Putting Today's Snow into Perspective

Yeah it's snowing today, and yeah it's supposedly Spring in our fine city, but it can always be worse.



This past Wednesday, the most powerful blast ever seen in the universe went off. It was a series of gamma-ray bursts that could actually be seen with the naked eye. Fortunately, it was 7.5 billion light years away.

According to Wikipedia (which I generally trust on matters related to astrophysics):

"Research has been conducted to investigate the consequences of Earth being hit by a beam of gamma rays from a nearby (about 500 light years) gamma ray burst. This is motivated by the efforts to explain mass extinctions on Earth and estimate the probability of extraterrestrial life. A gamma ray burst at 6000 light years would result in mass extinction; a 1000 light year distant burst would be equivalent to a 100,000 megaton nuclear explosion. A burst 100 light years away would blow away the atmosphere, create tidal waves, and start to melt the surface of the earth. There is a one in a million chance that there could be a gamma ray burst as near as the earth's closest star, Alpha Centauri, in the lifetime of the earth. Such a burst, at 4.3 lightyears distant, would effectively incinerate the earth."

Honestly though, I'm still kind of pissed about the snow.
-Ben