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> we'd be cooked!

Would it cook all the Earth or only the unlucky half that is in that direction?

The lucky half would be the ones who got cooked due to facing the burst. The unlucky survivors would get to take a journey with a planet on its way to being inhospitable due to just having half of its atmosphere burned away and half of the surface completely sanitized of life.

The Late Ordovician mass extinction may have resulted from a GRB 443 mya.

Its effects are observed in the fossil record of marine life (effectively: the only life on Earth at the time), and were far more pronounced at shallow depths than deeper ones, corresponding to dose-effect theories.

Note that this is a hypothesis and would likely be impossible to verify.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Ordovician_mass_extinctio...>

I'm not sure the half sheltered from the direct burst would be considered lucky. There's a cool short story about the sun going nova, and one half of the planet is immediately destroyed. For me it always seemed like going quickly would be the better option..

Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven

Wow, that was a scary story. Imagine seeing the full Moon suddenly flaring brightly; what would you do?

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