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Post by Mistress Rell on Feb 27, 2008 8:29:21 GMT -5
"Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice," wrote the poet Robert Frost. Astronomers, it turns out, are in the former camp. A new calculation predicts that Earth will be swallowed up by the sun in 7.6 billion years, capping off a longstanding debate over whether the sun's gravitational pull will have weakened enough for Earth to escape final destruction or not. Other theorists have predicted that our planet will fry as the sun expands in its old age. But the time estimates have varied by a couple billion years. "Although people have looked at these problems before, we would claim this is the best attempt that's been made to date, and probably the most reliable," said astronomer Robert Smith, emeritus reader at the U.K.'s University of Sussex, who made the new calculations with astronomer Klaus-Peter Schroeder of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico. "What we've done is to refine existing models and to put the best calculations we can at each point in the model." If 7.6 billion years doesn't sound like an urgent death sentence, don't relax yet. Regardless of whether Earth will ultimately be vaporized, as the sun heats up, our planet will become too hot to live on before then. "After a billion years or so you've got an Earth with no atmosphere, no water and a surface temperature of hundreds of degrees, way above the boiling point of water," Smith told SPACE.com. "The Earth will become dry basically. It will become completely impossible for life of any kind to exist. It's a pretty gloomy forecast." Full Article
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Post by Enchant on Feb 27, 2008 8:49:42 GMT -5
I am hoping that by the time for the urgency, that we would have advanced far enough for space exploration and other planets colonizations. I mean look how far we have come in a 100 years....it is plausiable...
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Post by Mistress Rell on Mar 7, 2008 7:42:18 GMT -5
Who's to say that the human race as we know it will even exist 7 billion years from now? the dinosaurs lived for what-25o million years and they evolved into some of the largest creatures on the planet. Perhaps we will evolve to a point where we don't need coporial bodies.
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Post by Enchant on Mar 27, 2008 7:11:21 GMT -5
Very true...especially with all the predictions for 2012.
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Post by Shooshoo on Apr 8, 2008 4:23:50 GMT -5
Everything good must come to an end at some point, chances are humanity will have destroyed itself long before the end of the sun.
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Post by Shawn Farrell on Apr 10, 2008 20:42:37 GMT -5
Just in the past 100 years we've come pretty far, so I'm sure we'll have discovered a planet capable of supporting life and have the technology to travel there before Earth becomes inhospitable. Hopefully the human race won't have destroyed itself (as Shooshoo said) by then.
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