Monday, May 10, 2010

What the Future Holds

Here's some pretty good estimates:

500 - 900 million years from now:  the planet's average temperature will by 158 degrees F.  All plant life will be gone.
500 million years after that:  Earth will no longer be habitable

This is because the Sun's luminosity increases 10% every 1.1 billion years.

250 million years from now, continental drift will bring all the continents together into one massive supercontinent around Antartica.

4.5 billion years from now the Milky Way Galaxy will merge with the Andromeda Galaxy.

5 billion years from now the Sun will explode into a Red Giant.  The Earth will find itself within the Sun's atmosphere and will be incinerated.

Cheers!

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Just for context, the Earth is 4 billion years old; the universe is 12 billion years old.

1 comments:

2 Tramps said...

Interesting possibility but valid only if we don't destroy our earth first with nuclear war or we don't get hit by an asteroid or any number of other earth altering catastrophies...