People are jaded. They think they’ve seen it all. When an experience, a book, or a movie is called “mind-blowing,” it takes a lot to convince them.

But I still have to say it: Death from the Skies! by Philip Plait is mind-blowing. The first line? “The universe is trying to kill you.” Think on that a little while, then read on.

I mentioned this book in a previous blog post, That’s the Way the World Ends. I hadn’t read this book at the time, but I’d read a review that piqued my curiosity. With all of the talk in the media recently about the end of the world, what was really possible? What was probable? What was likely?

Philip Plait, Ph.D., is the astronomer behind the Bad Astronomy Blog for Discover Magazine. In Death from the Skies!, Plait breaks down the different ways that commonly occurring events (in our solar system, our galaxy, or in other parts of the universe) could kill us all. The subtitle, These Are the Ways the World Will End…, indicates that these aren’t idle threats. Many of these potential end-of-the-world scenarios have an almost 100% chance of happening…eventually.

The scientific explanations for these events are delivered in an engaging style that doesn’t require a Ph.D. to understand. Each chapter begins with a vivid vignette describing what it might be like to experience these ends first-hand, starting with the potential for comet and asteroid impacts causing mass extinctions, and ending with the death of the universe. Other scenarios include solar flares, supernovae and gamma ray bursts, black holes, galaxies colliding, alien attacks, and the eventual death of the sun. None of these events bode well for us.

Often, real-world terrors are the most frightening. What I find most horrifying about the potential disasters Plait discusses is that they can happen without warning. You wouldn’t necessarily see death streaking down from the sky. In the next moment, you could just be snuffed out, like a candle, and the universe would go on without you.

Plait manages to work in humor as he discusses the potential ends of the world, which kept the book from becoming depressing. The part of the book the bummed me out the most, however, was Plait’s chapter on potential alien invasions, which also discusses the possibility of intelligent life out there in the universe being able to communicate with us. His conclusion? That if there is another advanced species out there, they should have tried to contact us by now, even if they didn’t show up themselves. While little green men don’t do much for me in fiction (or comic books), I still hold out hope that there is other intelligent life in the universe. Somewhere.

Even with the end in sight, the science of astronomy continues to advance, and theories do change. Twelve years ago, I was taught that the universe had an outer limit to how large it could grow. It would eventually stop expanding and settle into a steady state. Or, if it had enough mass, its gravity would eventually cause it to collapse and end in a “Big Crunch,” the opposite of the original Big Bang. As I learned from Death from the Skies!, however, this theory seems to have fallen by the wayside in favor of the idea that the universe will continue expanding for unimaginable amounts of time. (Remember what I said about mind-blowing? The numbers used in the penultimate chapter are so huge, models are insufficient to help you wrap your brain around them.)

Eventually, according to this model, the universe will use up all of its energy, and it will go cold and dark. Lights out. Which is unfortunate for those of us who love to read. Still, we’ve got a long time before the final end of everything. Plenty of time to read Death from the Skies!