If so, they may have indirectly affected human evolution.Before 1963, the United States and other countries conducted more than 500 nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere. However, they might have contributed to the colder temperatures and series of glaciations that started about 2.6 million years ago and ended only very recently.
The supernovas investigated by Breitschwerdt and Wallner were much too far away for their radiation to kill life on Earth the so-called “kill distance” for that to have occurred is about eight parsecs, or 26 light years. The Late Cretaceous extinction 65 million years ago, which ended the age of the dinosaurs, was caused by the impact of a large asteroid, but there have also been less severe extinction events in Earth’s history for which we do not know the cause. It was the only such event that also included a mass extinction of insects. In 1954 Otto Schindewolf linked nearby supernova explosions to past mass extinctions, particularly to the Permian extinction, the most catastrophic event in the last 500 million years, during which up to 90 percent of all species went extinct. It’s tempting to speculate what effects these supernova explosions might have had on our planet. The exploding stars originally had 9.2 and 8.8 times our sun’s mass, respectively. The Breitschwerdt team used modeling to further distinguish between two explosions within the younger event, one 1.5 million years ago and one 2.3 million years ago. Wallner’s team calculated that there were two distinct iron-60 fluxes associated with the supernova explosions, one 1.5 to 3.2 million years ago and the other 6.5 to 8.7 million years ago. The sources were located about 100 parsecs away (about 325 light years) at the time. According to Breitschwerdt the explosions occurred within the Local Bubble of hot, diffuse plasma in which our Solar System is embedded.
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