The World: Will it End?
|
Everything will end, including the universe itself, most likely. So will everything else, Earth included. But before that, the sun will do what every other sun does. Start to burn out, expand and go supernova. And there goes the neighborhood. Assuming an earth sized planet wasn't taken out by a super-nova or some other phenomena, it could theoretically hang out forever, wandering slowly around the universe. But then the universe will suffer heat death and everything made of matter dies. Darkyear expressed it well. I further conclude life on this planet is coming to end since those who can afford a space flight ticket is praying that mankind finds another planet that can sustain human life so some can get off this rock and say to the rest of us "So long suckers." It is impossible to speculate when our planet and the life on it will cease to exist. The ONLY thing we can know for sure is that our world WILL end in about 500 million years, if it has not already ended by then. Why? Because that is when our sun, which is a very average, middle-aged, main sequence star, will finally expire as it depletes its supply of hydrogen and helium. It will then explode into a huge fireball (not as big as a supernova, though) that will extend about as far as the orbital path of Mars. Thus turning this planet, which is only about 93 million miles away from it, into a spherical and lifeless cinder. I doubt we will be around then, however. I mean homo sapiens, of course. During the life of this planet there have been Five "Mass Extinctions." The last one was 65 MYA when a 6-mile wide asteroid slammed into the coast of the lower Yucatan Peninsula. The one that killed off all the Dinos! We are due for another extinction anytime now. Of course, the term anytime in geological and Cosmological terms can mean Ten Million Years. Which is just a drop in the bucket. It's like one minute out of a 24-hour day. I wouldn't worry about it. I truly do not think the world will end within our lifetime, or even in the next couple hundred years or so. If it WERE to end, say, within the next few hundred years and I had to bet on the reason why it did, I would have to say a viral plague. You really want to get scared? Do some studying on Virology and its history in the world. See how many people have died from viruses. You will find it is more than has died in ALL the wars combined. Read a book called "The Demon in the Freezer" id you really want to get the shit scared out of you about viral plagues and how one could easily erase us from this planet. I think the author is Richard Preston, the guy who wrote that book that the movie "Outbreak" was based on. SS Calculated? Well, yeah. But based upon strong empirical Cosmological data. We have observed other similar stars to our sun--which is a very average G-Type Main Sequence middle-sized star--that have had the very same lifespan. And we know the rate at which the sun converts hydrogen to helium. (600 million tons per second!) And we know it's mass. So this is only speculation, as it is, say, speculation that our orbit around the sun will continue to last about 356 days. Or that it is calculation that galaxies recede at the Hubble's Constant. Or that......a comet like Halley's comes aorund every 80 years or so. Comes a point when this sort of calculation is all but being a Law. It is more than a mere theory, and far more accurate and credible than a guess. These Cosmologists base these calculations, again, on observed and proven past occurrences. They're not just sitting at the drawing table with a slide rule and making SWAG's. (BTW...I botched my number in my OP. The Sun should expire in about 5 BILLION years from now, not a mere 500 million. Sorry 'bout that.) SS |
