How will it all end? The world I mean, not Emmerdale.?

Question

Nuclear War, Iraq, Global warming, meteor, Next Ice age, Alien Invasion. Lets face it we have been lucky so far and we can only keep it going for so long. The streak has to end sometime so how are we all going to check out? How will we or anyone else for that matter finally kill this planet.

Answer 1

we might die soon in the next centuries or so by global warming, next ice age, and so on, but the earth wont. there will be new life after us and the earth my die when the sun explodes or when the milky way galaxy (the galaxy we live of course) crashes onto another galaxy and their will be a big explosion as well bigger than the sun exploding.

Answer 2

I seem to recall it will be a mere 40 million years until the Earth is essentially eradicated, though logically speaking it should be a lot longer since this planet has been around for around 4 billion years already (which would be 100 times that). Perhaps it was 400 million and I'm just getting mixed up.

In any case... its going to happen when the sun is reaching the end of its life span. The sun isn't going to "explode", persay... but due to it having run out of hydrogen with which to continue running nuclear fusion... it starts switching to other things...
... Okok, I won't bore you with the details of its working.

In any case, the sun is going to expand to become a Red Giant. It will technically be cooler than it is now, but since it will be bigger... well. The sun will expand, consuming Mercury, Venus and Earth in its path. Rest assured as it expands, the temperature of the surrounding space will rise massively too, and Earth will be scorched dry long before the sun actually consumes it. It will however eventually consume the Earth... maybe Mars too, though thats uncertain (it certainly won't get as far as Jupiter).
For a while at least, Mars could possibly be of a habitable temperature, though it wouldn't last too long..... maybe less than a million years...

In any case, I'm also 100% certain that humanity won't live long enough to see the end of the world. Society panics about global warming and all that crap, but its really no big deal. The earth has been a lot hotter countless times in the past, and we're really not doing anything all that different.
Sure... some life goes extinct. It can't be helped. Sometimes an awful lot goes extinct... but that just leaves more room for the rest to expand, adapt and speciate. Even if global thermonuclear war broke out and most life on earth was wiped out..... it would recover. Afterall, the End-Permian extinction event (the one BEFORE the dinosaurs that paved the way for them) wiped out around 99% of biodiversity on the planet, at species level... but you'd barely know it to look at the planet these days...


So essentially... We'll never see the end of the Earth as a species. Its far more likely that we'll either manage to make ourselves extinct or be killed off by some other means before then. I can say with fair certainty that we will NOT be able to move to other planets and expand out into the Universe before we end up destroying ourselves... and thats probably for the best. We will all just die out... and something else... something better able to withstand the change in conditions... will take our place, until it too is wiped out.

Thats the way of things.
Theres no way of knowing what kind of life will be left on this planet by the time the sun really does become a red giant and eventually destroy it all for good.

I bet the sky will look really pretty then...

A pity I'll never see it...

Answer 3

I read a couple of years ago that there were some scientists in the US who were banging atoms together at colossal speeds to see what would happen, and one of the possibilities was that they would create their very own Black Hole.

I assume they have been told to stop doing this now, but if we all start being sucked towards America, you know what has happened.

Answer 4

The world won't end until the sun explodes. Human life could be eradicated long before that though!

Answer 5

This planet will die, like any other, of natural causes. The human race will have moved on to other planets by the time Earth pops it's clogs!

Answer 6

When the magnetic field of the earth cools and die down, it will no longer protect the earth from the solar wind. The solar wind will then blow off the earth's atmosphere, killing us.

Answer 7

I dont know, but someone told me that it's scheduled for Tuesday at 10:00 Greenwich meantime.

Answer 8

It will end with the oxygen tax, it will go up by 15% a year and in the end we will all choke.

Answer 9

I reckon we will just gradually wear ourselves out. That we will use up all our resources and become extinct. Who cares what happens then? Nice q by the way.

Answer 10

This world will cease to exist in its current state when Jesus Christ returns to establish a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwells righteousness..