How Long Will Life Exist on Earth? 46
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:2)
... 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'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 ... :-)
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
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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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?
Human? or other? (Score:2)
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
Can't Kill the Planet with CO2 (Score:2)
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
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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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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
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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:3, Insightful)
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:2)
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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Search the link for photosynthesis. Looks like about a billion years before all multicellular life dies off.
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.