Start packing your bags. Researchers at the
University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom have determined that Earth will
become inhabitable in 1.75 billion to 3.25 billion years’ time.
As
stars age, they burn brighter, radiating more heat. Just a few billion years into the future, the
scientists said, our Sun will be so hot that Earth’s oceans will evaporate,
making impossible for plants, animals and humans to live here.
Writing in the journal Astrobiology, the
research team noted that conditions for humans and other complex life will
disintegrate much sooner, with only microbes in niche environments lingering on
Earth at the end.
"It
will get progressively hotter, and there's nothing we can do about
it," lead researcher Andrew Rushby, based at the School of Environmental
Studies at UEA, said.
We can, however, decamp to Mars, which will
be a balmy temperature by then. “It’s very close and will remain in the
habitable zone until the end of the Sun’s lifetime – six billion years from
now,” Rusby said.
"If
we are still around, and the optimist in me likes to think we would be, I hope
we'd be away from the Earth, perhaps on Mars, or spread out in a huge galactic family
across the Milky Way," he added.
The
scientists did not work on this study to depress the public about Earth’s
inescapable demise, but to develop a tool to help determine which other planets
in the galaxy are likely to host advanced alien life.
“Of course, much of evolution is down to
luck, so this isn’t concrete, but we know that complex, intelligent species
like humans could not emerge after only a few million years because it took us
75 percent of the entire habitable lifetime of this planet to evolve,” Rusby said.
“We think it will probably be a similar story elsewhere.”
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