Human civilization is under attack
from a catastrophic but unseen threat...
That turns life into a living hell
and literally rips the Earth apart.
All this destruction
comes from deep space.
A powerful, menacing
black hole.
- Nobody on Earth is safe
or secure.
- Is this Armageddon or what?
- It's a dangerous universe.
There's a lot of ways
the human race can go extinct.
Will you be ready?
When doomsday strikes,
can any of us survive?
There are 100-million black holes in our galaxy,
with vicious gravitational forces
that devour everything in their path.
If one headed straight for Earth,
and we got sucked into its deadly vortex,
what would happen to our planet?
Would mankind survive?
- Everyone is wondering, "What can we do?
What's the next step? How do we get through this?"
- The destruction never stops. The chaos never stops.
It just keeps going until everything
is ripped apart and torn asunder.
In New Mexico's high desert,
the radio telescope observatory,
known as the Very Large Array,
scans the skies above.
Scientists are tracking something truly horrifying
barreling towards Earth.
- The first thing you do when you see a new phenomenon
is you use computers to simulate
what happens into the future.
And as we run the videotape forward,
we begin to say to ourselves,
"Oh, my God!"
- It's a black hole.
A supermassive black hole with a billion times
the mass of the sun.
Of all the objects in space,
this lethal mass possesses
the strongest gravitational pull,
earning its name.
Because nothing, not even light,
can escape the grasp of a black hole.
Anything... Or anyone...
That crosses its outer edge...
An invisible boundary known as the event horizon...
Will never be seen again.
Scientists calculate that in 24 hours,
the black hole will reach our planet.
But people are already beginning to feel its effects.
- As the black hole approaches,
we have kind of a global warming on steroids.
The black hole's gravitational force
is so powerful that even though it has not yet
entered the solar system,
it's pushing our planet
closer to the heat of the sun.
- Now it's Christmas in New York
and everyone's hanging stockings and putting up Christmas trees,
yet it's 110 degrees outside.
As the black hole enters the outer solar system,
people everywhere notice an ominous sign
that it will be arriving soon.
A strange effect called gravitational lensing.
- The black hole acts like a lens that's placed
in front of the distant background stars and galaxies.
And it distorts them and it warps them.
- You can think of it as simply a cosmic lens.
It's the universe's spyglass in a way.
- It would be extraordinarily unsettling
to the see the familiar patterns
in the night sky warped and distorted
by an object that's filling more and more of the horizon.
This is the first visual sign
that the greatest disaster in the history of mankind
is upon us.
As the black hole moves through space,
it hurls comets and asteroids
in every direction,
which serve as warnings to people around the world
that doomsday is near.
- Some of the asteroids will go flying in
toward the sun, many away from the sun.
But those flying toward the inner solar system
would start colliding, in some cases,
with the planets
and with the Moon.
- The impact that occurs to the Moon is devastating.
This isn't a quick, bang, done kind of scenario.
You're watching it over a half hour.
Material is beginning to fan out.
It's coming toward the Earth.
As people everywhere look up into the sky,
- Watching the Moon disintegrate
in the night sky is an absolute psychological effect.
You have cultures based on the Moon.
The Moon's our friend, it causes the tides,
prevents things from hitting us.
Watching that being destroyed,
it's an apocalypse unto itself.
Black holes, like the one heading toward Earth
form when massive stars die.
The remnants from the star implode
like an enormous building
collapsing onto itself.
- A black hole is the result of a gravitational collapse
All the material from the star
is crushed down to a small pinpoint.
The fact that so much mass is concentrated in one spot
is what gives a black hole enormously powerful
and destructive gravitational forces.
- If you have enough material
crammed into a relatively small volume,
its own self gravity will grow stronger
and eventually the gravity is so strong
that nothing,
not even light, can escape.
Albert Einstein first predicted
the existence of black holes in 1916,
when he presented his equations of general relativity.
Although the first one
wasn't spotted until 1971.
Now scientists say millions of them exist
throughout the galaxy
and some of them move rapidly through space.
- We used to think that black holes
were stationary, but we were shocked...
Shocked to find that there are
rogue black holes that wander across the galaxy.
As the black hole moves closer to Earth,
its gravity continues to send asteroids
crashing into the planet.
A meteor streaks through the sky over Barcelona.
- You're seeing a flash of light.
Then a big, hot, expanding balloon of gas.
Then buildings and trees shaking
because of the seismic activity.
Then debris being thrown all over the place.
This two-million pound iron meteorite
vaporizes the area around its impact site,
Instantly killing anyone in its path.
The crash is as powerful as the atomic bomb
dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
And like a nuclear blast,
a shock wave radiates out
in every direction.
- If you're farther than a couple of miles away
from ground zero, it would be silent,
is one of the strangest things,
because the light takes a much shorter time
to travel to you than the sound does.
One of the greatest threats to you
is actually the shock wave, propelling debris,
blowing out windows and shards of glass,
which are deadly at those speeds and pressures.
So something as simple as duck and cover
from the Cold War is actually very relevant.
As the first shock wave passes overhead,
people just outside of the meteor impact site
are safe, for now.
But the black hole has only just started
to wreak havoc on planet Earth.
Can mankind survive?
- This is devastation from space
that there's nothing you can do about.
A black hole...
The remnants of a dead star
with a gravitational force so strong
that nothing can escape its clutches...
Is heading straight towards planet Earth.
Can you survive?
As it enters the solar system,
the black hole's immense power
has already unleashed devastation on mankind,
hurling meteors that destroyed the Moon
and devastated cities across the globe.
People across the world struggle to cope
with these unprecedented disasters,
and fear what catastrophe will strike next.
- Everyone, rightly so, is wondering
"What can we do? What's the next step?
How do we get through this?"
The scientists who discovered the black hole
realize that nothing can alter its path.
- There's no way we're gonna deflect it,
move it out of the way.
It's not like an asteroid
where you could park a spacecraft near it
and gravitationally pull on it
or explode a bomb next to it
and deflect a little bit.
It's just too massive.
As the black hole moves closer to our planet...
People everywhere see something extraordinary
The photon sphere.
A place where gravity is so strong
that light travels in circles around the black hole,
filling the sky with streams of red and green light,
known as auroras.
- What anyone on the surface of Earth would see,
looking at the photon sphere
would be an incomprehensible, perhaps,
display of half imagery,
a light show, radiation.
I mean, this would be something that's almost
impossible to describe.
The effect this would have on the Earth
is the radiation and the light energy
hitting the atmosphere would cause aurora
that would light up all over,
which is essentially turning the atmosphere
into a sort of florescent bulb.
These unearthly images flash across
people's eyes just for a moment
as the Earth passes through the photon sphere.
And then they're gone.
With people enduring
unprecedented disasters everywhere,
some of America's military and political elite
gather in Cold War-era nuclear bomb-proof bunkers...
Like Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain,
which is buried under 2,000 feet of granite.
- For reasons that are obvious in the context of the Cold War,
the U.S. military set up their strategic defense
in Cheyenne Mountain.
And with good reason.
The Earth naturally
cooked these very tough rocks
that would naturally withstand the direct impact
of a nuclear weapon or several.
And it would make a robust outpost
for humanity to try and set up a last stand on Earth.
Traveling at more than a million miles an hour,
the event horizon...
The invisible boundary of the black hole...
Closes in on our planet.
And once the threshold is crossed,
there's no escape.
- Crossing an event horizon, is similar
to going over Niagara Falls.
Imagine that you're in a boat
and you know that the falls are coming,
because the water gets faster and faster.
And before you hit the edge, there's still a possibility
of you paddling hard enough to get to the side.
However, once you go over the edge of the falls,
there's no going back.
You can't paddle hard enough to get you back up the falls
and to safety.
Niagara Falls is very similar
to the event horizon of a black hole.
Once you cross the event horizon,
there's no possible way to escape.
- If you get so close to a black hole
that you're in the grip of the gravitational field,
then no matter what you do,
you're doomed to fall into the black hole.
As the black hole's gravitational forces
strengthen their grip on the Earth...
Does humanity have any chance of survival?
In 1916,
Albert Einstein first predicted
the existence of black holes...
Objects from space that suck in
and destroy everything in their path.
If we came in contact with a black hole today,
is there any way to survive?
For the last 24 hours,
people around the world
have been watching in horror
as a supermassive black hole speeds toward Earth.
It has already unleashed apocalyptic light shows,
scorching temperatures,
and massive asteroids
that have turned the Moon to dust.
Now, our planet is about to pass through
its event horizon...
The outer boundary of the black hole,
where gravity becomes so powerful
that nothing can escape.
- We reach the event horizon,
which is the very literal point of no return.
- Nobody on Earth is safe
or secure once the event horizon
of a supermassive black hole has been breached.
But for a while,
life would go on on the surface of the Earth.
As the Earth finally passes through
the event horizon,
it's majestic.
Instead of a big bang,
there is light.
- Once you've crossed the event horizon
of the black hole, it's now possible
for you to see the light that's inside
that can't escape from the event horizon.
- You'll notice strange light effects
like the light from stars coming in from some weird angle
and flashing into your eyes
and other weird effects like this.
This cosmic light show may be amazing,
but it's also confirmation
that our planet has entered the black hole
and now we're being pulled closer
to the doomsday point at its center,
known as the singularity.
- The singularity is the point
where all of the mass of the star collapsed into.
- As the Earth approaches the singularity,
the black hole's gravity is stronger
on one side of the Earth than the other.
And so because of that difference
in strength of gravity,
there is a stretching and a squeezing effect
that gets applied to the Earth.
The black hole's gravitational forces
are so strong
they literally start pulling our planet apart.
- Earthquakes are happening on orientations
that don't appear to make any sense.
They're not near coastal boundaries or subduction zones,
places where you'd expect plates to collide
and start to cause earthquakes,
or stretch and cause earthquakes.
- Unlike normal earthquakes, which build up
and then dissipate, these earthquakes are getting
stronger and stronger and stronger.
- You feel that?
These enormously powerful earthquakes
strike everywhere.
From Los Angeles
to New York and Miami,
as well as Australia, Africa,
and across Asia.
- As the earthquakes are reaching magnitudes
seven, eight, nine... When they start
to impinge upon the size of historical
massive earthquakes, then infrastructure
like dams start to fail.
And so you would see dams not just
in seismically active areas,
but dams across the world fail
and the water behind them would start to rush down
through the river valleys.
- The chaos never stops.
It just keeps going until everything
is ripped apart and torn asunder.
It's absolutely terrifying to think
that a population that's never dealt with this before
all of a sudden is being reduced to rubble.
For countless millions,
there is nowhere to run or hide.
As the death toll mounts,
as ocean levels rise across the planet.
- You're seeing a mound of water on the horizon
and as it approaches, the entire level of the water is rising.
And this has the effect of carrying water
to areas that have never seen water before in that way.
- It's gathering speed and pressure
because you are forcing all of the water
into a smaller and smaller channel.
It's like putting a nozzle on a hose.
As that wave comes in, it's gathering speed,
gathering pressure, and it's beginning to destroy
everything that's in its way.
For the 3 billion people that live on the coast
of whatever country they're in,
it's absolute chaos.
The water is washing into their homes
and taking everything away.
You've got massive waves.
The ocean will never be the same again.
To me and to many others,
that is the moment where I snap.
I am going to die,
the Earth is going to be destroyed.
It's scarier than hell.
While the few survivors
along the world's coastlines have watched
their homes, their neighbors,
and even their families washed away...
Other parts of the planet are left without water.
- In some coastal regions,
you'd see water flowing away
and leaving dry land where there used to be an ocean.
What's going on is that as with the tides on Earth
raised by the Moon, some areas have more water.
That's where you have high tide.
And other areas have less water.
That's where you have low tide.
But with a black hole pulling on the water,
the effects would become extreme.
And some places would have really deep water
and other places would have a huge deficit of water.
In fact, they might be completely dry.
- The fact that the black hole is able to have
such dramatic effects really illustrates
just how insignificant the Earth is to these processes.
It's like the Earth is a grain of sand on a beach,
being flung by a hurricane
that marches over the top of it.
As the Earth is pulled closer
to the singularity...
The black hole's lethal center...
Will it wipe out civilization as we know it?
It's been 17 minutes
since a black hole
a billion times more massive than our sun
gobbled up the Earth.
And now the black hole's powerful gravity
is stirring up geological forces
that are ripping the planet apart.
Can any of us survive?
- Ultimately, the people wiped out first by the effects
of the Earth being drawn closer to the black hole
are the nearly three billion people
who live in coastal areas.
Enormous tsunamis have destroyed Cairo,
Miami, and other cities
that lie along rivers and oceans...
While massive earthquakes...
Have quickly spread across the globe.
This unprecedented geological activity
has opened up gashes on the Earth's surface,
that allow gas, molten lava,
and rock, deep inside the Earth
to blast through the surface.
In Chicago,
citizens experience a kimberlite pipe eruption...
Something that hasn't happened on Earth
in 30 million years.
- Kimberlite pipe eruptions emerge
from the deep mantle of the Earth
and as they push their way up,
through the solid rock of the crust...
They breach the surface faster than a supersonic jet,
leading to an explosion...
Seen from a few miles away
that would look quite a bit like a nuclear explosion.
- It's like uncorking a champagne bottle.
The trapped gases within, they're trying to escape
and they can't, and it causes an explosion.
- Immediately, all of this burning hot interior
of the Earth is blowing out through a hole.
Everything around it is flattened.
As the Earth comes within a few minutes
of the black hole's center... The singularity...
Gravity begins sucking the air off our planet.
It becomes harder and harder to breathe.
People everywhere start suffocating.
- The black hole's gravitational pull on the air
is starting to dominate over Earth's gravitational pull.
So you've got these hurricane and gale force winds
and the air's just being sucked toward the black hole.
- Anything outdoors is absolutely unsurvivable
as these winds kick in.
It's a sandstorm and a hurricane
all warped together,
with a force that's far larger than has been experienced.
Only those who have access to oxygen,
like the scientists at the Telescope Array
in New Mexico, can survive much longer.
Or those in pressurized environments deep underground,
like Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain,
where some of America's political and military leaders
have gathered.
- Hardened government facilities,
like Cheyenne Mountain, are pressurized.
They have their own power.
If you go there, it will be fine
for a short amount of time.
But the Earth itself is being ripped apart.
As the world's population is reduced
to a few hundred thousand people,
can the last vestiges of humanity hold out
Space scientists first detected
a black hole in 1971.
Now, the Earth has been swallowed by one.
Is there anyone, anywhere,
who can survive?
As gravitational forces pull our planet closer
to the singularity...
The black hole's lethal core...
The devastation has been massive.
Earthquakes, tsunamis,
hurricane force winds,
and volcanic eruptions,
the likes of which mankind has never experienced.
- The black hole's gravity is pulling on different parts
of the Earth by different amounts
and that's causing a stretching of the different parts
of Earth's crust.
Earth's shape is actually being altered
by the gravity of the black hole.
But very few of the world's 7 billion people
are left to see the devastation.
Without oxygen,
animals, plants, and most humans
are dead.
- The atmosphere gets peeled away.
Anything on the surface of the planet,
or in the air, dies,
unless it can adapt
or get somehow underground into a pressurized vessel.
The stuff that requires less oxygen
will live a little bit longer.
But ultimately, anything that requires
the atmosphere to breathe,
will die.
Without oxygen,
animals, plants, and most humans are dead.
With the Earth close to the singularity,
buildings, bridges,
and then the Earth's surface itself
violently buckles.
The black hole's gravity is now so strong
that it can bend, twist, or tear our planet
like a sheet of paper.
- The gravitational pressure is so great
that the continents themselves begin to crumble.
The crust and the mantle of the Earth
are cracking under the pressure.
- Relatively quickly,
the previously familiar shapes
of the continents and oceans start changing
until they're unrecognizable.
- At this point, the Earth is being stretched
to such a degree, it's physically distended.
And it finally just gives way.
And there's such an amount of heat built up,
that when the crust starts to break up,
you'd have magma all over the place.
- When it's being ripped apart,
those kind of geologic events...
Volcanoes, earthquakes...
Everything is going to be going off at once.
The absolute, utter,
concise destruction of the planet
on a cosmological scale.
- The continental rock will be floating in an expanding,
taffy-like sea of lava.
The entire scene will be extremely bright,
the entire scene will be extremely violent,
and the entire scene will be almost completely unsurvivable
unless you're in a very well insulated
- The crust of the Earth is very heated,
and you might end up with rafts, essentially,
of crustal material that survive for a while
as the surface of the planet becomes molten.
But eventually it would all start to get mixed together.
And you are definitely in unsurvivable territory
if you are unlucky enough to be on the surface of the Earth.
- The entire Earth is bathed in a heat.
And it's really something
that is almost hard to imagine.
The Earth as we know it
is being ripped apart
and civilization has been decimated.
Is there any hope for the future of mankind?
30 brutal, devastating minutes
after our planet was sucked into a black hole,
it's nearing the doomsday point at its lethal center...
The singularity.
And extraordinarily powerful gravitational forces
start ripping the Earth to pieces.
- The planet turns into a hellscape.
Every minute piece
of crust and mantle
begins to break apart.
Some of the last remaining people on Earth
are America's political and military leaders,
locked inside the reinforced Cold War bunker
under Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain.
But they stand little chance
against the black hole.
- If Cheyenne Mountain manages to break free
of the fiery stream of debris
that the Earth has become,
then as you fall towards the singularity,
you'll experience a period of weightlessness.
There would be a period
where you're now free from the Earth.
The Earth has been destroyed,
and so you're in, literally, a freely falling stream
of debris that's heading toward the singularity.
Scientists call this deadly gravitational stream
spaghettification.
- Objects become stretched.
So a round object becomes a long piece
of spaghetti-like substance,
hence the term spaghettification.
The last humans are now gone...
Spaghettified.
But this is not the end
of the black hole's assault.
- As the material that had been the Earth
is drawn ever closer
to the core of this black hole,
what happens is the strength of gravity goes up so quickly
that you can start to rip apart not just a planet into rubble,
but you rip apart the rubble into dust,
and then you rip apart the dust into molecules,
the molecules into atoms, and then it's possible
you even rip the atoms apart
into subnuclear particles.
After the supermassive black hole has passed through
our portion of the Milky Way,
where there once was our solar system
is only a cleared lane, where not even
interstellar dust remains.
Planet Earth has been reduced to nothing.
But there is a chance that something of humanity
has survived.
- It's conceivable that one or more of the spacecraft
that humans have sent beyond the distant planets
wouldn't get gobbled up by the black hole,
would miraculously be on a trajectory
that allows it to escape the black hole.
- These space probes contain
microscopic hitchhikers.
We know that microbes can be extraordinarily hardy
even in the harsh conditions of space.
- And maybe, just maybe,
if this landed on a planet
around a distant star and the conditions were right,
that life would come out of hibernation
and that could actually seed life on another world,
And in that way, maybe a piece of Earth could survive.
There's also another theory,
one that bodes much better
for the survival of mankind.
Albert Einstein... One of the most influential
scientists in history...
Suggested an astounding possibility.
His equations indicated that Earth could slip through
a black hole unscathed,
into a parallel universe.
- If you take a look at Einstein's equations,
you realize that if a black hole is spinning,
spinning rapidly, and that's what we see in outer space.
All black holes are spinning very rapidly.
We see that the singularity's actually a ring,
not a dot at all.
Einstein's equations predict the Earth
might be able to enter the ring.
- If you fall through the ring,
you actually don't die.
You're not spaghettified. You can actually
go right through the ring.
"Then the question is," Well,
where does this lead to?"
The mathematics says there's a parallel universe
on the other side of a black hole.
- This is actually based on real science research
conducted in the mid to late 20th century.
And the idea is, a singularity warps space
so dramatically that it may actually connect
to otherwise totally unconnected portions
of the universe.
It's a question that scientists
around the world have debated for decades.
Will an encounter with a black hole
lead to a new beginning for Earth
in a parallel universe...
Or will it trigger the end of the world?
It's a question that science
cannot yet answer.
- The final encounter with the singularity,
we don't know how that unfolds.
Singularity by definition, right now,
is a location where the laws of physics
as we currently understand them break down.
- In all likelihood, however,
the environment is so destructive and so powerful
that the Earth would be completely obliterated.
- More likely, for us,
the black hole is the end of space,
the end of time,
the end of everything.