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NARRATOR: A freak cosmic collision...
a fatal shock to the Earth's interior...
triggers all of the world's volcanoes to erupt.
MAN: This is a Class 1 Volcanic Zone.
In a week, you will be dead!
NARRATOR: Could humanity prevail?
Leading minds join forces
to craft scientifically plausible scenarios
of Armageddon...
WOMAN: There's nowhere to go right now.
WOMAN: Oh, my God!
NARRATOR: ...and find the secrets to human salvation
in the face of ultimate disaster.
CONDUCTOR: Tickets, please.
Ticket?
There you go.
CALEB SCHARF: We actually live in
an incredibly precarious place in the cosmos.
We live on the outer layers of a ball of molten rock
that is itself a tiny speck around a small star
that's one of 200 billion stars in a galaxy
that's spinning its way through a universe
of 200 billion other galaxies.
CONDUCTOR: Tickets.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: There are all sorts of very fast,
very dangerous objects racing around out there in the galaxy.
And if they come into our neighborhood,
they will do some very real damage.
Just about all these objects reflect light,
so chances are we'd see them coming from a very long way off.
There are other projectiles we would never see coming,
and one of those is called a primordial black hole.
A primordial black hole does not reflect any light,
therefore it's essentially invisible to us.
WOMAN: What time will we be getting to Dayton?
CONDUCTOR: 30 minutes.
WOMAN: Thank you.
OLUSEYI: A primordial black hole is different
from these huge black holes we often read about.
It's a theoretical space body
that we believe is left over from the Big ***.
It's a very, very small object.
It can be smaller even than an atom.
And yet it's incredibly dense and heavy,
possessing perhaps one-tenth the mass of the Earth.
And with those properties,
if one of them was to collide with the Earth,
it could shoot through us like a bullet through an apple.
CONDUCTOR: Ticket.
MAN ON RADIO: Harry! Look out at the sky.
Are you seeing this?
SCHARF: How big a hole is the primordial black hole
going to make in the Earth?
Well, if it's the size of the atom,
it is probably going to make a hole that's about 100 yards,
no more, across.
It's really quite a small hole,
except it's going to go all the way through the planet.
OLUSEYI: It's going to hit the Earth
at a very high rate of speed, maybe 20 miles per second.
At that speed, it'll transit through the entire body
of the Earth and come out the other side in about six minutes.
MAN: This is Peter Pacific Shipment R1817 from Perth.
Position 32-22-10947.
We're seeing some kind of vortex.
Something just flew out of the ocean!
There's a huge wave!
We're going to capsize.
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
Mayday!
OLUSEYI: Now, as traumatic as this is,
the planet can probably take it.
Earth could probably absorb that kind of impact.
The real problems emerge inside the Earth.
SCHARF: As the black hole moves through the planet,
its destructive power is going to release
enormous amounts of energy,
that's of the order of several hundred gigatons
of explosive energy.
OLUSEYI: The energy released could be equivalent
to setting off as many as 100,000 atomic bombs
inside of the Earth.
That's a lot of energy,
and that's going to send shockwaves radiating out.
And when those shockwaves hit the crust of the Earth
from the inside,
it's going to shake up our world in some very deadly ways.
REPORTER: It is a volcanic disaster without precedent.
REPORTER: At least five active volcanoes around the world
have erupted in the last 24 hours.
REPORTER: Near Mexico City, hundreds have died
when steaming mudslides flowed into their homes.
REPORTER: An international coalition of geologists
is gathering in New York
to review data and present their findings.
WOMAN: Good morning.
To briefly recap--four days ago,
we believe a very small black hole
shot through the center of the Earth.
This event has caused a series of shockwaves
going through the Earth's core.
We've seen an unprecedented spike
in global volcanic activity.
OLUSEYI: And this is why those shockwaves are so frightening.
As they ripple out from the Earth's core,
they're going to impact all the magma chambers
in all of the volcanoes all over the Earth.
And that's going to drive those volcanoes
straight towards eruption.
People might not even be all that scared at first.
REPORTER: Is this your first time to see raw lava like this?
GIRL: Yeah.
REPORTER: Looks like you're having a lot of fun with it.
[laughs]
OLUSEYI: Volcanoes are interesting, they're exciting.
And some may seek them out for the thrill.
OPERATOR: Manasee County 911.
WOMAN: I don't know what to do.
[screams]
OPERATOR: You need to get to a safe distance.
TRACY GREGG: The engine that makes a volcano erupt
is something we call the magma chamber.
And a magma chamber is a blob of molten rock
that lives inside or under a volcano.
And that molten rock comes from Earth's mantle,
deep within the Earth.
It can get up to around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
And when it gets hot, it will melt, and hot things rise.
And so the melt from the mantle rises up
toward the surface of the Earth until it reaches a place
where it can't go up any higher, and it sits there.
And it stews and it bubbles.
OLUSEYI: Now there's all this liquid rock, bubbling away,
under immense pressure.
And there's gas mixed into the magma,
and that makes the pressure even greater.
GREGG: Gas is always the biggest problem in volcanoes.
And when you get enough gas collected inside a magma chamber
it will blow up.
DAVID FERGUSON: As the stress wave was to pass through
a magma body, it could cause bubbles to grow
as gasses in that magma come out of solution,
and these bubbles cause a massive increase in pressure
in the magma body.
Many volcanoes that have magma sitting beneath them
could be pushed to the point of eruption.
MAN: We anticipate that within the next six months to a year,
almost every major volcanic system is going to experience
an event of a catastrophic scale.
The key concern now is the world's supervolcanoes.
Lake Taupo in New Zealand,
Lake Toba in Indonesia, Campi Flegrei in Italy,
and here, of course, in the US, Yellowstone.
GREGG: A supervolcano is one that would erupt somewhere
between hundreds of cubic miles or thousands of cubic kilometers
of material within a short time, days to weeks.
That's a lot of stuff.
FERGUSON: The explosive power of a supervolcano
may be up to a thousand times the power of the atomic bomb
that was dropped in Hiroshima.
GREGG: We think there are around a dozen supervolcanoes
on Earth.
And if one of them went off, that would have global effect.
It's going to throw the world
into financial and biological chaos.
More than one super-eruption would throw us
back into the Stone Age.
MAN: Our top priority now is to try and predict
when these systems could erupt.
DAVID BARTELL: How can we do it?
How can we get enough inside information about a volcano
to know when it will erupt, and how big,
how deadly that eruption will be.
GREGG: And these are questions we can answer
by imaging the magma chamber
and trying to understand its shape and dimensions.
MAN: This is 236 and 237.
OLUSEYI: But there is a brand-new technology
that helps us do just that.
It's basically an MRI for volcanoes.
It creates images using tiny particles called muons.
FERGUSON: Muons are subatomic particles
that are created constantly in the Earth's atmosphere
as we are bombarded with cosmic radiation from space,
and even as we're sitting here, thousands of these muons
will have been passing through my body.
A muon detector is placed at the base of a volcano
to detect the muons that are passing through it,
and by measuring the difference in the intensity
of these particles,
we can build a picture of what's inside the volcano.
PHILIPP RUPRECHT: If you have all this information,
then you have probably a very good understanding
how close to an eruption the volcano is.
REPORTER: Authorities are scrambling
to retrieve reliable data on the Earth's supervolcanoes
as the world braces for a possible chain
of cataclysmic eruptions
in the wake of a collision with a subatomic black hole.
OLUSEYI: But even as we get a clearer picture
of what's churning inside the supervolcanoes,
other problems will begin to present themselves.
The Earth keeps a lot of nasty stuff under its skin,
and some of it will come bubbling up
in ways that we can't anticipate.
GREGG: A limnic eruption is essentially
the eruption of a volcanic lake.
They're extremely deadly because they're very surprising.
What happens is, you get a volcano
that has a crater on top of it from a previous eruption,
and if it's located in an area that gets a lot of rainfall,
that crater will fill up with water.
If the volcano contains a magma chamber
that has a lot of gas in it, the gas bubbles,
it's usually carbon dioxide, will start to bubble out
and they get to the bottom of the lake.
And they will just build up there.
FERGUSON: This is because the pressure at the bottom
of the lake is high enough that instead of forming bubbles
and escaping into the atmosphere,
the carbon dioxide is able to become dissolved
into the lake water.
OLUSEYI: A shockwave from inside the Earth
will agitate this gas-rich water,
like it was shaking a can of soda.
Thousands of tons of gas come out of solution
and bubble right to the surface.
FERGUSON: And when this is released catastrophically
from the surface of the lake,
this massive cloud of deadly CO2 can actually flow downhill,
displacing the air as it goes,
and anybody caught in the wake of this cloud
will be suffocated.
BORIS IVKOV: It will kill indiscriminately
all living things that need oxygen for survival.
The only survivors will be probably plants.
REPORTER: Officials say more than 25,000 people are dead
on the outskirts of Managua
after an eruption of carbon dioxide
from a nearby volcanic crater lake.
REPORTER: Most of the victims were sleeping
when the eruption occurred, and had no warning.
REPORTER: Searchers are still finding bodies
in otherwise undisturbed homes.
OLUSEYI: A big limnic eruption will focus the world's attention
on what's coming next-- the giant volcanoes.
Which ones are most likely to explode?
And how big will those eruptions be?
FERGUSON: The way that scientists categorize
the size of a volcanic eruption
is using something called the Volcanic Explosivity Index.
This is sort of like a Richter scale for volcanoes.
GREGG: An eruption that most people in the United States
are familiar with or at least have heard of
is the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980.
And that was a pretty destructive
and phenomenal eruption.
Around 64 people were killed by that eruption.
PILOT: And now we've got an eruption down here.
The whole northwest side is sliding down.
GREGG: So that 1980 eruption would have had
a Volcano Explosivity Index of 4.
The Explosivity Index of a supervolcano
would be on the order of 8 or 9.
What you have to know to understand these indices
is that the steps between the numbers--
so from 6 to 7, or from 4 to 5--
it's not just one times larger, it is 10 times larger.
So when we're talking of a super-eruption
with an Explosivity Index of 8,
that's 10,000 times bigger than a Mount St. Helen's eruption.
FERGUSON: Volcanoes don't typically erupt
without showing signs of their awakening beforehand.
It is usually possible to give a forecast
that an eruption is becoming increasingly likely.
Magma that is starting to fracture a path to the surface
will start to break the rocks above it,
and these will cause many, many earthquakes.
[screaming]
OLUSEYI: As earthquakes and other warning signs
of coming eruptions become more common,
the pressure will grow on governments
to take some kind of action.
Even preventive action, to somehow use human technologies
to divert or defeat these volcanoes.
GREGG: There's really nothing humans can do
to change the behavior of a volcano.
We have no abilities, zero abilities
to prevent an eruption.
OLUSEYI: The only man-made device we have
that even approaches the forces inside a volcano
is a nuclear weapon.
GREGG: So, if you tried to use a nuclear weapon
to stop a volcanic eruption, it would not work.
FERGUSON: At best, you would hope for it to have no effect,
but it is possible that you could destabilize the structure
enough to actually initiate an eruption.
REPORTER: In an ill-fated attempt
to forestall a volcanic eruption,
the government of North Korea detonated a nuclear device
inside Baekdu Mountain.
The effect was catastrophic, triggering a major eruption.
REPORTER: An enormous cloud of radioactive ash and steam
has enveloped the North Korean city of Chongjin.
REPORTER: Experts say there is little hope
for the city's 600,000 residents.
REPORTER: The Russian government has ordered its fleet
out of Vladivostok.
REPORTER: In Japan, evacuation plans are already under way
for the Kyushu Islands,
where eruptions from two separate volcanoes
could spell death for some 13 million citizens.
GREGG: When a volcano explodes,
what you'd see is this column of dark material
rising up into the sky,
and that's what we call volcanic ash.
FERGUSON: Volcanic ash is not really ash at all.
It's made of very fine particles of glass.
GREGG: It's frozen magma shards.
It would look like a snowfall, except it's not snow, it's ash.
It weighs a lot more than snow,
it's going to cause buildings to collapse.
FERGUSON: It is also very damaging to engines,
as it will clog up the air systems,
and in the case of airplanes,
can coat the engines in a fine film of glass,
which stops them working.
When volcanic ash falls on power lines,
it can coat these lines in a fine layer of volcanic dust.
When this becomes wet, it actually becomes conductive,
and this can short out the power lines,
effectively shutting down the grid.
OLUSEYI: So now we have a giant ash cloud
drifting out over East Asia.
And volcanic ash is catastrophic for crops.
PAUL FALKOWSKI: You'd ruin the food chain for that year
and probably for many years in the future.
BARTELL: If you live within a thousand miles of an eruption,
your environment could be poisoned for years.
The only way you can live through that kind of ash cloud
is to seal yourself away.
You'd have to create for yourself a closed ecosystem,
a mini world that was sealed off from everything else.
The term we use for this is a biosphere.
LES JOHNSON: A biosphere is essentially something that would
simulate life on Earth in a contained environment
that might be able to keep out
all that's happening on the planet
and simulate within it all the processes necessary
to keep people, plants, and animals alive.
MAN: Let's get down to the bare bones of it.
What do human beings need to thrive?
Air, water, food, shelter.
LEVINSON: People have been working on biospheres
for actually several decades or longer.
The idea being a self-contained unit, totally sealed,
grow its own food, its own medicine.
It could live without any contact in the outside world.
OLUSEYI: Can we do this?
Can we build a completely enclosed world?
It might be our only hope.
[snaps] MAN: Just like that.
And our whole world changed.
And there's not a place on this planet you can hide from it.
Or maybe there is.
Maybe there's a safe place, a SafeHaven.
LEVINSON: The question is who would fund the biosphere?
It could be the government, but it could also be a billionaire
who has the wisdom and the monetary wherewithal
to say, "You know what? Let's do this."
MAN: When the volcanism crisis hit, I had a vision.
A vision of a new world.
BARTELL: In a habitat like SafeHaven,
you have to choose your food supply carefully
to maximize the nutrition you get
for the space you have available.
Ultimately, you might have to think about
limiting the population, because everyone has to eat.
MAN: Now this isn't surviving.
This is living.
OLUSEYI: Any biosphere we'd want to construct
would have to be built very quickly.
And we'd have to get them up and running
on a very short timetable.
Within a few months, really.
The volcanoes won't give us very much time to spare.
When they go off, every life on the planet will be in danger.
But in a crisis like this,
all eyes will turn to one place--Yellowstone.
FERGUSON: Yellowstone Park lies above a huge body of magma
that has been accumulating in the Earth's crust
at a depth of about 5 to 6 miles.
And this vast area of magma is about 25 to 50 miles across,
and could be considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes
on the Earth today.
GREGG: Every time something wiggles or breathes
or moves on Yellowstone, we're on it.
We've never seen Yellowstone erupt.
We don't know what its signals are.
So we're watching very, very carefully
in the hopes that we would be able to identify
the signal of a big eruption.
MAN: We got to get out of here!
REPORTER: Now, after weeks of waiting,
warning signs of eruption have been detected
at America's biggest supervolcano, Yellowstone.
GREGG: Think of the worst disaster
you've ever experienced or read about.
Yellowstone going off would make those look like
a walk in the park.
REPORTER: Millions of Americans across eight states
from the Central West are now fleeing,
hoping to put some distance between themselves
and the volcanic catastrophe that may be coming
within the next few days.
REPORTER: The Department of the Interior changed the status
of the pre-eruption evacuation from recommended to mandatory.
MAN: Come on in, welcome to SafeHaven.
Hello, sweetheart. Head on through.
OLUSEYI: At a certain point,
the clock is just going to run out.
There will be no time left to build anything
or come up with a new idea.
The solutions we've put in place
are the solutions we're gonna live with,
even if there are still problems and rough edges.
BARTELL: Communities like SafeHaven will be available
only to those few people who can buy their way in.
But what about the rest of us? What about the 99%?
In this scenario, there's really only one thing
the government can do--evacuate.
ERWANN MICHEL-KERJAN: Many people will decide
not to evacuate,
or not to evacuate until it's almost too late.
If you saved all your life to buy a house,
and you know that you're going to lose that house,
the decision to evacuate or to follow the order
might not be as simple as we think.
SOLDIER: Sir, this is a Class 1, High Risk Volcanic Zone.
MAN: I'm not moving from here.
SUSANNA HOFFMAN: People are enormously attached to place.
We don't totally understand it.
SOLDIER: What you don't understand is in a week,
this house will not be here!
You will be dead!
HOFFMAN: It is so strong.
First place, they won't leave.
Secondly, they will try to go back.
OLUSEYI: The fact is human beings are as unpredictable
as volcanoes are.
When Mount St. Helens was about to erupt,
some people chose to stay.
The government had no system, no protocol,
for forcing them to evacuate.
REPORTER: You don't mind working in the shadow
of the mountain then?
MAN: No, not at all.
I have nothing to be scared of.
BARTELL: A fair number of those people who stayed, died.
HOFFMAN: Most people I think in the world are used to the fact
that the government has not saved them
and does not do much for them.
BARTELL: In this scenario, I think a lot of people
would look for their own solutions,
however improvised those solutions might be.
An average adult requires about 1.1 million calories
annually to survive.
So it's possible to scrounge up enough food to last for decades.
But that's a lot of scrounging.
GIRL: Hey, Dad!
OLUSEYI: The world's landscape is sprinkled with infrastructure
that can, in a pinch, be used as improvised biospheres.
There are fallout shelters,
grain silos, industrial buildings.
A lot of concrete has been poured in the last 50 years,
and I think this is where everyday people,
in small groups, would try to prolong their lives.
BARTELL: If you could find a livable space underground,
with breathable air that has no ash in it,
drinkable water and a food supply,
you could last a very long time.
And you might need to be prepared to wait 20 or 30 years.
REPORTER: It's being called "the beginning of the end."
REPORTER: The Yellowstone caldera has erupted,
and a national state of emergency
has been declared in the US.
JOHN McCAIN: Assistance is coming in,
ranging from medical assistance to technical assistance.
GREGG: If Yellowstone were to go off,
what would we experience?
Well, within a hundred to a thousand miles of Yellowstone
there would be blankets of ash, meters, yards deep.
It would block out the daylight for a few days
in the western US.
Anybody living within a couple hundred miles--dead.
JENNIFER FRANCIS: Then those particles would be carried
towards the east coast.
And most likely they'd make it all the way to the big cities
along the Eastern Seaboard and even across the Atlantic.
GREGG: If you had billions of these ash particles
rubbing against each other in the atmosphere,
that's generating a lot of static electricity,
and so you could have the potential
for an electromagnetic pulse.
It's a big release of electric or magnetic energy.
That's bad news.
Computers don't like electromagnetic pulses.
We are so integrated into our cell phones and the Internet,
and that will be gone.
People will freak out.
I mean, I think there's going to be mass hysteria,
because there will be no way to communicate.
BARTELL: In a crisis like this,
there will be very few places in North America
where the drinking water won't be contaminated by ash.
At this point, by simply breathing,
you'll be inhaling pulverized ash particles into your lungs.
IVKOV: We will be inhaling huge amounts of quartz crystals,
or you can look at them being glassy shards,
which will penetrate the lung tissue and stick to it.
We will develop a disease called silicosis,
and its most acute form, acute silicosis,
it's a very deadly disease with a very high mortality.
OLUSEYI: Yellowstone will deal a devastating blow
to the US population
and will threaten the survival of the US government.
GREGG: We would need a lot of help from other countries
to get us through that.
We would need resources, food, fresh water.
There aren't too many other sources in the world
that could help feed and water
the population of the United States.
REPORTER: Today the United States Government
appealed to the European Union for disaster relief.
REPORTER: Super-eruptions of the Yellowstone and Valles Calderas
have paralyzed the American West and Northern Mexico.
REPORTER: Fighting has been reported
in the port of Oakland,
as desperate mobs have tried to commandeer merchant vessels
to escape the Bay Area by sea.
REPORTER: But the EU has delayed its reply.
They are nervously eyeing their own supervolcanoes.
REPORTER: Life in Europe could be extinguished
by one system alone--
the Campi Flegrei Caldera near Naples.
FERGUSON: Many people are familiar with Vesuvius
on the west coast of Italy.
And this volcano famously produced the eruption
that destroyed the Roman town of Pompeii.
However, the Bay of Naples itself
is actually a giant volcanic caldera called Campi Flegrei.
This is capable of producing eruptions far in excess
of the kind of activity that we've seen from Vesuvius.
GREGG: When Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD,
it killed thousands of people.
The main killer from this volcano
is something we call a pyroclastic flow.
FERGUSON: A pyroclastic flow is a red-hot mixture
of volcanic ash and gas that travels across the land
at several hundreds of miles per hour
and can travel to tens to hundreds of miles distance.
GREGG: It is extremely hot,
up to about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
One breath would really be all it would take.
You inhale something that hot, it's going to burn your lungs,
and when your lungs are burned, they don't work.
FERGUSON: If you can see a pyroclastic flow coming,
it is very likely that you're too late to get out of its way.
They literally obliterate everything in their path.
You stand no chance of survival.
WOMAN: Oh, my God!
RUPRECHT: And what happens in the case of Campi Flegrei
actually is that people live inside the caldera.
GREGG: It's going to be an enormous eruption.
If Campi Flegrei were to erupt,
it would be a lot worse than Vesuvius.
OLUSEYI: Once Yellowstone and Campi Flegrei have erupted...
It's just a matter of time
before the other supervolcanoes erupt.
And that will be the ultimate test
of all our preparations for survival.
REPORTER: Naples, Italy, has been ravaged by the eruption
of the Campi Flegrei Caldera.
REPORTER: 100,000 residents are feared dead in a grim echo
of the destruction of Pompeii 2,000 years ago.
REPORTER: Only the farsighted evacuation of the city
prevented a more chilling disaster.
OLUSEYI: That will be the end of one chapter of life on Earth,
and the beginning of the next one.
Agriculture will collapse.
Industry will collapse.
And in all likelihood, governments will collapse.
REPORTER: This is Wildcat Station New York.
If you are in range of this broadcast, stay away.
The city is deserted.
The ash from Iceland and Greenland is 6 feet deep.
The refugee trail points south.
They say North Carolina is still pretty clear.
OLUSEYI: We're talking about mass migration.
Even when there are very few options,
people are survivors, they're fighters.
And we'll keep moving, keep hunting for a place
that isn't yet poisoned.
A place where we can breathe, find food.
But volcanoes have yet another lethal trick,
and that's the sulfur gas they eject
miles up into the stratosphere.
GREGG: Sulfur is a very nasty gas
in terms of how it affects people and the Earth's climate.
Sulfur can combine with oxygen and water in the atmosphere
and create sulfuric acid,
it can also create these little aerosol droplets,
little microscopic droplets.
They actually block the incoming solar energy,
so the sun's energy never gets to the surface.
And instead it bounces back off the top of this aerosol layer.
Volcanoes can cause global cooling.
OLUSEYI: It's called volcanic winter.
And Earth is going to become an extremely hostile place to live.
So plants will die,
animals will die,
and people will die.
PAUL FALKOWSKI: Most of the life on the surface of this planet
as we know it would go extinct.
It just simply will die.
BARTELL: So, who will survive?
There's a small percentage who bought their way to safety.
But they're not as safe as they may think.
Some of them won't make it either.
MAN: Welcome, welcome to SafeHaven.
OLUSEYI: Remember, the most important lesson we have
in self-enclosed living is that it's highly unstable,
because humans are unstable.
In the famous Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona in 1991,
the participants turned on each other.
MAN: You're getting worse, you're not getting better!
I'm stuck in this place.
MAN: You want to go outside where there's no air at all?
Where people are sick?
MAN: The air in here is pretty bad also!
JOHNSON: I cannot imagine that you're going to have
the optimum mix of personality types
in a circumstance like this, where you have a lot of people
who are just there because they can buy their way in.
I think for a while the survival instinct
is gonna be pretty high.
But over time, you know, we're people.
The conflicts and things that arise
whenever you have people around would be really, really tough.
MAN: You step off now.
MAN: Oh, I'll step off.
JOHNSON: In Biosphere 2 they experienced
a fairly rapid decline in the oxygen level
within the life support system, within the dome.
There was some unexpected chemistry happening,
because of the type of concrete they used to build the structure
that was keeping the, basically,
the closed loop life support system
from being able to get the oxygen back into the air
from the carbon dioxide
that the animals and the people were exhaling.
And those are the kinds of things that 6 months, 8 months,
8 years into the survival of whoever's inside
are going to make a big difference
as to whether they live or die.
FALKOWSKI: If you looked out 30 years after such an event,
you'd see basically a barren world.
Animals would be virtually all dead.
The organisms that would sustain themselves
through such a process
most likely will be marine organisms.
The world we know would be gone.
JOHNSON: To think of a few scrappy people surviving,
I think it's highly likely.
If you've got hundreds of millions of people,
there are going to be a few, and I mean a very few
that might be able to make it through this
by basically living off whatever survives around them.
SCHARF: Life on this planet has gone through many phases.
Dinosaurs were here for 100 million years
before they went extinct.
Humans have only been around for a very short period of time,
but we're kind of different.
Our ability to manipulate the world around ourselves,
to find ways to survive in environments
that wouldn't naturally support us are really incredible.
Even in the face of something so cataclysmic,
the possibility exists for our survival and our future.
