So, Diary. In times of war, I guess most of us have been made familiar with expressions stating how mankind is in possession of so-and-so many nuclear weapons, capable of destroying the world, not just once and for all, but so-and-so many times over.
This is, of course, not the case. The Earth is bigger than us. No blow we are capable of delivering could destroy it. What we mean by this saying is that we would destroy ourselves, eradicate humanity. We would be gone, the environment would be polluted, nuclear winters would last for a long time and it wouldn't be easy to see the Sun - but Earth would still be there.

So, as destructive and unnatural as we may think we are, we haven't got that kind of power. Without a doubt, a lot of other life-forms would survive, evolve and thrive in our absence - you know: roaches, rats, worms, bacteria. We'd get rid of ourselves and not even manage to wipe everything else out in the process, least of all the planet itself. After that there might be a million years or two, and then the Earth would go along as if we had never existed.

Anyway, as far as big explosions go, did you know that roughly 4.4 billion years ago, a world the size of Mars struck the Earth? Mars is about half the size of Earth, and the blast evaporated most of our planet's mantle and shot it into space. The energy released in this collision was of course untold billions of times greater than our collective nuclear stockpile, and no forms of life (as we know it) would have stood a chance.
Had the impacting object been only a little larger, the result would have been the obliteration of Earth, and we wouldn't have been here. Instead, leading theories say, the debris from the collision stayed in orbit around the battered Earth, gradually reaccumulated, and formed our Moon.

Now, if that blast didn't destroy our planet, it's a pretty safe bet that nothing we presently can do will either. Still, back then, like now, the prospect of our existence was shaky. Our Earth may stand firm, but as a species we are fragile. We can't survive too much of a change in our surroundings, atmosphere or climate, and we have spent a long time practicing the art of self destruction. As it seems our world survived by mere chance once upon a time, then so perhaps do we.