An asteroid striking the Earth with the force of 20 hydrogen bombs. A super volcano posing a threat to all life on Earth. The last ever total solar eclipse. Life for your great great grandkids will probably look nothing like today, and honestly, I'm glad we're going to miss most of it. This asteroid named Bennu is currently ranked as the highest potential risk for a serious collision with Earth, and it's headed for us right now. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory actually tracks the entire asteroid catalog we have to assess whether there are any risks of collisions. The program currently ranks Bennu right at the top with a 1 in 1,750 chance of it hitting Earth on September 24th, 2182. Astronomers even found that there is actually a 30-year window where our orbits are so intertwined that there are eight separate occasions where a collision could occur. At its closest approach, Bennu will be just 750,000 kilometers above Earth's surface. That's roughly twice as far away as the Moon. Now, if this impact does occur, the collision will have the kinetic energy of 1,200 megatons of TNT. Now, for comparison, the Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated on Earth, was around 52 megatons, meaning Bennu would strike the Earth with the power of 22 Tsar Bombas. In preparation, scientists have actually been studying Bennu in detail for decades now. The OSIRIS-REx mission was sent to Bennu to sample the asteroid and bring some rocks back to Earth. It launched on September 8th, 2016, successfully collected a sample as you can see here, and then touched down back on Earth just last year. The contents of the sample are currently being studied, so we don't know too much, but we do know that there appears to be organic molecules and other unknown materials. One thing is for certain, though. I personally am kind of glad that we won't be around when Bennu potentially strikes the Earth. I want to imagine a hypothetical scenario together, okay? Elon Musk decides that one of his children should be sent on a mission to colonise a nearby star system. He gets his SpaceX rocket ready, straps the little kid in, and sends him on a journey to the exoplanet. But this exoplanet is actually obscured from Earth, so they lose all communication with home. Their rocket is broken, and they are forced to survive on their own. His child lives there on the planet, makes his own little house, and has his own family. They spend generations fixing the rocket and doing research, until 1,000 years later, they are finally ready to get on board and fly back to Earth. They make this journey home, arriving 1,000 years after that first sun left the planet, and finally, they make communications with other humans. But something strange is happening. They can't understand them, even though they both claim to be speaking English. But how can this be? Well, if I show you this document, can you read it? You would probably say no, obviously, because that's a different language. But what if I told you that was English? This was written in the year 616, and surprisingly, English looks essentially nothing like it does today. Even just 100 years ago, English was really different to how it is today. I'm sure you would know this if you've read any books from that time in your high school English class. Cooperate and Zoologist used to be spelt like this. Diarrhoea was written with ligatures like this, and the capital of Japan was, well, Tokyo, but spelt T-O-K -I-O. Because of this reason, many linguists have suggested that English and most of the other languages around the world will not be around in 1,000 years. All of language as we know it today, gone forever. Crazy to think about. When I say Sahara, you probably picture something like this. Dry, hot, barren, hell on earth. But did you know that one day, it will look like this? A vast grassland filled with life. It happened many times before, and it will happen again soon. For hundreds of thousands of years, this area on the African continent has alternated between desert and tropical savannah on a roughly 20,000 year cycle. This is caused by the precession of earth's axis every 26,000 years as it moves and wobbles its way around the sun. It reached its present day desert conditions around 1,100 years ago, after slowly drying out across around 6,000 years. In around 13,000 years, earth's wobble will once again flip, leading to the Sahara becoming green once more. Now before we continue with these unbelievable real events, I just want to quickly thank Morgan & Morgan for sponsoring this portion of the video. Morgan & Morgan is America's largest injury law firm, and it's for good reason. They've won a lot. When people get into an accident and suffer serious injuries, they often get lowballed by insurance companies who just don't want to pay out the fair amount. So if you do really get seriously hurt, your injury could be worth millions. Just in the past couple months, they saw the verdicts of $12 million in Florida, $26 million in Philadelphia, and $6.8 million in New York. If you get into an accident or get injured in any way, you should know how to protect your rights, and they make it easy for you. You can submit your claim in just a few minutes from your phone and manage the entire process remotely. And the best part of all, in my opinion, is their fee is completely free unless you win. So you really know they are going to fight to get you the best results. So you can check Morgan & Morgan out at forthepeople .com forward slash AstroKobe, or simply click the link in the top of the description. Within the next 10 to 20,000 years, an event that no living human has ever witnessed will likely occur. A super volcano, super eruption. There are just 20 super volcanoes on Earth, located mostly throughout the US, Southeast Asia, and New Zealand. For a volcano to be considered a super volcano, it needs to be capable of ejecting more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of material. A truly unbelievable amount. Before an eruption, magma will collect in a vast chamber below the surface, building pressure as it does. This continues until the Earth's literal crust is cracked, ejecting the magma onto the surrounding region. For example, I'm sure you've already heard of Yellowstone, one of the most famous super volcanoes on Earth. If this volcano were to actually erupt, unbelievable destruction would ensue. The surrounding states of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana would be directly impacted by massive flows of magma, ash, and rock. While you might think you can run, you can't. These flows move more than 300 kilometers per hour, picking up and destroying everything in their way. The surrounding 800 kilometers around Yellowstone would be covered in a thick blanket of ash, and the shockwave, well, it would be heard all around the globe. Super volcano eruptions like this happen on Earth once every 17,000 years on average, so don't fear. The chances of one happening in the next few hundred years is only 2%, so chances are you and I will miss out on this one. Okay, I have a question for you. If you could send just one message to an alien civilization, what would you send? Because we actually did do this, and in 25,000 years, the message will arrive, and if someone is listening, well, this is what they will find. In 1974, we sent the Arecibo message, an interstellar radio signal carrying some super basic information about humanity and Earth. We sent it to the globular cluster M13. It was sent to celebrate the reopening of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. So once you convert the binary data into a graphic, this image is what you get, and if this looks like a big mess to you, you're a little bit like me, so let me take you through all the key elements. There are seven key messages here. The numbers 1 to 10 are given in white. The atomic numbers of the elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus are labeled in purple. These are precisely the elements that make up our DNA. The formulae for chemical compounds that make up the nucleotides of DNA are shown in green. The estimated number of DNA nucleotides in the human genome and a graphic of the double helix structure is shown in white and blue. The dimensions of an average American man, 5 foot 9, is here in blue and white. We of course have a graphic of a human being, and the human population on Earth at the time, which was around 4 billion, is shown in white. A graphic showing our solar system, including Pluto before its demotion, is shown here, and Earth is distinguished by it being raised towards the human. Finally, a graphic of the Arecibo radio telescope and the dimensions of its transmitting antenna dish are shown here in purple, white, and blue. My question for you is, if you could personally do this, you know, send a message to an alien civilization, what would you send? I'm currently working on making this a reality and actually doing it, so if I like your idea, I just might send it. So comment your ideas down below. In just over 1 million years, something terrifying and kind of beautiful will happen. Something only spoken of in science fiction. A star will likely pass through our solar system. Seriously. This is Gliese 710. It's an orange star, slightly smaller than our sun, and it's currently located around 60 light years away from us, but not for long. In 1.29 million years, this star will pass just 0.16 light years away from our sun. Comparing that to the current closest star to us, which is 4.2 light years away, this is nearly scarily close. In fact, it will be so close that it will appear as bright in our sky as Venus and Jupiter, the brightest planets. This is so close that it has an 86% chance of actually passing through the Oort cloud. The Oort cloud is just this huge sphere of icy rocks that surrounds our solar system, and at this distance, it could seriously impact some of the objects in the Kuiper Belt, like Pluto. Even many of the comets that we get to watch every single year could be impacted. Astronomers have predicted that this could result in something known as comet rain, sending showers of comets into the inner solar system for millions of years. This would cause our skies to be lit alight with beautiful comets every single year, and this of course increases the chances of collisions. This is by far the closest pass-by that astronomers currently know of, but there are some other candidates that astronomers think might get even closer, potentially too close. But for now, we're probably safe. A side effect of climate change that we don't often hear about is the acidification of our oceans. The ocean absorbs 30% of the CO2 released into our atmosphere. This CO2 is absorbed by the seawater, leading to an increased concentration of hydrogen ions, making the seawater more acidic. This actually causes corals to be unable to maintain their skeletons, impacting their growth and strength. This is one of the leading causes of the slowly dying reefs that we have today. Around the world, particularly here in Australia's Great Barrier Reef. And what's awful is, it actually takes more than 2 million years for these corals and other marine organisms to recover from this ocean acidification caused by humans. 200 years of our actions, resulting in 2 million years of destruction for the reefs. For thousands of years, our ancestors have looked to the stars with wonder, telling stories of what they see. Orion the Hunter, the Big Dipper, the Southern Cross. These constellations have guided humans for thousands of years, even helping them navigate across the vast oceans late at night. But in 5 million years, none of the constellations we see today will have survived. When you're outside at night watching the stars, it's easy to think that these stars are just fixed in place, never changing. But of course, this isn't true. They are actually moving throughout space at hundreds of kilometres per second, just like our sun. Since 2014, the European Space Agency's Gaia mission has been tracking the position of stars in the Milky Way with greater accuracy than ever before. And using this data, they created this real video showing how stars in our sky will move over the next 5 million years. Constellations will wander, leaving our stories in the past. The Big Dipper and Orion the Hunter left as distant memories. Now we're going really far into the future. In 225 million years from now, we will finally have completed one full orbit of our Milky Way galaxy. This is known as a galactic year. Despite the fact that we are orbiting pretty quickly at 230 kilometres per second, it still takes us 225 million Earth years to complete one full orbit. Since our planet formed, Earth has completed this trip 20 times already, but never with humans on board. But we don't orbit in a nice flat plane like this. We are actually travelling more like this, tilted on a 60 degree angle. If you took just one piece of paper every single day and stacked them one on top of another for an entire year, 365 days, you would end up with a stack that looks a little something like this. And this is how far the Moon moves away from the Earth every single year. It's around 0.1 millimetre every single day. Almost two inches in just one year. This is because of tidal interactions with the Earth. The Moon's gravitational pull creates these bulges on either side of the Earth. But because Earth rotates in the same direction as the Moon orbits, the bulge causes the Moon to speed up ever so slightly, causing it to slowly get further and further away. Now, while two inches doesn't sound like a lot, over millions of years, it adds up. In 650 million years, this will have two huge effects. A day on Earth will last 24 hours and 18 minutes due to the Earth's rotation slowly slowing down as a result of the Moon moving further and further away. And more importantly, the last ever total solar eclipse will happen. Beyond this point, the Moon will no longer be big enough in the sky to eclipse the Sun completely. Currently, the Moon is 400 times closer to the Earth than the Sun, and it just so happens to be 400 times smaller. This means that we get to see these beautiful total solar eclipses as the Moon is just the right size to block out the light from the Sun perfectly. But eventually, the Moon will be just too small because it's moved away from us. We will no longer get to see eclipses like this. Finally, in one and a half billion years, something truly freaky will happen. The plate tectonics that are responsible for creating the vast mountain ranges around the world, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the creation of new land, those tectonic plates will stop moving. It's actually true. Eventually, the mantle of the Earth will have cooled so much, preventing the tectonic plates from drifting anymore, and the effects will be… horrifying. The carbon cycle completely stops, affecting life on Earth. The continents no longer move, preventing new continents from forming. The wind and weather will slowly erode the mountains here on Earth over millions of years, leaving the remaining land extremely flat. This could even result in the Earth being reverted to an ocean world over time. The entire planet covered in a cold ocean. I'm personally glad that I wouldn't be around to see the day.
