Brad Bergan opines that if we stay on Earth, some believe, humans will cease to exist. In an article published in June, Elon Musk warned of this cosmic inevitability: that life on Earth will go extinct if we don’t become a multi-planetary species. There are two paths, Musk wrote: “One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually, history suggests, there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go.”
Survival, compounded by fear, are ostensibly the primary motivations for humans to become a multi-planetary species. And though hypothetical mass-extinction events like asteroid impacts or nuclear war may crease our brows, we have advanced technologies, or strong theories about how to make such technologies, in order to safeguard the future of humanity. How pressing, then, is it to colonize Mars or even the Moon?
But the real danger lies in the remote possibility of a second subsequent major flare (SSF) that occurs before our ozone has fully recovered from the first, according to the study. Without an ozone layer to protect us, the UV radiation from a second SSF would cause DNA to mutate so dramatically that it could damage fertility and alter physiological functions. Even extremophiles could perish (though, admittedly, this scenario is even less likely than just one SSF).
So far, humans haven’t witnessed a SSF from our Sun in part because they aren’t so frequent, and our civilization has only existed for a few thousand years. But unstable atoms trapped in tree rings show that bonafide SSFs have struck Earth before.
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