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Thankfully, people in the past weren’t complete idiots.

Oh, also: deadly gamma rays from space

When our farty little sun dies in about 5 billion years, it will expand into a sickly red dwarf that will engulf the earth in a fiery apocalypse. But there are many stars fifty to one hundred times larger than our sun that will go hypernova when they kick the bucket, spewing deadly gamma rays across the galaxy. If we’re lucky, the exact right amount will hit the earth, transforming everyone into giant green-skinned monsters with anger issues.

If we’re less lucky, and the wrong star explodes, it would end life as we know it. (See how unlucky that is?) Ten seconds of gamma rays could deplete half the ozone layer, allowing our sun to sneak in and fry us all to a crispy golden brown. The most likely candidate for this sunburned apocalypse is Eta Carinae—it’s a scant 7,500 light-years away and scientists predict it will go boom very soon. That’s less helpful than you think—on a galactic scale “very soon” could be a million years from now or tomorrow. The only thing that we really know is that when it arrives, even if every scientific community from around the globe combines forces with Bruce Willis and the worst power ballad ever written by Aerosmith, ain’t shit we can do to stop it.

FIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS THAT PROVE HUMANITY IS DOOMED

YOU have to be careful when you go poking around the human mind, because you can’t be sure what you’ll find there. A number of psychological experiments over the years have yielded terrifying conclusions, not about the occasional psychopath, but about you.

5. THE GOOD SAMARITAN EXPERIMENT (1973)

The setup

Naming their study after the biblical story in which a Samaritan helps an enemy in need, psychologists John Darley and C. Daniel Batson wanted to test if religion has any effect on helpful behavior. So they gathered a group of seminary students and asked half of them to deliver a sermon about the Good Samaritan in another building. The other half were told to give a speech about job opportunities, and members of both groups were given varying amounts of time to prepare and get across campus to deliver their sermons, ensuring some students were in more of a hurry when heading to deliver the good news.

On the way to give their speech, the subjects would pass a person slumped in an alleyway, who looked to be in need of help.

The result

The people who had been studying the Good Samaritan story did not stop any more often than the ones preparing a speech on job opportunities. The only factor that made a difference was how much of a hurry the students were in.

If pressed for time, only 10 percent would stop to give any aid, even when they were on their way to give a sermon about how awesome it is to stop and give aid.

What this says about you

As much as we like to make fun of anti-gay congressmen who get caught gaying it up in a men’s bathroom, the truth is that we’re just as likely to be hypocrites. After all, it’s much easier to talk to a room full of people about helping strangers than, say, to actually touch a bleeding homeless man.

And in case you thought these results were restricted to seminary students, in 2004 a BBC article reported on some disturbing footage captured by the camera of a parked public bus. In the tape, an injured twenty-five-year-old woman lies bleeding profusely in a London road, while dozens of passing motorists swerve to avoid her, without stopping.

To be fair, the report doesn’t mention if there was anything good on TV that night, so they might have had somewhere really important to be.

4. THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT (1971)

The setup

You may have heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which psychologist Philip Zimbardo transformed the Stanford Psychology Department’s basement into a mock prison. But you probably didn’t know just how ashamed it should make you to be a human being.

Seventy young men responded to a newspaper ad soliciting volunteers for an experiment. Zimbardo then gave each