We’re about halfway through the Earth’s expected life.
The Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. The Sun has about 5 billion more years of hydrogen fuel. When that happens, the Earth won’t survive because the Sun is expected to swell and become a red giant and swallow the Earth, evaporating it.
Other than an enormous collision, there is no other way to destroy the Earth.
Whether human civilization lasts any fraction of the next 5 billion years is another story. I’d guess “no” since we don’t seem to be very good at finding stable equilibria that are required for any system to be stable for long periods of time. May be human civilization will last more 100 years, may be 10,000 years, but it’s hard to imagine it lasting 100,000,000 years.
But the Earth will be a-okay. Don’t worry about it. Even life will survive and regardless of what we do, will thrive again.
According to Paul Renne, the study co-author and director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, “We’ve shown the impact and the mass extinction coincided as much as one can possibly demonstrate with existing dating techniques.” The asteroid that hit the Earth was believed to have been six miles wide, kicking up thick dust and debris that blocked out the sun for centuries. It also created mega-tsunamis and massive firestorms around the planet, killing off at least 75% of all life on Earth.
The research team has also found more evidence that the giant prehistoric crater near the town of Chicxulub in Mexico is indeed a souvenir of the rock that wiped out the dinosaurs worldwide. They have discovered that the asteroid hit the Earth 33,000 years before the extinction of the dinosaurs, rather than 300,000 years before, as originally thought. Now, 33,000 years sounds like a lot of time, but in big cosmic picture it’s a blink of an eye. The researchers came to this conclusion after conducting high-precision radiometric dating of debris near Chicxulub.
The impact of the asteroid wasn’t the sole contributor to the demise of the dinosaurs, however. Before impact, the Earth was experiencing massive climate change, creating extreme cold weather and unstable volcanic eruptions.
Humanity? Possibly. We are not very kind to our environment. We have a fairly advanced range of biomes we can inhabit but with our great numbers, the capacity to support those biomes and to have those environments support us at our current populations is beginning to be in doubt.
The world is getting hotter, the ocean levels are slowly rising, the temperature of the sea and its levels of oxygen are slowly dropping. Will this destroy all life on Earth? Probably not. The Earth has survived hot periods and ice ages equally well.
However the life on Earth has had varying degrees of success in terms of survival. As the ecosystems change, old life dies out and new life replaces it. Or adapts to it. Environmental stresses aren’t the only things Humans need to fear. We are poised to create technologies which could accidentally erase us from the planet.
We are also capable of transporting diseases around the world in a day, spreading antibiotic-resistant diseases to all corners of the globe, diseases made nearly invulnerable by their constant exposure to the unnecessary and improper uses of antibiotics both in Humans and in animals we consume.
Garbage is another problem we need to address, as well as environmental pollution and destruction. There are so many different problems needing to be addressed, each person who claims their perspective will be the one to bring us down may indeed be able to claim some degree of truth to their point of view.
The ever-increasing threat of perpetual or even nuclear war has never been closer than it is right now. The Doomsday Clock is down to two minutes and disturbances in governance could tip the world’s delicate nuclear balance over the edge…
However, the lifeforms on the surface of the world have struggled mightily for survival and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. If you have a vested interest in the future of life on Earth as we know it, you have to choose something worth believing in and fighting for it. Protecting it from those who might not value it as much as you do.
Belief is a strange thing. Some people believe it is humanity’s destiny to subjugate the Earth, taking from it, whatever our technology will allow us. The future of that viewpoint would ultimately create robots and other mechanisms to streamline this presumably profitable enterprise.
But if no one is there to counter this perspective, such a technological singularity could bring amazing technology to a planet unable to support Human life
The end is always near. Sometimes you can see it and do something about it. Sometimes you can’t.
If it’s an asteroid or comet, we can do nothing. We simply can’t watch enough of the sky to prepare and our technology is too immature even if we could spot one, to make a difference about it hitting the planet.
A random gamma-ray burst or an extreme solar flare could disrupt our ecosystem in ways we can scarcely imagine, from a simple as disrupting all of our electrically-based technology we are so dependent upon (i.e. GPS) to stripping the ozone layer from the Earth in an afternoon. We could do nothing about either.
If its global warming, we might be able to make a change for the better if we start migrating toward non-fossil fuels and dealing with our pollution and our enterprise better than we have in the past.
If its nuclear war, we can always opt to NOT press the red button. We can opt to find new ways to solve our difficulties. Difficulties we will always have until we decide we don’t want them any longer and are willing to do the difficult work of changing our perspectives. See: The Doomsday Clock
The goal of being a civilization based in science and reason, is to put such abilities to work, finding ways to forestall our inevitable demise — because it is inevitable, almost every species ever born on Earth has become extinct, even while millions still thrive — so it behooves us to recognize this and work harder to do the best we can to survive.
It is unlikely we will surpass the amount of time spent on Earth by the dinosaurs or by this humble fellow likely to survive us…
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