NASA’s Search for New Laws of Physics

Looking at gamma-ray bursts and gamma-ray burst explosions.

These events are so mind-bogglingly intense that they can be detected from billions of light years away (and so billions of years in the past). Which is good, because you really don’t want one to get any closer than that. One popular “sudden extinction” theory is that such a burst has happened within range of our own galaxy, but because the lethal gamma radiation moves at the speed of light, the first evidence we could ‘detect’ would be everybody and everything dropping dead. The only people who could investigate it are those who evolve from particularly hardy bacteria hidden deep in a rock somewhere, evolving for billions of years then looking at fossils full of iPhones and saying “Hmm, I wonder why everybody fell over all of a sudden”.