Farewell to Life on Earth–International Researchers Estimate Complete Extinction Timeline Linked to Sun’s Increasing Thermal Energy

The thought of Earth’s final day may seem distant, even unreal, but we know it will inevitably happen. Now a group of scientists working for NASA together with researchers from the University of Tōhō in Japan have calculated a timeline for the complete extinction of all life on Earth.

According to this calculations – which have been made possible by advanced mathematical models powered by supercomputers -, survival on planet Earth will be impossible in about 1 billion years, when conditions become too extreme for life as we know it.

So yes, we still have a few more years to go.While the moment arrives, space agencies around the world are launching missions to explore other planets, mainly Mars, with the aim to determine life conditions outside the Earth.

The Sun will end all life on Earth For now, this story may sound like sci-fi. But as time goes by – a lot of time – the Sun will grow in size as it reaches the end of its life as a giant star....

Advance mathematical models have predicted than the Sun expansion will significantly worsen air quality, as Earth temperatures rise. According to these calculations, life on Earth will be impossible by the year 1,000,002,021 – which means there are still 999,999,996 years to go until then.

Although the end is still billions of years away, the Sun is already causing some disturbances. Last year, NASA detected a large number of solar eruptions and coronal mass ejections (CME) which ejected billions of tons of particles and magnetic field towards Earth – resulting in the most intense solar storm in two decades. Solar storms are known to cause changes in the atmosphere, reducing available oxygen. As time goes by, this phenomena will continue...

We’re never getting off this planet.

Space isn’t empty, there’s hydrogen everywhere at an average concentration of 1.8 atoms/cm3. And at velocities of 0.5C and greater, every hydrogen atom slammed into is converted into ionization radiation, which will pass through the spacecraft (and you) and kill you dead dead dead in mere minutes.

But we’ll likely never get that fast because there’s also dust scattered everywhere in space, and colliding with a piece of dust with the mass of a standard grain of sand (0.00440 grams) at 0.1C (30,000 kms) will have an impact force equivalent to the explosion of more than a half a ton of TNT (1043.3 lbs).

So we don’t really have to worry about the radiation because the space dust will kill us first ... if we fly faster than, say, 0.05C.

The nearest exoplanet we have seen directly outside of our solar system is about 12 lightyears away, which would take 440 years to reach at 0.05C because you can only accelerate half way there and then you have to use the last half of the trip to slow to a velocity low enough to be captured by the target exoplanet’s gravity.

The trip to the next nearest galaxy would take a million years at 0.05C.

The eggheads estimate we’d need 10,000 to 40,000 mating pairs to have sufficient genetic diversity to successfully colonize another planet. And because it would be a multi-generational flight, they would have to grow food en route (Silent Running, anybody?). So it would have to be a YUGE spacecraft.

The most “compact” way to do it would be to have an all-woman crew, and a freezer full of fertilized embryos. Every woman on board would have to be a surrogate mother, and during the voyage, they would only implant female embryos. So for this plan to work you might have to have tens of thousands of generations of women born and raised knowing their goal in life is to one day be the surrogate mother to their own replacement on the crew.

And if one rebels, you either throw her out the airlock into space, or to conserve the resources, kill her and user her corpse for fertilizer. Or just eat her.

And when they finally arrive at the distant planet, and once they’ve erected a permanent, self-sustaining habitat, only then can they start implanting male embryos and raising boy children. At which point no woman would have ever so much as seen a live man in centuries.

The game changes if we learn to control and/or exploit wormholes. But since they’ve not yet been proved to be possible, I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Like I said, we’re never getting off this planet.

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