If a Gamma Ray burst happened inside our own galaxy, within 5-8k light years and we were in the line of fire, we would all be dead.
Half immediately on the side of Earth facing the burst, the other half slowly as the atmosphere is stripped of its protective upper ozone layer and sudden production of massive amounts of ozone at ground level...................
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Sounds a bit worse than global warming.
But it would be painless............for the people on the front side, anyways.....................
I remember a few decades back, Carter Administration IIRC, the US Army was in process of developing a ‘Death Ray’ weapon, using intense Gamma radiation.
They showed on 60 Minutes I think it was, a monkey sitting in a cage doing what monkeys do, and behind the cage was a source of Gamma radiation that had an IRIS type door, like a camera shutter. They pressed a control button, the shutter opened up quickly and just as quickly closed, like a 1 second exposure. The monkey just fell over dead, no screams of pain or anything, it just died immediately, like someone turned off its life switch......................which is effectively what they did........
Don’t know whatever happened to that weapon development, probably shut down by Carter because it was related to the Neutron Bomb project which he killed............