If I'm not mistaken, gamma ray bursts properly directed from a close enough entity are a realistic "wipe out all life on Earth" event, though extremely improbable.
Either way, it's not likely to produce a GRB in the first place, it's too far away to really affect the earth in dramatic sci-fi story ways, and it's pointed in the wrong way.
It's a "GRB candidate" in the same way you're a "lottery winner candidate" if you buy a ticket.
> What does “pointed in the wrong direction” mean?
Gamma-ray bursts [1] are a class of observations, not single event. (Like how we first saw pulsars, and then learned they're neutron stars.) Some GRBs may originate from relativistic jets [2] emitted by massive, spinning, charged objects colliding (e.g. black holes) or collapsing (supernovae). Those jets' intensity is not uniform, they emit from the poles. (See: spinning, charged.)
There are other proposed mechanisms that columnate emissions [3][4]. These involve a star's rotation creating a radiating column along the star's axis. (I'm not sure if the atoms in that column radiate with a bias.)
Stars have a magnetic field and rotate along their axis, similar to planets. The burst is emitted along the axis of rotation (the geographic north and south pole).
Many stellar objects rotate and/or have a magnetic field, and thus an "up", "down", and "side" in spite of being a sphere. Pulsars (extinguished stars that emit radio waves from their poles) are another famous example.
Stars, like planets, rotate around an axis. GRBs that are emitted by collapsing stars are believed to be directionally aligned with the axis of rotation.
That would not even kill all humans. It would possibly destroy all of civilization though. But even then, the coming generations would have artefacts to study and be inspired by.
That's an interesting thought. ACOUP did a blog post a while back [1] outlining the very specific circumstances that led to the Industrial Revolution and arguing that it's hard to imagine another way it could have happened. I suppose a rebuild would have to find a completely new route. Perhaps fields of Don Quixote esque wind mills connected to giant led-acid batteries rather than coal! With a couple hundred years gap between Armageddon and a substantial human population making progress, at least there would hopefully be decent timber reserves to work through the early phases.
> For more than 100 years, Machinery's Handbook has been the most popular reference work in metalworking, design, engineering and manufacturing facilities, and technical schools and colleges throughout the world. It is universally acknowledged as an extraordinarily authoritative, comprehensive, and practical tool, providing its users with the most fundamental and essential aspects of sophisticated manufacturing practice.
I think the level of scientific knowledge we have accumulated would be a tremendous short cut.
Even without books, the myths and obvious ruins of previous technological success would be a huge cultural guidepost for recovery.
Perhaps we would go through a 1000 year energy poor "dark age", and recovered populations wouldn't peak as high as ours, but I would expect that to be the worst case if an awareness of our history was not lost.
And maybe 10,000 years, after a complete cultural breakdown to hunter gathering with little functional memory of the past.
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Given rewrites of first versions are often much improved for having seen previous failure modes, it would be interesting to pop into the future of a recreated civilization and see how they might do things better!
Even having this written knowledge available to us it might still be impossible to recreate the technologies; so much knowledge exists in an active state only.
Like the F1 engines on Saturn V. We couldn't just "recreate them" because all of the know-how was lost.
Written info is useless without the right sort of culture where the necessary experimentation and problem solving can occur to work out those undocumented details. That is all that matters.
However, that is also true today and the effects are visible through the variations in technological progress of different populations currently on earth.
If you can jump right to electric power, then hydro power can give you all the power you need to get civilization going again. I don't think that tech knowledge would be likely lost if people survive at all.
My guess is that all the required knowledge, including sufficient people, are squirreled away in the bottom of Cheyenne Mountain and probably a few similar locations around the world.
I guess it depends on how long before the collapse happens, but I think there's enough accessible fossil fuels left to sustain a less than 10-figure human population for under a century while it figures out what else to do. They'd probably have to live with far more local supply and distribution networks, but global communication should still be fine.
Probably not? Half of the life on earth would probably survive the initial radiation burst, due to geography, and while there will be massive atmospheric chemistry changes that would be highly traumatic it seems like life would find a way, as they say.
