How Long Will Life Exist on Earth? 80
An anonymous reader shares a report: Wikipedia's "Timeline of the Far Future" is one of my favorite webpages from the internet's pre-slop era. A Londoner named Nick Webb created it on the morning of December 22, 2010. "Certain events in the future of the universe can be predicted with a comfortable level of accuracy," he wrote at the top of the page. He then proposed a chronological list of 33 such events, beginning with the joining of Asia and Australia 40 million years from now. He noted that around this same time, Mars's moon Phobos would complete its slow death spiral into the red planet's surface. A community of 1,533 editors have since expanded the timeline to 160 events, including the heat death of the universe. I like to imagine these people on laptops in living rooms and cafes across the world, compiling obscure bits of speculative science into a secular Book of Revelation.
Like the best sci-fi world building, the Timeline of the Far Future can give you a key bump of the sublime. It reminds you that even the sturdiest-seeming features of our world are ephemeral, that in 1,100 years, Earth's axis will point to a new North Star. In 250,000 years, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, adding an extra island to Hawaii. In the 1 million years that the Great Pyramid will take to erode, the sun will travel only about 1/200th of its orbit around the Milky Way, but in doing so, it will move into a new field of stars. Our current constellations will go all wobbly in the sky and then vanish.
Some aspects of the timeline are more certain than others. We know that most animals will look different 10 million years from now. We know that the continents will slowly drift together to form a new Pangaea. Africa will slam into Eurasia, sealing off the Mediterranean basin and raising a new Himalaya-like range across France, Italy, and Spain. In 400 million years, Saturn will have lost its rings. Earth will have replenished its fossil fuels. Our planet will also likely have sustained at least one mass-extinction-triggering impact, unless its inhabitants have learned to divert asteroids.
Like the best sci-fi world building, the Timeline of the Far Future can give you a key bump of the sublime. It reminds you that even the sturdiest-seeming features of our world are ephemeral, that in 1,100 years, Earth's axis will point to a new North Star. In 250,000 years, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, adding an extra island to Hawaii. In the 1 million years that the Great Pyramid will take to erode, the sun will travel only about 1/200th of its orbit around the Milky Way, but in doing so, it will move into a new field of stars. Our current constellations will go all wobbly in the sky and then vanish.
Some aspects of the timeline are more certain than others. We know that most animals will look different 10 million years from now. We know that the continents will slowly drift together to form a new Pangaea. Africa will slam into Eurasia, sealing off the Mediterranean basin and raising a new Himalaya-like range across France, Italy, and Spain. In 400 million years, Saturn will have lost its rings. Earth will have replenished its fossil fuels. Our planet will also likely have sustained at least one mass-extinction-triggering impact, unless its inhabitants have learned to divert asteroids.
Depending on the sun's supply of lighter elements (Score:3)
... it will become a red giant in about 5 billion years, and cause the Earth to become a toasty crisp
I suspect that will spell the end of life on Earth, and I really do not see anything short of that causing such an effect
...and Technology (Score:2)
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Larry Niven has an interesting book A World Out of Time [wikipedia.org], that explores this scenario
I strongly suggest it
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I think I've re-read A World Out of Time more than any other Niven work. It holds up.
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Have you read the works he wrote together with Edward M. Lerner? They tie up a lot with regard to the Pak and the Puppeteers.
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If we are still around to care I suspect we'll be able to alter the Earth's orbit to cope with any solar expansion well before 5 billion years are up.
We could turn it into a museum ... with blackjack and hookers...
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I've got another scenario that could do all life in for you: if the earth's magnetic field waned to around 1% of its current strength and stayed there, the sun would do strip our atmosphere and oceans pretty quickly(a few dozen million years) and every living organism depends on one of those two things.
I don't think that'll happen before the sun starts burning helium instead of hydrogen, but I also don't know.
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While an interesting scenario, I suspect we will find something living underground on Mars, where that has already happened
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Metabolizing what?
There is water down there, but there isn't sunlight, and there's no ecosystem or active geology to supply chemical energy.
Life is resilient, adaptable, and persistent, but enthalpy is a non-negotiable part of the equation.
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I am no Martian geologist, but I believe that recent observation of Mars has reveled molten layers in the mantle and a core that remains hot [nasa.gov]
Beyond that we know very little, and I hope that humans get the opportunity to explore and inhabit Mars to learn more
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There is certainly some active geology going on, and all models suggest Mars has a molten core, so there is going to be geothermal energy. If there's any kind of available free water in the crust, as we find on Earth, there is geothermal activity, and there is organic compounds, all of which seem reasonable assumptions, then Mars could support life beneath the surface. Metabolism might be pretty damned slow, with less available free energy, but it could occur.
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I've got another scenario that could do all life in for you: if the earth's magnetic field waned to around 1% of its current strength and stayed there, the sun would do strip our atmosphere and oceans pretty quickly(a few dozen million years) and every living organism depends on one of those two things.
I suspect even that wouldn't do it. We have microbes, rotifers, and arthropods living several kilometres beneath our feet in total darkness, oxygen-deprived and exposed to extreme heat, radiation, and high concentrations of salt. I think such hardy lifeforms will be around until the earth is broken into pieces. Depending on where said pieces end up, these beings may even live beyond that event and take up residence in some other rock somewhere in the universe.
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if the earth's magnetic field waned to around 1% of its current strength
Don't worry, there's already a plan [wikipedia.org] to jump-start the magnetic field if that happens ... :-)
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Does it involve cats? [theinfosphere.org]
Re:Depending on the sun's supply of lighter elemen (Score:5, Informative)
Earth will likely be incapable of supporting life long before that. Obviously that's a hard deadline where even microbial life will go, but most estimates put Earth at having between 800 million and 1 billion years of habitability left.
This is because as the amount of helium in the sun builds up, it grows hotter even within its main phase, on the order of about a 10% increase per billion years. Over the next billion years that increase will become too much for Earth to remain habitable. The temperature will creep up over time, and there will be a point where eventually the oceans start boiling and create a runaway greenhouse affect. Eventually we'll look a lot more like Venus.
This is outside of crazy sci-fi inspired scenarios like engineering some method to nudge Earth further away from the sun, or installing large space-born "shades" to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet.
Realistically I think simple travel/relocation to another star system is more likely than either of those types of scenarios.
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> This is outside of crazy sci-fi inspired scenarios like engineering some method to nudge Earth further away from the sun
We already know how to do this. You put a mass in a loop between Earth and Jupiter designed to transfer orbital momentum. Because of the mass difference, Jupiter barely moves but you can get Earth far enough out that you have to worry about moving Mars out of the way first.
It is a very gradual process, but that works out well as the Sun's temperature increase is a gradual phenomenon
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The day is also getting longer due to tidal interactions with the Moon, and for all I know that evens out.
But then the interaction with the Moon gets overwhelmed by the interaction with the Sun and the Moon crashes into your bed while you're trying to sleep through that long night to survive that pending long day. And that's if we haven't bumped into Mars first.
The future is not friendly.
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So, how did a dimmer Sun maintain approximately present-day conditions on Earth? There's your paradox.
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We could go live nestled up close to a red dwarf that has tens of billions of years of life left. We could dyson sphere it.
I'm using "could" very loosely here.
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We could go live nestled up close to a red dwarf that has tens of billions of years of life left. We could dyson sphere it.
I'm using "could" very loosely here.
Indeed - a lot of things are theoretically possible, but most things out there are things that people assume we'll eventually be able to do, or if they say "We technically already know how to do this." its something that works out mathematically if you had infinite funds and infinite energy and the attempt when flawlessly with no hiccups.
I think we vastly overestimate our future technology potential, and assume infinite linear progression forward for all technical capabilities. Realistically there have bee
Related question (Score:2)
How long will humans be around?
In theory it could be longer than this planet is capable of supporting life, but we have to make more progress in getting off this rock...
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Re:Related question (Score:4, Interesting)
At this rate, our descendants might not even be organic
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Re:Related question (Score:4, Insightful)
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Wait, what? How much money did he inherit?
Elon Musk arriving in the USA net worth: $100,000 (just making that up, I have no idea, please fill me in!)
Elon Musk now net worth: $258.8 billion.
Come on now. It is hard to say that level of wealth all came from his parents! Like what is that exact number that he got from his parents?
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How long will humans be around?
In theory it could be longer than this planet is capable of supporting life, but we have to make more progress in getting off this rock...
The general response when I suggest this is angry ranting about focusing on long-term instead of immediate problems. I think MBAs will see to it that we never really leave this rock. There's no immediate profit? Why bother?
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When I was in school in the 70's I had teachers arguing that it was unjust to spend money exploring space while people starved on Earth
They seemed unmoved by the effect of the early ERDAS satellites on increasing crop yields around the planet thereby relieving starvation...
MBAs are similarly slow to move away from the ideas of increasing profits by eliminating such costs as developing new technologies or exploring distant planets
We really need to recognize that there will always be luddites and have plans i
Human? or other? (Score:3)
Humans, not long, either war (and we destroy the planet) or we killing the planet by global warming, slow poisoning or others slow and invisible ways of killing ourself
Other living, while most may disappear with us, others will sustain the problems and evolve to workaround those. Even caves, deep valleys can hide live, but of course, on a long run our sun will explode, strip the atmosphere and kill everything
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You make some dramatic assumption, imo
An all out global thermonuclear war, would at the very most cause a 'nuclear winter' scenario that might result in the eradication of humans, but would more than likely only result in massive loss of human life. Beyond that, life in general is very resilient, and even if knocked back to cockroaches, would rebound eventually
Similarly, global warming would certainly disrupt our society, but would have to go all the way to a Venus level of runaway greenhouse effect to kill
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That is today, what about the future? more countries with nukes, more powerfull, radioactive poison the food chain... and how about biological weapons, when you don't have anything to lose, that will always e a choice for revenge for the insane (and one needs to be insane to start a nuclear war, but we are walking in that direction as it was a normal path, instead of talks and negotiations, lets use force, that always worked!!)
Can't Kill the Planet with CO2 (Score:4, Informative)
we killing the planet by global warming
That is literally not possible. We can certainly disrupt the planet and our societies but to actually kill the planet through CO2 emission would require burning about 10 times all available fossil fuels. Unless we start deliberately extracting CO2 from most of the world's carbonate deposits like limestone there is no physical way this can happen.
Looked at another way the pre-industrial CO2 levels were 280ppm, the current level is 421ppm and we would need over 30,000ppm to trigger a greenhouse apocalypse. Indeed, CO2 levels were thought to be around 4,000ppm when life first evolved. So, while we can certainly damage the current ecosystems and even cause a mass extinction event we cannot actually "kill the planet" with greenhouse warming.
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Looked at another way the pre-industrial CO2 levels were 280ppm, the current level is 421ppm and we would need over 30,000ppm to trigger a greenhouse apocalypse. Indeed, CO2 levels were thought to be around 4,000ppm when life first evolved.
I agree with your main point, we're not likely to extinguish life on Earth with the greenhouse effect, but I do need to quibble: the sun was about 30% fainter when life on Earth first started, so in fact we needed a stronger greenhouse effect to avoid Earth being frozen.
Current estimate is that somewhere near 800,000,000 years from now the sun gets bright enough that even zero carbon dioxide in the air isn't low enough to stave off runaway greenhouse effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Current estimate is that somewhere near 800,000,000 years from now the sun gets bright enough....
Yes, but these same solar models also predict that the sun would have been 70% less luminous in the past leading all the water on Earth to have been frozen solid because there was nowhere near enough greenhouse effect to overcome that. This directly contradicts the evidence of liquid water and so if these models cannot explain the past why would you believe that they can predict the future?
I would argue that it is clear that these models are missing something. What that is I do not know but if your mode
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As you pointed out yourself, the greenhouse effect was stronger, because there was a vastly higher amount of carbon dioxide. Greenhouse warming raised the temperature high enough for water to be liquid even with the fainter sun.
(Even so, for parts of the Earth's history it was close.)
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It does not have to be the solar model but if it is not that then there also needs to be some mechanism to explain how, as the sun gradually brightened, the level of CO2 stayed in more-or-le
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There's tons of modelling of it-- https://www.nature.com/scitabl... [nature.com] gives an overview, or do a search [google.com].
But if your point is "we don't have good measurements of the atmosphere billions of years ago so we can't really know for sure," well, ok.
Faint Young Sun Paradox (Score:2)
Given that there is a well-known and serious problem with the sun
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And the STANDARD ANSWER to the faint sun paradox is that the greenhouse effect warmed the planet.
--which is right there in the second paragraph of the Wikipedia aritcle you linked: "The predominant theory is that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide contributed most to the warming of the Earth.[5]"
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However, when you have a model that is highly inconsistent with data
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I'm sorry you don't like the fact that I referenced the link you posted, but if you didn't want me to read the link you posted, you should have linked something else.
The models are not "inconsistent with data", because the data needed to refute the models doesn't exist. There is a lot of data on stellar evolution, but
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The models are not "inconsistent with data", because the data needed to refute the models doesn't exist.
If you read the second link I posted it is to a recent paper that has data that is inconsistent with there being sufficient greenhouse effect i.e. actual peer reviewed science paper rather than one throwaway line in a Wikipedia article that cites a YouTube video as a source that you are reading an insane degree of certainty into. This _is_ a reason to think that it might be wrong: people are looking for evidence of extremely high CO2 levels and not finding any. Yes, the accuracy is not sufficient yet to ru
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what i meant was not this current global warming killing everyone, but it trigger some chain reaction that could make our "stable" weather to gi wild... after all, Venus was not always like that, nor Mars, both had runaway problems and one lost the atmosphere and the other overloaded it with
Re:Can't Kill the Planet with CO2 (Score:4, Interesting)
So we understand (or at least have compelling models for) why Venus and Mars are different and neither of their situations apply to Earth. As the Earth gets warmer our weather will get wilder due to more energy in the atmosphere but that is happening in a largely predictable way and while it certainly causes disruptions and can ceratainly kill some people in the regions it hits is never going to get so "wild" that it wipes out life on Earth.
Global warming is not, not has it ever been, an existential threat. However, it is something that will disrupt and damage people and property, potentially lead to mass-migrations of humans and generally lead to a far worse quality of life for many, if not all of us unless we act to curtail it.
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IMO, the greatest threat of global warming is due to the fact that approx 40% humans live close enough to coastal areas to be affected by rising ocean levels and THAT will result in societal disruption as masses of people face relocation
Throw in some little things like changing resource/crop patterns and you could easily see human society devolve into open warfare over resources
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Around 1000ppm CO2, humans don't function so well. If it reaches that level indoors, it's considered poor indoor a
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by slow, i'm talking about a few decades or even a few century, after all we send lead, CFC to the air for decades, but we did stop, in what it look, not too late... CO2 for much longer and it looks like it is harder to stop... We do release chemical not only to the air, but also to the water and land. What if we found that plastic make people sterile? Bees are dying and that can break ecosystems and our food source. The idea is that we do many things that we don't actually know what long term effects they
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hey, i hope that we don't trigger any runaway problem, just like i hope there is no war... but i also know that people are stupid and that greed from some can affect millions. We keep doing the same past errors, but each time we kill more people.
Tomorrow, probably (Score:2)
Anything beyond that depends on too many variables, but the odds are still good for another week at least.
Depends on what you mean. (Score:2)
Pssst, don't tell Republicans. (Score:1)
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It probably won't have, though, unless the lignin-digesting fungus all dies.
There's one I can get behind: (Score:5, Funny)
10,000 - Slashdot will finally have Unicode support.
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That's got to be a typo. I think they're missing a couple of zeros.
Short of Virus Bomb from WH40K (Score:3)
Life will be on Earth until the Sun become Red Giants and engulf Earth. Earth survived multiple oxygenation mass extinction before as well as multiple Iceball Earth scenario. Human is but a blink in the epoch of Earth.
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There are a few recent papers speculating that the the Sun may deviate from main-sequence stars by becoming a white dwarf rather than going through a red giant phase first.
At least we have a few years to sort it out.
Keeping people from building Mars settlements until it's terraformed is a much more immediate problem.
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Got a reference for that? I admit to not keeping on top of my daily listing from Arxiv for several months. That would be a pretty major change to accepted astrophysics.
Definitely something to worry about in the 10,000s CE. Terraforming is
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Search the link for photosynthesis. Looks like about a billion years before all multicellular life dies off.
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Just don't piss in the Big Dipper (Score:1)
Post apocalyptical drinking will do that.
Earth dies long before the Sun, so ~200 My. (Score:3)
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I believe it's supposed to be around 700my before the planet can no longer host complex life, and maybe a billion until it's sterile.
After that, there's a pause of a few billion years before the Earth likely (but not certainly) is consumed by the expanding Sun.
What's really weird is to consider that we already have the technology to control aspects of this and keep the Earth viable until the Sun finishes dying by transferring momentum from Jupiter to Earth over millions of years.
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That momentum-transfer idea is interesting, but I doubt a civilization with that kind of technology is sentimental about planets. We think Earth is precious because it's
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What's really weird is to consider that we already have the technology to control aspects of this and keep the Earth viable until the Sun finishes dying by transferring momentum from Jupiter to Earth over millions of years.
We don't have that technology yet, although it's plausible we could develop it in time scales much less than millions of years.
May not be a good idea, though. The solar system is remarkably stable in its current configuration; it's not clear we want to mess with it.
Ancient Chinese secret! (Score:1)
We're all gonna die!!!!!
Some day.
In reality, the planet will continue for billions of years.
And human life, barring bits of adaptation, will continue mostly unchanged.
So, barring radical bouts insanity and malfeasance, human life will continue.
Yeah yeah. I know. Not as exciting as a rapid extinction level event.
But only idiots try to pretend that's what's happening.
So, feel free in freaking out and going off half-cocked (or even less!).
Given the way that the Middle East ... (Score:2)
is going, more and more of the world is going to be drawn in -- so I would say: 18 months; maybe a bit more for you if you live in an out of the way place where the radiation takes longer to get to.
The way the human race is going ... (Score:2)
... it will not be around for these events anyways.
Asteroids (Score:2)
Even a few thousand years would be sufficient (Score:1)