro,
and every large North and South American city
in the non-impact zone,
power grids are down,
and commerce is frozen.
- You are literally left in the dark,
without heat, without light, without food.
You're basically thrown back a hundred years into the past.
Municipal water supplies are severed.
Without electricity,
the pumps can't distribute the water.
Grocery stores are mobbed,
and desperation sets in
as people fight over a shrinking food supply.
Ventilators, dialysis machines,
and backup systems fail,
all but ensuring the deaths
of thousands of hospital patients.
- We live in a bubble.
This bubble is energized by electricity.
But what happens if something pops that bubble?
Without backups, without heat, without food,
then you begin to realize that civilization itself
will begin to degenerate as a consequence.
When the gamma-ray burst
slammed into Earth's atmosphere,
it ripped apart the ozone layer,
exposing the survivors to a new radiation threat.
- The ozone layer in our atmosphere
is one of the most beneficial things on the planet.
We have this star in the sky,
the sun,
that dumps ultraviolet radiation
at us all the time.
It keeps us alive, but without the ozone,
it would cook us and kill us.
- The side of earth facing it
gets completely depleted of ozone.
All the ozone gets destroyed.
Essentially zero left.
Now, you've still got 100% percent
on the other side of Earth,
but as the atmosphere mixes together
in the ensuing days and weeks,
effectively, what you'll have
is 50% of the normal ozone throughout the world.
- If you go out in the weeks after this event
with any kind of unprotected skin,
you're getting doses of UV radiation
that would take you normally hours in minutes.
You're talking a serious sunburn
in 10, 15, 20 minutes.
Life-threatening if you're exposed for hours.
This is a "get inside or perish" situation.
- The long-term effects
are that UV is coming through
and interacting with living cells.
- That much larger dose of ultraviolet radiation
will change DNA and can create cancers.
Skin cancers will rise dramatically.
The only form of protection
is to avoid the sun.
- They're gonna have to put on extra heavy-duty clothing.
They're gonna have to put on sunglasses.
They're gonna have to cover every inch of their body,
realizing that the sun that gives us life and nourishment
is now bathing us in a ultraviolet radiation
that can eventually kill us.
- Lifestyles will change
because you have to in order to survive.
Think of living the entirety of the remainder of your life
inside or underground.
This is what we will have to do to survive.
As the ultraviolet radiation threatens mankind,
Earth's ecosystems begin to collapse.
- Ultraviolet radiation will, over time,
sterilize the upper meters of the Earth's oceans.
- The phytoplankton in the ocean are basically
little green plants, single-celled plants,
and they produce about half the world's oxygen,
which means they're the base of the food chain in the ocean.
Larger things eat them and so on up the food chain.
- Fishermen accustomed to harvesting large bounties
of fish from the ocean
would see something very different.
They would see a massive die-off.
Without adequate food and water
or electrical power,
North and South American cities
in the non-impact zone are now in peril.
- Food supply.
Average city, community has, at most,
about two weeks' worth of food on hand.
You go without any significant caloric intake
after about two weeks,
then you start becoming more susceptible
to disease and dying.
New York,
San Francisco,
Mexico City,
and Bogotá
are soon to be...
cities of the dead.
Earth's future hangs in the balance...
When a massive gamma-ray burst
showers the planet in deadly radiation.
Half the world's population is dead.
Like every other population center
in the impact zone,
Madrid is a city of corpses.
The blistering UV radiation hardens the skin,
preventing decomposition.
The bodies in the streets are now mummies.
Indoors, where the UV rays don't penetrate,
the bodies become food for insects
that survived the radiation blast.
- A gamma-ray burst can be thought of
as a cosmic silent assassin
that arrives with no warning,
exterminates much of life on Earth,
and then leaves no real trace behind.
Meanwhile,
people on the side of the planet
facing away from the burst
survive the initial onslaught,
but the danger is far from over.
Across America, there is no electricity.
- The average major urban center
in an industrialized nation has, at most,
two to three weeks' worth of food on hand.
That's what you have in your pantry,
in your fridge.
In the supermarket,
most of it is climate-controlled or frozen.
Turn off the electricity, no food.
After we've lost our power grid,
you have a city that is starving to death...
Starving the way people once did, say,
in the Siege of Leningrad in World War II.
- The police force, the EMP crews, the firemen.
All our emergency systems are down.
Across the non-impact zone
from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.,
food is the biggest problem.
The supermarkets were cleaned out weeks ago,
and on farms, there is nothing to harvest.
- The crops that we rely on
are gonna be affected by the UV,
so there's gonna be a lot less wheat,
corn, soybeans, rice.
- So without the protective ozone layer,
agriculture as we know it will collapse,
which means there'll be massive food riots
as people start to kill each other
for whatever scraps of food
that are still left.
Humans aren't the only ones affected.
Livestock also suffer.
- They, too, will begin to die,
meaning that we're gonna have a lack of protein.
We're not gonna see animals that we can harvest and fish
that we can take from the oceans.
We're gonna see the fact that we're facing mass starvation.
Deaths begin to rise sharply.
More than 50% of the United States'
population has perished.
The survivors eke out a living
scavenging scraps of food
and avoiding the harmful UV rays.
- Some of the population will be able to survive in,
say, an underground setting.
You're got hardened military shelters.
You're got underground survivalist-type silos.
- This is life on Earth
trying to survive.
This kind of event, this gamma-ray burst,
is a reset button for the planet.
Whatever survives at this point is a roll of the dice.
Natural selection becomes
the ultimate decider
of what evolves and what goes extinct.
But even the strongest survivors
could be out of luck
when the same gamma-ray burst
that destroyed half the Earth
comes back to finish the job.
It's been two years since a gamma-ray burst,
a deadly beam of radiation from space,
wiped out half of Earth's population.
On the other side of the Earth,
hundreds of millions in the non-impact zone
of North and South America
are now dead.
The failure of the power grids
has turned the clock back to the Dark Ages.
As food supplies dwindle,
can any survivors
prevent the end of the human race?
Omaha, Nebraska,
once part of America's breadbasket,
lies barren.
A steady rainfall
falls over what was once a cornfield.
But this is no ordinary rain.
It is acid rain, heavy with nitrogen dioxide
because of the gamma-ray burst's radiation.
Strangely, this acid rain
offers a glimmer of hope to survivors.
- The presence of nitrogen in this acid rain
acts the same as the type of fertilizer
we might throw on our grass or our crops.
The acid rain
is actually the first sign
of Earth returning to balance.
It cleanses the atmosphere
and allows Earth's ozone layer to reform.
This begins to block out
the sun's hazardous ultraviolet rays again.
Life slowly begins to repopulate the oceans.
- We could be seeing a new equilibrium
being established,
so there is some hope.
Even though civilization as we know it
has been destroyed,
perhaps with the atmosphere re-stabilizing itself,
perhaps we can start all over again.
As agriculture returns
and fish populations are replenished...
Mankind slowly returns from the brink of extinction.
But the rebirth is destined to fail.
Five years after the gamma-ray burst impact...
Survivors begin to drop dead.
A sudden rush of radioactive particles
is pouring in from outer space.
It's another wave of radiation
from the same star collision
that caused the gamma-ray burst...
but this blast takes longer to travel through space
and reach the Earth.
- A gamma-ray burst produces not only gamma rays
but also charged particles.
- Particles that would be emitted
along with these gamma rays
travel at a slower speed.
- So it's possible that an onslaught
of energetic particles will arrive
years after the onslaught of photons
from the gamma-ray burst.
Earth's rotation has placed the Americas
directly under the particle burst
when it arrives.
Across the new impact zone,
humans succumb to the second assault from space.
Once again, Earth's ozone layer is stripped away,
and without protection from our atmosphere,
there is no chance of survival.
- As the particles continue to arrive,
we're going to get this enhancement in radiation
over a long time scale.
The Earth is now a radioactive wasteland.
The only remaining life:
Radiation-resistant insects.
It's a catastrophic scene
scientists believe has happened before.
- 440 million years ago,
during what we call the Ordovician period,
there was an extinction-level event that wiped out
about 75% of all life on Earth.
- So we don't have a smoking gun
that the gamma-ray burst was the cause
of this late Ordovician mass extinction,
but there's a lot of correlations
that seem to make the case pretty strong.
Could another cataclysmic extinction event
happen again?
And could planet Earth and mankind
become the victims of a gamma-ray burst?
- We know that the gamma-ray bursts happen all the time.
They're rare in any given location,
but we know that they happen,
and we know that the Earth
would be profoundly affected by one.
- We are children when it comes to understanding
gamma-ray bursts, their history.
Maybe, just maybe,
it's happened many times in our history.
We don't know.
We didn't think that there could be
rocks from heaven coming down,
killing the dinosaurs.
But now we know better.
How many more gamma-ray bursts
are just waiting to fire?