The spark of life was lit billions of years ago on Earth , perhaps caused by the impact of meteorites or comets capable of feeding the origin of the Earth, but everything that begins ends and the end of the Earth also has a marked date that science seems to already know. so we reveal to you now, when life will end on Earth and when the planet will “die” according to science.
When will life on Earth end and when will the planet “die” according to science?
Earth, the only planet (known to us) with a biosphere is not destined to last forever , but is doomed to an inevitable end. Obviously these are very long times and intimately linked to astronomical phenomena, which have nothing to do with the fleeting duration of a single human life. However, the Earth, in the distant future, will cease to be the green and blue paradise we know today and will most likely become an alien world, totally inhospitable for life like the planet Venus, whose surface reaches 464 °. C due to a catastrophic greenhouse effect. Some research suggests that until 700 million years ago, Venus could have been as habitable as Earth, turning into a fiery inferno only at a later stage.
The end of the life
The end of life – and therefore of humanity -, as indicated, is inevitable. But when will it happen? If we do not find a way to move to another habitable planet (currently we do not have the technologies to reach other planets that although they could serve us are too far away), we and the vast majority of complex living species will be condemned to be eliminated within a period of weather. And that time frame is set at one billion years , according to the recent study “The future life expectancy of the Earth’s oxygenated atmosphere” published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.
The reason is a collapse of atmospheric oxygen , which began to accumulate in the Earth’s atmosphere only 2.5 billion years ago, during the so-called “Great oxidation event.” The Earth, in fact, has not always had the current concentrations of oxygen, but they have increased significantly with the diffusion in the oceans of photosynthetic microorganisms. However, current levels are projected to decline substantially, even one million times, according to estimates, due to the aging of the Sun, which will become brighter and project more energy onto Earth.
This process, as noted in The Conversation by Dr Matthew Warkel, a researcher at the Faculty of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of St Andrews, will lead to the erosion of silicate rocks such as basalt and granite, which will initiate the loss of enormous concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2). Although this process may seem advantageous from a climate change point of view , in reality too low concentrations of carbon dioxide do not allow photosynthesis of plants and other photosynthetic microorganisms. “Less photosynthesis means less oxygen production and gradually the oxygen concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere will decrease, creating a crisis for other life forms to come, ” said Dr. Warkel. According to simulations carried out by the authors of the study in Nature, there will be enough oxygen on Earth for complex life forms, such as humans, for another billion years at most.
Scientists previously believed that the first phenomenon that would end life on Earth, also related to increased solar radiation, would be the boiling of the oceans, which is expected in two billion years due to increasing temperatures. more hellish. But as indicated, deoxygenation will occur before this other catastrophe, which will eliminate much of the microorganisms that survived the first apocalypse.
” The atmosphere after the great deoxygenation will be characterized by high concentrations of methane, low levels of CO2 and the absence of the ozone layer, ” said study co-author Kazumi Ozaki, therefore, ” the Earth system probably it will remain a world of anaerobic life forms . ‘
But even these will subsequently be destined to succumb. As the oceans boil and the last of the water supplies are depleted, the atmosphere will fill with water vapor catalyzing a catastrophic greenhouse effect, causing surface temperatures to rise and transform Earth into what is today Venus.
The “death” of the Earth
The end of life is not the same as the end of the Earth, which will continue to exist anyway, even when the last living being is annihilated. The fate of the planet is closely related to that of the Sun , which is currently in the middle of its life cycle. Five billion years from now, the Sun will transform into a giant red ball (with the hydrogen in the nucleus completely turned into helium); It will be a huge expanding star, whose diameter is estimated to reach the orbit of Mars, incorporating the closest planets (Mercury and Venus) and perhaps Earth itself, although some forecasts predict a move away from our planet and not its absorption.
As Dr. Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and science writer, noted in Forbes, when it becomes a red giant, “the Sun will swell to nearly a hundred times its current diameter and will become thousands of times brighter than it is today. The Earth will completely wither away from the Sun in its orbit, while the internal worlds, Mercury and Venus, will be totally devoured. The Sun will die later, being reduced to a white dwarf, while only a tan remnant of the Earth will remain, floating in space in its orbit around a stellar ‘corpse’ .
Although purged of life, boiled, charred and bombarded by powerful cosmic rays, the Earth will continue to orbit what is left of the Sun until other events occur. As Siegel explains, the Earth could be ‘absorbed’ by the Solar System ; or it could be gravitationally expelled by the same object and projected to wander for eternity in the darkness of space. But it could also continue to orbit the black dwarf (the last hypothetical end of a star) derived from the Sun until it is absorbed by it.
Other modes for the end of the Earth
The end of the Earth and of life could also be caused by other apocalyptic phenomena; for example, a “collision” between the Milky Way and a dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is expected in two billion years. This process could cause the Earth to collide with some large object capable of destroying it; that it was absorbed by a star; to be gravitationally expelled from the Solar System or to cause it to be absorbed by the hypothetical “awakening” of the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A *.
Much of life, on the other hand, could be destroyed by catastrophic impacts with meteorites / comets or by the awakening of supervolcanoes – all events linked to mass extinctions of the past -, in addition, it cannot be excluded that the Earth could be hit in the future by a gamma ray burst (GRB) due to a supernova. It is a short-lived phenomenon, lasting only a few seconds, but so energetic that it “erases” the ozone shield and exposes us and other life forms to a lethal bombardment of solar and cosmic radiation.
