Existential Threats

[LSLGuy]

Here’s @Chronos thoughts on point from a few years ago:

How far out before some other star is brighter than the Sun?

OK, yeah, that was about what my intuition was telling me. I just wasn’t seeing a seam in some of those. And LSLGuy, I know that it’s popular to talk about a GRB flash-sterilizing the entire planet, but it can’t happen. Gamma ray bursts have a duration of at most a few seconds, and they can’t penetrate through an entire planet. So you could flash-sterilize half of the planet (or at least, half of the land area-- The deep oceans would also be protected), but the other half would be (initiall…