How the world ends.

GONE



Silence.
Not that it matters, there are no ears to hear. The fluorescent blue blob oozes unseen down the slope. If eyes could see and a consciousness could understand, the slope would be recognized as part of a mangled metal contraption.The vehicle was in motion when the driver ceased to exist. The blue blob is leaking from a broken plastic container, once part of a child’s toy, and becoming a viscous, shapeless mass where the slope meets the ground. The ground is still warm.
There remains nothing alive. Nothing. All cellular life has been disintegrated. No living cell survives the blast of raw stellar energy. Only those things based primarily on minerals retain any structure. Anything that relied on cellular arrangements for structure has become shapeless on the ground. Trees, grass, animals – all gone. There will be no biodegradation. There are no organisms left to perform it.
Some viral forms have survived the blast but there are no living cells to support their reproduction. Those that have the capability go dormant and wait. The wait will be long. The life that once existed had taken almost five billion years to evolve. By the time a sentient life again exists on the world there will be absolutely nothing remaining to indicate they are not the first. The planetary activities of weather, tectonic movement, volcanism, and asteroid strikes will have redesigned the entire surface of the world. The already molten core increased in temperature as the stellar energy passed through it making the reshaping of the surface even more complete.
There will be nothing surviving of the plans, dreams, or activities of the world’s most sentient lifeform. The changes to the world brought about by the population will quickly be undone. A fresh, virgin world will greet the new lifeforms that eventually appear. The cycle repeats.


What Happened? What caused this?
The stellar energy that sterilized the world was the galactic shockwave of a super massive supernova. The energy bathed every star system in the galaxy. Those systems farthest away received a more dilute wave of energy and were slightly less affected. The rest were effectively sterilized. The galactic clock is reset.


Donald Page