Get ready! Life will end in 1 billion years!

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I thought it was common knowledge. I think I saw the 'life will end in about a billion years or so' message in a car advert too.

everything ends.

I'm just glad they told us now, so I can plan!

Well, you know what they say: "The quicker it's diagnosed, the quicker we can scrape out the cancer."

Who here can fathom a billion years? I can't. Yes, I know how much 1 billion years is, but I can't truly imagine that amount of time actually passing. The scope is simply too great for the human mind to sense. Yes, I can convince myself that I can imagine it, but, being honest with myself, I don't know what a billion years would feel like, if, hypothetically, I lived that long.
I mean, a billion seconds is a little under 31.7 years.

”But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” 2 Peter 3:10 KJV

(I’m not trying to start a debate, I’m not trying to prove anything. I just thought about this verse when I read the article, don't take me too seriously).

I learned about this in third grade. Why does Fox consider this "news"?

There is an excellent book on this called The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Peter Ward and Don Brownlee. What basically happens is that as stars burn their supply of hydrogen their cores get denser because the star's mass takes up less space in the form of helium then in the form of hydrogen, the denser core burns hotter so a star slowly brightens over the course of it's life. 4 billion years ago the Sun was 30% dimmer then it is today, the Earth didn't freeze over because it had a dozens of times more CO2 in the atmosphere then it does now (nearly all of that CO2 is now buried in the form of limestone). As the Sun slowly brightened a self-regulating cycle involving erosion, algae with calcium carbonate shells, limestone formation, subduction, and volcanoes developed that slowly sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Within the next 1 billion years the ever-brightening sun will cause CO2 levels to drop to the minimum amount required for photosynthesis and the self-regulating cycle will then stop working. Earth will then undergo the same process that turned Venus into a furnace. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and will trigger what is called a "wet runaway greenhouse." the oceans boil away, and Earth eventually becomes hot enough for limestone to break down into CO2 and lime (calcium oxide), releasing all that CO2 into the atmosphere.

It is very likly life on Earth will continue to survive dispite likly doomsday scinarios like astroids, Nuclear war, and climate change. Life is tough, it can adapt and survive. Life changes and over time new species replace old ones that cant survive the new climate.

Earth will have to get really REALLY bad and change VERY VERY quickly in order to wipe out all life on it. Even nuclear war, a man made disaster I highly doubt would kill off most of the life on Earth, sure it would kill lots, and distroy human civilization, but it may even be likly some humans can even survive that.

A billion years even on a cosmic scale is not exactly a blip in time, well if you beleive in the big bang anyways. If not I suppose time is infinite, and so like second a billion years would only be a blip I guess. I think our nearest star could go thru drastic changes and life can still adapt, and survive, at least for a while anyways.

I know many of the people I used to go to high school with, those of us who had this similar interest beleived stars burned hydrogen and produced helium + energy. The truth is stars can burn other elements also such as carbon, and oxygen. This is possible because all stars have different amounts of mass, heat and pressure. It only taks a small difference in heat or pressure or mass to make a HUGE difference in how the star burns the different types of fuel they posess.

Early stars did not have fuel like oxygen and carbon, The early universe only have hydrogen as the only element and over time helium and other elements occured in the nuclear reactioons during the stars main sequence and even after it died, releasing even MORE energy then the start could produce in its entire lifetime of nuclear fusion.

So little time? topic

Long before the 1 billion mark we will have moved on to another world, another galaxy.

We might even figure out how to power the earth out of harm's way without resorting to unreliable asteroids. (Cannot trust 'em as far as we can toss 'em.)

Having said as much, I\we have got a lot of living to do.

I had a cassette tape when i was little, that always said the earth would end in about 4 billion years. that freaked me out, and this freaked me out more.

Hopefully, we will get another planet to live on or something.