The clock of destruction is ticking.
A deadly heat wave
is sweeping over the entire Earth...
with no end in sight...
except total annihilation...
because every day...
the Earth is falling closer and closer toward the Sun.
- There's no doubt that as Earth goes toward the Sun
and temperatures rise,
ice in Antarctica will melt
and that will make the ocean levels rise.
- You have extreme temperatures.
You can't go outside.
You try to turn on the air-conditioning,
but the power is out.
- All the water in our blood would be boiling into vapor.
We would boil.
This is the beginning of hell.
Will you be ready...
When doomsday strikes?
Can any of us survive?
Earth travels around the Sun
at just the right distance for life to exist.
But what if our planet
were suddenly thrown from its orbit
and spiraling into the blazing heat of the Sun?
How long could we survive?
- We haven't evolved to breathe hot air.
If you're outside and it's 141 degrees...
- You'll burn your lungs.
- As you get closer to the Sun, there's this death wave
that moves both directions towards both poles.
And people have to keep moving farther
and farther north or south to stay alive.
- You start reaching temperatures
where aluminum melts and even steel.
The whole memory of civilization is completely erased.
Beneath the North Atlantic,
something strange is happening
to the world's most famous shipwreck.
- The "Titanic," 3,800 meters down
is in the inky, inky blackness
of the deep ocean.
The "Titanic" has been trapped in the dark
since it sank in 1912.
But today the wreck is suddenly bathed in sunlight,
and it starts to rise from the ocean floor.
In a field outside Houston, Texas,
two amateur astronomers find that their stargazing app,
which has always been accurate before,
isn't lining up with the night sky.
The stars are in the wrong place.
- Mm-mm.
Normally, every night the stars and planets
look like they're in slightly different parts of the sky,
because the Earth is in a slightly different place
in its yearly orbit around the Sun.
But on this night, the stars and planets rise exactly
where they did the night before.
- So astronomers would think,
"Oh, I just screwed up something."
But then they would talk to the other astronomers,
and every telescope in the world would be wrong.
The reason the stars
are no longer changing their position
is that after 4 1/2 billion years,
the Earth is no longer orbiting around the Sun.
- This is a terrifying thought.
The cause is 30 billion miles away.
A rogue star with the mass of the Sun
is moving through space.
- We think of stars as being stationary,
but, in fact, sometimes a star will come a little too close
and disrupt things.
If the star got really close,
it could screw up the orbits of planets.
The rogue star's gravity is so powerful
that as it passes,
it affects the Earth, even across billions of miles.
- If a rogue star were to pass behind Earth,
it's in the direction opposite to Earth's motion,
in which case the gravitational pull
retards the Earth and takes away
some orbital energy.
The star's gravitational pull on Earth
exactly matches the energy
of our orbit around the Sun.
But it pulls in the opposite direction.
- That would stop Earth in its orbit,
and Earth then would start falling
almost directly toward the Sun.
Earth has orbited the Sun
at an average distance of 93 million miles.
Now, with that orbit interrupted,
the gravity of the Sun is pulling us closer
at the rate of half a million miles a day.
And the closer we get,
the hotter it gets.
Back in Houston...
In a normal year, the city has almost three months
where the average temperature
is above 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now daily temperatures are reaching 100.
Texans deal with the heat wave
the way they always do...
with air-conditioning.
3,652 miles away,
Barrow, Alaska, is also dealing with a heat wave.
And since America's northernmost city
has an average temperature that's below freezing,
most people don't have air-conditioning.
Instead, they are sweating through
Houston-like temperatures in the upper 90s.
Strange weather patterns are happening all over the world.
Out-of-season hurricane cells form in the Caribbean.
Thousands flee inland, as 100-mile-an-hour winds
slam into Cuba's northern coast...
tearing apart homes
and flooding the streets of Havana.
- Global warming increases the power of storms.
We now have more powerful hurricanes
than we had in the past,
just because we've heated up the planet.
So, when we're doing the same thing as global warming,
we're going to be increasing the power of storms.
After the first week or so,
storms would pretty much
instantaneously react to higher temperatures.
When a hurricane goes over warm water
it increases in speed and ferocity.
All along the Atlantic Seaboard,
hundreds of thousands of people board up windows,
pile up sandbags in front of their homes...
and stockpile food and water.
As the storm picks up strength,
it moves toward the United States
and makes a deadly landfall on Cape Fear, North Carolina.
- As heat rises, it causes more winds,
more wind storms.
Thousands of people are suddenly homeless
and struggle to survive against the raging storm.
Some make it to safety.
Others aren't so lucky.
At the same time,
almost 500 miles to the north...
another super storm strikes the Atlantic City Boardwalk
and floods the New Jersey Shore.
Tourists and residents are forced
into a desperate scramble for higher ground.
- So, very quickly, pretty much the beaches
all over the place... After even six days...
you're gonna have such unstable weather patterns
that they're gonna be flooded completely.
- You've got more and more severe thunderstorms...
Which would generate more lightning,
which would then have the capacity
to ignite some of this drier tinder
and set more forest fires.
But the real danger is the heat
that's causing the storms...
The temperatures that increase every day,
threatening the lives of everyone on Earth.
- Since the dawn of humanity,
seeing the Sun rise is the beginning of a new day.
But it will get to a point
where this life-giving ball of energy
will very quickly become
this nuclear furnace of death,
that the last thing you want to see every morning
is that globe...
very, very slowly...
coming at you.
Every day we fall closer to the Sun.
Every day we're just that much closer to hell.
If the Earth suddenly started moving
closer to the Sun,
triggering an unprecedented heat wave,
how could you survive?
Two weeks after being knocked out of orbit by a rogue star,
Earth is almost 7 1/2 million miles
closer to the Sun.
Temperatures in Houston and other American cities
keep soaring.
More people are staying indoors and drinking more water.
Meanwhile, in much of Europe,
temperatures reach 100 degrees,
More than 30% higher than normal.
Across the continent,
a heat wave strikes down the weak and the elderly,
from Scotland to Russia.
The most conmmon cause
of death is heatstroke.
When the core body temperature exceeds 105 degrees,
it affects the central nervous system.
The heat can shut down your body and kill you.
For hundreds of millions,
air-conditioning is no longer about comfort.
It's about survival.
Those who have air-conditioning
stay inside and live...
While those without air-conditioning die,
as their rooms become coffins.
- Air-condition is not very common in Europe.
Most people are not used to deal
with such a fast or quick change
in temperature.
- Part of that's because they have a more temperate climate,
and part of it is because they have these really old buildings
that just weren't built for it.
So, when the heat goes up,
those people without air-conditioning
have nowhere to go.
21 days since the Earth was forced out of orbit.
We are now almost 13 million miles closer to the Sun.
Water is evaporating quickly
from rivers and reservoirs
and cities across the world.
- Rivers would be dropping,
because other than just evaporating,
they're also fed by melt from mountains.
All of that would start to go first.
- Most of the shallow rivers, canals, or so will fall dry.
- Once you get close enough to the Sun,
the canals of Venice would start to evaporate...
with no water left behind.
Pigeons still flock in the Piazza San Marco.
These birds have evolved to endure
temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit
and above.
But there are no people in the square.
- So it'd be this ghost town with dry canals everywhere.
As temperatures continue to rise,
throughout North America, and Northern Europe and Asia
all the snow has melted from the upper latitudes.
People are suffering and dying.
Around the equator, the heat is even more intense.
130 degrees or higher.
In countries like Colombia, and Brazil,
Uganda, Kenya, and Indonesia,
there are more corpses than the survivors can bury.
- The people around the middle of the Earth would be dead.
And the horror is only beginning.
As we fall closer and closer towards the Sun,
people seek shelter inside mountains...
While cities are attacked by armies of sand.
If Earth were thrown out of orbit
and kept falling closer to the heat of the Sun,
what would happen to humanity?
Across the world,
the extreme heat turns fertile land into desert.
Egypt is no longer nourished
by the waters of the Nile.
- When the Nile begins to drop in water level,
all of the surrounding area
that it used to flood will start to dry out.
What follows is a catastrophe
that dwarfs the ten plagues of the Bible.
- You start to get sandstorms...
to the point where you have sand blowing...
all the way from Western Africa into Israel and beyond.
You would actually have the same thing
at the same time in the American Southwest,
'cause they're at the same latitude.
You would have Phoenix and Tucson
dumping all of their sand toward New Mexico.
New Mexico dumping it into Houston.
There would be massive sandstorms
from Eastern California
that would stretch three states over.
But ironically, much of the world
is still unaffected.
70% of the planet is water.
And just a short way below the ocean surface,
marine life goes on as before.
- Ocean water doesn't transmit sunlight very well.
So, every 45 meters deeper,
you lose another 36% of whatever light was left.
And it takes time for the heat changes,
for the temperature changes, to build up.
So, on the muddy floor of the North Atlantic,
creatures that have made their home
in the wreck of the "Titanic" are unaffected.
Since it went down in 1912,
the "Titanic" has become home to deep-sea animals
like the rattail fish and the spider crab.
They feed and breed in the decaying hulk.
2 1/2 miles of near-freezing water
insulates them from the heat wave above.
- As far as they're concerned, nothing has changed.
But back on the surface,
life hangs in the balance.
- Humans, because we have an audacity to us,
will try and hold on as long as possible.
Some hope to find shelter
in the side of a mountain in China's Shanxi Province.
More than 3,000 feet above sea level
lies the Ningwu Ice Cave.
300 feet deep,
this cave traps frigid winter air
and remains frozen all year round,
lined with thick ice, even on the hottest days.
- There are ice caves,
and I've been in a number of them.
It is very, very, very cold on the interior.
- Of course, they would need supplies of food
and water and power.
And they would need to somehow deal with sewage,
and they'd have lots and lots of problems,
but they could try to live in these caves.
There are also other frozen places in the world
where desperate people seek shelter...
The North and South Poles.
- As you get closer to the Sun, there's this death wave
that moves both directions towards both poles,
and people have to keep moving farther
and farther north or south to stay alive.
- People will try to head
to the Arctic Circle or Antarctica
or book passage on ice clippers.
- Because Antarctica
is one of the most protected places,
you get the Sun's rays at an oblique angle,
and so the temperatures don't rise as fast.
- It takes time for the heat changes,
for the temperature changes, to build up.
- Down there, it's going to be about 70 degrees cooler.
An American icebreaker research vessel
is off the coast of Ross Island in Antarctica.
Its mission is not to escape the rapidly warming climate,
but to study it.
The scientists still pass glaciers
and ice sheets,
but that ice is melting faster than ever.
On board the icebreaker,
computer models reveal
that if we continue towards the Sun at this rate,
almost all of Antarctica's ice
will disappear in less than a month.
- There's no doubt that as Earth goes toward the Sun
and temperatures rise,
ice in Antarctica will melt.
And that will make the ocean levels rise.
The coasts of the world begin to flood.
- Parts of coastal Hawaii would undoubtedly be affected
by the rising sea levels.
Bangladesh has a very low average height above sea level.
The Netherlands has a low height.
They're toast.
Louisiana, New Orleans, places like that will get flooded.
- This is a constant level of water that is rising,
from Maine to Key West,
from Alaska all the way down to San Diego.
The Mississippi Delta is reaching into Oklahoma.
The Atlantic City Boardwalk is under water.
The deluxe casinos give way to the ocean.
Even many miles inland, away from coastal flooding,
melting ice reshapes landscapes across the world.
In Zermatt, Switzerland,
with the temperature hitting 110 degrees Fahrenheit...
People hear an echoing boom,
and a strange gray and white cloud of dust
fills the streets.
It comes from the nearby Matterhorn.
- The Matterhorn has glaciers right at the base of it,
and they're sort of helping keep the thing together.
When you start melting the glaciers,
parts of it would start to crumble.
- From the Matterhorn
to the Himalayas to the Andes,
you would have massive avalanches.
Hundreds of thousands of cubic feet,
densely packed ice and snow heat up and crack.
As temperatures continue to soar,
the skies will be streaked with fire,
and even the coldest shelters may fall to the rising heat.
If Planet Earth were thrown out of orbit
and started hurtling towards the Sun,
how long could we survive?
After five weeks, the Earth,
traveling at 22,000 miles an hour,
is now only 74 million miles away from the Sun.
The skies are streaked with blazing light,
as hundreds of satellites cascade
through the air as fireballs.
- The atmosphere on the Earth is made of gases,
and when they get hot, they expand.
And that means that the low-lying satellites
are going to start feeling a drag
that they didn't feel before.
That drag is going to destabilize their orbits,
and because of that, those may fall,
just like a meteor shower.
The destruction of satellites
means the loss of television and radio services
in towns and cities across the world.
Cell phones and the Internet also start to fail,
because the electrical power grid
is being pushed to its limit...
By people desperate for air-conditioning.
- By the time you reach day 35,
the average temperatures have gotten up to the range
that are exceeding the very highest temperatures
ever recorded on the Earth...
Things like 135, 137 degrees or so.
That's getting near death zone sort of temperatures
for the human body.
- We haven't evolved to breathe hot air.
If you're outside and it's 141 degrees
and the average humidity is, say, 10%,
you'll burn your lungs.
I can't breathe!
In Barrow, Alaska, people fight to stay alive
with new air-conditioning systems
powered by emergency generators.
Countless millions around the world stay inside, but their shelter won't last forever.
- The power grids are so taxed
from days and weeks of trying to combat this heat
that they're failing.
Also, the problem is humidity.
If you're in a very humid environment,
you can have a wet mat and a fan,
and the evaporation of the water will cool the air.
But when you're in a dry heat,
you need a radiator-type air conditioner.
You need one with an antifreeze, with coolant,
like a radiator in a car.
So, if you're running it for the past three weeks,
as the temperature has slowly jumped
from 70 to 80 to 100 to 120, now 141,
the coatings on wires
are getting superheated.
If that air conditioner is running too much,
it will begin to overheat.
It will begin to lose that coolant.
It will begin to fail.
And you're sitting in your room
slowly dying of heat exposure.
The world's power grid, overwhelmed by the need for air conditioning,
finally shuts down.
And time runs out for millions of people...
The victims of heatstroke.
- And you have extreme temperatures.
You can't go outside.
You try to turn on the air-conditioning,
but the power is out,
and so you just die.
Traveling at almost
42,000 miles an hour,
the Earth is now just 68 million miles from the Sun.
And the average temperature is an unbearable 169 degrees.
- The term "nightmare" doesn't really even apply anymore.
This is the beginning of hell.
In Ningwu, China,
the ice cave, once a sanctuary for desperate survivors...
Becomes a prison.
The heat of the outside air has seeped inside.
- At some point, even those caves themselves
are going to begin to melt.
- You will not escape this.
Even in the Antarctic,
the temperature is now 130 degrees...
at the upper limit of what human beings can endure.
The American research team living on an icebreaker
is struggling to hang on.
- Antarctica may be one
of the last habitable places on Earth.
But if there's any ice left on the planet at all,
it's rapidly melting.
It's not really an ice cap anymore.
It's more of a weird slushy.
Boats would be under constant flux
of glaciers falling over and pushing tides.
In the rest of the world,
survival is no longer possible.
- So, on day 47,
with a global temperature average of 217 degrees,
that's 5 degrees over the boiling point of water.
- This is beyond human habitability.
- Not only does water boil,
but being mostly water, we would boil.
All the water in our blood would be boiling into vapor.
All of that excess vapor
will be then going to your brain and your heart...
Strokes, cardiac arrest.
- You will die.
The oceans are evaporating,
and steam begins to spread over the Earth.
The hot mist fills the ruins of Havana...
The ghostly canals of Venice,
and soon, most of the planet.
As oceans boil
and humanity is left for dead...
Our proudest achievements burn...
and melt.
What if, after 4.6 billion years,
Earth was thrown out of orbit and fell towards the Sun?
Could our planet survive?
After 6 1/2 weeks Will you be ready...
of falling toward the Sun,
our planet is simply too hot to live on.
Of the over 7 billion people on Earth,
no one is left alive.
Even on the icebreaker in Antarctica...
The last humans are dead,
the blood inside them boiling...
Like the seas around them.
- Because the surface of the water
will be above 212 degrees,
if an iceberg were to slough off a glacier,
you would have...
for a very brief moment,
an iceberg sailing past your research vessel,
as the sea around you is beginning to very gently roil.
That would be a very strange sight.
Think of it is as an ice cube in a bowl of soup.
It will exist for a moment...
but then just slowly fade and disappear.
- Day 53, the oceans are boiling.
Almost all life is gone.
Only stuff in the deep, deep ocean may survive.
After almost nine weeks
of falling towards the Sun,
temperatures on Earth exceed 600 degrees Fahrenheit.
Across the world, wood spontaneously combusts...
Furniture ignites...
Billions of books burst into flame.
- As the Earth gets hotter and hotter,
you get the wood all drying out.
Once you pass the combustion point of wood,
you get massive forest fires everywhere.
You won't have people to put this stuff out.
So you're just gonna get these raging forest fires
all over Earth that's gonna increase smoke.
It may block out some of the light of the Sun,
but it doesn't matter.
It's still gonna keep getting hot.
Hot enough for gasoline
to burst into flames on its own.
- Everything that has fuel in it is a bomb at this point.
More than a billion cars,
buses, and trucks around the world...
explode.
- It's gonna be a real hellscape.
Amidst the devastation...
Another force, the Sun's gravity,
begins to tear at the structure of the planet.
- The Earth itself, for most of this plunge,
until almost near the final couple days,
other than the temperature changes,
the structure of the Earth itself
is relatively unchanged
until the final moments till we're actually
practically within the solar photosphere...
The outermost atmosphere of the Sun.
Earth has not yet had its worst day.
That is about to come.
If the Earth were thrown out of orbit
and falling towards the Sun...
Could our planet survive?
Every human on Earth has perished in burning heat.
- Probably won't even see the skeletons at that point,
because at those temperatures,
that organic matter is going to break down
and effectively burn to ash.
So it's going to be a world
that is fundamentally different than anything that we know.
The planet we once lived on
is only 6 1/2 million miles from the Sun
and closing in at 500,000 miles an hour.
- At this stage of the game, the Earth itself
would actually look probably very much
like a very large comet.
You're evaporating so much water
from the surface of the oceans,
upper parts of the atmosphere are being evaporated off
by the extreme heat of the Sun.
The atmosphere itself is being lost at this point.
Today is Earth's last day.
At dawn, the temperature is 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit.
At the beginning of our fateful fall into the Sun,
Earth's average temperature
rose by two degrees Fahrenheit in a week.
Now it rises three degrees every minute.
The Statue of Liberty stands
in what was once New York Harbor...
But is now a vast canyon.
- The harbor has been evaporated and dry...
desiccated.
As for Lady Liberty, her skin is copper.
Her copper torch is coated in 24-karat gold.
The gold melts away...
And the copper flame turns to liquid.
- You start reaching temperatures
where aluminum melts,
and even steel melts.
You have limestone melting, granite melting.
The whole memory of civilization is completely erased.
There's nothing left of us.
10 hours into the 65th day,
the temperature exceeds 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now, even mountains
and the mantle of the Earth simply melt.
- What was once what we call a rocky planet
really becomes a boiling soup
of all sorts of melting rocks and metals.
Then 2 1/2 hours later,
one million miles from the Sun,
the Sun's gravitational pull on the Earth
changes the very shape of our planet.
- The final destruction of the Earth
is not so much the evaporation of the water
and the boiling of the rock.
The final doom of the Earth
is not the heat effects from the Sun,
but the Sun's gravity.
The gravity triggers every single earthquake fault.
Massive temblors shake the planet.
- Also, fissures in Earth's crust
will open the passage for magma
to flow through known openings,
new openings, and volcanic vents.
Every volcano on Earth explodes.
- The Earth starts to get torn apart.
As the crust breaks,
the remaining ocean water rises,
pulled by the Sun's gravity,
and evaporates in the Sun's overwhelming heat.
- And so the final light that the "Titanic" sees,
in the deep ocean, which has been dark all this time,
is going to be the water of the Earth itself
flows off of the planet and is evaporated as it goes.
- There will be a brief moment
where all the Earth's water evaporates.
There'll be a brief moment
where sun will dawn upon the "Titanic" once more.
- The "Titanic" sees the brilliant flare of the Sun,
and in those last few seconds,
the Earth itself is pulled apart,
and literally every bit of the Earth itself
is exposed to the solar atmosphere.
- The Earth, at its very end,
looks very much like the Earth at its infancy...
A very hot ball of lava
deformed by the forces of the Sun.
So what you see is our history in reverse.
- The gravity becomes so strong that Earth will deform,
and the Earth will simply fall into pieces.
- And then that's it.
- In the end, everything gets destroyed.
- The ultimate fate of the Earth
is that it will be ripped apart into these chunks
that will then fly into the Sun.
When we pollute
the pristine hydrogen atmosphere of the Sun
with everything that has ever lived on Earth,
it may produce some kind of signature
that distant astronomers other places
could see on our star and say,
"Hmm, something really crazy happened there."
The Sun will continue to burn brightly
for billions of years.
But for the Earth,
this has truly been doomsday.
This is truly ...the end.